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01 A child is born. Is it a boy or is it a girl? Rooted in this binary we are doomed by birth to recall the site of difference, and Oedipally doomed to be determined through the sight of difference. Small wonder there is a feminist yearning that all should not be as it appears. Or does not. I have chosen to begin this text with an open ended artefactual/artefictional poetic attempt at elucidating the problematic of subjectivity. Mine is not an innocent exploration. A deconstructive approach to autobiography would constitute, in my mind, a sort of "incestography" traversing that tricky terrain of experience, truth, and the relationship of subjectivity to agency. However, due to my allergy to reductionist theory, and my pleasure in the text itself, I want to allude to the traces that frame this discourse even though I cannot follow all possible threads in one small essay. This analysis is a renegade exploration of a moment of psychoanalysis. Through the lens of diffraction provided by Donna Haraway's cyborg ontology I will examine the strata of subjectivization postulated by Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's matrixial theories. The threads which I wish to pull from my artefactual/artefictional texts and re-weave with the theories of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger are ontology and ontogenesis; essence and strata, and the silicon phallus and the maternal body. This marks a positional perversion of the law of the father. In spite of the Lacanian refrain that the 'phallus is not the penis' the organ plays the same old tune. And feminists who refuse to take their symbolic orders from the master-narrative are threatened with psychosis and fetishization.2 In search of agency, I reject self-defense but protect myself in the social space of fiction. I am moving towards an ethics, but not producing an ethics, because such a thing is perhaps, unspeakable. This essay is an attempt to mark out the monstrous edges of the not-yet symbolic. In Lacan's famous fable of the mirror phase the infant first learns to see his body as a whole in the reflection of the mirror. No longer the "hommelette" in bits and pieces, he is on his way to becoming the "homme de terre.3" A subject ready to move with agency on earth, no matter how illusionary this "whole self" may be, a certain mastery is attained. I have said "he" quite deliberately, not because little girl babies don't go through a mirror phase, but because, the process of gender differentiation has already begun, and therefore even this experience is differentiated sexually. Also, the mirror phase is repeated throughout life, it is not an absolute moment. I immediately wonder about this alleged "mastery" when at a certain moment in life so many girls begin to see their bodies not as wholes but utterly in fragments. Problematic fragments. It is the horror of implications of "feminine" difference that lead to feminist strategies, which of course are not all the same. I do not want to dwell on the Mirror phase, which is in any case well enunciated within current theory. Rather I want to explore some of the ruptures that the feminine can induce, even in the Oedipal bastion of psychoanalysis. Lacan was certainly lacking in ladies, as he did admit in the latter days of his reign. Theorising from the ladies side has become Lichtenberg Ettinger's domain. Lichtenberg Ettinger is a specifically feminist psychoanalysts committed to exploring the feminine dimension.
Interestingly Haraway also turns to the metaphor of diffraction as a strategic move in her latest book:
Diffraction implies a multiple reading and while woman herself can provide the lens of diffraction, she can also be the object of the diffracted gaze. This is a strategically useful tool as the straightforward gaze has all too often resulted in the totalizing tautology of the essential woman. In this way I am utilizing a methodology of diffraction, spiraling around the diffracting and diffracted feminine in my exploration of matrixial and cyborg subjectivities.
01.01 In the first instance, in the beginning, there was difference, and so began the struggle of some minds to gain advantage over others. This is a fragment of strategic narrative, oedipal narrative, and modern technological narrative, where survival - possible futures - is at stake in a techno-fetal world of "almost minds"6. There is a cost to origin stories. As a postcard on my wall proclaimed, one nuclear family can ruin your whole life. However uncomfortable, in this historical moment - Oedipus is still our ontogenesis, imbricated in our personal genealogies to varying degrees of traumatic impact. I began my fictional-true story with a tale of cyborg birth, conflating Haraway's statement "cyborg is our ontology"7 with a mutanted Oedipal origin story. When feminists open up the book of ontogenesis - what do we see? Inhabiting a state of philosophy where origins have been deconstructed beyond innocence, I do not want to pin the moment of origin through the centre like a butterfly. Still we have to start somewhere. Within psychoanalysis, a look at personal origins becomes fruitful. It is the re-scripting of origin stories that animates feminism. However, if these tales are meant to speak of "the way things are" as bedrock, as beyond refiguration, as "natural," then I would immediately invoke the deconstructive lenses of diffraction. Diffracting the origin produces a reading which cannot become dogma, and yet allows the exploration. There is a pleasure in this process, even when tinged with danger. There is something profound about recalling ones own helplessness, a temporal state to be sure, but one that constantly threatens the self-presence we cultivate in adulthood. To acknowledge mortality is to be embodied. The mysteries of birth and death need to be pondered and articulated in terms beyond the mystical. In this way the discourse of biology becomes a strata of immanence, profound in it's very limitations, rather than transcendent. Haraway's critique of Oedipus, is rooted in a deconstruction of the origin of apocalypse. Because this post gender 8, post human, frightening monster sign, bastard of the military industrial complex that it is, has no origin, it therefore does not need to succumb to the teleology of apocalypse. And in this way it marks a way out of the inevitable patriarchal implications of this web of technoculture the world has become. This simultaneously frightening and tempting futuristic vision is brought down to earth by her constant project of defining cyborg-subjectivity as the always already of the contemporary human condition. When Haraway names cyborg as "our ontology" she is articulating a network of technological connections into which we are implicated, out of which we cannot extricate ourselves and which we must negotiate. It could be described as the transcendental techno-phallic economy, but maybe that is giving it too much of the flavour we feminists are allergic to. It is also a network of profound possibilities. Haraway manages, through her masterful use of irony, to be heretic but not apostate, in her invocation of the cyborg as a model of subjectivity. A subjectivity built on agency but not a defense of any essential subject.9 This feminist agency is literally about being able to act out possible futures beyond the limits of the phallic dimension. And in spite of the radicalized dress code, cyborg subjectivity is embodied. Above all, cyborg does not need the nuclear family 'normalized' by socio-biology, and arguably psychoanalysis. In an interview with Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, Haraway elucidates her position on psychoanalysis which she considered to have detrimentally dominated feminist discourse. Her hostility towards Oedipal accounts hinges on her recognition of their power, and on what she views as their conservative heterosexual reliance on the familial.
It is this thinking that leads Haraway to wonder about a "technoscientific unconscious," and to understand the process of "the formation of the technoscientific subject."11 Although Lichtenberg Ettinger is not as precisely anti-Oedipus,as for example, are Haraway or the famously anti-Oedipal duo of Deleuze and Guattari, she questions the primacy of the phallus as the determinant of the symbolic. In the Lacanian paradigm, entry into language is entry into the Symbolic, and it cannot be accomplished without symbolic castration.
Lacking the phallus, women are left as the epitome of Lack. A state of affairs that has led to a plethora of feminist apologetics trying to come to terms with this interminable lack. Why not turn tail and run from this whole battlefield? There must be something deeper at stake, which even Haraway from her non-psychoanalytic position can see. Between the devil and the deconstruction is the deep blue sea of the unconscious. Sink or swim? The ongoing subtext of feminist/feminine diffraction involve the nodes of language, and concepts of the unconscious, as necessary sites to deflect power within the Phallic dimension. The role of language in the structuring of the unconscious is indeed central, however it must be re-viewed under our lenses of diffraction. As Haraway frames it, our account of the Unconscious is restricted to a particular moment in the acquisition of language, and she thinks:
Moving on from the earlier Saussurian moment of Lacan's unconscious "structured like a language," Lichtenberg Ettinger claims "the concept of the Unconscious is too limited in that theoretical position, and I do not believe we can accept a notion of an Unconscious without symbolizations of the pre-oedipal and also the prenatal. Neither can we accept a complete superposition of linguistics and psychoanalysis."14 It is to a prediscursive moment, within the matrix of the pre-natal that Lichtenberg Ettinger turns, only of course as this state is being viewed in retrospect, the boundaries of before and after discourse are diffracted. It is a memory of a state of affairs that is not dependent on language as we know it. The phallus has it's place in all this, but it cannot be seen as such a big guy. (And maybe, therefore, not just the bad guy!) Where did it all begin? The matrixial molds a model of multiplicity that cannot reduce neatly but raises new problematic of being and becoming.
01.02 While the primal scene for Freud invoked the threat of castration, and woman became synonymous with lack for Lacan, and these theories may indeed explain feminine subject formation under the status quo of Western patriarchy, for feminists - Choice - is the primal scene. And "Choice" is a cyborg. As such it is perhaps the techno-sublime object marking feminist histories and feminist futures. Too often the choice turns out to be between hysteria or hysterectomy. It is in this post-choice historical moment that Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger theorizes the matrixial. Lichtenberg Ettinger hypothesizes her matrixial sub-stratum of subjectivization, not as a mere opposition to the phallus, but co-existent with the phallic stratum and anticipating other potential strata as well. Not quite the full scale attempt at "destratification" of Deleuze and Guattari15, but a determined shifting of the bedrock of phallic law as the one route to the Symbolic. Or even of the notion that there is necessarily only one Symbolic.
To theorize her matrix, Lichtenberg Ettinger begins to unravel an unresolved thread, first in Freud's uncanny, then in later Lacan's acknowledgment of his lack of ladies. It is in those moments when the world begins to "provoke" our gaze, a strange feeling is produced, identified as "uncanny" by Lacan who says it indicates we are approaching the lack that constitutes castration anxiety. To Lichtenberg Ettinger this sensation signals that we are "on the horizon line of experience." Questioning Lacan's unquestioning position which links castration to the uncanny, she goes back to Freud for a "supplementary" possibility. (How dangerous is this supplement?) Within his theorizing of the Uncanny, Freud presents an unconscious infantile complex whose difference from castration Lichtenberg Ettinger exposes. What Freud describes as "intra-uterine existence" or "womb-fantasies." But mainstream psychoanalysis excludes this intra-uterine by inclusion within the phallic economy. Lichtenberg Ettinger suggests that Freud did separate the castration complex and the maternal womb/intra-uterine complex in 'The Uncanny' and when threatening to approach the subject in the Real, both of them become different sources of awe and strangeness for the same class of uncanny anxiety. She also suggests that within this separation, Freud:
Even in a "post-essence" theoretical climate, the formation of subjectivity, those questions of biology and destiny, nature and nurture, remain seated on the uneasy throne of the maternal body. Haraway is critical of the of the lack of interrogation of the political/social histories of binary categories like nature/culture sex/gender in colonialist Western discourse.
Lichtenberg Ettinger's turn to Freud in this initial conception of the matrixial does seem to be a return to the biologism that Lacan was moving away from. However, diffracting the primal-scene-of-the-crime to the womb requires an insistence, mirroring Lacan, that just as the penis is not the phallus, the womb is not the matrix. It is a matrixial stratum that Lichtenberg Ettinger theorizes, not a essential womb. The difference between strata and essence is that strata can destratify. Bedrock is a myth. It shift, erupts, cracks open, like women, the earth is prone to hysterical eruptions. That is if, as in the phallic paradigm, women's stability is essential, if she is supposed to be the bedrock upon which the phallic economy operates. Strata also carry traces, and as one sub-stratum becomes the shifting borderlink for the next. They are actively relational. It is important to distinguish that Lichtenberg Ettinger is positing a site for very multiple and sometimes partial encounters. This is not at all about the mother and child.
I do not have the time, nor the knowledge to comprehensively analyze Lichtenberg Ettinger's use of the concept of strata with the ideas postulated by Deleuze and Guattari. Suffice it to say that, what is useful to my argument is that, the matrixial stratum of subjectivization described by Lichtenberg Ettinger is in some way pushing the boundaries of bodily based subjectivity traditionally associated with women and the tensions around the body of the mother. The matrixial is not exactly about the mother, or about the fetus, but about a corporeal process in which stratification and destratification occur as a life-giving and life defining relationship. This is not to say however that this describes any sort of "natural" state. It is a Harawayan style of diffraction that causes me to emphasize the difference between strata and essences, and of course this language matters. Essences are pure, strata are relational. Both Haraway and Lichtenberg Ettinger call for a conceptualizing of the unconscious through a widening of our understanding of language, as not being purely linguistic. Writes Haraway:
The matrixial stratum is a "world of practice." It is the separating of this process of subjectivization from the powerfully constructed essential "Madonna and Child" paradigm, which is completely within the Phallic model, to this "feminine" diffraction, which is the matrixial and does not produce femininity or masculinity but widens possibilities beyond the phallic binaries. It is the non-linguistic qualities gestated by the matrixial, and their implications for radical relationality that move Lichtenberg Ettinger's theories into a realm where an odd kinship develops with Haraway's fetus as a cyborg entity. Haraway would like to attribute language to realms of the non-human. I would also infer that for her the "fetus" exists in that border between the human and the non-human, and she would categorize it as an "almost-mind." Within the pre-birth matrixial, the "I and non-I(s)" co-emerge and cofade. The matrixial gaze is also the gaze that privileges touch. Haraway ponders the supposedly scopophilic gaze of technoscience, as in NASA photographs of the earth and intrauterine photographs of fetuses, and says:
While in some ways the comparison of Lichtenberg Ettinger and Haraway seems an unlikely kinship, I firmly believe in the cautionary properties I perceive their tales offer each other. It is easy to postulate Haraway's cyborg as a prosthetic panacea for the trauma of psychoanalysis itself. I don't want to do anything this easy. To fetishize cyborg as a sort of techno-sublime, is to miss it's intent as a sign of radically responsible re-embodiment. It is, however, another story, out of which feminist subjectivities can be refigured. Perhaps psychoanalysis could be viewed as a breed of speculative fiction. However, as my little fiction, at the beginning of this essay points out, biology itself, as the corporeal matrix, is a shifting ground. We also have to speculate about the implications of the new stories we tell. There is always the danger of theoretically amputating the category of feminine too fast. But, if the feminine corporeality of the matrix were to destratify, as it may very well headed towards within the context of future reproductive technological possibilities, what might we lose in terms of the subjectivization process? Materially, the tenacious sub-species known as women, and their children, are among the majority of the worlds most impoverished. Who gets to enjoy abundant "Life Itself"22 is continually called into question by the semiotic-material construction of possibilities. As always, we risk the "Sacredness of the Same," the phallic drive towards transcendence. However I am slipping into another binary trap here by even posing these options as polar opposites. Haven't we been through this already? The intrauterine is already to varying degrees cyborged in its very tissues. And within the ontological cybernetic circuit, maybe Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger's matrix will birth a post-fetal, now no longer-so-much-the-stranger who could indeed grow up into Haraway's "bad girl" cyborg.
01.03 What is the desire for the mother all about? While it is obvious that there is a gender policing going on, Oedipally or otherwise, which restricts the daughter's desire for her mother, is this incest barrier so phallic and therefore impermeable to the feminine? Within the Law of the Father, the daughter's access to the mother is complicated. Termed "negative Oedipal complex" homosexual desire for the mother is viewed as regressive, as an archaic longing for the amorphous abyss of the pre-discursive. Kristeva attempts to theorize the feminine in the pre-Oedipal, through her concept of the semiotic chora in terms of the prediscursive element as being a materiality out of which language is enabled, It is still situated firmly around the maternal body in terms of the mother child dyad and the functioning of the post-natal pre-Oedipal drives. While she is theorizing through the borders of the inside/outside, there is still a level of purity in her terms. It is on this count that Judith Butler critiques Kristeva, mostly on the grounds of perceived heterosexist norms.23 Butler suggests that Kristeva's paradigm would render lesbian subjectivity psychotic. There is more than one way to return the maternal body to her daughters. However, as my little fiction points out, there is something "masculinising" about simple solutions of the masquerade. (Although I would argue vehemently for the pleasurable power of such cyborg performances, and Haraway would take it even further, arguing for "disturbingly pleasurably tight couplings," between the human and the non human"24.) In her essay "The With-In-Visible Screen," Lichtenberg Ettinger takes up some aspects of Butler's critique, and suggests that the matrixial is another potential response to Butler's call to achieve a "resignification and recontextualization of sexuality."25 Widening the discourse of the symbolic, to in effect redefine non-linguistic and multiple discursivity, may very well be what Lichtenberg Ettinger is getting at with her idea of "metramorphoses," with it's rhythmic inflection, and impure aims.
Again, it comes down to language. As always the pre-discursive is only defined as such in terms of it's own linguistic terms. The term is up, we have gestated long enough, it is time to birth some new symbolic which allows access to the unconscious, and risk it's potentially deformed form. Trial and error is the law of cybernetics. Risks are required. And in a risky move Lichtenberg Ettinger raises the spectre of a form of incest which is not subject to the big taboo.
If the matrixial stratum hypothesized by Lichtenberg Ettinger exists as a sub-symbolic, it always did. Therefore why has it not been able to enact it's radical potential? This neo-incest paradigm is indeed threatening, pushing at the edges of the symbolic status-quo. Lichtenberg Ettinger suggests it's exclusion from the symbolic is through the threat of its highly psychotic potential. Buried, repressed, "whatever of it escaped this destiny serves patriarchy: the desire to have children in heterosexually regulated units of society."28
In order to produce conditions conducive to a "life itself" beyond the phallic dimension, I would argue that what is needed is a social space of experimentation. This social space is already multiple, but perhaps is ripe for even more fruitful incestuous couplings. But let this coupling serve, not to assimilate, but to maintain the tension between the poles of possibility, so as not to ever be re-subsumed into any once-and-for-all Order. In the narrative that makes choice a primal scene for feminism, then it is Oedipus who finds himself castrated in as much as he will never again be a universalizing, totalizing transcendental signified. Phalluses, of silicon or flesh, wave from the wings, no longer centre stage, but available for bit parts. Wombs do not take their place. It is the stage itself that is central, and the set decorators and the articulators, that script the diffracted scenes, that are now primal. Notes 1 For Preamble to this essay, see Front Magazine, May 2002, pp.___. Or link to: self versions .01, .02, .03. >back 2 Grosz, Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan, A Feminist Introduction, Routledge, New York & London, 1990, p 165 >back 3 "Hommelette is Lacan's term, I have extended the joke to the "Homme de Terre." >back 4 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, Inside the Visible an elliptical traverse of 20th Century Art edited by Catherine de Zegher MIT Press Cambridge and London, 1997, p 92 >back 5 Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets _Onco- Mouse(tm), New York, Routledge, 1997, p 273 >back 6 Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions, New York, 1989.,p 376 "almost minds" refers to a primatology reference, children, AI computer programs, and non-human primates. (Cheney et al, 1987:494). Haraway asks: 'who or what has "fully human" status?' >back 7 Haraway, Donna, Simians Cyborgs and Women, Routledge, New York, 1991, p 150 >back 8 Haraway, Donna, "Interview with Donna Haraway," Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, in Technoculture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991, Haraway describes her cyborg as a "bad girl, she really is not a boy> Maybe she is not so much bad as she is a shape changer, whose dislocations are never free. She is a girl who is trying not to become a Woman, but remain responsible to women of many colours and positions, and who hasn't really figured out a politics that makes the necessary articulations with the boys who are your allies. It's undone work." p 20. >back 9 Haraway, Donna, Simians Cyborgs and Women, Routledge, New York, 1991, p 3 >back 10 Haraway, Donna, "Interview with Donna Haraway," Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, 1991, pp. 9-10. >back 11 Haraway, Donna, 1997, p 151. >back 12 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, The Matrixial Gaze, Feminist Arts and Histories Network, University of Leeds, 1995, p 6 >back 13 Haraway, Donna, 1991, pp 9-10. >back 14 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "Matrix and Metramorphoses" Differences, 1992, p .194 >back 15 Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, see chapter 6, discussion of destrafication in "How do You make yourself a body without organs?" >back 16 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 1992, p 202 >back 17 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 1995, p 7 >back 18 Haraway, 1991, p 134 >back 19 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "Metramorhic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace" in --, pp. 125-126 >back 20 Haraway, Donna, 1997, p 11 >back 21 Haraway, Donna, 1997, p. 175 >back 22 Haraway, Donna, 1997, p 133 See Haraway's discussion of Sarah Franklin's use of the term. >back 23 Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, New York & London, Routledge, 1990, p 87 >back 24 (Here I am radically simplifying Butler's complex argument, this could indeed be it's own subject of investigation, i.e.. a comparison of BLE and Kristeva, through the lens of Butler's critique.) >back 25 Haraway, Donna, 1991, p 152, Haraway goes on to add:" Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange." I don't have time to travel this path now, but what are the possibilities of thinking non-human fetal "almost-minds", and other non human questions in terms of non-phallic subversions of the incest taboo? >back 26 Butler, Judith, quoted by Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 1997. p 103 >back 27 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "The With-In-Visible Screen" Inside the Visible, an elliptical traverse of 20th Century Art, ed. Catherine de Zegher, MIT Press, Cambridge and London, 1997. p 93 >back 28 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 1997. p 93 >back 29 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 1997, p 101 >back Bibliography Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity, New York & London, Routledge, 1990. Grosz, Elizabeth, Jacques Lacan, A feminist introduction, New York & London, Routledge, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Haraway, Donna J., Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_ OncoMouse ú, New York & London, Routledge, 1997. Haraway, Donna J., "Cyborgs and Symbionts," Forward in The Cyborg's Handbook, Ed. Chris Hables Gray with the assistance of Heidi J. Figueroa-Sarriera and Steven Mentor, New York & London, Routledge, 1995. Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs and Women, The Reinvention of Nature, New York, Routledge, 1991. Haraway, Donna J., Primate Visions, Gender Race and Nature in the World of Modern Sciences, New York & London, Routledge, 1989. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "The With-In-Visible Screen," Inside the Visible, an elliptical traverse of 20th century art, ed. Catherine de Zegher, Cambridge and London, MIT Press. 1997. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "The Red Cow Effect, The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow," act 2, Beautiful Translations, art, criticism and theory, eds. Juliet Steyn & John Gange, London, Chicago, Illinois, Pluto Press, 1996. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, The Matrixial Gaze, Feminist Arts and Histories Network, University of Leeds, 1995a. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "Metramorphic Borderlinks and Matrixial Borderspace," Rethinking Borders, ed. John Welchman, MacMillan, 1995b. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha,"The becoming Threshold of Matrixial Borderlines," Traveller's Tales, Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson, Routledge, 1994. Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, "Matrix and Metramorphosis," Differences, A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 4.3, 1992. Moi, Toril, ed., The Kristeva Reader, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1986. Penley, Constance & Andrew Ross,eds. Technoculture, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 1983. Wright, Elizabeth, ed. Feminism and Psychoanalysis, a critical reader, Oxford & Cambridge, Massachussetts, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1992. |