Open Letter to Bracha Ettinger
Dear Bracha
I have enjoyed dipping into your writing. I like that fact that your Flickr photos show you hanging out with groovy people like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas and a bunch of other people I’ve mostly never heard of, but who are no doubt very interesting as you bother to take their photos. I found your take on sexual difference via matrixial borderspace interesting, and a useful complement to spatial metaphors such as Anzaldua’s borderlands and Deleuze’s rhizome. I like the fact that your lack of fame relative to, say, Butler or Irigaray, means that citing you gives my readers the impression I am far better read in these areas than I actually am.
But sometimes, Bracha, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Take your recent article, Fragilization and Resistance in Studies in the Maternal. You state, for example:
The human capacity for inspiration revealed in artworking begins with an archaic transconnectedness by psychic strings, that bounds each I, as presubject, to its particular non-I(s), and first of all to its pre-maternal transubject – its archaic m/Other. Desire, born out of the kind of transmission that the string allows, doesn’t seek for objects. It languishes for specific almost-lost links. In jointness, I and non-I differently feel-know in-and-by inspiration-transpiriting by which they are differently transformed. In each jointness that succeeds to tremble a borderlinking string, different I(s) and non-I(s) will start, restart and continue to feel-know with-in one another and with-in forms, images and encounter-events, by way of sharing with-in new and older psychic webs while also imprinting and engraving their traces in them in shareable threads. Traces are cross-inscribed and transinscribed between transubjects and between transubject and transject. (pp. 11-12)
That’s easy for you to say.
In Fragilization and Resistance you use the prefix “trans” 216 times, which is over double the usage in Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event, published five years previously; you refer in some way to “spirit” 78 times in the new paper, and only 5 times in the older (the pdf reader counted those, not me: that would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it?).
Here’s my theory, which I allude to in Numen, Old Men, which was revealed to me via Griselda Pollock’s vision of your matrixial borderspace:
of madness, of psychosis, with no signifiers to relieve phantasms and hallucinations that bleakly register both the trauma and the solace of what we now come to recognise as the matrixial dimension
To which I wrote:
Is this not another, darker weaving of a place we have heard of before? Of sacramental mystery? Ātman? Non-dual awareness? The “thresholds of I and non-I emerging in co-existence”?
Bracha, I believe through all this you want to speak freely about spirituality, but feel embarrassed by it; but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people eventually get tired with a secular-Leftist and psychoanalytically-informed worldview and make this turn: just read Irigaray’s work of recent years.
But I think the spiritual (as opposed to the psychoanalytic) dimension of your matrixial borderspace is better served by your painting than theory: it is, after all, pre-verbal (via the Real or, more accurately, trans-verbal). I think you could make a great living among the intelligentsia of Paris and Tel Aviv painting matrixial auras around them: oceans of bruised purple, brown and black. I’d seek you out if you did this.
Just my two cents,
Joseph.
pheeee-eeeew !
glad you made that clear for me joseph gelfer.
saraphine
February 22, 2010 at 6:54 pm
The result of reading Fragilization and Resistance on the train home this evening… Some surprisingly heavy reading takes place on the Sydenham line: a while back I saw someone looking confused with Deleuze, and more recently a very lovely young woman fondling Kierkegaard.
Joseph
February 22, 2010 at 7:15 pm
This modest little post even found itself a link on Ettinger’s European Graduate School faculty page:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/bracha-ettinger/links/
Joseph
October 31, 2010 at 2:02 pm
It now seems to have disappeared: clearly too silly.
Joseph
April 8, 2011 at 6:19 am
So glad I’m not the only one who is lost when reading ettinger.
Estelle
April 7, 2011 at 10:01 pm
Welcome to the club: it has a very select membership.
Joseph
April 8, 2011 at 6:21 am
Folks, I appreciate anyone reading, and inquiring into the unfamiliar, that is somewhat familiar, but then, not quite and so on.
Taking on Ettinger’s work is an adventure, as I have been in and out of it informally for a year now (thanks to my wife, who sent me the link here to Gelfer’s response).
Without further unclarification here, perhaps I can introduce my own humble fumble through the thorns, by inviting you to do a Google search (I just did for interest): “integral” and “matrixial” and, geez… my two articles (blogs) come up first… so, you may want to click and see what I managed to splatter on the canvas in this regard.
R Michael Fisher
July 11, 2011 at 11:05 am
Thanks: I’ll take a look.
Joseph
July 11, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Great Joseph. btw, I just was inspired to create an art piece and a blog with it this morning: “Integral Matrixial Compassionism: A New Art Genre” (go to http://fearlessnessteach.blogspot.com). -enjoy
R Michael Fisher
July 13, 2011 at 12:16 am
I suspect Ettinger would make mincemeat of the AQAL matrix
Joseph
July 13, 2011 at 9:08 am
Not sure about that. What I am sure about is that she would not dismiss any phallic approach to the Kosmos (e.g., AQAL matrix) as long as it is open and inviting to, and willing to encounter a matrixial approach, with the possibilities of copoiesis in their conjointness in a matrixial borderspace. This makes her unlike most feminist thinkers, I’d suggest.
R Michael Fisher
July 13, 2011 at 1:46 pm
I suspect she would see Wilber as an exemplar of a phallic economy, which is the complete opposite of the matrixial borderspace (i.e. other-to-phallic, rather than feminine as such). I also suspect Wilber would relegate her to relatively primitive consciousness, as he does eco-feminism, for example.
Joseph
July 13, 2011 at 1:55 pm
Another thing to remember is that matrixial borderspace is pre-individuated, there is no “I”, no masculine or feminine type, which puts it largely at odds with AQAL thinking.
Joseph
July 13, 2011 at 2:02 pm
“no masculine or feminine type” (?)– is what I am challenging here as we are reading Ettinger, not merely expressing our view or someone elses who is not reading Ettinger. So, bracketing our ‘normal’ or even prior-made conceptualizations of “masculine or feminine,” — what does Ettinger’s art/theory (post-Lacanian) uncover as a finding, datum, and/or philosophy re: gender. I think first of all to read the quote below from her work that you cited earlier emphasizes m/Other:
“The human capacity for inspiration revealed in artworking begins with an archaic transconnectedness by psychic strings, that bounds each I, as presubject, to its particular non-I(s), and first of all to its pre-maternal transubject – its archaic m/Other.”
That m/Other experiencing is her notion of the archaic (collective) aesthetic-relational template of all of us– we all have that pre-natal experiencing for approx. 9 mo. (more or less) as a matrixial borderspace of copoiesis in conjointness, unique to and prior to the phallic sphere of “seeing” and “symbolic” fracturation that arrives slowly in our first and into the second year of life where “language” is imposed from the phallic sphere. Ettinger argues psychoanalysis by the “guys” (Freud, Lacan) had not sufficiently, or ignored or rejected–the valuation of this aesthetic-feminine-template of our basic formation–that is, in a matrixial borderspace (more or less, pre-phallic in the sense of how phallic is derived in psychoanalytic theory). Thus over and over, without a phallic essentialism, or typical knife-cutting of gender types that occurs in the phallic sphere, Ettinger repeatedly in her work refers to a pre & trans subjective feminine.
To be epistemologically in-tune with her methodology of this uncovering and theorizing, and reclaiming of the matrixial under the hegemonic gaze of phallic theorizing and covering the feminine arche- m/Other experiencing, one needs to attune to the reality it is a theory, Ettinger repeats, that came from her artworkings, and then, she later (more or less) brings her understanding in from Freud, Lacan, Levinas, and many other theorists.
Griselda Pollock, I was reading this morning, is one of Ettinger’s strongest proponents and interpreters. She’s an eminent feminist art historian/critic. She wrote of Ettinger’s work after visiting the Ettinger art installation in the Freud Museum in London, 2009. She also has conversed with Ettinger. Pollock wrote,
“I want, therefore, to place Ettinger’s painting in resonance with this philosophical field [Arendtian humanism and
R Michael Fisher
July 14, 2011 at 10:14 pm
cont’d…
post-Holocaustian] by her seeking a means through art to foster life, to engender in the viewer a need for and a felling of humanising liveliness even as the panting dares to look back with the traces of the radical horror preserved in indexical, analogue photographs that her practice materially translates and transforms. At the same time, I need to stress another kind of difference; for, in a feminist sense, Ettinger’s engagement with this question of life ‘after Auschwitz’ differences. That is to say, it allows into this aesthetic-philosophical space of asking about both art and human life ‘after Auschwitz’ the specificity of feminine sexual difference as the matrixial structure for the trans-subjective, ‘proto-ethical’ and ‘com-passionate connectivity.’ This is why her paintings do not require monumental size to achieve their scale of affectivity…. [they allow] intimacy–both ethical and physical–in viewing. Her scale is not the result of being a woman who simply disowns the egotistical monumentality that has tended to be identical with making important painterly statements ‘in the masculine.’ Rather this artist
R Michael Fisher
July 14, 2011 at 10:21 pm
cont’d …
has created a new mode of working that is non-phallic and is inevitably non-monumental because the subjectivities the painting invoke are always several and ‘borderlinked.’…. onto matrixial processes for transformation [and healing]…”. (p. 239)
This was long, and in studying Ettinger and doing art and studying her art… “intimacy” is what her feminine pre and trans subjectivity linking creates, and that’s what I find different than any psychoanalytic writing I have ever read, albeit there is some of that indeed in Levinas and Buber, for example, though the matrixial lens of Ettinger’s uncovering and promoting includes and transcends… most guy theorists about relationship, the aesthetic, and subjectivities. Hope this all helps set some context for reading Ettinger’s work, as well as her text (albeit, it took me a good year in conversation with several women artists and theorists in our group, to get a “handle” on the qualities of her work–the matrixial–because it is so hard to “unplug” from the phallic in order to see, feel, and recover the matrixial aesthetic connective template of experiencing–yes, to recover the feminine, in this Ettingerian, very unique formation. I don’t think “type” is at all what she is talking about when she refers to feminine (i.e., through a matrixial lens).
R Michael Fisher
July 14, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Reference for the Pollock quote above:
Pollock, Griselda (2011). A matrixial installation: Artworking in the Freudian space of memory and migration. In de Zegher, Catherine and Griselda Pollock (Eds.), Art as compassion: Bracha L. Ettinger, (pp. 191-241) Brussels, Belgium: ASA Publishers.
R Michael Fisher
July 14, 2011 at 10:37 pm
I *think* I understand where you are coming from, and clearly it is entirely your business to mobilise any theorist in any way you want. However, I don’t think this is in the spirit of Ettinger at all (and I also acknowledge this is not necessarily a privileged point of view).
First, the pre- and trans- nomenclature she uses is not the same as its Integral use, and I think this is causing some slippage here. Also, I would reiterate, there is no “feminine”. When she (and the likes of Irigaray) speak of the feminine or Mother (even in very explicit terms), it makes much more sense to mean specifically and only the alternative to the phallic economy, not feminine in a normative (or even transgressive sense) or in a sense connected with women. The feminine here is a theorising space, not a category that has anything to do with personhood in a way that would be recognised within the AQAL framework.
Unless I am misreading your intention (which is perfectly possible, because anything to do with Ettinger is difficult and subject to slippage), this seems to me like another classic case of Wilberian Integral trying to co-opt everything through the funnel of its developmental worldview, thus in the process denying the reality of those things is co-opts (cf Schlamm, Leon. “Ken Wilber’s Spectrum Model: Identifying Alternative Soteriological Perspectives.” Religion 31, no. 1 (2001): 19-39 and Adams, George. “A Theistic Perspective on Ken Wilber’s Transpersonal Psychology.” Journal of Contemporary Religion 17, no. 2 (2002): 165-79).
Joseph
July 15, 2011 at 6:45 am
a fearologist..how intriguing..and love your new art piece..thanks
saraphine
July 13, 2011 at 12:47 pm
you’re welcome, a joy to share
R Michael Fisher
July 13, 2011 at 1:47 pm
I note, too, on this post you refer to me as an “integral” thinker. I can’t imagine why. Just because I refer to integral thought it doesn’t make me an integral thinker. I get this quite a bit from integral folks, and I wonder if it is another example, as I suggest below, of integral thought co-opting everything with which it comes into contact
Which makes for an interesting question: what kind of thinker am I? Short of a Gelfer thinker, I couldn’t answer it with any certainty!
Joseph
July 16, 2011 at 10:40 am
Lots there to digest. We’ve at least made some ‘trail’…
Re: the oppression aspect you are assigning to “integral” (or me), well, that’s your impression from text… and it so easily can be turned into what you want it to be… that said, your cautionary is well placed. You can be any kind of thinker you like, it’s fine with me. If I suggest you may be an integral thinker it is because that’s what I hear. Cheers.
R Michael Fisher
July 16, 2011 at 2:15 pm
You say, “If I suggest you may be an integral thinker it is because that’s what I hear”: but what, exactly, are you hearing that you perceive as integral? This is a genuine question, because outside of AQAL or developmental systems, I often cannot pin down what people mean by the word: it often seems to resemble little more than synthesizing a few different schools of thought, which is more like being a syncretic thinker?
Joseph
July 16, 2011 at 3:41 pm
Just to add, my small, yet I hope significant contribution, to the first exhibition of Bracha’s work, Matrixial Borderlines, in the UK in 1993 at MOMA Oxford. It was as a result of a personal, and meaningful encounter with the artist, and an intuitive response to a body of work that remains both compelling and insightful, as much as it conceals. As to whether theory informs practice or practice theory, her images and writings, touch upon one another, and like birds, take flight into language.
Pamela Ferris-Kember Chelsea College of Art & Design 2012.
Pamela Kember
January 31, 2012 at 4:43 am
Thanks for the lovely metaphor, Pamela.
Joseph
January 31, 2012 at 5:26 am