Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial and phallic space - Panopticon (forward from Richard White)

[Kate Southworth <katesouthworth@gloriousninth.com>]

Hi Richard,

 Griselda Pollock explains this relationship beautifully.  If I may quote
form her book 'Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire  and the Writing of
Art's Histories' (pages 210-212), I think it would help to contextualise
your points in relation to Matrix theory.

Its a long quote, but I think, in this instant, its worth keeping to the
original text rather than editing.

'In traditional psychoanalysis it is believed that subjectivity is only an
effect of the dialectic of 'the one' versus 'the other' that gradually takes
shape as the child is forced to distinguish itself - a mass of inchoate
sensations and impulses - from the surrounding world, and from other beings
in it, especially and fundamentally represented by the Mother.  The first
act that is said to precipitate the journey into subjectivity is, according
to mainstream psychoanalysis, some form of oral aggression which is
metaphorically a rejection - the biting of the nipple.  This is both the
opposite of, and yet structurally related to, the process of incorporation,
taking in, that now becomes one of the two formative modes - incorporation
or rejection - that define the emerging subject across a physical frontier,
the mouth, that becomes, conceptually, a binary opposition:inside/outside.
Without this imaginary division, it is argued, there would be no space or
gap for a subject to come into being.  Biting and sucking are physical
activities that begin to draw a boundary, and in this emerging sense of
space a subjectivity can begin to demarcate itself.  So the necessary
distinction upon which to construct subjectivity has a topography that
opposes the 'one' to what is 'other' to it.  This is the basis of
phallocentric logic - the logic built on absence/presence that alone raises
the phallus to the singular and sovereign status as signifier.  If the story
of the subject always begins with these acts that make possible the 'one',
the 'other' is then positioned to be aggressively rejected or to be
assimilated via identification.  what we can define as the phallic logic of
the subject is built upon archaic intimations of meaning [..] composed of
this on/off, either/or system of difference'.

'The radical implication of the concept of the Matrix is that subjectivity
does not start with one created in opposition to its other, but with the
several, paradigmatically represented - though no way biologically
determined - by the relational position of mother  and post-mature foetus in
very late prenatal moments [...] Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger theorises a
level of subjectivity in which the 'several' exist in a space that has
radical effects on the constantly modified - retuned - subjectivities which
are then defined not by a gap and either rejection or assimilation, but by a
creative - or traumatic - joint border space.  In this border space are two
unknowns to each other, lacking the drive either to assimilate or to destroy
the other'

'Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is suggesting that the Matrix can be though of
as a kind of sub-symbolic filter, which will allow certain 'vague, blurred,
slippery internal and external traces which are linked to non-Oedipal sexual
difference' to escape from foreclosure. 'Passing through the matrixial
filter, particular unconscious non-phallic states, processes and borderlinks
concerning the co-emerging I and non-I can become meaningful', Matrix is
thus not the opposite of the phallus; it is rather a supplementary
perspective. 'It grants a different meaning; it draws a different field of
desire (Bracha Ettinger).

Kate

On Tue Apr 26, 2005  1:27:21 PM US/Pacific Richard White wrote:
> How is 
> information (and hence subjectivity) articulated in matrixial space? I
> think some engagement with Lacanian theory is in order here, speci
> fically in reference to the idea that language precedes and determines
> subjectivity. There is a wealth of feminist criticism on Lacan that
> would be fruitful here - perhaps Lacan has been mentioned in another
> thread in relation to matrixial space and I have missed it?