Matrixial Borderspace(s): Reading Bracha Ettinger

18 11 14

It is North Wales. My lover and I are cycling through a town we pretend is unknown to him. We have begun the process of dressing up for a party, the remainder of our costume stashed in our rucksacks, alongside a veritable cabinet of drugs. I have some sort of clear liquid decanted into small [infant’s] medicine bottles; he has a white powder pressed into folded A4 paper, [that I know of].

We find ourselves in a space between alleyways/behind houses that is also a concrete architectural feature/garden for use by the residents [it is also a thoroughfare for pedestrians and cyclists – or perhaps a desire-line]. Lover strikes up a conversation with a manual labourer who is working the concrete land, re. directions, drug-taking etc. There is a mocking quality implicit in the former’s attitude to the latter that bothers me; the labourer seems flummoxed by my lover: he seems gentle and we are not. In the meantime the vicinity has filled up with elderly bodies moving mechanically with fixed expressions that trouble me. They don’t speak; they fix us with their gaze, which is empty, generalised and disturbing in its sameness. I urge my lover to stand beside me, to reinforce me somehow under the hypnosis of the gaze – their curiosity seems disproportionate. As the tension builds I make the decision to rather theatrically introduce myself, to demystify my self, but my utterance is marked with aggression. Haven’t you seen one of these [gesture to self] before? I am Lauren I am thirty-three I am from Preston, Lancashire, haven’t you heard if it? It’s a shitty town like this, it’s 4 hours north from here, on the west coast of England, it’s up there [gesture upwards], have you never left this place?

He has slipped away. He scoops me up mid-soliloquy [eliciting no response from my audience, their muteness escalating my diatribe, if anything]; we descend through the concrete passageways out into the world.

I am in the passenger seat of a car that is driving through treacherous conditions beyond any conceivable blizzard: snow falls, ice slabs are heaped up everywhere like icebergs, multi-layered sheets of ice around and beneath us. There is a woman in the backseat describing details of her sexual history. My lover is driving and talking to me ceaselessly, unperturbed by conditions I view as suicidal. I express this sentiment thus: I wouldn’t drive in this climate, to which he [nonchalantly] replies: one is safest when one is driving oneself [as opposed to ‘being driven’ on public transport, I presume].

I am silently capturing our situation, visually. My eyes remain fixed on the scenery that rushes towards us, eyes telescoping left to right, taking everything in [pre-emptively, like my driving instructor said: over-anticipating]. I notice that at a distance of about 100 feet a slip road to the right that joins this major road, which has 6 lanes crammed with vehicles travelling at speed: mostly juggernauts, articulated lorries etc [they loom large over this small car]. I notice that cars are joining this major road in the opposite direction, and skidding across the carriageway in a vain attempt to avoid multiple collisions, which occur but to which I purposefully turn a blind eye. Dusk light congeals with headlights and our vision is fuzzy, grey-amber. With calculated ease my lover manages the vehicle; he deftly manipulates the controls in order to drift, most casually, to the far left of the road/dividing us from the commotion, which continues ahead, repeatedly, to my horror. Slow down. keep left (cliff edge, M62, road most travelled as a child, a threshold, white rose of Yorkshire embedded in the rock, pass-over, liminality: “imaginary space of parents” into which we are born, place of perpetually angst-ridden return).

5 11 14

We sleep beside each other until he wakes and lights up a cigarette. The scent of tobacco floods a scene which frames him, my younger sister and me. The location is my childhood home. My daughter is asleep nearby. He is smoking and I ask him extinguish the cigarette, or go outside, in response to which he turns to my sister asking: should I go outside? From this gesture, the fluid substitution of authority, or else a substitution of confidence, I can tell he has yielded to her seduction. Before she can answer him I fly into a violent rage, I heave him across the threshold out of the house, maniacally exhorting him to get out in some sort of paroxysm that expresses my crushing sense of being totally undermined. Too close, too close. 

22 9 14

A huddle of three men – one of them, my lover. One of the men exposes a huge tumescent cock, its spherical tip (like the cap of a mushroom) is swollen and crimson. [First response]. Notice the other two men (they may, or may not, share a name) seem unperturbed by this phallic display (and why should they be). I identify the three men: father, lover, daughter’s father [interchangeable gendered bodies]. Continue to lurk in the vicinity of these three men in spite of the fullness of the room [party, drinks, frocks and suits]. The huddle opens and one man (not my lover) is coated in semen that has ejaculated from the bulging tip of that massive penis that earlier disturbed me. Erotic-vibes but from me not towards me. The semen like a wave has crashed over the man: it seems to pour out from his face, colour and texture icing-like as it drips from his chin. I imagine it on me, in me: the taste and the smell [overpowering].

11 11 14

The first witnessing is only of bodies falling, quite abstracted, orange shadows passing across the field of vision, against a concrete backdrop punctuated with small opaque windows that reveal nothing.

In New York City I pace about, every now and again descending into the subway (like those photographs I rediscovered in my memory), riding trains. I have redesigned my hairstyle – my fringe is dyed platinum blond and from the crown to the tips is hot pink, saturation increasing as it reaches the tips. I <3 my hairstyle; I feel renewed and reawakened from a decade of cultural obscurity and decreasing circles of criticality that have effaced my potential. I am sitting on a train, anxiously, on my way to a ‘meeting’ with my father. I am not drugged. I project that he suspects me drugged, for which he blames my lover. I project this in the dream and it floods me with more anxiety. I am sweating profusely. I hold a pocket mirror to my face and glance at my reflection. I reflect [on] my appearance. My appearance is too much; my hairstyle is ridiculous. Something that ought to be youthful and sleek is actually a depressing masquerade which harks back to a time before even my own [youth]. I look like an amalgam of Rod Steward and Suzi Quatro: like a Jem doll from the 1980s who is trapped in the signifiers of 1970s rock, in spite of a sort of futuristic pinkness.

It is now that I begin to nestle into my ridiculousness and begin to ripen there, and as I do my defences drop, the fury that resides in me seeps out into the follicles and I feel emblazoned. Also I realise that I need my daughter with me, and call my own mother with whom she is staying whilst I attempt this (nonetheless abortive) encounter with my father, who gives me nothing and takes everything: who empties me. I dial the number incorrectly over and over again, my palms are sweating and my body is convulsing. I manage to speak to someone [male] who reports that he, my mother and my daughter are driving away from where I am, out of the city, for the afternoon. It is too much to take [that my daughter is diverging from where I am], so I return to the subway, only to find that my train has departed. I watch it snake out of the station, aghast, horrified and paralysed.

Somehow, simultaneously, when I am calling/speaking to my mother/her male companion (and not getting through) I am also engaged in the articulation of a tirade against my father (face to face). This messy entanglement causes my speech to become corrupted and the trajectories of these confrontations (with self and other) to be mutually engulfing. I have no verbal flow, only bile, which flows but is also produced out of retching. My face is contorted and my tears have abandoned their taut, salty pathways on my cheeks.

Return to the falling bodies. This time, excruciatingly, I accompany them in their descent (scopically: I am a disembodied witness). The expressions on the faces of these falling bodies, clad in orange jumpsuits in the manner of U.S. prisoners, are already fixed grimaces etching greyish flesh. As the ground closes in my view detaches by degrees. By the time they make contact with the sidewalk [this in New York City] paving slabs, this witness watches from a distance of 15 feet: close enough to discern the crumpled (bloodless) corpses atop one another in a lifeless pile of grey over grey. The ground is icy and the bodies too turn to ice: the misery of their lifetime of incarceration enshrined in their grimaces that frame gritted teeth. My stomach turns.

30 10 14

I should have never pursued her. Something is happening.

I am living, with my friend and my daughter, next door to where she lives. My friend is (also) in love with you. I go next door (alone). It is early morning. You come to me and we embrace. You offer me breakfast and we talk. You are incredibly warm and tactile. Your hand hovers around my waist. I ask you questions as we move about the house: how long have you been here? How do you make money? (you are smiling and rolling your eyes as you describe the seasonal work you do in Blackpool) How much is your rent? (£300). You live with two women and a man – cardboard cut-outs of the four of you adorn the white wall of the immense vestibule. They seem peripheral, they drift about, and they are monumentally proportioned. You make us drinks and we sit together. Your chair is behind mine and we sit together watching the news on tv whilst sipping hot tea. Your chair is behind mine and the house is peaceful. Your hand is casually draped across the curve of my waist (I must be reclining). We occasionally speak. Our bodies are close. Your hand making contact with the side of my body charges it entirely. I know if I turn to you our faces will be aligned. I know if I turn to you our mouths and tongues will touch and be inflamed. I wake up still charged.

This essay will not engage directly with Emin’s words and the specificity thereof, but rather use her statement as a precipice to jump off.

In the wake of Tracey Emin's recent comments on the position of the maternal and of the artist, I am compelled to explore the status of the so-called artistic impulse in opposition to that of the, again, so-called maternal. This essay will not engage directly with Emin’s words and the specificity thereof, but rather use her statement as a precipice to jump off. For what does becoming a mother bring to or violently steal from the woman, artist or not, in the matrix of too much/not enough which all women must navigate, and furthermore how does the situation of being a mother affect my own personal engagement with the world and consequently my own art practice with which this world is entangled. One has to engage with the myths surrounding the maternal, including the existence of such a state in itself. The maternal figure is highly idealised – and denigrated. It cannot be said that this state is a singular entity and it would be dangerous to make this presumption, which acts as either a barrier to a bodily/emotional experience that runs the gamut between [the] violence [of birth] and unconditional love (that is nevertheless ambivalent), or an escape route (and for my part, I am guilty of predicating my decision to procreate upon the latter). Already one finds oneself in the murky territory of the contradictory and the incoherent. And each condition implies an act of fleeing – from the experience or from a particular idea of oneself.

Emin stated that if she had mothered a child she therefore would have faltered as an artist. Speaking from the post-menopausal position this statement shouldn't have raised hackles: enshrined in the comment is a mere explication of her situation as childless women, which carries its own burden, and a permissiveness that I find quite touching. It’s not as simple as the opposition, something which Derrida would say is appropriative of its other; this formulation of a position reveals in its articulation the passage through one state into another, and the impossibility of this state’s transformation. On the flip-side to which there is a joyful note of liberation from roles that, for her, seem incompatible with the role of the artist; a role and state of being which she has fought tooth-and-nail to occupy. One constantly seeks a narrative that cements one’s position or decision or even assuages one’s immense guilt or heals the wounds one has endured. For those of us who recall previous Emin personae we contrast this statement with that of her perimenopausal incarnation, in which she mourned the loss of her fertility: an acknowledgement, then, of a profound lack, menopause being an intertwined bodily/emotional passage through which all women pass, some enduring and others stoical, and the majority with at least a primordial sense of having 'done one's duty': as if the body and its potential functions were some kind of material to be first manipulated and last, obeyed. Parturition having occurred or not, the passage for all women is the same, and the situation of the both ‘the mother’ and the ‘childless woman’ remains a passage through both biological irruption and relational/libidinal cathection.

Bringing up a 5 year old daughter - in conjunction with her father with whom she stays for roughly a third of the week - definitely complicates the existing complexities of my existence (universally experienced or particular to my situation and the condition of the ‘I’ that occupies it), and presents both restrictions and hidden openings. These openings – some, one has to orchestrate and others attune to, are ruptures that reveal more of the morass of unconscious and experiential raw material that would anyway be fuelling my practice. There are practical exigencies that mustn’t be glossed-over; there are shocking oscillations that propel one hither and thither both physically and psychically with expansive repercussions for other relationships and the embodiments thereof. I don’t believe, as R.D. Laing did, that sociological shifts can heal the wounds of the divided self that goes some way to articulate this state. The maternal is a constant struggle that cannot be pacified by doing away with The Family or redefining the role of he father. Something more rhizomatic is going on that requires a deeper and broader engagement.

Self-identification is problematic as any attempt to fix one’s identity can generate a tumultuous situation for subjectivity (or the ego). The ego (and the unconscious narrative that is always present alongside it) generates itself in opposition to ideal-types from the outside world; necessarily mediated both externally and internally (termed by Freud as projection and introjection). The terms of our identification are defined not from within but from without, so that when one proclaims what one is, be that an artist, a mother, a bookseller, or unemployed, there are frameworks of meaning in place to which one is subscribing. For my part I prefer a multiplicity of partial identifications with a nod to the unknown, that don’t bond me too closely to any yet take all into account. My own tendency is towards the liminal: occupying thresholds, or transitional states, which may equally be called the condition of the artist, or of the mentally ill, or of the maternal, which is a state of constant transitioning and repositioning in relation to the baby/child/adult that itself transitions and reposition in its own right. Transformations operate cross-bodily, simultaneously, echoing and jarring and playing-out over a chain or passage of selves and others. In short: the maternal is a state of relation both like and unlike any other and it unfolds spatio-temporally, produced from a situation of rupturing. One cleaves an identity that is precisely unfixed from a stream that is never conclusively apprehended by the self, for the motion is perpetual, infinite. Self-image producing myths that then set in motion cultural and social presumptions depend not on being (a mire of corporeal/spiritual/consciousness) but on doing and having: the functionality of roles and the body as vessel.

Post-partum, her body of work/sexed body remapped – territoialized, parasitised – Emin might have found herself alienated form it anew: this position of metastasis might have produced some profoundly engaging work, or might have paralysed her with the impossibility of it all and led her instead down the route of least resistance (that is, from without): the contemporary conservative figure of the ‘yummy mummy’, a cultural phenomenon that operates as a narcissistic space in which women can cast-off their prior identity in some sort of consumer-led penitential ritual (“I used to do pills and sleep around but now I do aromatherapy, tend the garden and orbit around the child that is the centre of my universe, so I am therefore forgiven for my flights of youthful fancy, and by the way I AM BETTER NOW”). I can’t help thinking that if Emin had produced from her body another life, and engaged with that process of protrusion, detachment and the complex intimacies and antinomies between mother and child, her work might not have improved or degraded – simply expanded into the territory of an annexe to the realm with which she is familiar: the emotionally violent and the libidinal; the filth and the obscurity and the extrusions of the body in inexorable negotiation with the other.

Being optimistic, as I write, (for this optimism is a fleeting state that is vulnerable to wounding and harrowing visions) about the possibility of flouting ‘lifestyle’ choices, and recognising the illusory nature of such appearances and that, in truth, the maternal is a site of extreme incoherencies and complexities, I am most disappointed by the fear that seems to permeate the subject of the maternal. “You’re life is over when you have kids” is a popular refrain, which actually says more about taxonomies of the domestic/financial that the actual lived experience of caring, in the broadest possible sense, for children. I know practicing artists who have children, men and women, and their attitude, like mine, is co-conspiratorial: the child is along for the ride, that is to say, the child is born into this and it is this (the particular routines, the adventures and the problematics) with which we will all negotiate. Like art, parenting is a process and as a trajectory it is littered with contingencies. The experience is interpenetrating – the maternal body and the mind are altered by the experience, but why fear this? Are we afraid of letting go of ourselves? For holding tight to the mirror/s supports and at the same delimits the frameworks of our identity-forms. Subjectivity, however, is in constant flux, and by destabilising the fallacy of selfhood to which we (narcisstically) cling, our potential for polymorphic intervention, experiences and leaps of faith, in short, our openness, is spread wider.