The Lyotard/Krauss formulation of the matrix relies upon a binary on/off
scansion--absolute positions that Bracha has problematized in her
conception of matrixial borderspace. Never entirely on nor entirely
off, it is based upon a condition of co-emergence, providing a feminine,
transubjective counterpart to Lyotard. But before discussing the
differences, I would like to summarize the Lyotard/Krauss axis (which is
not Lyotard's contemporary position).
I find this of interest to our concerns in this forum because it
provides a psychological counterpart to the more tectonic, technological
discussions of networked spatiality, positioning psychological rhythms
such that they can be related to the paces of technological systems
(thus locating a field of operations). It also provocatively displaces
the issues on perspective we have discussed. Yet to be articulated are
the procedures for the construction and modification of this realm as
constitutive of contemporary spatiality.
I will quote directly. In Hal Foster, ed., "Vision and Visuality,"
Krauss narrates how Lyotard sees the matrix at work in one of Freud's
writings of his cases:
"'A Child Is Being Beaten' was the description given to Freud by several
patients who located this as an obsessional, erotic fantasy. As we know,
all that analysis could draw from the particular patient Freud describes
was another, more primitive version of the fantasy, enunciated as 'The
father beats the child.' In relation to this latter statement the only
added information was that here the child the father was beating was not
the patient herself, but another child; and as for the patient, she was
stationed as a witness. There are several senses in which ein Kind wird
geschlagen serves Lyotard as a matrix figure. One of them is the total
invisibility of one of its key terms, one that lay so deeply repressed
that it had to be extrapolated or reconstructed by Freud. This is that
phase of the fantasy which, as it were, puts its erotic spin on it,
investing it with both its excitement and its anxiety. It is the phase
that the patient never articulated but which Freud ventriloquized as 'I
am being beaten by the father.'
"But it is precisely from the perspective of that intermediary
phase--the one between 'the father beats the child' and 'a child is
being beaten'--that the multiple transmutations at work in the
production of the fantasy become apparent: the transmutation from active
to passive--as beating turns into being beaten; the transmutation in the
field of the subject--as spectator turns into victim; the transmutation
in libidinal zone--as genitality reverts to anality; the transmutation
in the contents of the drive--as sadism changes to masochism. And it is
this work of overlaying contradiction, of creating the simultaneity of
incompossible situations, that Lyotard identifies as the action of the
matrix. If it is a matrix, Lyotard maintains, it is because
"'the statements one can determine there which organize the goal (to
beat), the source (the anal zone), and the object (the father) of one
sentence, are in their turn condensed into a single product formula--"A
child is being beaten"--whose apparent coherence allows the psychic life
to contain in a single manifold a multiplicity of incompossible
"sentences." These do not form a system but a block. Thus the drive to
be and to have the father is simultaneous; and the investment is both
genital-phallic and sadistic-anal.'
"The matrix's invisibility is secured, then, by the very activity of the
changes it produces, of the constant nonidentity of its component parts.
Yet the product of the matrix is an obsessional fantasy, a recurrence
which, in each of its repetitions, is the same. And this leads Lyotard
to ask how this identity is secured since at the level of the fantasy's
contents there is nothing that is maintained as stable. To this he
replies that its identity is formal. 'The fantasmatic matrix,' he says,
'is evidently a "form."' Yet the difficulty of thinking this producer of
disorder and disruption as a form is obvious. 'How in general,' Lyotard
asks, 'can that which is form also be transgression? How can what is
deviation, derogation, deconstruction, be at the same time form?' The
answer he finds is in the evidence of a form that is not a good form,
not a good gestalt. Rather, as he shows, 'it is a form in which desire
remains caught, form caught by transgression; but it is also the, at
least potential, transgression of form.'
"This form, which is that of on/off on/off on/off, is the alternating
charge and discharge of pleasure, the oscillating presence and absence
of contact, the rhythm 'in whose regularity the subject's unconscious
is, so to speak, 'caught,' the formal matrix of both dreams and
symptoms. It is onto this form that the matrix figure's fantasized
gesture of a spanking that is also a caress can be mapped; for it is
this form that can represent the rhythmic oppositions between contact
and rupture. But Lyotard cautions that, unlike a pulse which is
understood in terms of a law of repetition, a principle of recurrence
guaranteeing as it were that an 'on' will always follow an 'off,' this
pulse involves the constant threat of interruption."