Lisa Robertson in Tarpaulin Sky V4n2

Lisa Robertson in Tarpaulin Sky V4n2

As a boy Sigmund Freud worshipped Heinrich Schliemann, the great archaeologist of Troy. Schliemann was a businessman who financed his excavations of the lost Homeric city by investing in the indigo trade during the Crimean War. Battlefield slaughter expanded the indigo market. The blue skin of imperial Europe supported the structural phantasy of origin. The archaeological metaphor called Troy—which informed Freud’s psychoanalytic fiction of a spatially structured consciousness—was financed by the movement of pigment across contested borders. Metaphor inflates an economy. Colour is structured like a market. Both colour and market are measured combinations of sentiment and emotion. A political economy appears to contain their instability, but at any moment this structure could be flooded by the randomness of affect. Plato and Aristotle thought paint or pigment was a drug or a pharmakon: an occult substance that, like poetry, could stimulate unaccountable change. They wished to excise it from the polis.