Announcing...

On behalf of our friends in Dublin:

Reading Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace
Two-Day Intensive, Interdisciplinary Seminar
Saturday 18 and Sunday 19 April 2009

As Part of The(e)ories: Advanced Seminars for Queer Research 2009 in Collaboration with UCD School of English, Drama and Film Studies

Seminar Description:

This two-day intensive, interdisciplinary seminar is devoted to responding to Bracha L. Ettinger's The Matrixial Borderspace (University of Minnesota Press 2006) from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives: psychoanalysis, philosophy, film studies, visual culture, feminism and queer theory. The seminar provides a unique opportunity to read a small sample of Professor Ettinger's oeuvre closely and discuss its implications for a range of fields but especially for the insights offered for considering gender and sexuality and the potential for a sustained dialogue between psychoanalysts, critical theorists and practitioners of the arts.

The first day of the seminar will feature a discussion of Sigmund Freud's paper on the uncanny together with Professor Ettinger's formulation of the matrixial before a lecture by Professor Ettinger on her current research. Day two of the seminar will be devoted to discussing The Matrixial Borderspace in more detail and the various theoretical, ethical, cultural and political questions it raises more generally. Each session will begin with four short responses by (30 mins.) by a leading expert in the area of the theme being considered, after which the chair of the session will offer a short response (10 mins.) to the presentation before opening the discussion up more generally to attendees of the seminar (50 mins.). The emphasis here will be on discussion. To further facilitate an engagement with the themes of the seminar, attendees will read one required article or book chapter for each session, which will be provided in a reading pack in advance.

Required Reading:

There are two required texts for this seminar: a copy of Sigmund Freud's paper will be provided however delegates must source a copy of Bracha Ettinger's book themselves.

1. Bracha Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

2. Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny' in The Uncanny, trans. Hugh Haughton (London: Penguin, 2003; first pub. 1919), pp. 121-62.

The Speaker:

Bracha Ettinger is an artist, senior clinical psychologist and practising psychoanalyst. Her artworks have been exhibited extensively and she has written a number of books and many essays on topics relating to psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual culture, feminism and ethics. She is the Marcel Duchamp Professor of Psychoanalysis and Art at the Media and Communications Division, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee. Further information about Professor Ettinger can be found here:

http://cmcep.uprrp.edu/Bracha_Ettinger/index.html

http://www.metramorphosis.org.uk

http://www.uprm.edu/optika.docs/bracha.pdf

Description of The Matrixial Borderspace:
A groundbreaking intertwining of the philosophy of art and psychoanalytic theory.

Artist, psychoanalyst, and feminist theorist Bracha Ettinger presents an original theoretical exploration of shared affect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ettinger works through Lacan's late works, the anti-Oedipal perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as object-relations theory to critique the phallocentrism of mainstream Lacanian theory and to rethink the masculine-feminine opposition. She replaces the phallic structure with a dimension of emergence, where objects, images, and meanings are glimpsed in their incipiency, before they are differentiated. This is the matrixial realm, a shareable, psychic dimension that underlies the individual unconscious and experience.

Concerned with collective trauma and memory, Ettinger's own experience as an Israeli living with the memory of the Holocaust is a deep source of inspiration for her paintings, several of which are reproduced in the book. The paintings, like the essays, replay the relation between the visible and invisible, the sayable and ineffable; the gaze, the subject, and the other.

Table of Contents:
Foreword: Bracha's Eurydice
Judith Butler

Introduction. Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference?
Griselda Pollock

1. The Matrixial Gaze
2. The With-In-Visible Screen
3. Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze
4. The Heimlich
5. Transcryptum
6. Weaving a Woman Artist with-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event

Afterword. Painting: The Voice of the Grain
Brian Massumi

Notes
Works by Bracha L. Ettinger
Publication History
Index

Further Information:
This seminar is organised by Dr Noreen Giffney (noreen.giffney@gmail.com), Michael O'Rourke (tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com) and Dr Anne Mulhall (anne.mulhall@ucd.ie). For further information or to register, please contact one of the organisers. Places are limited so early registration is advised.

Dear shadow

You have a dream. You find yourself walking through Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting "Netherlandish Proverbs", surrounded by figures re-enacting countless proverbs, sayings and aphorisms. The scene needs decoding. Above you, a man "hangs his cloak according to the wind" (adapts his viewpoint to the current opinion), whilst his neighbour "tosses feathers into that same wind" (works fruitlessly). A third figure "gazes at the stork" (wastes his/her time). And so it goes, according to accepted wisdom.

The sun is still climbing. You become aware of the shadow that your body casts on the ground. It is indistinct, and falls towards the sun rather than away from it. As you make your way through the characters and their travails, you begin to be overwhelmed by the burden of intersubjectivity, the sheer agony and exhilaration of being alive amongst other people also living, and yet long since dead. You think about joining them, leaving the darkness behind.

The realisation dawns that you have been here before, and some familiar words ring out, seemingly sung by a group of fleet foxes, sitting watching the humans from the slopes of Tiger Mountain, just outside the frame of Bruegel the Elder’s painting…

“In the town one morning, I went
Staggering through premonitions of my death-
I don't see anybody that dear to me.

Dear shadow, alive and well,
How can the body die?
You tell me everything,
Anything true.

Jesse,
I don't know what I have done-
I'm turning myself to a demon.
I don't know what I have done-
I'm turning myself to a demon.”

Misery and meaning

So, there’s a credit crunch going on. And a war on terror. Oh, and the world is getting too warm too quickly. In the classic 1970s sit-com constantly on repeat in my mind, there is a battle going on between the Jones and the Frazer- between “Don’t panic!” and “We’re doomed!”

And in one ear, the hopefulness of The Smiths’ “Ask” is ringing out whilst in the other, I can hear the dolorous tones of “Heaven knows I’m miserable now".

Vacillating between the denial and embrace of a kind of thanatos, I was interested to stumble upon the “Web of misery”. This is a tool for making predictions based on new online indicators of economic distress, devised by the eLab eXchange, which is part of the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing at the University of California, Riverside. It now seems possible to measure how the US economic recession has affected people's online behaviour by inviting people to predict how much traffic is likely to increase to internet sites devoted to 10 subjects that are often associated with economic distress- Alcohol, Education, Employment, Food, Gambling, God, Guns, Health Care and Real Estate. For example, some are at greater risk for problem drinking as unemployment rises, so the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration could attract increasing numbers of visitors seeking help. Similarly, during periods of economic hardship, there will be increases in gun ownership and interest in religion. The outcome of these 10 “markets” will be determined early in the third quarter of 2008 using Nielsen Online's NetView audience measurement service. And in the spirit of free enterprise and lottery love, you can even try to dodge your own personal credit crunch by winning a prize of up to $500 for playing. Hmm…

Thus we have a predictor based on others’ predictions and on that most slippery of things, “confidence” (which, incidentally, is what powers behaviour on the world’s economic trading floors). It strikes me that if there is a “web of misery” online, there must also be a “web of joy” or perhaps, more significantly, a “web of meaning”. They will surely co-exist- our fears of the future, our anxiety around death, our denial of meaninglessness, these will themselves be constituents of the kind of meanings we seek and find. If we consider online behaviour, there are a number of ways of tracking the “web of meaning”- there is plenty of freeware which will track your web useage, how far your mouse has travelled, how many different sites you have viewed, what you have searched for, “where” you have wandered to in cyberspace (are we still using that term, by the way?!) On their own, these measures may not add up to more than a fairly small hill of beans- they can’t capture the complexity of the meaningfulness of online activity, because it spreads out not just through cyberspace but also through the noösphere. However, the sum of our online activity, much like the sum of our face-to-face social interactions, is surely an indicator of something significant.

Whatever the “web of meaning” is, and it is probably closest to the semantic web, there are reasons to be cheerful. As people experienced in the delights and dangers of online education, Michael and myself have found that the online context brings some particular opportunities for learning, for making connections, for forging meaning in miserable times. Our courses, the MA in Psychoanalytic Studies and the MSc in Psychotherapy Studies, use slightly different blends of pedagogies, but both focus largely on the power of asynchronous communication, the gradual building of dialogues on particular topics which has such a different flavour to synchronous communication, be that face-to-face or online. As this dialogue progresses, we are continually surprised and delighted by the way students make connections with one another- people they never meet in the flesh, and have little in common with, but who become trusted companions in the search for meaning. Indeed, we find that some of the characteristics of online behaviour, such as the oft-cited “online disinhibition”, have significant advantages. As they study a particular topic, students will find themselves engaging in self-disclosure, sharing the most personal experiences with one another, opening up about losses, traumas, sorrows and joys, making links between theory and personal experience and clinical practice. And overall, we found in our research that students value the online experience highly, more so than comparable face-to-face courses (see the bottom of this page for our most recent research). Interestingly, we have found that some students are more comfortable with the disembodiment, with the lack of visual feedback and bodily presence, with the “not knowing” about the Other; and some students find this same disembodiment a barrier to deep learning. I suppose we come back to the role of confidence- we are continually working on ways of engaging these students in a way which facilitates their self-confidence and ability to learn.

E-learning is no panacea, but as we sit on our “web of misery” and think about the future, eLearning does offer new ways of connecting, new ways of building our own “webs of meaning” which allow us to capture those bits of significant information flying past us, onwards into nothingness.

Freud 2.0 possibilities

Two websites I would like to draw your attention to:

First, if you haven't already leapt into the world of the Web 2.0, with social bookmarking, wikis and collaborative documents, please do with all haste. A great site, just brought to my attention (thanks Andy!), is G02Web20.net -- a catalogue of possibilities. If it all seems a bit overwhelming, try refining what's on offer by using the 'Select Tab' button at the top. That'll help you narrow in on what you're looking for.

I'm still playing with that and finding all sorts of new things, so any recommendations are very, very welcome. But one site I'm already familiar with that I would like to draw your attention to is Diigo. Diigo (pronounced: dee'go) is a social bookmarking site that allows for the public annotation of pages. It allows you to clippings, annotate, tag, highlight and share webpages. Sign up for an account -- and, if you use Mozilla Firefox (as you should, really), you can get a Diigo toolbar integrated into your browser. (Correction: the Diigo toolbar is available for a number of browsers, including IE.)

Then, when visiting a website while signed into your account (and they account OpenID now, it seems), you can highlight clips on the page, write comments and let all of your friends know what's there. And if you are browsing and find a page that someone else has annotated, you can see their comments. (If you sign up, come back here and have a look.)

Comments can be private or public, open to all or just to a select group. So if you do join the Diigo network, please join the psychoanalysis group (or, my Foucault group, if you are so inclined).

More on psychoanalysis and the internet in coming weeks.