'But where is the soul'?

From time to time at I Cite, Jodi posts pictures of plastic beings like this:







They are frequently scary, disturbing, but what category should we use to describe this effect? It doesn’t seem to be ‘uncanny’ (although you may disagree). It has to do with kitsch and banality for sure, but why are these unsettling??

It probably has to do with Post-modern objects as Jameson defines them. You remember the famous opposition between Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes and Heidegger’s Peasant Shoes. Whereas the latter have clinging to them a whole peasant world of toil and ripening corn, the former carry no traces of their laborious origins, they are lacking in affect, bleached and without memory. They are the heralds of the new object world.

The new object world is not, contrary to received wisdom, one of appearances. As Baudrillard says, ‘There is something secret in appearances, precisely because they do not readily lend themselves to interpretation.’ The postmodern object has no secrets; on its surface there are no glimpses of the Hidden.



Now what struck both Rilke and Baudelaire about Dolls was the sense, the illusion, of interiority. The Doll (those older dolls, the Victorian dollies we find in classic horror films) contained the promise of a soul, and simultaneously frustrated this promise.

‘I can not say what it is like, when a little girl dies and refuses, even at the very end, to let go one of her dolls (perhaps one which had always been quite neglected), so that the poor thing is completely dry and withered in the consuming heat of her feverish hand.. does a little bit of soul then form within it?.’

And there is an apostrophe in Rilke’s essay to the ‘Doll-soul,’ but it is a mere 'question mark' of a soul. It is as if, to borrow a phrase from Heidegger, they are ‘poor in soul’, they appear to have some dim presentiment of that human world which they lack, or it's as if there is some being trapped inside the doll. Thus these older dolls seem plaintive. There is the illusion that they entreat us in some way. They beseech.

But what do they want? The doll gives us no answer, clams up, refuses dialogue, cleaves to some inconsolable secret; eventually the child’s frustration can take this maddening silence no more:

'The child twists and turns his toy, he scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against the wall, throws it on the ground. From time to time, he forces it to resume its mechanical motions, sometimes backwards. Its marvellous life comes to a stop. The child... finally prises it open... But where is its soul'. (Baudelaire)

The child tries to prise it open because he intuits that this mute wooden creature has a secret, something hidden. The look of the modern doll contains no such intimation of a hidden life. No sad soul will be expelled by shaking it or throwing it against the wall. Such violence will meet only with the same happy indifference.

This is why the modern kitsch dolls seem peculiarly vacant and banal. They are ‘soulless’ but not in the same way. They have no presentiment of that ‘soul’ that they lack; there is nothing melancholy about them. They are benignly indifferent to their emptiness. And it is this which is so disturbing