[-empyre-] Articulating a Matrixial Space

[Kate Southworth <katesouthworth@gloriousninth.com>]

Dear All,

I wonder if it is appropriate to speak here of a project that Christina
McPhee, Patrick Simons and I worked on for a week last summer here at
University College Falmouth in Cornwall - the aim of which was to try a and
articulate a  matrixial space?

One of the outcomes of the project is 'fuorange' and can be viewed at:

http://www.rhizome.org/artbase/27525/fuorange.html

>From the beginning, our intention was to work within a feminine creative
space that placed value on our ability to adjust to each others¹ thinking
and emotions. Through this process of borderlinking we were able to identify
our mutual aims and methodological approach. 

Loosely drawing on the situationists¹ use of the derive  we intuitively
established a process of drifting, talking and recording our encounters with
each other, with the environment and with strangers.  

For  me, it was quite a remarkable few days.   My intention at the beginning
of the project was to try to access with others, a particular psychic space
- one with which I have been intimately familiar my entire life, but a space
which, until I read Bracha Ettinger's work,  had no entry into the symbolic
for me, no way to be articulated.  The psychic space to which I am referring
is the matrixial space,  within which encounters between ?subject and
object, among subjects and partial-subjects, between me and the stranger¹
(Bracha Ettinger 2004) could occur and re-occur.

It is a space that refers us to intimate sharing in the feminine/pre birth
space (Bracha Ettinger, 2004). Moving beyond thinking subjectivity as ?an
accumulation of separations, splits, cuts and cleavages¹ the Matrixial
enables us to ?consider aspects of subjectivity as encounter occurring at
shared borderspaces between several partial-subjects (Griselda Pollock 2004,
p6).

I think the story of our project, of our few days together, is the
beginnings of my articulation of a Matrixial space - just a tiny beginning,
but one that I hope is pertinent to this discussion.   Here's how our
project started.

Earlier last year, in response to a new work by Glorious Ninth, Christina
had posted some texts by Bracha Ettinger to netbehaviour and rhizome, on the
subject of War, Trauma and Beauty. A common interest in Bracha¹s work
developed, and this led to Christina being invited as a Visiting Research
Fellow to Falmouth College of Arts for one week to work on a project
exploring Matrixial space.

On the first evening that Christina arrived in Cornwall, she and I walked
through the graveyard that overlooks the swan pool to a small cove and from
there along the coast path to a slightly larger beach. During this walk
ideas emerged and faded and re-emerged again as we began to map out a
mutually creative space within which we could work. We then met up with
Patrick, shifting our co-emerging borderspace as his thoughts and emotions
weaved alongside ours. 

Our conversations were focused quite particularly on Matrixial space and
moments and its place alongside phallocentric models of subjectivity. We
spoke about the article that Griselda Pollock had written in the February
2004 special edition of Theory Culture & Society dedicated to the work of
Bracha Ettinger, and her suggestion that ?we need to theorize dimensions of
subjectivity that move between elements of several subjectivities whose
shared borderspaces can become thresholds of affect (emotion) or even
effects¹ (Griselda Pollock 2004, p.6)

The following evening, Christina and I traced the route we had taken the
previous day but this time we took stills cameras with us. The rain was
heavy in the clouds producing a purple light that muted ordinarily garish
colours and made it difficult to distinguish one object from
another. Christina told me that the orange plastic fencing that was being
used to protect the cliffs and people from each other was known by workmen
as ?fuck you orange¹ because it barred people¹s entry from specific sites
and entire areas. This seemed to have resonance not only because of our
interest in psychogeography and derive, but because of the forbidden zones
within orthodox psychoanlysis.

?This is all I have to say about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and
fragmentary and does not always sound friendly?.If you want to know more
about femininity, inquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the
poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent
information.

Sigmund Freud, 1964, p.169

This is going to be an overly long post if I carry on now, so I think I
have to resort to a cut, a cleavage, a split.  I'm sorry.

Kate


Works referenced in this post:

Ettinger, Bracha (2004) Matrixial Tanssubjectivity for Rethinking Ethics
Inside Aesthetics 
Post to Jordan Crandall¹s Underfire Project
http://www.wdw.nl/underfire-archive/topic.php?topic_id=62

Freud, Sigmund (1964) ?On Femininity¹, in New Introductory Lectures on
Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 22, ed.
James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

Griselda Pollock (2004) Thinking the Feminine: Aesthetic Practice as
Introduction to Bracha Ettinger and the Concepts of Matrix and
Metramorphosis in ?Theory, Culture & Society¹, February 2004, vol. 21, no.
1, pp. 5-65(61) SAGE Publications