<underfire> Intimacy, wit(h)nessing and non-abandonement

[bracha L. Ettinger]

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
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On Dec 9, 2006, at 7:44 AM, caleb waldorf wrote:
> I would like to insert into the conversation on behalf of Rula  
> Halawani a series of images from a work titled "Intimacy."  The  
> images and description of the work are below.
> -Caleb
>
> Intimacy
>
> <01.jpg>
> <03.jpg>
> <08.jpg>
> <14.jpg>
>
>
> These series of photographs were taken at the Qalandia checkpoint.  
> This body of work examines and captures the experience of the  
> checkpoint which has become a hallmark of the current Israeli  
> occupation. There are very few faces among the collection of  
> images; rather we are invited to view a multitude of close-ups of  
> encounters between soldiers and Palestinians wanting to cross the  
> border.
>
> One of the distinctive characteristics of the Israeli occupation is  
> its highly personalized quality and the particular way in which it  
> invades and penetrates the private space of individuals. At 'the  
> checkpoint' there are no privileges, everyone waits in line, and is  
> reduced to an ID number, and everyone is searched and questioned.  
> It is these qualities and aspects that are conveyed in my  
> photographs, in particular the repetitive inspections of papers and  
> personal belongings. However, what is intriguing about the  
> photographs is how they document the subtleties of the encounters  
> between two anonymous parties. In the images we see different  
> gestures of waiting and the postures of human bodies placed in an  
> unequal power relationship. Via the close-ups, we get a sense of  
> people's different moods - tiredness, anxiety - and the nuances of  
> the way each person responds to questioning at the checkpoint.
>
> Shown through fragments, this series of photographs carries a  
> multitude of narratives on the experiences of Palestinians at  
> Qalandia. In a sense, when looking at the images, you can hear the  
> echo of people's voices as you imagine the all too familiar  
> dialogues that take place. I accentuate the issues of repetition  
> and the differences between each separate encounter by the  
> recurrence in this series of the large slab of worn stone that  
> marks the site of exchange. In many of my photographs, it is given  
> particular prominence and takes on a symbolic quality marking  
> nearness and distance at the same time, it becomes the one fixed  
> element or prop in this absurd theatre. Imposed on the landscape,  
> it marks the place where the ritual of authority is performed and  
> the place of contact with the other.
>
> The particular angle I used in my photographs shows the experience  
> and phenomena of the checkpoint in all its mundane and chilling  
> detail and documents how power in the modern days is exercised and  
> inscribed on individuals.
>
> -Rula Halawani
> <01.jpg>
> <03.jpg>
> <08.jpg>
> <14.jpg>
> _______________________________________________
> Under Fire  http://underfire.eyebeam.org
> 16 October - 10 December 2006
> International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Seville
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