Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial Encounters

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

Renee, Danny, Alan, Kate, Raul, Heidi, Ryan and everyone else 
interested in this matter of how the 'matrixial' might be a political 
or cultural action space.....

Can you talk a bit more about this issue of the invisible, as Renee 
notes here,  -- the out of sight  -- and if bringing 'other' 
stories/perspectives/differences into the light is part of a matrixial 
action, perhaps even, of play, as in the child -- the  child that she 
was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes,
  there at the point where, the same she mothers herself)."

Is there a space for play as an action of revealing alterity... ?  I 
sense some  resonance with the comment about Cixhous that Danny sent 
in, by Gayatri Spivak (see excerpt below).

I 'm reaching here into something intuitive. Any thoughts out there, 
empyreans?

Christina

On Friday, April 22, 2005, at 03:19 AM, Renee wrote:

>   I cannot help but find it cynical and dismissive that you 
> characterize measures of inclusion as "gestures".   As a faculty 
> member of a Dutch art academy, I concretely benefited from measures to 
> include women on the staff.  For me, and no doubt others, these shifts 
> towards inclusion of other races, gender, etc. had and continue to 
> have VERY REAL consequences .   Not only in terms of economic 
> implications , but also in relation to those 
> stories/perspectives/differences which are visible and those which are 
> not.  Of course, once in these positions we shouldn't sit complacent 
> or rest on our laurels.  Instead, we need to remain self-critical and 
> continually ask ourselves who may be out of sight or whose narratives 
> are being suppressed.
>
> Finally, not all acknowledgements of difference are in fact about 
> inclusion.  It can also be about limits, understanding your own social 
> trappings/conventions and therefore keeping in check the impulse to 
> master others.
>
>
> xx Renee
> www.geuzen.org

"Cixous might be bringing into the feminine familiar that space 
described by
Heidegger as a space of prior interrogation, 'a vague average 
understanding
of Being... [which] up close, we cannot grasp at all.'

We know that Derrida has reread such Heideggerian passages as the
effaced/disclosed trace (not a past present), and the differed/deferred 
end
(not a future present), inscribing what we must stage as our present, 
here
and now, here only insofar as it is also away, elsewhere. Cixous' 
genius is
to take these ways of thinking and straining and turn them into 
something
doable. I think she is helped in this by her somewhat unexamined belief 
in
the power of poetry and art in general which she has never lost. To be 
sure,
in the hands of essentialist enthusiasm, this doability can turn into
precious posturing. But then, in the hands of rationalist convictions,
attempts to bring the aesthetic into the Lebenswelt can lead to 
interminable
systems talk bent on the simple task of proving that the aesthetic is
coherent. And, in the grip of *anti*essentialist enthusiasm, the 
Derridean
maneuvers can *also* turn into precious posturing. I think it is in this
spirit that Cixous has recently written: 'I believe the text should
establish an ethical relationship to reality as well as to textural
practice.' The task here is to not suspend reading until such time as 
the
text is our of quarantine.

All precautions taken, then we can say that Cixous is staging the 
thought
that, even as we are determined in all kinds of other ways - academic,
philosopher, feminist, black, homeowner, menstruating woman, for 
example -
we *are* also *always* in the peculiar being-determination that sustains
these. She is staging that dimension in the name of the place of
mother-and-child. This is not really a space accessible to political
determinations, or to specific determinations of mothering in specific
cultural formations. Following a chronological notion of human
psychobiography, this is where, at the same *time* as we mature into
adulthood and responsibility, we continue to exist in a peculiar
being-determination to which the name 'child' can be lent:

  The relation to the "mother", in terms of the intense pleasure and
  violence, is curtailed no more than the relation to childhood (the
  child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes,
  there at the point where, the same she mothers herself)."

- Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited", Outside in the Teaching
Machine, p155.


-cm