Noisy Matrixial Borderspaces: Recognition Vulnerability Survival

Reflecting on chapter two of Giving an Account of Oneself, Marie and Tim, via Ettinger, Serres, and Hoogstad, have offered a few ways of thinking about how to resist ethical violence. Both Marie and Tim engage in a discussion regarding those cultural signs and symbols that fall outside of language and parallel Butler’s meditations on opacity and ethical failures. For Marie, aesthetic encounters and for Tim, musical encounters both demonstrate ways of thinking about Butler’s ethics (where, as Marie suggested citing Serres, we can productively acknowledge and work with the ‘noise’ which surrounds us). For this reflection, I am most interested in the relationship between recognition, vulnerability, and survival.

For Butler ethical violence “demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same” (42). Here, recognition plays an instrumental role. Butler argues that our self-opacity establishes an ethical capacity to level a ‘certain kind’ of recognition unto others (based on our mutually shared partial blindnesses). She writes: “it follows that one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centering and ‘fails’ to achieve self-identity” (42). Butler suggests that if we are to understand recognition as an ethical project then we must re-position it [recognition] as unsatisfiable (43). Much like Ettinger’s fragility, Butler suggests a certain level of vulnerability in this de-centering process.

Marie and Tim both highlight the opacity present in their (aesthetic/musical) event-encounters. Marie suggests that art has the capacity to recollect that which narrative fails to render. To some extent, it seems Tim makes a similar argument (his example: Arabic music). Both suggest that these pre/non-linguistic tactile signs that are non-narrativizable, indeed, open themselves up to deliberative (Butler)/transport (Ettinger) space. It seems to me that Marie and Tim are implicitly pointing to this problem of recognition as cited above. For instance, if Ettinger is correct, and art facilitates a potential ‘transport-space’ for trauma, then, it seems to me that Ettinger’s matrixial borderspaces and Butler’s deliberative spaces are indeed the noisiest and thus, the most productive spaces of them all. Recognition in both Marie and Tim’s examples level ‘a certain kind’ of recognition either upon the subject in the encounter or upon the encounter itself by the subject. Are Butler’s ethics enacted when one breaks through the noise and renders ‘a certain kind´ of recognition, where ‘a certain kind´ demands disorientation, de-centering, and ethical failure? Is it a breaking-through noise? A working-with noise? A translation-of noise?

Beyond recognition, I am left wondering how the vulnerability inherent to unsatisfiable recognition processes and the fragility within the matrixial borderspace play out in Marie and Tim’s examples. Responding to Marie, Tim argues that, for him, Ettinger does not move past the linguistic symbolic order enough because her work is confined within “our own narrow spectrum of cultural language we deploy and receive through the moniker ‘art.’” First, I’m not so sure ‘art’ is actually confined to such narrow fields of intelligibility. Second, it seems to me that musical encounters function much in the same way aesthetic encounters do in the sense that both may be genre-ized in advance but still lend themselves to unique and different-every-time encounters. Third, Ettinger’s theoretical/psychoanalytic work convinces me that she does move past the trouble of language enough. Never have I encountered a ‘noisier’ article that problematizes subject-formation and relationality at every artistic/linguistic turn. Fourth, and back to this problem of vulnerability, Ettinger cites the fragility which occurs in opaque situations (matrixial borderspaces). Fragility, or vulnerability, directly implicates an interruption of the self and as Butler argues, it is precisely in those interruptions where the ‘truth’ may well become more clear in “stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form” (64). Thus, even if Ettinger’s work is confined to the museum (which is also suspect), any event-encounter with her work will foster a level of productive interruption, even if the question is merely “why oil and mixed media on canvas, again”?

In the blog discussions prompted by Christopher’s earlier questions regarding ‘pathologized subjects’, we noted the importance of Foucault’s notion of de-subjugation for Butler’s meditations on giving an account of oneself. For me, vulnerability plays itself out precisely in those desubjugated moments. Butler writes,

In the language that articulates opposition to a non-narrativizable beginning resides the fear that the absence of narrative will spell a certain threat, a threat to life, and will pose the risk, if not the certainty, of a certain kind of death, the death of a subject who cannot, who can never, fully recuperate the conditions of its own emergence. But this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of a fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had. In other words, it is a necessary grief (65).

For Butler, non-narrativizability spells out a death of something that never was. That loss and grief, is necessary and here, I relate this passage back to interruptions of the self, vulnerability, fragility, and de-subjugation. When we realize we cannot fully articulate ourselves, these moments of interruption may prove to be the most fruitful enigmatic encounters that allow us to approach the other and ourselves ethically. The loss of something that never was highlights that which never was and illuminates the blind-spot that is transparency.

Butler argues that in order to survive, we must constantly harness the desire for recognition. As discussed above, that desire will always be unsatisfiable. Part unsatisfiable, part the longing for survivability, the desire for recognition necessitates vulnerability—one that is shared. I imagine this issue of vulnerability and grieving will become more important in next session’s discussion of Precarious Life but, for now, I wonder how vulnerabilities productively add to this idea of possibility and co-creativity (both in Ettinger and Butler). For Ettinger matrixial borderspace is a mutating copoietic net where co-creativity might occur (705). Again, when Ettinger writes ‘might’ she argues that these deliberative processes (in the Butlerian sense) cannot be delimited in advance and furthermore, may result in trauma. This trauma necessitates ethical attention and that attention may thus also be fragile. Because both Butler and Ettinger underpin vulnerability in these ‘account matrices’, I am trying to think of concrete examples where shared vulnerabilities unfold productively (for survival, recognition). Marie’s political artworks example begins to make this question more tangible for me, though I’m wondering if anyone else has any thoughts?