Carnal Aesthetics

Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics

Marta Zarzycka, Bettina Papenburg, Marta Zarzycka, Bettina Papenburg

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857732903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Genderforschung

Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing transgressive works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Carnal Aesthetics is a fascinating, new examination of this aspect of contemporary visual culture. Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affect and sensation, it provides a fresh look at the meeting point between the politics of representation and the politics of perception through the prismatic lens of feminist theory. Acclaimed scholars analyse a wide range of seminal case studies coming from different media: digital photography, painting, video, film and multimedia art. They explore here a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image. Unlike other books on the complex relationship between politics and aesthetics, Carnal Aesthetics seeks to provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual studies, film and media studies, as well as trauma studies.
It is a significant contribution across these dynamic fields of exploration for scholars who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their work.

PART 1
Encountering (Aesth)Ethics

Chapter 1
Trauma, Time and Painting: Bracha Ettinger and the Matrixial Aesthetic

Griselda Pollock

I

What time is it?¹ I have a watch. I am not jet-lagged. So why ask?

I am asking about the time of feminism, and the temporalities of sexual difference which feminist thought raises as a historical-theoretical question.² The temporalities of feminism are in crisis. Think about the current reframing of what feminism has been into first, second or third waves, or the prevalent use of the generational metaphor that pits feminist mother against post-feminist daughter under the unconscious shadow of mother-hating fantasies.³ Banished to a past by both patriarchal resistance and either feminists’ own historical nostalgia or Oedipal anxiety, both of which shape a historical reconstruction of the feminist moment lodged around 1970, feminism is falling prey to the mirage of posterity. Post-feminism or third-wave feminism, such phrasings connote supersession, transcendence and exhaustion. Feminism is over even before it has really begun. The speeding-up temporality of fashion-conscious liquid modernity fails to grasp the longue durée of social histories of women and the monumental time of psycho-symbolic orders, both of which are critical to understanding the movement of feminism between linear time and symbolic time, between history and language.⁴

How can we link these new discourses of feminism either being in the past or needing a new face, with trauma as no-time, when trauma challenges all temporal thinking since it is both a continuous unknown present and a haunting absence? According to psychoanalysis, trauma is an overwhelming event for which the psyche has no means to digest its impact. Pierced by what has happened, the subject does not know it. Trauma has two dimensions. One is a structural dimension of how subjectivity is formed through overwhelming psychological events such as birth, weaning, and loss of the mother’s body/love that impact the infant before it has the psychic apparatus to process these catastrophic events. They happen to a subject who cannot know them. Trauma also refers, however, to the shattering effects of extreme historical events that impact on already formed subjects and even on collectives of subjects: peoples, nations, cultures. The impact of such historical events is predetermined by grooves within the psyche already carved by structural traumas of loss, abandonment and feared mutilation. In cultural analysis, trauma confronts mass catastrophes such as world wars, decolonising struggles and their long aftermaths, AIDS, the Holocaust, the Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian and other genocides and so forth. Modernity itself is considered traumatic in the shock of urbanisation and industrialisation through to the impacts of new technologies that themselves generate what Luc Boltanski has named ‘suffering at a distance’.⁵ We – a worldwide ‘we’ of contemporary humanity in all our plurality – live in a post-traumatic age.

Does the disinclination to keep feminism on the academic as well as general cultural agenda alongside its former partners in radical critique – the post-colonial and the queer – in fact register not so much the exhaustion of the feminist project as the traumatic impact of feminism’s continuing challenge not only to phallocentric cultures but to us, the feminists ourselves, still deeply formed by, and even comfortably within, phallocentric imaginaries? Rather than quibbling over when feminism was, or what generations of feminism succeed/displace each other, both of which positions tie us to Oedipal models, I propose to argue that feminism is to be understood under the sign of trauma. Its challenge to the epochal psycho-symbolic order we name phallocentrism is so shocking that we have not yet found a way to assimilate that challenge culturally or even subjectively.

Gayatri Spivak taught us that our project would always be a double one: work against sexism (opposition) but for feminism (critique). Oppositional denunciation of immediately palpable sexism was relatively easy, but it would rapidly lose its potency once the very reforms we campaigned for began to materialise. But critique? Are we still doing that? Do we still imagine, are we still working for, feminism to come? As a work in progress? As a space creating new conceptualisations of both sexual difference and time to which the aesthetic may give us singular access?

Instead of the linear model represented by waves of feminism, or even Kristevan generations of feminism (superseding each exhausted phase and turning to different preoccupations managing a Hegelian synthesis of their contradictions between equality and difference), I suggest a more spatial mapping of a multi-dimensional feminist landscape across which different intellectual/theoretical settlements have emerged to work through specific issues, questions or problems, themselves overdetermined by the pressures of local geopolitical and historico-familial formations on each location of feminist practice. The linear time of political histories and historical narratives is the time of nations and nation states, whose borders were transgressed by both emergent transnational movements (women, youth, queer, diasporic and migrant peoples) and the brute forces of globalising capitalism which has rendered powerless the hitherto national monitoring of capitalism’s unchecked and rapacious activities. Caught between its new exploitations and the facilitation of communication through international webs, radical movements and critical thought also work to re-imagine modes of connectivity and forms of difference. These then touch on aspects of the social and the subjective that are not shaped exclusively by linear time. While feminism engages politically within its bounds to bring about real change, it also operates at deeper theoretical levels with slower moving sediments of relations of power and meaning to which the term phallocentrism refers: a symbolic order with real effects on life and meaning, difference and desire. Thus a challenge I seek to address is that which allows us to articulate the relations between both the historical and the monumental times in which what we call feminism constitutes a barely initiated investigation into human possibilities not merely beyond class oppressions, racialised violence and self-determining sexual choice, but into that domain we have never yet been able to think: a meaning for sexual difference.

I do not mean sexual difference as we usually understand it: namely difference between men and women (gender), or the psycho-linguistic (+/-). We need to imagine a non-derivative, originary sexual difference of/from the feminine, a possibility which Lacan intuited when he acknowledged a psycho- symbolic dimension ‘beyond the phallus’, that is a psychic dimension not organised by the unique phallic signifier tracing the signifying field by means of a binary logic plus/minus, presence/absence. Feminism, it seems, has turned away in fear from this very possibility of a sexual difference of/from the feminine, fearful before the dangers of daring to think so shattering a challenge to phallocentric logic. Why? Because it would need us to find the means to think about bodies, sense and signs in ways that our own desire, groomed within the blockages and seductive pleasures of the phallocentric to enter linear time, has effectively made taboo. It would inevitably take us back to the unconsciously hated/desired maternal, to a realm of meaning and subjectivity that feels too carnal while also being too aesthetic for our over-intellectualised, social constructionist, linguistic structuralist feminist identities who will play with de-gendered rhizomes but not sexually-differentiated strings.

The idea of the body, the sexual body, the sexed body or rather sexed bodies, not merely differentiated bodies, but sexuated bodies capable of both sexual pleasure and creative sublimations that might found other systems of ethical, aesthetic and affective relations, leads us, the feminist theorists, to confront two longstanding fears. Any invocation of a non-linguistic construction of sexual difference leads to the fear that what feminist theory wants to insist is purely social might be reduced to merely physical, physiological, anatomical, hence non-social and unchangeable ‘facts’. For this threat, we resist what we dismiss as essentialism. Embodied we may be, but corporality is not allowed to determine what we are. Any discourse on the body risks the taint of essentialism or biologism that seemingly places issues of gender and sex beyond social transformation. Thus we have created a theoretical no-go area. Then, of course, the body in such debates is not neutral. Body connected to or specified as sexual/sexuated is the reproductively-defined body and hence any consideration of femaleness in these terms appears to risk reifying the procreative dimension of the gendered body which is elided with the heteronormative body and with the social institutions that heteronormatively police all bodies and desires towards the proper ends of procreative activity.

II

I want to take you around but one painting by Bracha Ettinger, titled Eurydice, no. 30, 1994–2001, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 22.3×38.7 (see Plate 1). Its high number, 30, already suggests it belongs in a series and that the series is a long one. It took time to arrive at no. 30. It also took many years to make this one painting. Why does a painter remain with a question over a prolonged period?

My eye initially discerns a grid across the painting’s surface. Its verticals are stronger than the horizontals. The grid provides an underlying structure, but negatively. It exists only by the degrees of its lightness in relation to other densities on the paper mounted on canvas. Through its ‘absence’ resulting from a fine degree of deposited colour or intimated mass, I can see the grain of the paper. I sense yet another layer, itself grainy, of an ashen deposit that yields some kind of figuration. I know that this is a product of depositing photocopic dust from a blind but interrupted reproduction of found images, bearers of several histories, and different times. I am familiar with the image-archive, faithfully explored by Bracha Ettinger, of found images, texts, photographs, diagrams, which form a reservoir of familial and historical images with, not from, which the artist repeatedly works. Participant in what now appears in retrospect as the archival turn in the visual arts, Ettinger’s archive is a traumatic one, linking ‘the Family Album’ with historical catastrophes across the twentieth-century, linking the array of public and private images with the militarisation of technologies of vision in spaces of conflict.⁶

Some elements of this archive come from German aircraft surveillance of Ottoman territories named Palestina during the First World War, others from pre-war Poland or Germany, yet others from post-war Israel/Palestine, others from the theoretical papers of Freud and Lacan on sexuality, hysteria, femininity, from Hebrew-German lexicons, from nineteenth-century psychiatric manuals on madness, some from Nazi racist typologies. Others come from the family album which Jo Spence revealed to us, lying precisely at the hinge of the private and the public, the familial and the social, the historical and the psychological. In Eurydice, no. 30 we have traces of two such images: a family snapshot of a young mother holding her lolling baby taken by someone who excised her face and a historical photo-readymade from the violence of war and a racist genocide folded within it.

On the left of the painting, we can discern figures; this is the trace of an incomplete photocopy of a photograph of a woman holding a newborn baby. The newly born baby is tiny, almost its entire body grasped by the hands of the woman who holds its limp, unmuscled, once swimmingly weightless body which is almost matched for size by the lolling head; its inexpressive infant face has not yet learnt from the humanising mirror of its mother’s face how to configure itself. We see the sweep of the neck of the black garment and a locket around the woman’s neck. But troublingly her face is cut off at the level of her mouth. She has no eyes. Her subjectivity, her gaze is absent from the field of the painting. She cannot look at her baby. She cannot look at us. She cannot meet the gaze of the figure on the extreme right.

The other source is the trace of a frieze-like photograph from a notorious image of a massacre of innocent women and children perpetrated in Mizocz, Ukraine on 14 October 1942 during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the Second World War. On 13 October some of the Jewish prisoners confined to the ghetto of Mizocz, near Rovno in the Ukraine, rose up against their Germans captors. As a punishment, the entire population of 1,700 men, women and children was taken to a nearby ravine and systematically shot dead. A series of seven photographs documented this process. How and why photographs were taken, of which five still exist, is hard to imagine. Was it as witness, as protest, as trophy? More importantly, how are we, belated viewers of such a document of atrocity now to position ourselves before it? How can we move beyond its troubling conditions of production and beyond its current pedagogical use to reveal evil by exposing, again and again, vulnerable women and children to a gaze that cannot be secured from the ambiguities inherent in its creation: voyeurism, pornography or sadism, whatever our own political or personal affiliations and identifications?

The partial promise signified by the mother and new baby on the left as the trope of the familial highlights the atrocity of its total abrogation as the Jewish mothers desperately and tenderly hold their babies and toddlers nakedly, in the autumnal chill as they proceed towards a hillside where they must lie down and be shot dead. But at no point in Ettinger’s painting must the violence that is encoded in the archive photograph, ‘shot’ at the same moment as deadly shooting was about to begin, be allowed to return to feed sadistic voyeurism or scopophilic mastery in the viewer. Ettinger’s novel painting process generates another kind of gazing to allow us to look back through time without iterating a deadly looking, linking looking and killing that is the historically traumatic condition of the production of this image.

Several figures in this new encounter-painting lack a gaze. Is the painting then about sightlessness, and about what is not, cannot be seen, or is it about the missed encounter that the painting’s virtual geometry unconsciously seeks to re-plot as a newly spun web of willed resonance? A tall figure on the right, head averted, forms part of a trio, the ‘three Graces of catastrophe’ as I have named them elsewhere.⁷ There is a second woman beside the standing figure. Her hand encircles and cradles the head of her baby whom she holds in her arms, both of them naked and afraid. At the centre of the painting in a space that is paler as it forms a horizontal band or opening we can discern two dark pools. I read them as the eyes of a third woman in the trio whom we will find again and again in the Eurydice series and before in another series by Ettinger named Autistworks (1993–1994). She gazes directly out from whatever space or place she was once, staring at the photographer who was there then, watching, photographing women condemned to die as they waited for their deaths, and appealing now to the passing gaze of whoever stops, and is drawn by the riddle of this painting to gaze long enough at the multi-valent surface. The onlookers feel themselves found, once again by this fading, emerging trace of an invocation to shared human reciprocity of a woman perpetually suspended between two deaths: what came after this photograph and what might come because of its existence beyond her death and in our life.

Were we to use the intimations of a grid and imagine it in three dimensions, we might create a series of sight lines in and across the depth of the space of this virtual encounter that weave strings through time. What would occur if we could align the gazes of women across time and place? Would we sense the anguish of missed or impossible encounters, the pain of not being seen or of being subjected to a murderous gaze, identification? Is there a willingness to wait with these figures, to share the tremor of their terror clothing the naked horror along with the artist’s constant painterly scanning of the surface? Is it her touching refusal to abandon these many Eurydices in their darkness of death? What kind of gazing does this painting now solicit from the viewer once the elements have begun to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Bettina Papenburg and Marta Zarzycka
• Part 1: Encountering (Aesth)Ethics
• Part 2: Affective Imagery
• Part 3: Sentient Bodies
• Part 4: Strategies of Disruption
• Notes