Brach L. Ettinger: Intimacy, wit(h)nessing and non-abandonement
Thank you Caleb for inserting into the conversation this moving series of photos by Rula Halawani. Rula's series called "Intimacy", and my series called "Brother's photo", are being photographed at the same geographical locus. Undefire has thus become the space of a virtual exhibition where such two different series can shed light on one another and deepen the meaning of particular moments of suffering inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli occupation. I was touched to discover that both our titles reflect the affective ambivalence, the mixture of sorrow, irony and hope, dispair and compassion, agony, tenderness and bitterness (and there is much more to say here), and in a way similar in some aspects to the relations of title and image in works like those of Nancy Spero for example, or Peter Buggenhout (with his series titled "Sincerely, a Friend").
The phallic subject with its gaze is unavoidable on certain levels of identity and on many dimensions of reality, and it is an ethical obligation to recognize the phallic gaze, not in the other, to begin with, (and not by projecting), but inside each subject, because with its negation, denial or projection, it (the gaze, operating in the subject) becomes dangerous (paranoia being one of its dangerous modes). The phallic subject within each one of us is potentially a perpetrator; the perpetrator is not a "them", but a potentiality of each and every identity (as so well showen by Hannah Arendt.) Yet, on the other hand, only individual identity can take responsibility and can become a direct witness.
In an era of technical gazes and anonymous global eyes, the choice of witnessing to, rather than ignorance, of a phallic gaze becomes crucial. Direct witnessing is painful, since one can't ignore one's own participation in that gaze. When a subject documents traumatic humiliation it takes the risk of temporarily organising itself around a phallic gaze and of partially joining it. But since the question of direct witnessing is also the question of the personal responsibility of each identified subject, if we ban the subject completely (which is the claim of some contemporary mythology and the aim of some technologies) and over-embrace the dimension of endless fragmantation or technical eyes, the idea of responsibility will disappear. A certain reading together (from a psychoanalytical and schizoanalytical post-Lacanian perspective) Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Lacan's Seminar on Ethics, Francisco Varela, the first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and the last chapters of Thousand Plateaux, will enlarge the field of reference here and enable a further discussion on these matters.
It seems to me important to emphasize that what I have named the matrixial gaze doesn't "replace" the phallic gaze but aids in its moving aside from its destructive aspects toward responsibility, a moving which is however a lifelong unending process. Embracing instants of matrixial borderlinking can orient the subject toward responsibility. With the matrixial gaze, the question of wit(h)nessing arises, where the I reattunes itself in co-response-ability with the non-I's traces within a shared psychic space (shared by chance, accident or will, choice or destiny), where we can talk about co-response-ability and asymmetrical responsibility and coemergence-in-difference on a transsubjective level, as the time-space of encounter-event is shared by several borderlinking I(s) and non-I(s). It is very delicate to explain the difference between the several and multiplicity in a brief way (for those who wishes, see my book The matrixial Borderspace (essays from 1994-1999); however, the matrixial sphere emerges alongside the phallic arena and alongside the sphere of multiplicity; it is a dimension of unconscious subjectivity that transgresses the individual boundaries, a sphere where the I is always transconnected to the non-I (even if the logic of identity, personal or national, denies and negates this), and where multiplicity is not endless, and the I can't reach total anonymity because of the distribution of transmissive affects. Partial-subjects in borderlinking are in touch in metramorphosis. The (matrixial) kind of diffused gaze doesn't "belong" to the One subject (male or female) in identity, but neither does it "belong" to endless anonymous part subjects, interconnected. It is therefore between Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan that the articulation of shareable affectivity in the field of the several in encounter-event can take place. Here a copoietic jointness evolves, only inasmuch as it is transfused with compassion, which is in my view, as I have said in an earlier posting, a primary affective knowledge of the other. Compassion is fragile; it is not very strong at survival, it doesn't enter any commerce of exchange, and it is therefore easily foreclosed. And we have to work through a very long process (ethical and aesthetical working-through) to re-access it, risking failure, guilt and shame, failure again, and repetedly fragilizing our selves. We can't "produce" compassion in advance or program it, it arizes and becomes poietic, on the basis of originary com-passion, through wit(h)nessing while borderlinking, which is not a witnessing but which can aid in the move toward choosing it. Wit(h)nessing in borderlinking accounts for the passage of a special kind of "memory" traces between individuals and between generations via affective and mental intensities, vibrations and channels, within a psychic shareable resonance chambre. You can't feel the other's trauma in the real of your body at the level of bodily pain, but you can share in the circulating of its traces and of memory traces of the trauma, inscribed in the I and the non-I, where the non-I's traces are joining one's "own" traces by resonance and via all kinds of transmissive mental and affective antenne, since in the matrixial sphere affects operate to transconnect partial-subjects.
The risk to misunderstand the meaning of the matrixial potentiality is huge because of the fragility of such a sphere. Certain psychoanalytical writers (like Ogden, Tustin, Aulagnier to mention few) might help to make the bridge from inter-subjectivity to what I call transsubjectivity. A matrixial encounter-event is always psychically traumatic, even when jouissance is accessed. We are usually trying to avoid the encounter-event rather than embrace it, since we are trying to avoid feeling psychic pain and bare anxiety. The I here (partial subject in a shareable subjectivity) doesn't correspond to anonymity, yet it is not defined by Oedipal parameters (even if those can still be applied to it, from a different perspective); it transgresses the individual boundaries to become poietic (in the Varela sense) only within com-passion, and it can therefore evoke responsibility (in the self) by particular jointness and in vulnerability, where jointness itself comports also, of course, anonymous non-I(s). Borderlinking and borderspacing produce unexpected linkages and co-implications. I have explained (in "Art as the Transport-station of Trauma", in: Artworking, 2000) how resistance is also an opening and unsurmounted distances can become psychic and mental encounter-events. I have also articulated (elsewhere) the spiralic process of transsubjectivization in small-scale webs, a process that do not depend on the phallic processes but informs them, as well as aesthetical and ethical venues that correspond to it, where we can rethink the I in its relations to non-I(s) without rejection and without assimilation, with neither appropriation nor abandonment (see for example "Matrix and Metramorphosis" 1992). And it is through this perspective that I have been thinking the links between the posts of Ryan (mentioning the risk of abandonment), of Naeem (concerning responsibility and the question of involvement) and Anahid (concering affect), as well as the very interesting early post of Jalal (writing and images), and Caleb's insertion of Rula's text and images. To these posts I would like to add that, like in pregnancy, one needs to dwell long enough in com-passionate jointness interweaved behind the veils of any phallic gaze, hopefully relaxing one's "schizoid" or "paranoid" defences, so that a matrixial web would become creative or even visible and audible (the resonating voice of the m/Other is a primary affective feeling-knowing transmission tool.) In a prolonged encounter-event, I and non-I are trembling in different ways along the same sensitive, affective and mental waves, sharing in different ways the same affective waves to create a feeling-knowledge of different aspects of a shared event. Meaning might emerge from a retrieval of memory of trauma in art, as long as transmitted traces and cross-inscriptions of traces of the trauma, accessed by wit(h)nessing in com-passion, offer themselves in a sensible form. This is one of the paths by which the aesthetical informs the ethical.
The matrixial sphere of transsubjectivity precedes and is different from the plane in which the individual separated subject is shaped, that subject which creates inter-subjective relations based on his distinctness and the clarity of his boundaries, that crystallizes into identity. The matrixial consciousness is a joint awakening of knowledge which is not from cognition, an affective brittle knowledge, on the borderline between different subjects along strings of traumatic and phantasmatic connections that link them together. The transmissivity by intensities and frequencies, and the impression, trans- and cross-imprinting (in one another's psyche) of the traces of the encounter-event which allows connective strings for the one and for the other to vibrate in shared space relates to the desire for borderlinking. The desire for becoming is distinctly matrixial when co-generation becomes evident. The desire to connect that which cannot be united, to join all the manifestations of the visible that do not come together in reality, is related to the problematics of "feminine" difference. This desire produces an opportunity for occurrences of transgression beyond the isolated subject. The Eros of transmission and connection is founded as an intermediate-being in the service of passage. An encounter whose potential returns threatens to jump out at any given moment and produce a connection between the foreign and the intimate in an additional passage-space in which, again, all participating partial-subjects will be connected by further reattunements. The movement of eternal return from within the pain contained in the traces of the encounter-event, as well as the possibility of its potential return in the future, turns the differentiating movement which is also at the same time a generating yearning, with and for a woman-m/Other, into a signal which stimulates the intermediate stage between foreignness and familiarity and the mediating position. The desire for copoiesis means being located in the midst and spreading in the space between worlds that do not meet in order to be generated as the connection between them, to come-into-being as a combination and as a vibrating string and to create processes of exchange, leakage and dripping in the combination's participants. The event of coming-into-being as encounter will receive its meaning only through encounters and further matrixial transferences in between subjects who are becoming partial subjects, through more connections and further borderlinking, inside trans-subjectivity that transgresses their individual identities. It is impossible to bypass by means of interpretation the very desire for participation in an encounter during the course of creating a difference from the "foreigner". The erotic antenne which connects and transmits traces exposes the artist in her encounter with her materials to a traumatic contact that will turn her, in all these aspects, into her other’s intimate stranger. Any one of us can ask herself can I, do I want, am I willing to constitute myself as such an intimate-stranger for my other fellow(o)man, to come-into-being with him/her in a continuous encounter, to pass and work through a pregnancy filled with twists and surprises, fatale, unplanned, painful.
> Bracha L. Ettinger
The phallic subject with its gaze is unavoidable on certain levels of identity and on many dimensions of reality, and it is an ethical obligation to recognize the phallic gaze, not in the other, to begin with, (and not by projecting), but inside each subject, because with its negation, denial or projection, it (the gaze, operating in the subject) becomes dangerous (paranoia being one of its dangerous modes). The phallic subject within each one of us is potentially a perpetrator; the perpetrator is not a "them", but a potentiality of each and every identity (as so well showen by Hannah Arendt.) Yet, on the other hand, only individual identity can take responsibility and can become a direct witness.
In an era of technical gazes and anonymous global eyes, the choice of witnessing to, rather than ignorance, of a phallic gaze becomes crucial. Direct witnessing is painful, since one can't ignore one's own participation in that gaze. When a subject documents traumatic humiliation it takes the risk of temporarily organising itself around a phallic gaze and of partially joining it. But since the question of direct witnessing is also the question of the personal responsibility of each identified subject, if we ban the subject completely (which is the claim of some contemporary mythology and the aim of some technologies) and over-embrace the dimension of endless fragmantation or technical eyes, the idea of responsibility will disappear. A certain reading together (from a psychoanalytical and schizoanalytical post-Lacanian perspective) Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Lacan's Seminar on Ethics, Francisco Varela, the first chapter of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and the last chapters of Thousand Plateaux, will enlarge the field of reference here and enable a further discussion on these matters.
It seems to me important to emphasize that what I have named the matrixial gaze doesn't "replace" the phallic gaze but aids in its moving aside from its destructive aspects toward responsibility, a moving which is however a lifelong unending process. Embracing instants of matrixial borderlinking can orient the subject toward responsibility. With the matrixial gaze, the question of wit(h)nessing arises, where the I reattunes itself in co-response-ability with the non-I's traces within a shared psychic space (shared by chance, accident or will, choice or destiny), where we can talk about co-response-ability and asymmetrical responsibility and coemergence-in-difference on a transsubjective level, as the time-space of encounter-event is shared by several borderlinking I(s) and non-I(s). It is very delicate to explain the difference between the several and multiplicity in a brief way (for those who wishes, see my book The matrixial Borderspace (essays from 1994-1999); however, the matrixial sphere emerges alongside the phallic arena and alongside the sphere of multiplicity; it is a dimension of unconscious subjectivity that transgresses the individual boundaries, a sphere where the I is always transconnected to the non-I (even if the logic of identity, personal or national, denies and negates this), and where multiplicity is not endless, and the I can't reach total anonymity because of the distribution of transmissive affects. Partial-subjects in borderlinking are in touch in metramorphosis. The (matrixial) kind of diffused gaze doesn't "belong" to the One subject (male or female) in identity, but neither does it "belong" to endless anonymous part subjects, interconnected. It is therefore between Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan that the articulation of shareable affectivity in the field of the several in encounter-event can take place. Here a copoietic jointness evolves, only inasmuch as it is transfused with compassion, which is in my view, as I have said in an earlier posting, a primary affective knowledge of the other. Compassion is fragile; it is not very strong at survival, it doesn't enter any commerce of exchange, and it is therefore easily foreclosed. And we have to work through a very long process (ethical and aesthetical working-through) to re-access it, risking failure, guilt and shame, failure again, and repetedly fragilizing our selves. We can't "produce" compassion in advance or program it, it arizes and becomes poietic, on the basis of originary com-passion, through wit(h)nessing while borderlinking, which is not a witnessing but which can aid in the move toward choosing it. Wit(h)nessing in borderlinking accounts for the passage of a special kind of "memory" traces between individuals and between generations via affective and mental intensities, vibrations and channels, within a psychic shareable resonance chambre. You can't feel the other's trauma in the real of your body at the level of bodily pain, but you can share in the circulating of its traces and of memory traces of the trauma, inscribed in the I and the non-I, where the non-I's traces are joining one's "own" traces by resonance and via all kinds of transmissive mental and affective antenne, since in the matrixial sphere affects operate to transconnect partial-subjects.
The risk to misunderstand the meaning of the matrixial potentiality is huge because of the fragility of such a sphere. Certain psychoanalytical writers (like Ogden, Tustin, Aulagnier to mention few) might help to make the bridge from inter-subjectivity to what I call transsubjectivity. A matrixial encounter-event is always psychically traumatic, even when jouissance is accessed. We are usually trying to avoid the encounter-event rather than embrace it, since we are trying to avoid feeling psychic pain and bare anxiety. The I here (partial subject in a shareable subjectivity) doesn't correspond to anonymity, yet it is not defined by Oedipal parameters (even if those can still be applied to it, from a different perspective); it transgresses the individual boundaries to become poietic (in the Varela sense) only within com-passion, and it can therefore evoke responsibility (in the self) by particular jointness and in vulnerability, where jointness itself comports also, of course, anonymous non-I(s). Borderlinking and borderspacing produce unexpected linkages and co-implications. I have explained (in "Art as the Transport-station of Trauma", in: Artworking, 2000) how resistance is also an opening and unsurmounted distances can become psychic and mental encounter-events. I have also articulated (elsewhere) the spiralic process of transsubjectivization in small-scale webs, a process that do not depend on the phallic processes but informs them, as well as aesthetical and ethical venues that correspond to it, where we can rethink the I in its relations to non-I(s) without rejection and without assimilation, with neither appropriation nor abandonment (see for example "Matrix and Metramorphosis" 1992). And it is through this perspective that I have been thinking the links between the posts of Ryan (mentioning the risk of abandonment), of Naeem (concerning responsibility and the question of involvement) and Anahid (concering affect), as well as the very interesting early post of Jalal (writing and images), and Caleb's insertion of Rula's text and images. To these posts I would like to add that, like in pregnancy, one needs to dwell long enough in com-passionate jointness interweaved behind the veils of any phallic gaze, hopefully relaxing one's "schizoid" or "paranoid" defences, so that a matrixial web would become creative or even visible and audible (the resonating voice of the m/Other is a primary affective feeling-knowing transmission tool.) In a prolonged encounter-event, I and non-I are trembling in different ways along the same sensitive, affective and mental waves, sharing in different ways the same affective waves to create a feeling-knowledge of different aspects of a shared event. Meaning might emerge from a retrieval of memory of trauma in art, as long as transmitted traces and cross-inscriptions of traces of the trauma, accessed by wit(h)nessing in com-passion, offer themselves in a sensible form. This is one of the paths by which the aesthetical informs the ethical.
The matrixial sphere of transsubjectivity precedes and is different from the plane in which the individual separated subject is shaped, that subject which creates inter-subjective relations based on his distinctness and the clarity of his boundaries, that crystallizes into identity. The matrixial consciousness is a joint awakening of knowledge which is not from cognition, an affective brittle knowledge, on the borderline between different subjects along strings of traumatic and phantasmatic connections that link them together. The transmissivity by intensities and frequencies, and the impression, trans- and cross-imprinting (in one another's psyche) of the traces of the encounter-event which allows connective strings for the one and for the other to vibrate in shared space relates to the desire for borderlinking. The desire for becoming is distinctly matrixial when co-generation becomes evident. The desire to connect that which cannot be united, to join all the manifestations of the visible that do not come together in reality, is related to the problematics of "feminine" difference. This desire produces an opportunity for occurrences of transgression beyond the isolated subject. The Eros of transmission and connection is founded as an intermediate-being in the service of passage. An encounter whose potential returns threatens to jump out at any given moment and produce a connection between the foreign and the intimate in an additional passage-space in which, again, all participating partial-subjects will be connected by further reattunements. The movement of eternal return from within the pain contained in the traces of the encounter-event, as well as the possibility of its potential return in the future, turns the differentiating movement which is also at the same time a generating yearning, with and for a woman-m/Other, into a signal which stimulates the intermediate stage between foreignness and familiarity and the mediating position. The desire for copoiesis means being located in the midst and spreading in the space between worlds that do not meet in order to be generated as the connection between them, to come-into-being as a combination and as a vibrating string and to create processes of exchange, leakage and dripping in the combination's participants. The event of coming-into-being as encounter will receive its meaning only through encounters and further matrixial transferences in between subjects who are becoming partial subjects, through more connections and further borderlinking, inside trans-subjectivity that transgresses their individual identities. It is impossible to bypass by means of interpretation the very desire for participation in an encounter during the course of creating a difference from the "foreigner". The erotic antenne which connects and transmits traces exposes the artist in her encounter with her materials to a traumatic contact that will turn her, in all these aspects, into her other’s intimate stranger. Any one of us can ask herself can I, do I want, am I willing to constitute myself as such an intimate-stranger for my other fellow(o)man, to come-into-being with him/her in a continuous encounter, to pass and work through a pregnancy filled with twists and surprises, fatale, unplanned, painful.
> Bracha L. Ettinger
