<documenta X><blast>Home-affect and Co/in-habit(u)ation
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Sun, 3 Aug 1997 01:19:48 +0200
The 'Heimliche.' Home-affect and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ation
* Psychoanalytic thought concerning both art and repetition revolves
around the impossibility of annulling an originary repression and accessing
a psychic thing encapsulated and hiding in an "outside" captured inside -
in an 'extimate' unconscious space. The thing is traumatic and aching, and
we do not know where it hurts and that it hurts. It struggles
unsuccessfully to re-approach psychic awareness, but only finds momentary
relief in symptomatic repetitions or, by subterfuge, in artwork, where its
painful encapsulation partly blows up. Lacan's gaze as objet a, like
Lyotard's figure-matrice deals with the figurality of this archaic thing in
the visual-psychic zone, by recurrences of present/absent conjunctions and
pulsational scansions correlating to phantasmatic alternations. The
matrix-figure is the unseen object of originary repression. Invisible in
principle, it is for Lyotard original absence as absence of origin. Its
locus is a non-place of donation where work of art may be born. * The
rhythm of repetition created by absence/presence alternations stands for
the disappearance/return of the archaic mother, notched and burnt onto the
kernel of the thing. The emergence of sense contracts the rhythms of the
interval which traces the repetition of her painful withdrawal of the
mother. These rhythms suggest, for Fedida, repetition as the mother and
therefore meaning-creation is this repetition itself. Enactments of the
invisible matrix-figure channel eruptions of on/off beats (Krauss) from
body to visuality to disturb it from a libidinal within. Hidden behind the
screen of phantasmatic vision, rendered inaccessible by originary
repression, the thing thus finds incarnation in the aesthetic artobject and
induces the coming into subjective existence and the emergence of
de-signified sense. Difference in recurrences is created, like in Duchamp's
"infra-thin," for a calibate, individual psyche, split and mourning its
separation. * And what if this elusive intra-psychic remnant of the
body, matrix-figure, objet a or gaze, operated in a transferential
unconscious field stretched between several individuals unknown to each
other? Such a transgression of the celibate boundaries discloses what I
call a matrixial aesthetic borderspace, where rhythms of interval capture
and trace co-engendering with/by the stranger. Art then grooves the routes
of enactment of erotic aerials of the psyche, conducting and transmitting,
dispersing and assembling joint gazes and lost figures between different
subjects rendered partial through their very participation in a composite
trans-subjectivity. A rapport that transgresses the opposition between
original and readymade emerges, where a gaze wanders, scattered and sprayed
among several floating eyes in a nomadic place, and it is impossible to
re-gather the matrixial gaze's traces without a rapport of coemergence or
cofading with a stranger. Gazes may be joined in a labyrinth, woven in the
course of creating the matrixial borderspace itself. A possibility to
access via artwork one's own trauma hidden behind the gaze by originary
repression is opened, if an unexpected encounter with an-other who
partially and by bribes is affected by the gaze occures, thus establishing
a rapport-without-relations to the I's archaic m/Other. In matrixial
transferential relations, several I(s) and uncognized non-I(s) are
interlaced, opening together the wounds of nomadic places repeatedly,
working-through to re-in/di-fuse the celibate place. * Anamnesis
works in psychoanalysis through infinite recurrences of an immemorial - yet
always present - originary scene, and artwork, says Lyotard, emerges by
working-through via anamnesis to give traces to the invisible in the
visible. In art, repetitions in anamnesic working-through do not
reestablish the lost object but make present the unpresentable thing,
crypted in the artwork's unconscious, that keeps returning, for its debt
can't ever be liquidated. This thing inhabits the artist as if it dwelled
outside, or rather, the artist is de-habitated out from its own habitat by
it, from its own body and history. The artist's body is invoked by Lyotard
as a monster inhabited by, and concealing the non-place of a thing without
face. If the subject is found by what Lyotard calls a recurrent
intermittence of its losses and returns, to enlighten the Freudian fort/da
that establishes an object by two distinct movements - constitutive of
matrix-figure on/off beat -, a spasm is now brought forward, where an
appearance is bound up with disappearance in one and the same movement,
where artwork testifies to such an event, and artist pays for it in its own
body conceived as affection. * In anamnesis, the return of the
"same" via a spasm is never the same for it carries the marks of the peril
of disappearance in the appearance. Spasm thus gives birth to artwork's
apparition amidst recurrences as a threshold. The artist's gesture Lyotard
refers to is that which creates a space of suspension inside recurrences
and contracts recurrences as alternations in a spasm, where an event is
repeatedly processed but in difference, and artwork affects and create a
'minimal' soul - an anima. Artworking is tracing a spasm in suspension,
delineating recurrent intermittence of disappearance in appearance. *
And what if art triggered potentiality for co-spasming? And what if the
spasm that is a celibate "state of birth" (Merleau-Ponty) was shared by/via
the artwork as a matrixial borderspace of co-birth? Subjectivity is then
suspended to allow archaic trans-subjectivity with the m/Other to operate
anew its borderlinking, transmitting and dispersal. When an intra-psychic
rhythm of interval transmits its effects with-in co-spasming, it operates
a rhythm of a swerve with-in a rapport between several partial subjects,
and the concealment of non-place of thing makes a side place for a
potential shared production/revelation of home-affect at the heart of
wandering, for habituation as a heimelich. An heimliche effect becomes
accessible via compiled co/in-habit(u)ating. Now recurrences do not produce
the same. They implicate matrixial co-affecting and events of encounter
that take place alongside different connective points in a transferential
borderspace beyond different times and places, where what could have been a
no-place of a potential nomadic existence is transformed into a fortuitous
homeplace by virtue of recycling-in-transformation grains of hybrid shared
mental objects, and of reiterated co-affecting. With each recycling and
co-affecting, an ephemeral, composite, unexpected home is successively
crystallized. The product - unconscious home-affect - is inseparable from
the process that creates it - the metramorphic co/in-habit(u)ation -
with-in each singular severality. Me and stranger(s) matrixially
co/in-habit(u)ate with-in/by working art. Matrixial co-affection is a
transgression of affect. * When rhythms of swerving with-in a
rapport are co-affected, recurrence stands for the fading and
transformation in returning of the archaic 'woman'-m/Other-encounter
notched and burnt onto the kernel of the thing. Sense doesn't dwell in the
celibate subject but is created by different designes of rapport in
co-emergence and by gradual changes in borderlinks. The biography of the
matrixial recurrences-in-difference is recorded in its metramorphosis: in
the successive changes in the borderlinks of a rapport of suspension
between different rhythms of recurrent intermittence. A metramorphosis
composes/traces home and habituation in one and the same psychic move while
trembling their specific affect. Such co/in-habit(u)ation captures/reveals
the impossibility of not-sharing in the production of matrixial
home-affect, the impossibility of not encountering via poietic and
aesthetic wit(h)nessing the non-place of a thing without face, in the
fragile extimate zone of potential sharing with-in the trauma of the other.
Co/in-habit(u)ating is inseparable from the subjects' affecting one another
and being thus transformed while creating a borderspace for their
transgressed subjectivity-as-encounter, at the price of their being
dispersed (into partial subjects) - but not split, and assembled (into
amalgamated temporary identity via joint hybrid objects) - but not fused.
* If there is knowledge in the Real as the late Lacan claims, then
the Real in its recurrences, contrary to Lacan's earlier idea, never
returns to the 'same,' and sense, as Varela shows us, does not dwell inside
its elements but in the complex schemas of activity that emerges from the
interaction between several processes of production. In a matrixial
borderspace it is not autopoiesis that is engaged but what I call:
co-poiesis. Fragile and risking, co-poiesis is not subordinated to the
maintenance of its proper organism and identity. Borderlinking in
co-poiesis is open ended, at the cost of identity's catastrophe, even at
the risk of the collapse of the fragile matrixial gaze itself, at the risk
of the disintegration of its screen. * Erotic aerials weave
together partial subjects and objects that unknowingly and unknown to each
other are in the process of co-in/habit(u)ating. In this, a trembling
heimliche effect, experience and sense emerge. A rhythm of swerving in
rapport, conducting toward an unforeseen home while creating it, bypasses
the off/on beat. Its rhythm never arches total "on" or total "off", for it
treasures several celibate spasms together and is attuned by several
co-spasming. Co-in/habit(u)ation is primarily affective, not visual, and it
destabilizes visuality by transgression of affect that cause infiltrations
of invisible trauma into appearance. In the matrixial borderspace, the
artist as a partial subject takes part and testifies to/for an unknown
other or rather, it is the matrixial threads of the artwork which testify
to the trauma of an-other in withness. A center-less heimliche affect
silently ascents behind the 'unheimliche' aesthetic experience (Freud),
anguishing and soothing, tearing and stitching the wounds of a nomadic
place, opening in them a rhythm of interval for an exile, suspended like a
rotating sea-wave between its fading and next birth. The painful movement
of fading of this wave is already the transient return-in-transformation of
archaic 'woman'-m/Other-encounterthing, co/in-habit(u)ating.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger