TUZLU SU SALTWATER

24 Griselda Pollock
Denemeler / Essays
25
What is the story and who tells it? I am still, intellectually and philosophically, unwilling
to abandon the implications of our discovery of language: the so-called linguistic turn.
I admit it. For me, the double discovery at once of linguistics and of psychoanalysis
made a new politics and a new aesthetics possible. For the latter, reshaped by the
former, language is not, however, a tool of the knowing subject, a grid imperiously imposed
upon a lively world. Language is a generative structure that forms and decentres
us even while it creates, through pronouns and syntax, grammatical illusions for
our own, always partial, agency. It enables a double knowing of ourselves as effects
of its generative structure, but also of our world and its many social forms as well as
productive forces. Language is, moreover, according to Lacan, unconscious. Trying
to know that involves, with Freud’s theory of a psycho-dynamic unconscious, admitting
to never knowing who or what we are, or what we are saying, always allowing
ourselves to be other to ourselves at some profound level.
Tears
Our tears are salty. To enter the conversation between art and healing, I turn to the work
of Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, who coined a concept
to define the liveliness of living organisms: autopoiesis. Self-creating might be a translation.
(11) The cell, for instance, has a system, a structure and boundaries, but through various
exchanges and flows such as energy it produces the very conditions that sustain
it. Ettinger extended this insight and created for/from her practice the idea of copoeisis.
She seeks thereby to imagine, psychically, the ecology of trans-subjective relations between
elements that she names I and non-I (distinct from the binary opposition of I and
not-I). Ettinger creates through language another way of thinking and knowing based
on our potential to transform and be transformed in a copoietic encounter that entangles
the ethical (how we relate to others) and the aesthetic (how we sense-know the world).
She thus also draws on metaphors of energies, of waves, but specifically of connecting
lines: strings and threads that she relates to matrixial copoiesis.
Unconscious transmission and reattunement as well as resonant
copoietic knowledge do not depend on verbal communication,
intentional organization or inter-subjective relationships … In aesthetical
working-through the artist transforms time and space of an
encounter-event into matrixial screen and gaze, and offers the other
via com-passionate hospitality an occasion for fascinance. (12)
Fascinance proposes a kind of gazing with the world for a duration that encourages
transformation to occur at both ends of the string that vibrates between different
partners. Fascinance displaces the idea of seeing as a form of knowing, or vision as
a route to the erotic. Coupling hospitality and compassion, fascinance is a slow being
with, opening towards, a ‘self-fragilising’ responsiveness that allow the aesthetic
process to affect us and to shift understanding co-poietically. But how will we be
‘with’?—John Dewey’s question about how ‘public’ groupings of affected and affecting
persons form. Is this a possible description of an exhibition conceived to incite a
momentary public of artists and viewers?
A matrixial co-emergence has a healing power, but because of the
transgression of individual boundaries that it initiates and entails,
and because of the self-relinquishment and fragilisation it calls forward,
it is also potentially traumatizing. Therefore, to become artistic
or generate healing, the aesthetical transgression of individual
borderlines (that occurs in any case with or without our awareness
or intention) calls for the awakening of a specific ethical attention
and erotic extension: an artistic generosity … By aesthetical and
ethical joining-in-differentiating and working-through, a spiritual
knowledge of the Other and the Cosmos is born and revealed. Artworking
and art-works create such knowledge. (13)
Ettinger’s art-thought-art-working links to saltwater as passage, saltwater as the medium
of transport, saltwater as sweaty sign of our bodies’ exertions and tearful signs of
our capacity for affect. If we seek to know more about the life of all on this planet beyond
an exclusively human-centred perspective, we also need a deeper knowledge
of our capacities for trans-subjective, copoeitic encounters and trans-subjective passages
between Ettinger’s I and non-I. My final thought is this: are we so sure that we
know yet how to live a human condition of our own plurality that is also genuinely able
to pass on a liveable world to those coming after us? What is the role of education –
shared critical reflection – in this transmission?
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world
enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token to save
it from the ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming
of the new and young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is
where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel
them from our world, and leave them to their own devices, nor to
strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new,
something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the
task of renewing our common world. (14)
Notlar / Notes
(1) Bütün alıntılar, sanatçıyla yapılan konuşmalardan ya da okumama izin verdiği notlardan aktarmadır.
All quotations are from conversations with the artist or notes she allowed me to read.
(2) Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things [Dirimsel Madde: Şeylerin Bir Politik
Ekolojisi] (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
(3) Bracha Ettinger, “Traumatic Wit(h)ness – Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating”, parallax [Travmatik
Birliktelik/Tanıklık – Şey ve Matrissel Birlikte/içinde-yerleşim/alışma], c. 5, no. 1 (1999), s.89–98.
Bracha Ettinger, ‘Traumatic Wit(h)ness – Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating’, parallax vol. 5,
no. 1 (1999), pp.89–98.
(4) Bracha Ettinger, Artworking 1985–1999 [Sanat-çalışması 1985-1999] (Brüksel: Palais des Beaux
Arts and Gent: Ludion, 2000). Ayrıca bkz. “Artworking and Trauma” [Sanat-çalışması ve Travma]
içinde, Griselda Pollock, After-Affects I: Afterimages: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the
Virtual Feminist Museum [Artçı Duygulanımlar I: Artçı İmgeler: Sanal Feminist Müze’de Travma ve
Estetik Dönüşüm] (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).