Ettinger and Kristeva Are in Clear Disagreement About the Significance of the Womb in Culture

(Re)thinking the feminine – Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger and the significance of the womb in culture

Nóirín Mac Namara Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper examines the significance of the womb in psychoanalytic theory according to Bracha Ettinger and Julia Kristeva. Whereas Kristeva says that it must be rendered abject in order for the speaking subject to operate, Ettinger re-examines the impact the intrauterine experience has on psychic life. She concludes that the psychic mechanisms engendered within the intrauterine experience only lead to psychosis if they are foreclosed in culture. This paper will consider the degree to which Kristeva’s notion of abjection enables us to understand one of the psychic mechanisms used to maintain (phallic) subjectivity, how Ettinger’s theory relates to sexual difference that emerges from the feminine within the matrixial stratum of subjectivity and Ettinger’s examination of the role of the m/Other in the subjectivization process.

At first glance Ettinger and Kristeva can both be seen to argue for the subjectivizing influence the mother has on the child. Yet they are not at all similar. Kristeva aims to show how the Symbolic is already within the mother. The mother is the child’s first point of contact with the Symbolic through the ordering of the semiotic chora. Kristeva’s Symbolic, composed of the semiotic and symbolic signifying processes, is founded on castration and

Ettinger takes the model of the late prenatal intrauterine stage and shows how different psychic mechanisms are developed within this experience. Ettinger’s theory is not actually about the mother and child but rather relates to sexual difference that emerges from the feminine within the matrixial stratum of subjectivity. Ettinger uses processes of metramorphosis to account for differentiation from the m/Other that do not involve wholesale separation, rejection, assimilation or abjection.

Julia Kristeva and the phallic mother

Kristeva argues that ‘Woman’ cannot exist and in positing or claiming such an identity we erase difference between all women. In her essay Stabat Mater she puts forward the idea that it might be different with mothers, considering this a function that is only attributable to the female sex. She quickly retreats from this though as she points out the inherent problems. Within Western culture motherhood is often used to represent femininity in its entirety and, even more problematically, when examined closely, the representation of motherhood does not refer to the reality but rather to the fantasy of motherhood as a “lost territory” (Kristeva, 1987:234). It does not refer to any actual mother, archaic or not, but idealizes the relationship between the mother and child. Real, lived motherhood is shrouded in silence.

For Kristeva, the union between the mother and child is prior to the child’s entry into the symbolic order and therefore prior to life. Kristeva asserts that the process of becoming a mother does not have a subject. We cannot assert that the mother is the master of the gestation process. The gestation process is “prior to the social-symbolic-linguistic contract” (Kristeva, 1980:238) and to assert that the mother is the master of that process is to risk losing our identities, as identity is constructed within the social-symbolic- linguistic contract. According to Kristeva an examination of the gestation process brings us dangerously close to psychosis so the mother (the phallic mother) is constituted. Through this construction of the mother we deny psychosis with the assertion that “mamma is there, she embodies this phenomenon; she warrants that everything is, and that it is representable” (Kristeva, 1980:238). As Kelly Oliver puts it

“The mother cannot be on the side of the drives or we are born out of something nonsocial and nonsymbolic; yet she cannot straddle the drives and the Symbolic for the same reason, and she cannot be completely within the Symbolic or we lose the child” (Oliver, 1991:59). According to Kristeva, the loving mother hides the fact that our identities are constructed on an essentially unknowable and unsymbolizable abyss. The loving mother enables the subject to deny the reality of death. Without the phallic mother each subject would “be led to conceive of its Being in relation to some void, a nothingness asymmetrically opposed to this Being, a permanent threat against, first, its mastery and ultimately, it stability” (Kristeva, 1980:238).

Kristeva argues that we need to accept that all identity is divisible and founded on separation. She does not subscribe to the idea of an omnipotent archaic mother with no separation and no frustration and stresses that the abyss that opens up between the mother and child can only be traversed through love and pain.

Kristeva celebrates the way in which the maternal challenges the idea of linear time and the unified subject. Yet she is adamant that women do not inhabit the maternal. The current social structure must perpetuate the idea of the mother as a subject so that the very idea of the universal subject can be maintained.

For Kristeva “pregnancy is a sort of institutionalized, socialized and natural psychosis” (Kristeva, 1995:220). She argues that we have not yet been able to conceive of maternity as a truly “creative act” because we cannot conceive of a way to process it that doesn’t entail masochism or the annihilation of “one’s affective, intellectual, and professional personality” (Kristeva, 1995:220). Maternal lucidity is repressed because it poses such a threat to the symbolic code. The construct of the ‘phallic mother’ is placed on the threshold between the symbolic order and the paradox of gestation to reassure the subject of its mastery.

Kristeva and the role of the mother in the subjectivization process

Kristeva aims to show how the mother is the child’s first point of contact with the Symbolic through the ordering of the semiotic chora. She argues that Freud points to the distinctive nature of the semiotic when he posits “the structuring disposition of drives” (Kristeva, 1984:25) and the primary processes of displacement and condensation which operate on energies and their inscriptions. Energy flows within the body are arranged according to family and social structural constraints and are structured by the mother’s body. While the child exists within the pre-symbolic realm their oral and anal drives dominate the “sensorimotor organization” (Kristeva, 1984:27) and are ordered by the mother. It is through this ordering of the drives by the maternal entity that Kristeva wishes to highlight the role the maternal function plays in the child’s acquisition of symbolization.

Using her concept of the semiotic chora Kristeva criticizes Lacan for positing the mirror stage as the subject’s first entry point into the Symbolic realm. She argues that the maternal ordering of the semiotic chora and anal stage have already instigated the move to the Symbolic realm. Furthermore, she argues that the mirror stage is not possible without the previous ordering of the semiotic chora. The process of rejection precedes and produces the verbal function. In order to recognize themselves in the mirror, the child must be able to conceptualize the difference between ‘I’ and ‘other’ which is achieved firstly through rejection which then turns to negativity and finally to negation and judgement.

She argues that the Symbolic should be conceptualised as “this always split unification” (Kristeva, 1984:49) composed of a dialectical relationship between the semiotic and symbolic signifying processes. Lechte and Margaroni (2004:16) stress the importance of recognising that the semiotic and the symbolic are not in opposition nor are they separate objectified entities but rather they exist as an antagonism1. Neither is absolutely exterior to the other and they need to be thought of as “reciprocally deconstructive, each placing

1 Lechte and Margaroni take Laclau and Mouffe’s definition of antagonism here as “[t]he relation [that] arises not from full totalities, but from the impossibility of their constitution” (Laclou and Mouffe cited in Lechte and Margaroni, 2004: 17) Antagonism is “the failure of difference” which they read as the failure of absolute difference because the presence of an Other “prevents me from being completely myself” (Laclou and Mouffe cited in Lechte and Margaroni, 2004: 17) the other under erasure, preventing it from becoming one with itself” (Lechte and Margaroni, 2004:18).

The arrival of the symbolic (signification through language) hides the semiotic stage or region in the process of the subject. The semiotic “logically and chronologically precedes the establishment of the symbolic and its subject” (Kristeva, 1984:41). According to Kristeva the semiotic and the symbolic are constitutive of the subject and both are always operational within the subject’s signifying system (Kristeva, 1984:24).

Kristeva argues that the child experiences maternal (semiotic) authority at the oral stage and during “sphincteral training” (Kristeva, 1982:72) Maternal authority maps out the body through prohibition and frustrations and this mapping is the precondition of language. Language represses this “maternal authority and the corporeal mapping that abuts against them” (Kristeva, 1982:72). Julia Kristeva and the abjection of the maternal entity

Kristeva argues that culture is safeguarded through the process of abjection (Kristeva, 1982:2) and that the abject is characteristic of the time we first attempt to break away from the “maternal entity”(Kristeva, 1982:13). She posits that this breaking away is extremely difficult given that at this point we do not exist in language and the break is always precarious; we are always at “risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling” (Kristeva, 1982:13). Kristeva argues that the child must make the mother abject in order to initiate a separation from her. I cannot be ‘like’ another, I cannot identify with another before I have separated from another. Thus, for Kristeva, abjection is necessarily before narcissism and indeed a precondition for its development.

If the subject is to take up a masculine identity, the mother must be split in two, the abject and sublime. The male child can then separate from the abject mother and love the sublime mother (Oliver, 1991:50). For the child who is a girl, the process is slightly more complicated. In abjecting the mother she abjects herself and she must also abandon the mother for the father as the object of her love. Kristeva locates the vulnerability of the female subject as she is currently constructed within the Symbolic order as explicable by the “structural extraneousness of the phallus” (Kristeva, 1998:37). The woman never truly has the phallus and lacks a stable identity within the Symbolic order. Women cannot but regard the symbolic order as illusory (at least some of the time) and in order for women to wholly identify with the phallus they must refuse to recognize the pre-Oedipal primary bond with the mother

The abject is that which disgusts us as it threatens the borders on which our identities are constructed. Before we acquire language and the ability to exist in language, the abject confronts us “with our earliest attempts to release the hold of maternal entity” (Kristeva, 1982:13). The abject is not an object. The abject is not something that is identifiable and definitive and it is both fascinating and repulsive. The object is identifiable and, through its positioning as definitively outside of the subject, situates the subject in a meaningful place. The abject is that which threatens to annihilate our ‘selves’. It is that which “disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva, 1982:4).

Kristeva identifies menstrual blood and excrement as the two main types of abject. Excrement and that with which it is associated, infection, disease, decay and corpses, represent the threat to identity that comes from outside (Kristeva, 1982:71). On the other hand, menstrual blood represents the threat (social or sexual) that comes from within – “it threatens the relationship between the sexes within a social aggregate and, through internalization, the identity of each sex in the face of sexual difference” (Kristeva, 1982:71). These two types of abject are both associated with the maternal and/or the feminine.

For Kristeva any organization is constituted through difference, opposition and separation (Kristeva, 1982:81). Kristeva argues that abjection is a “universal phenomenon” (Kristeva, 1982:68) although it takes different shapes within different signifying systems. Kristeva’s argument is based on signifying systems which are formed around exclusion and power. Since the symbolic order is based on differences and distinctions (subject/object, clean/dirty) it is inherently vulnerable to that which it excludes. The speaking subject is constituted through a series of prohibitions that establish inner and outer borders (Kristeva, 1982:69). For Kristeva, the Symbolic depends on the repression of the maternal authority which maps the subjects clean and proper body (Kristeva, 1982:72). The autonomous subject requires both the mother’s continued abjection and idealisation as a self-sacrificial loving entity. It is against the mother that the autonomous subject first asserts their independence.

In rituals of defilement directed against the feminine Kristeva sees the admittance by the masculine that it is constantly threatened by the feminine (Kristeva, 1982:70). Rituals of defilement are carried out in an effort to ward off the feeling of being threatened by the mother/child dual relationship again and risking the loss of the self (Kristeva, 1982:64).

According to Kristeva, it is the Imaginary Father which offsets the devouring potentiality of the abject mother. The child needs an identification with a loving father to facilitate its separation from the abject maternal space (Kristeva, 1987:41). However within the primary identification disposition there is no awareness of sexual difference so this ‘father’ is actually both parents and is prior to the establishment of any object (Kristeva, 1987:26).

Kristeva posits that identification with the Imaginary Father precedes the mirror stage, the Name of the Father and the advent of Lacan’s Symbolic. She acknowledges that it goes against common sense to conceive of the Father as the receiver of primary identification when the infant’s first vocalizations and affections are generally directed towards the mother. However she argues that identification always needs to be conceived as already within the symbolic order and thus the realm of language and of the Father (Kristeva, 1987:27).

The identification with the Imaginary Father could also be read as identification with the mother’s desire for an Other, the symbolic order. Kristeva argues that the loving mother must love a Third Party and love her child in reference to this Third Party. “..without the maternal ‘diversion’ toward a Third Party, the bodily exchange is abjection or devouring” (Kristeva, 1987:34)

If the mother does not love the child in reference to a Third party, if she loves only the child, the child will not truly believe he or she is loved as the mother does not love “any other one” (Kristeva, 1987:34).

If we conceive of the mother child relationship as symbiotic and potentially claustrophobic this is a valid argument. However if we conceive of the mother child relationship in terms of two partial subjectivities in coemergence, if we bring metramorphic psychic processes to that relationship, it cannot only be conceptualised in terms of symbiosis, claustrophobia or annihilation. It may still be experienced as symbiotic or claustrophobic but if we accept that metramorphic psychic mechanisms are also at work between the m/Other and the becoming-subject, the m/Other does not only relate to the child in terms of domination or assimilation. This is one of the major differences between Ettinger and Kristeva which has enormous import for the mother daughter relationship.

According to Kristeva the “loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity” (Kristeva, 1989:27). She acknowledges that this is more difficult, even impossible, for females due to the daughter’s “specular identification with the mother” (Kristeva, 1989:28).

As Lechte and Margaroni (2004:25) argue, Kristeva’s insistence that the maternal function has an impact on the constitution of the subject is a valuable contribution to psychoanalytic theory. Furthermore her rehabilitation of a signifying modality associated with the feminine-maternal and active within male and female subjectivity is very significant, even if she refuses to theorize it within a feminist framework. Possibly the key point is that, according to Kristeva, subjectivity is not predicated on a denial of the mother-child experience but on “its (re)symbolization” (Lechte and Margaroni, 2004:24, Kristeva, 1984).

Kelly Oliver posits that Kristeva does not want to perpetuate the idea of binary sexes and this is why she avoids talking about sexual difference and prefers to discuss difference in more general terms. She does locate “the beginning of sexual difference in the child’s relation to its mother” (Oliver, 1993:97). Oliver admits that one of the most problematic aspects of Kristeva’s theory is the idea that the female subject cannot fully abject the mother’s body and thus cannot use the “semiotic for revolutionary purposes like males can” (Oliver, 1993:97). Oliver does argue that through her theorization of the maternal function Kristeva provides “not only a discourse that can explain the child's move into the Symbolic, but also an alternative discourse of maternity” (Oliver, 1991:51).

In Kristeva’s account the battle for autonomy is a battle with the maternal entity. She argues that society is founded on castration and the realisation that the violence of separation “underlies any symbolic contract”(Kristeva, 1995:216) will be the means through which human beings will be able to symbolize murder and thus postpone it. The archaic, all-encompassing mother does not exist. The ‘cut’ is a reality and we need to symbolize the ‘cut’ and thus keep ourselves from re-enacting it on the material level (Kristeva, 1995:223). For Kristeva, an acceptance of the alterity within, a consciousness of the unconscious and the undermining of any illusion of the unified subject or an all encompassing archaic mother will lead to greater tolerance for difference within society.

For Kristeva, the experience of maternity calls any argument in favour of a unified subject into question. She points to the mother as the representation of “separation within union which founds ethics” (Oliver, 1993:105) and indeed she posits ‘herethics’ as an ethics founded on the experience of motherhood. An ethics situated around “that which in life makes bonds, thoughts, and therefore the thought of death, bearable” (Kristeva, 1987:263).

Kristeva argues that culture, and Occidental culture in particular has “produced profoundly true visions of the human being as the symbolical being, as the being who lives in language and who is not reduced just to the womb and to reproduction” (Interview, 1988:143-144). She stresses that women are, first and foremost, speaking subjects and they must take their place as speaking subjects. She brilliantly deconstructs psychic life and points to the paradoxes inherent in the psychoanalytic construction of psychic life for females. She posits female psychical bisexuality, which would entail ‘an experience of meaning and its gestation, of language and its erosion, of being and its concealment’ (Kristeva, 1998:38), as a possible solution yet concludes that this would require a huge amount of psychic energy and is not really achievable within the phallic paradigm.

Introduction to Matrixial Theory

Ettinger is opposed to the argument from Freud, Lacan and Kristeva that ‘the womb can appear in culture only as psychosis’ (Ettinger, 2006c:179). Her theory also negates the necessity of the ongoing abjection of that which does not respect borders in order to maintain subjectivity. Ettinger’s theory is based within what she terms the matrixial stratum of subjectivity. Whereas Kristeva critiques Lacan for taking the drives out of the Symbolic and argues that semiotic and symbolic signifying processes operate within the Lacanian Symbolic, Ettinger theorizes an enlarged Symbolic. She argues that the Symbolic is composed of the phallic stratum of subjectivity (where Lacan and Kristeva situate their theory), the matrixial stratum of subjectivity and other strata yet to be theorized.

An alternative passage to an enlarged Symbolic

Ettinger’s theory is based on a clear differentiation between the castration complex and the maternal womb/intrauterine complex and she posits that they each offer a way into the Symbolic2. Both of these archaic phantasy complexes appear in Freud’s text and both trigger a feeling of the uncanny, yet Ettinger argues that although anxiety is the effect of both complexes on the adult subject, before their repression they were attached to entirely different affects. While castration phantasy is frightening at the point of the emergence of the original experience before its repression, the matrixial phantasy (from matrice, for womb) is not frightening at the point of its original emergence, but becomes frightening when the experience is repressed (Ettinger, 2006c:47) 3.

According to Ettinger the intrauterine phantasy is not based on separation or rejection and should not be “folded retroactively into the castration phantasy” (Ettinger, 2006c:48). The matrixial phantasy and complex leads her to develop the matrixial stratum of subjectivity which is entirely different to the phallic stratum of subjectivity.

2 Within classical psychoanalytic theory intrauterine phantasies are supposedly based on ‘the imaginary of the early oral experience’ (Ettinger, 2006c:185). Separation from the breast is the first separation and is understood through the castration mechanism as a split between subject and object (Ettinger, 2006c:185) 3Freud did criticize his own theory on this point saying that ‘The discoveries regarding infantile sexuality were made by men, and the theory that emerged from them was elaborated for the male infant.’(Freud cited in Ettinger, 2006c: 175) Lacan completely ignores the intrauterine phantasy in his treatment on the uncanny effect (Ettinger, 2006c:175) Ettinger posits that we develop primal trans-subjectivity (the ability to relate to each other as partial subjectivities, co-emerging I and unknown non-I(s)) within the late prenatal stage of pregnancy. Matrixial paths and strings are opened through borderlinking between ‘I’ as partial-subject and unknown non-I(s). Within this trans-subjective zone matrixial frequencies, intensities and affects, which Ettinger terms the erotic antennae of the psyche, circulate memory traces. This co-emergence occurs “with-in a female body- and-psyche” (Ettinger, 2006d:220).

Ettinger argues that ‘the human becoming within pregnancy is the first psychic-mental shareable voyage – an initiation in jointness’ (Ettinger, 2006a:20). The matrixial stratum of subjectivity must be accessed in order for all subsequent initiation-in-jointness to take place. Projection, substitution and split do not work within the matrixial sphere. Knowledge is accessed through ““intuition”, “inspiration” and “telepathy” in the absorbance and “translation” of the m/Other’s psychic-mental-affective waves and frequencies” (Ettinger, 2006a:19).

The Matrix is accessible to both men and women insofar as both experience the womb as an archaic out-side and past-site but it is also an in-side and future-site for the female. Females have ‘privileged access to the matrixial stratum of subjectivity but this double access does not translate into social or cultural privilege. All it does is give females ‘access to a surplus-of-fragility’ (Ettinger, 2006c:182).

Griselda Pollock terms the masculine/feminine opposition within the phallic stratum of subjectivity, masculine/feminine(P), and the feminine within the matrixial stratum of subjectivity, Feminine (m) (Pollock, 2006:27). Within the Matrix the Feminine (m) has an active, subjectivizing role to play. The womb as the invisible female corporeality and as the psychic place of coemergence represents a “subjectivizing potentiality by transgression of affective and mental waves and by sharing in the same mental, affective and sensitive resonance time-space” (Ettinger, 2006b:104). Ettinger argues that psychoanalytic theory has never developed “inscriptions of/from and in relationship to a female corporeal specificity”(Ettinger, 2006c:107) because of the potential psychotic effect it would have in the phallic paradigm. Matrixial incest which is inevitable and produces life cannot be prohibited but it has been silenced within Western culture. Ettinger argues that only the desire to have children within heterosexual partnerships has been acknowledged but matrixial desire “that of linking with the unknown and bounding with unknown others in the process of becoming and transforming oneself” (Ettinger, 2006c:107) has been marginalised as it endangers our current conceptions of subjectivity, centred around the individual, autonomous and self- determining subject.

Ettinger posits that in the late prenatal stage the fetus in the womb has some awareness of I and unknown not-I(s) and the mother has a similar awareness of I and not-I(s) (Ettinger, 1992:176). When thinking through Ettinger’s concept of Matrixial theory it is important to understand what she refers to when she talks about I co-emerging with unknown non- 1(s). ‘The unknown not-I corresponds to 1)the other unknown to the I, 2)to the unknown elements of the known I, and/or 3)to the unknown elements of the known other. We can recognize an unknown not-I in a matrixial way while he/she/it remains different, neither assimilated nor rejected (Ettinger, 1992:200)

The non-I is unknown to the I on a cognitive level but we should keep in mind that the non-I “is known by noncognitive process” (Ettinger, 2006c:64).

Metramorphosis, the process whereby I and unknown non-I(s) co-emerge within the matrixial sphere, is not a symmetrical, identical or mirroring relationship. It does not entail the domination or control of one over another, indeed there is no ‘one’ or ‘other’; all involved in a matrixial encounter are partial-subjects, co-emerging and in co-existence (Ettinger, 1992:200). No identifiable subject exists within a matrixial encounter event. A matrixial encounter-event operates on the margins of metaphor and metonymy, at the threshold of each partial subjectivity and once I ‘know’ something of the unknown non-I, I am back within the phallic stratum of subjectivity (Ducker, 1994:7). The matrix is not a variation of Kristeva’s semiotic chora, it is rather ‘a concept for a transforming borderspace of encounter of the co-emerging I and the neither fused nor rejected uncognized non-I’ (Ettinger, 2006c:64).

Matrixial Theory

Ettinger does not negate the pre-Oedipal, Oedipal and post Oedipal phallic stratum of subjectivity. One of her key points is that the matrixial stratum is absolutely not in opposition to the phallic stratum; they co-exist and we regularly switch back and forth from the matrixial stratum to the phallic stratum even within the same encounter. Although the matrixial stage is earlier than both the pre-Oedipal stage theorized by Kristeva and the Oedipal stage itself, the matrixial stratum of subjectivization that is engendered within the matrixial stage co-exists with the Oedipal phallic stratum of subjectivization (Ettinger, 1992:177).

After our emergence within the phallic stratum of subjectivity, shareable strings, which enable the psychic “cross-imprinting of events and the exchange of traces” (Ettinger, 2006d:219) continue to operate and emerge. “I(s) and non-I(s) continue to interlace their borderlinks in metramorphosis on the matrixial resonance field” (Ettinger, 2006d:220)

Within the matrix partial subjects or the elements which meet recognize one another but do not ‘know’ one another. The other is an unknown non-I, it is “the other that we do not know” which participates “in the feminine subject(ivity)” (Ettinger, 1992:199). The Matrix is thus different from symbiosis but matrixial modes of subjectivity and symbiosis can “alternate, co-exist and modify one another” (Ettinger, 1992:199).

Matrixial encounter events have the potential to be both healing and/or traumatising as I and unknown non-I(s) must be open and vulnerable to the traces exchanged within each encounter-event.4 Each person within an encounter-event is like a pole “across the same

4 An encounter-event within the matrixial dimension can be traumatic as well as creative or joyful. Ettinger says that a “particular Eros of compassionate alliance with otherness on the borderlines between string, and the poles tremble together but differently at each stroke” (Ettinger, 2005:215). This movement is not subordinated to the preservation of the community’s identity; indeed it transgresses the community (Ettinger, 2005:215). Ettinger argues that although this transgression of individual psychic boundaries happens anyway, with or without signification, it requires self-relinquishment and, therefore, calls for specific ethical attention and responsibility.

We must be careful to distinguish between intersubjective relationships and matrixial borderlinking. The psychic mechanisms through which matrixial borderlinking operate are developed within the prenatal stage and sustained “inside an already trans-subjective sphere”(Ettinger, 2006d:221). They are entirely different from those psychic mechanisms we use to understand post-natal attachment. Matrixial psychic transmissions, also speculated on by Freud5, “transgress intersubjective relations and form a creative potentiality of resistance to repetition” (Ettinger, 2006d:221).

Matrixial subjectivity does not involve an infinite number of individuals. It only ever involves a severality. If I wish to share knowledge via a concept I have a limitless audience. However if I differentiate and share via mental waves and affects the number of partial subjects I can engage with is quite limited. Within an encounter event several partial subjects must work through the exchange of mental affects.

Metramorphosis

non-life and life” is operational within a matrixial encounter-event however if the vulnerability of each partial-subject is abused enormous psychic damage may be caused” (Ettinger 2006d:221)

5 Ettinger cites Freud’s remark on the psychical transference of ideas to support this when he said “One is led to a suspicion that this is the original, archaic method of communication between individuals and that in the course of phylogenetic evolution it has been replaced by better method of giving information with the help of signals which are picked up by the sense organs. But the old method might have persisted in the background” (Freud cited in Ettinger 2006e:193) Within the matrixial paradigm each encounter-event between I and non-I is singular in nature; is inscribed through metramorphic processes rather than signifiers and does not contain whole subjects in relationship with each other as whole subjects.

Ettinger uses terms such as jointness-in-differentiation, relations-without-relating and distance-in-proximity to articulate these psychic mechanisms. In many ways these are contradictory terms, yet I read this terminology as an effort to take the reader away from thought processes dominated by the Phallus and present us with contradictions linked together in order to conceptualize a non definitive movement (distant yet near), sharing (relating without actual specific (phallic, readily identifiable) relations taking place) and a different way of being (co-emerging-in-differentiation in an asymmetrical way).

Ettinger cites Freud’s concept of ‘floating attention’ and Bion’s notion of the maternal ‘reverie’ in explaining how we can access the matrixial stratum at work saying that the separate self within the phallic stratum of subjectivity has only a “vague affective knowledge of the matrixial” (Ettinger, 2006d:221).

As outlined already, within a matrixial encounter once I ‘know’ something of the unknown non-I, I pass over to the phallic stratum of subjectivity. Ducker (1994:7) points out that this idea of knowledge as bringing about the loss of something, of a shared matrixial borderspace, “is a radical shift in traditional aspirations towards phallic mastery and control, and in the privileged and exclusive role of language in achieving this domination.”

Ettinger uses the model (and she places enormous stress on the fact that is only a model) of the becoming m/Other and the becoming-subject to illustrate the asymmetrical nature of matrixial transference6. The becoming m/Other allows the becoming-subject to

6 In her use of this model Ettinger stresses that it does not point to any limitation of a woman’s rights over her own body. In fact the concept of the Matrix supports women’s full response-ability for that which occurs within their own ‘not-One corpo-reality’ (Ettinger, 2006c: 180) emerge through enlarging her capacity for compassionate hospitality, wit(h)nessing7 and fragilization.

Through differentiating-in-jointness the becoming m/Other includes the becoming-child “not only with-in herself but with-in larger subjective clusters and other matrixial webs of which she is a part” (Ettinger, 2006d:221). Ettinger is careful to stress that the principle of severality always applies to matrixial encounter-events. The matrixial subjective cluster refers to several partial-subjectivities participating in “a shareable psychic eventing” (Ettinger, 2005:214). It does not refer to ‘one’ or ‘two in symbiosis’ or any intersubjective relations or even to infinite multiplicity. Each partial subjectivity borderlinks to other partial subjectivities “when the matrixial subjectivizing potentiality opens up” (Ettinger, 2006d:221). Each psyche is a continuity of an-other psyche along a psychic string. This psychic continuity is first developed in the late pre-natal stage of intrauterine experience and results in ‘ongoing differentiating – not sameness’ (Ettinger, 2005:214).

The matrixial stratum is predicated on the idea of multiplicity and not-oneness (less-than- one or more-than-one but never infinite). If I recognize the matrixial stratum of subjectivity I acknowledge that I am co-born with other partial subjects (not in the biological sense) who influence me and are influenced by me. I exist in a covenantal relation with the other and accept that my cognitive knowledge on the phallic stratum of subjectivity will never fully comprehend the foreignness that is both within me and within the other (Ettinger, 1996:106).

Symbolization within the phallic stratum is supposed to abject the experiences of the pre- subject while in co-emergence with the becoming-mother on the ‘borderspace between not-yet-living and life’ (Ettinger, 2006c:177). Whereas Kristeva argues that the feminine/maternal threatens the subjects’ clean and proper self, Ettinger conceives of the borderline as transgressive and seeks to symbolize that which lies beyond the phallic

7 Wit(h)nessing refers “witnessing while resonating with an-Other in a trans-subjective encounter-event” (Ettinger (2006d:220) paradigm. Death and the foreclosed feminine do lie beyond these borders but the experience of co-emergence with the begetter archaic m/Other and the archaic trauma and jouissance associated with that are also present and accessible through metramorphic processes.

Although Ettinger uses the model of the encounter between the subject-to-be and the becoming-mother to build her theory of subjectivity-as-encounter, matrixial subjectivity is not only operational in nature. Ettinger’s argues that corpo-reality impacts on psychic mechanisms and the womb represents the ‘psychic capacity for shareability created in the borderlinking to a female body’ (Ettinger, 2006c:181). Borderlines become thresholds within the matrixial paradigm.

Within the phallic stratum of subjectivity all chains of signifiers refer back to the signifier of signifiers, the Phallus, one meaning at a time is assigned to every action and desire is related to a lost or lacking object, objet a. Castration is the one and only passage to the Symbolic. Traces of the Real can only be inscribed in the Symbolic if they are signifiable through language. Ettinger’s argument is that this hypothesis seriously limits that which we can signify. For Ettinger there are also “matrixial, out-of-focus passages from non-definite compositions to others. Pre-Oedipal and prenatal elements go through matrixial passages to the Symbolic and can be symbolically used to analyze and recognise interior and exterior realities” (Ettinger, 1992:203).

Within the matrixial stratum our psyche is not confined to the one body nor is it subject to some pre-existing collective psyche, rather it is trans-subjective. Trans-subjectivity “transgresses individual boundaries and is spread in the several; it is a weaving of affective and mental strings” (Ettinger, 2006d:219).

Ettinger’s argument is that we engage with metramorphic processes all the time and it is impossible to not-share within the matrixial paradigm. This raises the question of how we attribute meaning to difference-in-jointness which precedes and exists alongside our conception of ourselves as separate subjects (Ettinger, 2006c:196). Conclusion

The Matrix, as feminine, is not an Other. The Matrix is “a network of subject and Other in transformation linked in special ways in subjectivity” (Ettinger, 1992:195). Ettinger theorises a feminine subjectivity (accessible to both men and women) “that is neither one nor necessarily double, but more-than-one and/or less-than-one” (Ettinger, 1992:195). Ettinger conceives of subjectivity-as-encounter. She theorises the psychic processes at work within an encounter-event between partial-subjects where traces of non-cognitive knowledge are transmitted. These partial-subjects necessarily release their hold on their identity within an encounter-event which occurs beyond identity and moves the question of gender identity to the margins (Ettinger, 2006b:115).

The matrixial stratum of subjectivity in no way negates the phallic stratum of subjectivity and indeed we are required to exist within the phallic stratum most of the time. Ettinger argues that the phallic stratum is necessary as it is only on this level that the subject can speak the ‘I,’ take responsibility for their actions and practice freedom (Ettinger, 2006b:104). Kristeva’s notion of abjection enables me to understand one of the psychic mechanisms I use to maintain my (phallic) subjectivity yet it does not sit well with me. I am ashamed of my affinity with the borders which mark where everybody else stops and ‘I’ begin. Butler’s interpretation of the abject which highlights my need to maintain those borders lest I become ‘socially dead’ shames me. Yet to a certain degree my psychic health is dependent on the illusion that I exist within boundaries and am reasonably self-aware. In order to function on a personal and professional level I must speak the ‘I’ and commit to certain positions.

Abjection, projection and assimilation play a large part in our collective psychic life especially if our concept of the ‘subject’ is solely centred on the individual, autonomous and self-determining subject. What Ettinger’s theory allows for are alternative psychic mechanisms which point to the necessarily interconnective nature of the subjectivization process and could perhaps lead to a greater capacity to withstand ambiguity without engaging in abjection, assimilation and projection.

Ettinger does not refuse the phallic term and the symbolisation that it engenders but she argues that the phallic stratum is just one of at least two, and possibly more strata of subjectivity (yet to be theorised) within the Symbolic. All that is thinkable does not have to pass through the castration mechanism. On the matrixial level I and unknown non-I(s) exchange matrixial affects, traumas, traces, fantasies and pictograms. Once I ‘know’ something in a cognitive sense, I am back in the phallic level. In order to accept the possibility of the matrixial level at all, one needs to accept that humans exchange and transform (noncognitive) knowledge through “aesthetical and ethical joining-in- differentiating and working-through” (Ettinger, 2006d:222).8

Whereas Kristeva argues that the womb must be rendered abject in order for the speaking subject to operate, Ettinger re-examines the impact the intrauterine experience has on psychic life (Ettinger, 2006c:180). She wishes to move the womb “from nature to culture, making it the basis for another dimension of sense, for another sense, and for a supplementary feminine difference that is the human potentiality for a shareability and a co-poiesis where no “hero” can become creative alone” (Etttigner 2006c:181 my emphasis)

Within the matrixial level there is an awareness of I(s) and non-I(s) from the very inception of psychic life accompanied by an awareness of subjectivity-as-encounter.

I need to access the matrixial stratum as partial and borderless (at least some of the time) to allow unknown non-I(s) to truly affect both my non-conscious and the cultural and social framework through non-cognitive metramorphic processes. This will not happen if I can only conceive of my ‘self’ as separate and discrete. If I can access the matrixial stratum, existence (at least for short periods of time) is not constructed within and

8 An example of this would be trauma that is passed on from generation to generation and becomes ‘buried unknown knowledge’ inside a crypt. This knowledge is transmitted through the matrixial psychic sphere and is not part of the child’s own history as a separate subject and is not the result of intersubjective relations either. For more on this please see (Ettinger, 2006c:163-170) dependent upon boundaries. Ettinger’s argument posits that the human universe is not only demarcated by the process of abjection and the womb need not be “rejected as the ultimate abject” (Ettinger 2006c:180). She argues that the human universe is a fundamentally interconnected web of psychic strings a “trans-subjective webs of co- poiesis composed of transformations along psychic strings stretched between the participants of each encounter-event” (Ettinger, 2006d:219).

In her essay ‘Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event’ Bracha Ettinger highlights Otto Rank’s comments on the minor role of the mother in myths on the birth of the hero. The mother is often presented as either copulating or nursing but between those two representations the begetting mother is conspicuously absent (Ettinger, 2006c:173). This absence holds the birth of the mythic Hero-Genius together as it allows the hero-son-god to give birth to himself. If man is not born from a womb, he can create himself and thus embody the creative principle, appropriating “maternal gestation, begetting, birth-giving and love in the service of father-son relations” (Ettinger, 2006c:175). The Genius-Hero myth is built on the disappearance of the archaic Woman- m/Other.

Ettinger’s ‘Woman’ embodies an interlaced subjectivity which is not limited to one body and is “a sexual difference based on webbing of links and not on essence or negation” (Ettinger, 2006c:197). Ettinger argues that once the hero myth is adopted (whether by a man or a woman) the subject becomes a ‘Man’ who eradicates the archaic Woman- m/Other (Ettinger, 2006c:175). The danger for female subjects is that an elimination of the archaic Woman-m/Other is effectively a sacrifice of herself. An elimination of the archaic Woman-m/Other is an elimination of subjectivity as an interlaced experience for all subjects, regardless of their sex or gender. Ettinger highlights that female modes of differentiating are different from those of the male subject. The female subject cannot abject or eliminate the archaic m/Other.

According to Freud, Lacan and Kristeva the feminine is connected with the death drive and the subject must foreclose the feminine in order to split from the death drive. This foreclosure enables the ‘Hero-Ego-Genius Oedipal mythology to pull filiation over onto the male’s side’ (Ettinger, 2006c:177). Ettinger posits that such a clear cut divide between life and death is untenable and she aims to introduce ‘ideas of nonlife and of feminine borderswerving, borderlinking and borderspacing into the heart of our thinking about the creative ‘soul’’ (Ettinger, 2006c:177). The initiation process of the hero-son- god is at odds with ‘Woman’ whose subjectivity is necessarily an interlaced experience. Female subjects can become ‘Man’, they can abject the feminine/maternal but as Kristeva so forcefully argues this leaves the experience of gestation outside the cultural psyche. What Ettinger attempts to do is conceptualise the psychic space inhabited by ‘Woman’ which is accessible to both men and women.

Ettinger’s theory points to a more nuanced understanding of the subjectivization process. An encounter-event is necessarily limited to several partial-subjects in co-emergence as the psychic mechanisms translate affects and phantasies of each partial subject rather than overarching concepts.

The key strength of Ettinger’s theory is that there is difference within and between each of us from the very inception of psychic life yet we are unavoidably and inextricably connected to each other. She recognizes that we are living in a post-traumatic world and seriously addresses the question of how to process this trauma outside of phallic thought. She argues that we must partially withdraw in order to meet the unknown. We must make a space within in order to create. Ettinger points to the connection between the feminine and creativity. She points to new ways of meaning donation that are not dependent on reducing everything to the One or the Same. Hers is a ‘theory in process’ the effects of which are yet to be fully realized. Primary compassion is at the root of her theory rather than fear or disgust.

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