Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

[Kate Southworth <katesouthworth@gloriousninth.com>]

Marc, I wonder if we are brave enough?   I think you are right to say we
don't need big ideas, nor do we need to be the most intelligent, but I think
we do need a  bravery.  I think we need to be brave enough to be vulnerable.

>On 14/4/05 2:43 am, "marc" <marc.garrett@furtherfield.org> wrote:

> Yes - we have all those amazing writers and thinkers who have guided us
> across the chasms, as we thumble around in the darkness of our own
> evaluated notions and various interpretations. But what use are these
> these amazing people unless we are brave enough to question our own
> desires for cultural acceptance, and move outside our circular walls.

> We don't need big ideas
> We can have small ones that we can all share
> We don't need to topple institutions
> We can build our own connected groups, small ones
> We don't need to be the most intelligent
> We can be aware and critical and open
> We don't need patriarchal leaders
> We can create shared vision(s) amongst ourselves
> We don't need manifestos
> We can declare our behaviours instead
> We don't need more solutions
> We can build and change as we go along
> ad finitum and all that stuff...
> 


> I feel that it is our own behaviours that need to be re-evaluated for we
> are all toughened by life, and can easily be blind to what is good for
> ourselves and others. Regarding the choice of rebuilding an alternative
> to what we have now in life; I'm game, I'm busy but not dead yet and
> always fascinated by people and their creative minds, especially when
> shared with others mutually (not self-consciously).
> 
> We are right now, part of a ratio with many combinations, entwined and
> can potentially be reshaped.

What potential do we envision?  What is possible for us as artists to do?

If, as Bracha Ettinger and Griselda Pollock argue we are all shaped by the
catastrophic trauma of the 20th Century and the ongoing trauma of the 21st
century, then it would seem to be an urgent need to transgress these borders
and find 'a radical and creative way to address the persistence of traumatic
legacies in a way that opens a future beyond them'(Pollock, 2004).

'The matrixial feminine becomes a means to think 'after Auschwitz: that is
both to think about a world reshaped by that catastrophic rupture, and to
theorize the structure of its trauma to which we are now orphaned and
bereaved heirs' (Pollock, 2004, p.19).

Can we grieve for 'others unknown
And for ourselves
So as to imagine a future not defined by trauma acquiring through its'
repression and latency the power to become the dominating tendancy'(Pollock,
2004, p.19)?


Isn't art one of the foremost places in which we can image these futures?

'A future that can reconstruct a basis for ethical existence [...]in the
awareness of matrixial trans subjectivity and of [..]borderlinking between
[..] me and the stranger, not just at the borderspaces of becoming, but also
of disappearance and dying'(Pollock, 2004, p20).

love
Kate