Aesthetic Practice and Ethical Encounter

My wander and investigations in what I’ve suggested to be a Butlerian “museum” (see my post on February, 13th) is getting on. In my reflections on the second chapter of Giving an Account of Oneself entitled “Against Ethical Violence”, I’d like to continue drawing on the relation between the act of giving an account of oneself and art, i.e. on the relation between ethical encounters and aesthetic practice.

First of all, “Against Ethical Violence” strongly reminds the reader of the genuine and necessary ethical implication of human communication. The blog discussions of the last few weeks pose the questions of how to address subjects who are deprived of language (the discussion was especially about subjects who are bodily or mentally diseased), and to what extend are these subjects in state of giving an account of themselves if they’re lacking language? In fact, it appeared that the act of giving an account of oneself was only possible within a scene of address, during which the question “Who are you?” is being asked again and again. This question (“Who are you?”) is simultaneously sustaining the real impossibility to fully satisfy its answer—at least as long as one accepts to acknowledge one’s shared opacity—due to the absence of narratives capable of answering it fully.
In fact, although it remains a genuine problem to give an account of oneself for those who are deprived of language, Butler also reminds us that the problem of understanding or of being understood has in turn to be placed right at the centre of language. In fact, our daily life appears to be ruled by various kinds of communications, many of them using language as main means of expression. Yet, language also fails to truly communicate. Fist of all, there can be noises interrupting the narrative, making it blurry, sometimes even making it completely un-understandable. But this is not all. Departing from the linguistic terms installed by Lacan (the latter suggests that the unconscious is constructed as a language, which generates the complete impossibility of a subjectified reality outside of language), Butler suggests that there might well be something outside of language, and not the least the way people relate to each-other. This is partly to be read in the following quote:

I would suggest that the structure of address is not a feature of narrative, one of its many and variable attributes, and an interruption of narrative. The moment the story is addressed to someone, it assumes a rhetorical dimension that is not reducible to a narrative function. It presumes that someone, and it seeks to recruit and act upon that someone. Something is being done with language when the account that I give begins: it is invariably interlocutory, ghosted, laden, persuasive, and tactical. It may well seek to communicate a truth, but it can do this, if it can, only by exercising a relational dimension of language. (GAAO 63)

The truth it seeks to communicate is rooted in the moment in which the subject is considered still being out of the realm of language. Butler suggests that at this stadium, the infant registers information not through language, but through tactile signs: “my infantile body has not only been touched, moved, and arranged, but those impingements operated as “tactile signs” that registered in my formation. These signs communicate to me in ways that are not reducible to vocalization” (GAAO 70). So, these moments that have constituted the infant in a very low age, that have make the subject emerge as an “I”, do not belong to the realm of language, and yet still must be part of the answer to the question “Who are you?”.

Let me take a step back here, and look more in depth at this possibility of non-linguistic message, making a movement back and forth between Butler’s text and Michel Serres’ concept of noise, as I think they greatly complement each-other.
It appears that in Serres’ view, noise is not only that which is indiscernible, blurring and disturbing, but also that which contains an infinite range of information and possibilities. It is that which is at the source of the relation between chaos and form, being the foreground of chaos ready to be put into form and yet escaping any definite categorization. As Serres says:

The intermediate states of Proteus are the roar of the ocean being made. The beautiful noiseuse is agitated. She must be recognised amidst the swelling, splashing, breaking of forms and tones, in the unchaining of the element divided against itself […] Portbus and Poussin didn’t see the beautiful noiseuse and they treat the old man who sees her like a mad man. […] How many sailors have seen nothing in the noise of the sea, how many have only felt nauseated, organisms invaded by sounds and furies, like moving gray shadows, [..] how many have never seen the beautiful noiseuse, Aphrodite, naked, shimmering with beauty, emerging anew, renewed from the troubled waters […], simple as a new-born babe, from the chaotic canvas of the dying old master. (51-52)

So, noise is that which at first sight has no meaning at all, but still appears to be at the source of meaning. Those who see it this way are often treated as mad, because they seem to refer to nonsense at first hand. However, according to Serres, noise may be precisely the hidden and undefined message in all what we are not able to grasp, which eventually appears to be the core of what we want to communicate. For as Serres also says, noise is “at the heart of being” (51). Noise then also becomes the hidden beauty we are prevented to see when we refuse to acknowledge our opacity, as it seems to be precisely that which resides before any narrative can be formed, and before any judgement can be formed. Thereby, noise must be at the heart of an ethical encounter with one another, as it is within noise that we may genuinely feel and experience our shared opacity. Butler appears to echo this idea when she states that “the failure to narrate fully may well indicate the way in which we are, from the start, ethically implicated in the lives of others” (GAAO 64).

But let’s come back to what I first suggested, namely the relation between the ethical encounter and the aesthetic practice, considering that Michel Serres relates his concept of noise to the notion of masterpiece. As he says, “the [art]work is made of forms, the masterpiece is the unformed fount of forms; the work is made of time, the masterpiece is the source of time; the work is in tune, the masterwork shakes with noises” (53). This is to suggest that the masterpiece is a place where noise—i.e. what lies beyond the power of categorization, knowledge, and thus also what lies beyond narrative—still resides in abundance.
So, isn’t it that art is precisely that which attempts to recollect that moment which narrative fails to render? In other words, isn’t art precisely that which forces us to come together in the acknowledgment of our differences, in the acknowledgment of our opacity? And thereby, isn’t art precisely that which yearns for genuine ethical encounters between human beings?

These questions are echoed by the work and thoughts of Bracha L. Ettinger, artist, psychoanalyst and feminist theorist. In her article “Co-poiesis”, she stresses to what extend artistic practice is deeply connected to what she calls an “ethics-in-action”. Let me first quote her shortly:

Fascinance might turn into what Lacan describes as fascinum when castration, separation, weaning, split or rejection abruptly intervene. Working through traces of the Other in me is also an aesthetical gesture where compassionate hospitality and generosity meets with fascinance. Co-poietic differentiation-in-coemergence is possible only with-in compassionate hospitality and with fascinance. Artworking, like psychoanalytical healing of long duration, is a compassionate encounter-event of prolonged generosity. The artist who is working through the cross-inscribed traces and is worked through by virtual, phantasmatic or traumatic real strings practices her art—art that is aesthetic-in-action—as a healing, healing that is an ethics-in-action. Such is the co-response-ability of artworking and of healing in copoiesis. (708)

Echoing Judith Butler, Bracha Ettinger refers here to the encounter-event as a central point in both the artistic practice and ethics-in-action. I would suggest that a narrow parallel can be drawn between what Ettinger refers to as ‘prolonged generosity’ in the passionate encounter within the artwork and the way Butler describes the encounter of subjects in the act of giving an account of oneself. In fact, as it has been noted earlier, giving an account of oneself necessarily occurs within a structure of address, in which an “I” tries to narrate his/her own identity to a “you”.
Several things happen at that point: first of all, the narrative account fails, partially barred by a (shared) opacity. Secondly, the “I” is somehow dispossessed from his narrative, caught up in the exchange of the scene of address. These two points result in what could be seen as an ethical failure, since the “I” fails to achieve self-identity and to be recognised as such. Yet, according to Butler, it is precisely in this ethical failure that a true ethical encounter may take place, resulting from the acknowledgement of the very the limits of knowing (GAAO 42). Moreover, the experience of these limits of knowing can “constitute a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves” (Ibid.). Isn’t the “prolonged generosity” which Ettinger refers to the genuine recognition of one another’s narrative failure in the act of giving an account of oneself? So, the “prolonged generosity” would be both the recognition of one’s failure to achieve self-identity, and one’s own dispossession within the scene of address. In fact, it also appears to be the result of both ‘fascinance’ (i.e. a moment of brutal separation or rejection) and compassionate hospitality.

Following Ettinger, Serres, and Butler, I would like to suggest that the aesthetical encounter-event achieves a dialectical re-encounter of what has been lost in language (i.e. what dwells beyond the limits of knowing) and what is still at one’s disposal through narrative. So, the practice of aesthetic is a tool to re-experience our shared opacity, which is, according to Butler, the pre-condition for meeting the other in a genuine ethical manner.


Additional note:
There are many practical attempts to artistically heal the wounds of war and hatred through artistic processes. Think here for example of the Israelo-Palestinian project to unify in their artistic practice, thereby attempting to bring ethical recognition back in both communities. Think also of Merlijn Twaalfhoven’s attempt to build a children orchestra in the Middle East with the hope to bring them a feeling of ethical values. And I’m sure there are many other examples.