Re: [-empyre-] Matrixial and phallic space

[Jordan Williams <jordan@cartocorpus.com>]

Hi Kate and everyone

I've found your unfolding of Ettinger really intriguing and very useful,
esp. as access to her work is denied me until I can order some
books/articles.
Some comments/questions/slipperiness re your last post.

> ...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'.

This is certainly one episode in the psychoanalytic soap opera or telenovela
(I love soaps, and psychoanalysis too has its uses). One could select other
scenes from this long running series that would provide a different story
line - for example, infant sees its reflection in the mirror (or mother's
gaze or...), hey presto, self and other, phallic logic established. Whatever
the episode, the mise en scene is the same - props and scenery courtesy of
the male body, the monstrous female body confined to the  margins beyond the
frame. In Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, this is unproductive desire, this
selfing and othering, whereas D&G argue that desire is productive - desiring
machines form connections between things/people/ which is a productive way
of looking at, for want of a better less loaded word, difference. That's
part of my take on D&G's critique of Freud and Lacan in both Anti-Oedipus
and Thousand Plateaus.

And
 
> '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).

Up to this point (and maybe still) I've thought that matrixial space
corresponded with D&Gs ideas of the Body without Organs, a borderless limit,
where everything is always already co-emerging. Or maybe with their concept
of smooth space, the space that is not measured/divided. Where all is
'becoming'.

How does adding a supplement based on the female body do something
qualitatively different than phallic psychoanalysis? My problem here is with
the word "supplement". Why not a substitute? How is basing a
supplement/substitute on a gendered metaphor (the womb) any more borderless
than the phallic logic it seeks to supplement/replace? My concern is that by
using a 'full body', in this case that of the abstract machine of 'woman',
one already is constrained by a border. Maybe you could illustrate with an
example from art or art history to make it clearer? How will this idea of
matrixial space help the making of art be more (substitute here whatever you
want are to be more of) than a phallic spatial model could help it to be?

These are genuine questions, not rhetorical ones (or should I say matrixial
questions, not phallic ones).

Regards and thanks for all this food for thought.
Jordan