Published in Elena Marchevska and Valerie Walkerdine (eds.) Maternal Structures in Art: Intergenerational Discussions on Motherhood and Creative Work, Oxford: Routledge, 2020, (pp. 91-106)
TINA KINSELLA
Introduction
Apart from the future reality of death, the prior event of our emergence into life from the body of a woman is the one ontological event that all human beings share. Yet apart from some noted feminist philosophers and psychoanalytic thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Sara Ruddick, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, until recently there has been insufficient persistent theoretical enquiry into maternity and natality as an ontological condition of being. For the past 30 years, artist and theorist Bracha L. Ettinger has elaborated a body of work that radically challenges extant philosophical and psychanalytic understandings of the contribution that the maternal feminine makes to human subjectivisation. Although Ettinger’s thought has been widely disseminated within an emerging area of enquiry commonly referred to as the ‘maternal turn’, the challenges of her theory have yet to be fully considered within philosophical debates concerned with ontology.
Classical psychoanalytic thought conceives of pregnancy and birth in terms of psychical and somatic symbiotic fusion between mother and child. In this model of subjectivisation, the mother is erased from consideration with regards to theories of subject formation in psychoanalysis or re-appraised philosophical exegesis of human ontology. This essay aims to bridge such an elision by positioning Ettinger’s theorisation of maternal femininity, pregnancy and birth as conceptual prisms by which we can recalibrate our understanding of ontology. Ettinger argues that the late intrauterine encounter in the womb between mother and child initiates psycho-corporeal life, as the pregnant woman is proposed as a primary subjectivising co-ordinate for the not-yet born infant. This enquiry places Ettinger’s theorisation of our emergence into life in the maternal womb in conversation with an image by the photographer Francesca Woodman,’ Self-portrait at 13’, Boulder, Colorado, 1972. This collaboration is instantiated to explore what I entitle an aesthetic ontology of the pre-birth scene. Considered as an act of ‘self-birthing’ within the photographic frame, Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ is explored as a performative enactment of our emergence into life from the maternal womb that can expand upon our apprehension of the contribution that pregnancy and birthing make to the ontological status of the human subject.
Central to this disquisition is Ettinger’s claim that artists can produce aesthetic symbols from the margins of their consciousness that usher previously foreclosed knowledge into the domain of thought. Ettinger insists that her conceptualisation of the maternal feminine as a subjectivising agency surfaces from her artistic practice in the first instance by way of thoughts and words that are recorded in her studio notebooks, as they emerge in her consciousness during the process of making art. This model for theorising the contribution that the pre-birth scene makes to our conceptualisation of ontology requires us to engage with the artwork as a source of knowledge or conduit that can bypass unconscious repression of our emergence into life in the womb so that a ‘joint awakening’ of the ‘unthoughtful knowledge … of being-born together’ (Ettinger, 2006d: 181) can be aesthetically apprehended.
Within this schema, the artwork is considered ‘a thinking apparatus’ for the viewer who yields to the aesthetic encounter with the artwork and who affectively apprehends and cognitively translates the symbols contained therein. The theoretical elaboration of maternal femininity that arises from Ettinger’s artistic process provides a conceptual toolkit to return recursively to Woodman’s’ Self-portrait at 13’ and re-evaluate the contribution that the pre-birth scene makes to our ontological constitution. ‘Self-portrait at 13’ is believed to be the first photograph that Francesca Woodman took of herself. Registering the characteristic blur that would become a trademark of her repertoire, one can certainly interpret this image as Woodman’s germinal investigation into the formal challenges of photographic space and the technological apparatus that make photography possible. Whilst some analyses take a formalist approach to Woodman’s photographic repertoire — locating her opus within Minimalism’s investigation of material, surface and space — other hermeneutic approaches situate Woodman’s work within a feminist artistic legacy or draw on her engagement with Surrealism to interpret her photographic repertoire. By proxy, Woodman’s engagement with the legacy of Surrealism has provided justification to read her work through the prism of psychoanalysis, which has profoundly gendered implications for women and for the pre-birth scene.
Death and the Feminine in the Work of Francesca Woodman
Death, it has regularly been argued, permeates Woodman’s artistic oeuvre. Her suicide at the age of 22 has contributed to a hermeneutic tendency to interrogate her work within the already familiar iconographic and symbolic signifying economy that equates femininity with death. Extant hermeneutic analyses undertaken by Peggy Phelan (2002), Jui-Ch’I Liu (2004) and Elisabeth Bronfen (2010) have drawn on psychoanalytic conceptualisations of the death drive, the abject maternal body and the uncanny in order to interrogate the exploration of feminine subjectivity in Woodman’s works.
Peggy Phelan (2002) argues that Woodman’s images simulate the oscillating psychical tension between stillness and animation that Freud identified as the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Noting the play of presence and absence enacted through the physical body in Woodman’s images, Phelan (2002) claims that the photographer’s vacillating bodies both rehearse her own death and repeat the repetitive conflict between the entropic death drive (Thanatos) and the animating life drive (Eros). In so doing, Woodman’s images confirm to the viewer the ‘certainty that we will die’ (2002: 999) too. Drawing our attention to the wistful spaces of childhood and crumbling domestic interiors that populate so many of Woodman’s frames, Jui-Ch’I Liu suggests that these abandoned spaces are symbolic placeholders for the mother’s body that subvert ‘the paternal symbolic order’ (2004: 29). Referencing Julia Kristeva’s theorisation of the abject, Liu proposes that Woodman’s images indicate a paradoxical fear of absorption into a threatening feminine world alongside a perverse, fetishistic desire for illusory reunion with the ‘maternal body of early infancy that cannot be captured, except in death’ (2004: 30). Approaching Woodman’s photography through Freud’s analytic of the uncanny, Bronfen contests appraisals of Woodman’s work as a representation of the desire for self-annihilation. Rather, Bronfen claims that Woodman’s images attest to a ‘feminine subjectivity, willing to engage with her frailty’ (2010: 13) as part of an ongoing process of self-creation. Drawing our attention to Woodman’s deployment of domestic space with which Western thought ‘has equated the feminine body’ (2010: 13), Bronfen argues that Woodman commandeers interior space so as to render it ‘uncanny’ and thus subvert the indexical link between the feminine body and the private sphere of the home.
Whilst all three analyses offer subtle and informed readings of Woodman’s work, I consider their interpretations of it as affirmations of the patriarchal and paternal dynamic that classical psychoanalysis avows between femininity, maternality, natality and death. Maintaining the correspondence psychoanalysis details between maternal femininity and the death drive, Phelan’s analysis exemplifies the hermeneutic propensity to situate Woodman’s photography within a semiotics of mortality. Following Kristeva, Liu can only envisage the maternal body in terms of psychosis, as early contact with the mother’s body is singularly countenanced as a catalyst for the collapse of psychical and corporeal borders. Although Bronfen accords a performative aspect to Woodman’s images as acts of feminine self-creation, she also confirms femininity as a displaced subjectivity that appropriates empty interior spaces that are always already signified as uncanny. Phelan, Liu and Bronfen’s analyses confirm natality and the scene of early infancy as that which remains veiled behind a screen of originary repression: the maternal body is rendered an object of fear or fetishistic phantasy, and feminine subjectivity is that which remains forever uncanny.
Such analyses rely upon the premise that birth is a past event forever foreclosed from the subject. If we refuse to comply with this injuncture to extend enquiry into Woodman’s photography by way of the psychoanalytic insights of Bracha L. Ettinger, we may find that the photographer has already made an interrogatory reconnaissance into the ontological implications of birth.
Fig. 1 Francesca Woodman, ‘Self-portrait at 13, Boulder, Colorado’, 1972
fort/Ma — Reanimating the Object of the Drive
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud tentatively began to outline his analytic of the death drive as ‘a manifestation of inertia in organic life’ that exhibits a ‘powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state’ (2006: 165). He observes a young child repetitively throwing and retrieving a spool of thread across his mother’s bed whilst chanting ‘fort/Da’ (gone/here). The game of fort/Da demonstrates the psychical mechanisms by which the life drive trumps the death drive, as the cotton spool over which the child exerts his will through play quite literally becomes the receptacle for the death drive’s impulsion towards inertia. Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ seems to replicate the conflict between stillness and animation that is central to Freud’s claims of the tensile conflict between the life drive and the death drive. An eerie atmosphere pervades the image: the sunshine that streams from a window situated behind Woodman’s figure creates puddles of light and penumbrous shadows that combine to de-familiarise the nostalgic spaces of Woodman’s childhood home in which the photograph was taken. Woodman’s body is resolutely still, and yet the shutter release cable for the camera that she holds in her hand seems curiously animated, almost shimmering with energy.
The above details seem to authenticate Phelan’s interpretation of Woodman’s oeuvre, yet I wish to draw attention to a significant detail that Freud overlooks in his commentary on the fort/Da game. He fails to pay attention to the fact that the cotton spool the little boy is so industriously casting and redeeming remains attached to him via the skein of thread the child retains in his hand. Similarly, in Woodman’s image, she retains the shutter release cable in her grasp and it forges a bridge between the interior space of the photographic scene that she stages and the camera that is placed outside of the frame, recording this scene. My suggestion is that Woodman deploys the camera as a prosthetic device to act as witness and accessory to her own self-birthing within the photographic frame. However, to advance this line of interpretation, it is necessary to return to Freud’s detailing of the fort/Da game.
Freud clearly states that the fort/Da game reveals the psychical mechanisms by which the young child instigates an incipient separation from his emotional and physical attachment to the mother. The throwing and retrieval of the cotton reel is provoked by the child’s anxiety over his mother’s enigmatic absences and presences: her comings and goings over which he exerts no control. The anxiety evoked by the absences of the mother produces the child’s need to repetitively cast and redeem the cotton spool. These actions allow the boy to separate from the mother by externalising her as an object in the inanimate spool of cotton. With this symbolic gesture the mother becomes an object for the child over which he can exercise his executive control. Confirming Freud’s proposition that birth and early infancy be conceived as an entropic absence of being, the child becomes a subject through separation from the purported unity of the maternal ground.
As the child of the fort/Da game authorises the terms of play, so Woodman directs the staging of the theatrical scene she chooses for her first self-portrait. The apparatus of the camera is placed outside of the photographic frame and becomes an inanimate object that Woodman can control at will through the shutter release cable held in her hand. The trigger action of the shutter release cable grasped in Woodman’s hand echoes the repetitious relinquishing and redeeming of the cotton bobbin by the child in the fort/Da game. In this way, we could consider Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ as a restaging of the conflict between the life and death drive as elaborated by Freud in the fort/Da game and hence as an act through which she re-stages her independence from the maternal body. However, contra Freud, I suggest that this thread of cotton in the fort/Da game may be considered an indicator of sustained connection between the child and the maternal body: a prosthetic umbilical cord ‘that is never done away with’ (Irigaray, 2004: 43). To progress this thesis, I turn to the work of Ettinger, who contests the absolute distinction between subject and object that is central to Freud’s explication of the death drive.
Revising Freud, Ettinger claims that mother and infant not only become objects for one another by way of the separation that occurs during early childhood. Rather, she suggests that in the late stages of pregnancy, the pregnant woman and not-yet-born infant are partialised subjects and partialised objects co-becoming together. Therefore, according to Ettinger, pregnancy and the early scene of childhood do not index ‘symbiosis nor absolute separation’ (2006b: 47) but rather processes of ‘differentiation-in-jointness’ (2011: 10) that indicate co-emergence as a primary process of subject formation. As Griselda Pollock observes, these ‘becoming-entities cannot be perceived as celibate totalities or as one symbiotic unity’ because they ‘refer to moments of partial subjectivity emerging before either partner becomes in psychic terms an object for the other subject’ (2006: 17). From this perspective we can consider that the camera Woodman situates outside of the photographic frame in ‘Self-portrait at 13’ does not necessarily replicate the mother as the inanimate, externalised object of the fort/Da game, but rather references the pregnant woman and not-yet-born infant as co-emerging partialised entities comprised of subjective and objective elements implicated in the processes of co-becoming during the late intrauterine encounter. What I have termed Woodman’s self-birthing within the photographic frame enacts this scene of co-emergence and co-becoming in the womb as a partialised subjectivity comprised of anonymous, object and subject elements. Ettinger entitles these processes of co-emergence and co-becoming copoiesis, whereby:
… partial-subjects and partial-objects are prenatal and participate in processes of change and exchange that occur together but differently and are imprinted together … These processes should be differentiated from clear-cut interruption in the continuity of experience (Ettinger, 2006b: 70).
Copoiesis does not imply any symmetry or continuity in the frequency of exchange between these co-emerging, co-becoming entities. These exchanges take place on the level of somatic and psychical cross-inscriptions of affect. Such affects are ‘complex schemas’ of psycho-corporeal activity that are non-conscious and may remain uncognised, yet contribute to ‘processes of production-creation’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 159). According to Ettinger, copoietic affects exchanged during the late intrauterine encounter may not be available to perceiving consciousness that makes sense through conceptual thinking but may be affectively transmitted in the artwork and translated by the viewer who participates in the encounter with it.
With reference to Ettinger’s theorisation of our emergence into life as a copoietic event that instantiates processes of ‘production-creation’, we may expand upon Phelan’s reading of Woodman’s oeuvre as a repetitive re-staging of the conflict between the animating life drive and entropic death drive. In ‘Self-portrait at 13’, the blurred cable attached to the shutter release of the camera lens impregnates the technicality of the scene to animate the image as if from the outside. The vibrating cable provides a symbolic codex for the psycho-corporeal copoietic connection between pregnant woman and not-yet-born infant that Ettinger details. The objective of the fort/Da game is separation from the inchoate ground of the mother’s body through displacement of the drive into the animate object that becomes the receptacle for the entropic tendencies of the thanatic drive. Supplementing Phelan’s reading, we can consider that Woodman’s image reanimates the object of the death drive by referencing a sustained connection between the maternal body and subject as composite copoietic partialised subjects and objects. Within this scenario, the subject is not only posed in a conflicting, binary dynamic between animation (which equals the subject) and torpor (which indexes the object). Rather, the game of fort/Da is re-orientated in the direction of sustained copoietic connection with the maternal body, which can be afforded the status of fort/Ma.
The Womb — Not Abject, but Transject
In many of her photographs, Woodman’s body merges with and emerges from walls, fireplaces, trees; pushes and presses against the frames of museum display units; is wrapped and revealed by snaking slithers of wallpaper; is suspended from doorframes and immersed in water. Jui Ch’I Liu argues that this participation with inanimate objects in Woodman’s work resonates with Julia Kristeva’s theorisations of the abject. Indexing the undifferentiated, symbiotic, pre-Oedipal maternal space where there is no distinction between ‘subject and object, between self and other, inside and outside’ (Kristeva, 1982: 229), the abject signals a collapse of psychical and somatic borders that ultimately results in psychosis. Kristeva argues that the dynamic of abjection simultaneously evokes a desire for return to the maternal body and a repulsion for the fusion this return implies. Hence, Liu suggests that Woodman’s photographs display her fetishistic longing for union with the maternal body and fear of ‘fantasmatic fusion with the womblike environment’ (2004: 29). Following Kristeva, Liu can only envisage desire for the maternal body as a psychotic, illusory phantasy. As we have seen, Ettinger argues that during the pre-intersubjective late intrauterine encounter, the pregnant woman and not-yet-born infant are co-becoming, partialised subjects/objects in co-emergence together. Furthermore, she argues that this composite of subjective and objectal elements persists beyond the late intrauterine encounter on what she entitles the transubjective stratum of subjectivity. In this way, on the transubjective stratum, the subject is always part-subject and part-object, or what Ettinger entitles transject.
Ettinger acknowledges that on what she entitles the phallic level of subjectivity — where we are engaged with intersubjective encounters between discrete subjects and objects — the subject is concerned with shoring up the contours of identity and policing the integrity of individual psycho-corporeal boundaries. However, according to Ettinger, the transubjective stratum of subjectivity continues to pulse alongside and beneath the phallic level of individual subjectivity as a ‘shareable dimension of subjectivity’ (2006b: 64). Comprised of objectal and subjective elements, the partialised subject is to be considered as transject, capable of transgressing past individual psychical and somatic boundaries to participate affectively with and share in a subjectivity that is larger than one’s own. The work of art, Ettinger argues, is also a transject as it contains objectal elements as well as subjective traces from the artist. In this way, the artwork operates as a connective portal between the artist and the viewer who participates in the encounter with that artist’s work.
In ‘Self-portrait at 13’, the shutter release cable provides a conduit between the inside and outside of the photographic frame. Attached to the camera placed off-stage, the shutter release cable also connects the viewer, situated outside of the photographic frame, to the scene Woodman stages by way of positioning the viewer in the space that the camera occupies. The amorphous shape that infiltrates the lower third of the image encroaches upon the staged, photographed scene from outside of the photographic frame. It is as though the cable is pulling the observer into the frame and implicating him or her in the drama that is unfolding. Triangulation occurs between the connective cable held in Woodman’s hand, the camera and the viewer, who is now both witness and accessory to the scene that the photographer stages. What I have entitled Woodman’s self-birthing within the photographic frame is staged within a scene of ‘afterwardness’. As Pollock observes, affective traces of the traumatic, immemorial event of birth can be ‘re-activated through the inevitable retrospective … “afterwards” translation work of fantasy and thought’ (2011: 225) via aesthetic affects aroused by the work of art and with the viewer’s participation as transject.
According to Ettinger, the transgression of affect in the late intrauterine encounter exposes our subjective boundaries as permeable, as they ‘have already always been transgressed, and on certain levels they are only a fiction’ (2011: 4). On the transubjective stratum of subjectivity, the sovereign contours of the post-natal subject remain porous and prone to arousal by non-cognitive, pre-conceptual, aesthetic affects that are activated by engagement with the artwork. Hence, aesthetics ‘precedes identity’ (Ettinger, 2001: 103) and therefore subjectivity is foundationally aesthetic on the transubjective stratum; this stratum is prone to arousal by aesthetic affects that are prior to conceptual understanding and previous to the phallic level of subjectivity, which is concerned with shoring up the contours of individual identity. Woodman entitled this image a self-portrait, but as such it is entirely curious, as it conveys a distinct lack of interest in her identity, which remains indistinct. A swathe of hair covers Woodman’s face, entirely obscuring her visage from the viewer. Her teenage body is encased in a large cable knit sweater and voluminous trousers that make it impossible to identify her sex. We are not sure, as viewers, what we are meant to see in this image, which, despite being entitled a self-portrait, offers us no details for identifying the author of the image.
Ettinger argues that Kristeva’s Freudian-Lacanian inspired paradigm of abjection makes ‘the womb that which must be rejected as the ultimate abject’ (2006d: 179). Instead of accepting Liu’s reading of Woodman’s repertoire through the prism of Kristeva’s abject — which singularly indexes the pre-Oedipal maternal space as symbiosis, fusion and psychosis — we can reappraise Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ through the prism of the transject that Ettinger details. Woodman and the viewer are co-participators with the objects in this image. Acting as an intermediary between the photographic scene and the viewer, the cable in Woodman’s hand invites the observer into the frame as participator: the cable is thus a virtual umbilical cord that transforms the scene from one of abjection to one where the viewer may enter the scene as transject. As co-participating transjects, there is no clear distinction between subject and object, self and other, inside and outside: there is only connective tissue between these entities.
From Uncanny/Unheimliche Anxiety to Homely/Heimlich Wit(h)nessing
Elisabeth Bronfen notes how, in her photographs, Woodman intervenes in cultural inscriptions that equate domestic space with the uncanny feminine body to appropriate the home and resignify interior space in an act of feminine self-creation. Unlike many of the abandoned interiors that populate her frames, Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ is located within the domestic space of her parental home in Boulder, Colorado. In this image, the nostalgic spaces of childhood are appropriated and subsequently de-familiarised, thereby seeming to confirm the agential re-signifying of space that Bronfen wishes to assign to Woodman’s photographs. This photograph evocatively replicates the displacement and indeterminacy that is central to Freud’s analytic of the uncanny, and yet the deliberate inscription of the words ‘self-portrait’ confirms the photographer’s agency over the self-representation she creates. At the same time, the very indeterminacy of Woodman’s figure and the eerie shapes that inhabit the frame seem to signal the feminine subject and the spaces of childhood as uncanny and, therefore, unrepresentable.
Though we know that Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ is staged in the locale of her parental home, there are no distinguishing features by which we can identify it as a familiar space in the image. Space is rendered strange by the lack of detail and the curious cable in Woodman’s hand that occupies most of the photographic frame. The image thus seems to confirm the displaced, mechanistic return of the maternal body that Elissa Marder (2012) identifies as the ‘maternal function’. In The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marder deploys the term ‘maternal function’ to explain the manner through which the unrepresentable event of being born is expressed in the psyche in a post-hoc fashion, as well as to focus our attention on the technological and non-anthropomorphic nature of the uncanny maternal body.
According to Marder, photography is inevitably linked to birthing and to ‘the body of the mother’ (2012: 182). The very fact that we are not able to witness or be ‘present’ at ‘the event of our own birth’ (Marder, 2012: 4) produces a form of psychical blindness that renders the maternal body forever uncanny. In this way, the unwitnessed event of birth becomes bound to the mechanical repetitions that photography engages as a medium of reproduction, as the photograph is produced as a site to which we endlessly return, seeking to see what can never be made visible. Forever disclosed to the psyche, the event of birth mechanistically returns in the photographic medium as an uncanny maternal function that manifests in eerie images of strangely displaced and ‘animated containers whose contours defy the confines of any determinable spatial location’ (Marder, 2012: 2). In this way, the maternal body returns in a mechanistic, spectral fashion in the frame of the photograph, where it creates disturbances in time and space precisely because the event of birth cannot be represented. Marder’s propositions support the general philosophical and theoretical tendency to accept that birth is the unthinkable event par excellence.
Freud argues that the return of uncanny, infantile material repressed in the unconscious can only manifest in displaced automata engaged in senseless, dumb repetitions, as no symbolic substitute can return us to the familiarity of the original home of the womb. However, Ettinger argues that via the artwork, one may access ‘one’s own trauma, hidden behind the gaze by primal repression’ (2006a: 157). This possibility is not accessed by the amnesiac repetition incurred by uncanny anxiety. Rather, access to the traumatic primal scene may occur by way of a ‘rhythm of swerve with-in a relation between partial-subjects’ that produces the potential for ‘shared production revelation of home-affect at the heart of wandering: for habituation as heimlich (familiar/homely)’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 158). The rhythm of return, without meaningless, dumb repetition, ‘will not produce the same’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 158), but induces home-affect as heimlich. Whilst Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ distils a scene within the mechanical frame of the photograph, we, as viewer-participator, do not necessarily observe this image from the same place each and every time we encounter it. Rather, we can engage in a ‘working-through and bringing-into-being of that which we cannot remember’ (Ettinger, 2006c: 163) yet which cannot be forgotten: the affective emergence into life in the maternal womb.
The viewer is invited to participate with the artwork in an act that Ettinger calls wit(h)nessing, which is an aesthetic bearing witness that indexes a ‘being beside the other’ but ‘not assimilated to’ the experience of the other (Pollock, 2010: 831). Aesthetic wit(h)nessing facilitates a shared copoiesis, which is a ‘sensuous-affective processing’ (Ettinger, 2011: 26) of Woodman’s restaging of the immemorial, yet affectively subjectivising, event.
Encounter-Eventing with Art — Towards an Aesthetic Ontology of the Pre-Birth Scene
This enquiry critically resituates Francesca Woodman’s oeuvre. Previous readings of Woodman’s work —which have analysed her output through the psychoanalytic concepts of the death drive, the abject maternal body and the uncanny — were placed in conversation with Bracha L. Ettinger’s claim that maternal femininity and pre-natality are at the heart of the human experience. One of Woodman’s images, ‘Self-portrait at 13’, has been proposed as a prism through which to aesthetically reconsider how the pre-birth scene may contribute to our ontological formation. Ettinger claims that:
Artists continually introduce into culture all kinds of Trojan horses from the margins of their consciousness: in that way the limits of the Symbolic are transgressed all the time by art. It is quite possible that many artworks carry subjective traces by their creators, but the specificity of works of art is that their materiality cannot be detached from ideas, perceptions, emptions, consciousness, cultural meaning and that being interpreted and reinterpreted is their cultural destiny. This is one of the reasons why art is symbologenic (1992: 196).
The artistic process and affective participation with the artwork, Ettinger argues, fosters a mode of aesthetic feeling-knowing that can transgress the economy of the linguistic signifier to produce an image, sign or symbol for uncognised or not yet symbolised experience that we may not currently have the language to express. One can work towards developing this language through the aesthetic encounter with the art, which is, in Ettinger’s estimation, a privileged locus for the transmission of de-signified meaning that has been precluded from the realm of signification. Aesthetic, in this sense, does not signal the artwork as an ‘object to look at’ (Ettinger, 2006b: 87). Rather, the aesthetic ‘encounter-event’ of artworking indexes the triumvirate of artist, artwork and viewer that can agitate the affective thresholds of apprehension to provide symbologenic conduits for pre-conceptual knowledge as it emerges on the horizon of comprehension during the aesthetic encounter with the artwork.
The aesthetic encounter-event is, thereby, the process by which what was thought to be hidden behind the scene of primary repression is transmitted through the encounter with the artwork and affectively apprehended by the viewer, now as participant, in a co-becoming, co-emerging, copoietic encounter-event with the work of art. Artist, artwork and viewer-as participant in the aesthetic encounter-event foster a generative triad whereby transgressive, pre-conceptual and affective knowledge can be braided into language and into thought. The encounter-event with art ‘supplies the occasion for sharing’ by ‘affectively-emotively’ (Ettinger, 2006c: 166) and processing whatever occurs in such a participation with the artwork. This is a ‘Memory Tracing In/For/With the Other’ (Ettinger, 2006c) in which ‘viewers as subjects/objects — will also become, in one way or another, partners and witnesses’ (Ettinger, 2006b: 86) that may weave affective apprehension of the pre-birth scene into experience and into our collective memory. This possibility is potentialised by way of the transubjective, shareable stratum of subjectivity that is available to all. The transubjective stratum of subjectivity supplements the phallic stratum; it doesn’t replace it. Therefore, Ettinger claims that art ‘bears traces of the phallic’ (2006b: 86) subjectivity as well as transubjective subjectivity. Art potentialises the possibility of engagement with the memory of events that are ‘burdened with a freight that a linear story cannot tell’ because it arrives from ‘inside and outside of Time’ (Ettinger, 2006c: 167).
Ettinger’s propositions invite us to consider the potentialities that arise when a theory that emerges from, and is inflected by, art practice and aesthetic participation is deployed to reflexively interrogate another artist’s oeuvre. Such claims ask us to re-consider artistic practice as capable of negotiating, filtering and organising somatic, sensory and non-verbal affects before they are consumed and subsumed by the signifying capacities of language. Ettinger is intent on pointing out that:
In psychoanalytic thinking, whatever lies behind originary repression is in a way a ‘woman,’ related to the feminine … to the prehistory of the Subject embedded in relations with the Mother (2006c: 164).
The prehistory of the subject must include thinking through the implications of relations with the mother. To aid our thinking in this regard, Ettinger claims authority for incipient subjectivisation processes initiated during the late intrauterine encounter, proposing the pre-birth scene as formative of the subject to detail a transubjective stratum that donates an aesthetic, shareable dimension of subjectivity.
I have argued that Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ resonates with Ettinger’s proposals and have claimed that such an approach supplements existing hermeneutic analyses of Woodman as well as contributing to our understanding of the ontological constitution of the subject. To consider Woodman’s images only as rehearsals for her own death, and reminders of the inevitability of our own perishability, is to further inscribe her opus within discourses that persist in linking femininity to death. This gesture not only denies Woodman agency in her artistic process; it also denies agency to the viewer and to the aesthetic encounter with art. Whilst Woodman’s engagement with the enigma of femininity in her practice has been repeatedly analysed through the theoretical prism of psychoanalysis, we have seen that psychoanalysis continually consigns our maternal origins to the domain of the unrepresentable. In this way, the womb as first home, being placed beyond representation, becomes unthinkable. From Ettinger’s perspective, affective experience, which slips by or underneath cognitive understanding, emerges encrypted in the artwork, even foreclosed psychical material that was enveloped by originary repression.
The aesthetic encounter-event contributes to contemporary conceptualisations of ontology as it potentialises an opportunity for the revision of our conceptual understanding and rehabilitation of our foundational ontological formation. Woodman’s ‘Self-portrait at 13’ may occasion an encounter-event, which stretches the conceptual framework of existing hermeneutic frameworks that constantly deploy the manner of Woodman’s death as a means of understanding that which she created in life. From this perspective, we may countenance Woodman as an artist who could create symbols that may forge pathways for the communication of maternal material that has been jettisoned from culture and hence excluded from the discursive production of concepts.
References
Bronfen E. (2010) ‘Visuality – Textuality: An Uncanny Encounter’, Image and Narrative, Vol. 11, Issue 3, http://www.imageandnarrative.be/index.php/imagenarrative/article/view/90/65. Accessed 4 June 2014.
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Ettinger B. L. (2006a) ‘The Heimlich’, in Massumi B. (ed.), The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 157-162.
Ettinger B. L. (2006b) ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, in Massumi B. (ed.), The Matrixial Borderspace, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 41-92.
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Tina Kinsella 