We often suppose that an artwork has a meaning – that it carries a knowledge for the question we bring to it, and most particularly when such knowledge is withheld the audience makes knowledge, imputing the artwork as its cause. Psychoanalysis has long sought for art to produce new knowledge of civilisation, in advance of the clinic. And indeed The Sinthome Score with its withdrawal of extraneous interpretative framework seems like it might offer this possibility. What we have are two elements which play against each other, we can question whether the movement of the body interprets the text or vice versa, and if so what emerges? Perhaps some meaning emerges, or perhaps it is lost between the two sides of the work, neither here nor there. Perhaps something of the encounter of a body with speech offers something of the relation between body and speech, perhaps on the side of meaning, or otherwise. We may perhaps come up with a chain of interpretations – the work certainly lends itself to this possibility. We may ask what of this enactment is connected to the work of Lacan’s seminar? Is there something sinthomatic for García in this? After all we know that Joyce’s writing, a key reference for the seminar, is a magnet for interpretation, read more in the university than beyond it, but is also singular and sinthomatic, there’s no contradiction in that. Whereas a sinthome is something found in Joyce’s escabeau, it is something here forced as a subject matter, an S1 for a potential chain of blah blah blah, more or less interesting or useful, about what is singular in the relation of body and speech as an S1 all alone. Lacan could be a key in García work in a way that may be contrary to the singularity of what might be sinthomatic – but then again meaning too has its non-sense. If belief in the artwork crumbles, the viewer might perhaps wonder whether García has read a bit of Lacan (and we suppose at least Seminar XXIII) and understood that she can make an artwork which appears to have qualities in common with what’s been read as it might be given as a subject of understanding. It could be something akin to a certain kind of academic Lacanianism cooly applied with the blank reflexivity of contemporary art, but on the side of good faith, perhaps that is harsh. It is not clear whether the indeterminacy is of the order of a not-all, an ‘it doesn’t work’, which might be sinthomatic, or whether it works towards the idea of indeterminacy which has become a central device of contemporary art as an institutional practice, firmly on the side of ‘it works’. Perhaps the mode of interpretation that such artwork might produce would be too much on the side of ‘it works’ to offer any resistance in a society modelled on a certain efficiency. You may believe or not in the artwork, and thus it may work for you or not in one way or another. The work seems to lend itself to support along the lines of belief.
Jacques Alain Miller has on occasion sought to use the English expression make believe in the place of the French semblant. Something of the direction of semblance, as can be sensed in making an adjective of it – semblantize – moves in the direction of a dissolution of belief, whereas make belief operates the same axis in the other direction. Miller refers to the semblant as the crossover of appearance and Being. Being in so far as Being is an effect of language and always incorporates a want of Being. If there is Being there must be a lack of Being otherwise everything would Be and the word would lack the differential characteristic of signification, and as such there would be no Being. Being includes its lack, it is never quite entirely Being, although we may cover this inconvenience over such that that Being can appear to be whole. Being in so far as it is defined here in its logical differential quality in relation to not Being is symbolic, whereas appearance may be more towards the imaginary – in this sense a make believe, in so far as we believe, can be something which is a holding together of the symbolic and imaginary, if not quite a sinthome, working in this regard as an at least ad-hoc and impermanent solution to making the world liveable, when guarantees of meaning aren’t what they used to be and compensations are of use. It is quite possible that even if it were to offer only a semblance of a kind of Lacanianism, there may be in The Sinthome Score a make believe which if not a sinthome, might at least be something to be going on with.