#galliston

“By the 1920s there existed a strong model of a coherent inner self, knowable only in its encounter with a “truly objective” outer world (objectivity is represented in the case of the blots by pure meaninglessness). Hence, a single test of seemingly loquacious objective reality (Talk to the Blots!) was enough to elicit the whole of the person inside. The Rorschach blot, says Galliston, works only if the talkative object is so perfectly of the “objective” outer world that one can be sure that no other human agency was there before one — what one says about the objects makes one’s encounter with the pure outsideness of the world in all its delightful, and hence intensely meaning-laden, rigidity. “The [Rorschach blot test] means that the functions of subjectivation (how subjects are formed) and objectivation (how objects are formed) enter at precisely the same moment. To describe the cards (on the outside) is exactly to say who you are (on the inside).” The importance of Galliston’s reading resides in the close fit that the Rorschach blots produce with other early-twentieth-century texts on what it might mean for indisputably mute objects to “speak” the inner truth that they contain, to disgorge out of their abiding flatness some kind of depth that bespeaks the character of the people with whom they abide.”