YouTube birth and the primal scene

Motherhood has recently re-emerged as ‘material’ for artistic practice, and as a viable subject of academic research that both recognizes and extends earlier feminist assertions that the maternal is a key site for the anxious psychosocial negotiations of identity, subjectivity, equality, ethics and politics. Additionally, pregnancy and birth have graphically entered the public domain. Hundreds of thousands of short films of live birth, for instance, circulate around the globe on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, some with followings of many million viewers. Yet, how might we understand the desire to perform and spectate birth? ‘YouTube birth’ raises questions about performing and spectating birth in digital culture, and the meaning of watching our own birth with a mass public of millions of viewers. In this paper I explore these questions through revisiting the psychoanalytic notion of the ‘primal scene’. The primal scene is the Freudian articulation of the crucial role of infantile sexual and violent fantasies in structuring psychic life, linked to the loss of, or denial of, the material/maternal body as source or origin. Although within feminist scholarship the primal scene as a theoretical concept is radically out of date, it may be productive to revisit primal fantasies in the digital age, and the ways digital technologies shift our relation to ‘analogue’ notions of place, scene, birth, origin and loss. Exploring the continued place of psychoanalysis in helping to understand issues to do with origin, reproduction and temporality, I ask both what psychoanalysis might have to offer our understanding of performing and watching birth, and how a psychoanalytic configuration of the primal scene may itself need to change in relation to digital primal fantasies and technologies that function through fungibility and loss-less-ness

On the Dialectics of Charisma in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present

While ‘charisma’ can be found in dramatic and theatrical parlance, the term enjoys only minimal critical attention in theatre and performance studies, with scholarly work on presence and actor training methods taking the lead in defining charisma’s supposed ‘undefinable’ quality. Within this context, the article examines the appearance of the term ‘charismatic space’ in relation to Marina Abramovic’s retrospective The Artist is Present at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Here Abramovic uses this term to describe the shared space in which performer and spectator connect bodily, psychically, and spiritually through a shared sense of presence and energy in the moment of performance. Yet this is a space arguably constituted through a number of dialectical tensions and contradictions which, in dialogue with existing theatre scholarship on charisma, can be further understood by drawing on insights into charismatic leaders and charismatic authority in leadership studies. By examining the performance and its documentary traces in terms of dialectics we consider the political and ethical implications for how we think about power relations between artist/spectator in a neoliberal, market-driven art context. Here an alternative approach to conceiving of and facilitating a charismatic space is proposed which instead foregrounds what Bracha L. Ettinger calls a ‘matrixial encounter-event’: A relation of coexistence and compassion rather than dominance of self over other; performer over spectator; leader over follower. By illustrating the dialectical tensions in The Artist is Present, we consider the potential of the charismatic space not as generated through the seductive power or charm of an individual whose authority is tied to his/her ‘presence’, but as something co-produced within an ethical and relational space of trans-subjectivity

Nuo proto-etinės atjautos prie atsakomybės: gretimumas ir trys pirmykštės motiniškos nepakantumo, rijimo ir apleidimo fantazijos

Reikšminiai žodžiai: Afektai; Apleistumas; Atsakomybė; Erosas; Erotas; Estetinė teorija; Etika; Feministinės studijos; Freudas; Kultūros studijos; Lacanas; Emanuelis Levinas (Emmanuel Levinas); Moteriškumas; Motiniškumas; Motinystė; Nepakankamumas; Nėštumas; Palikimas; Prarijimas; Psichoanalizė; Subjektyvumas; Sunaikinimas; Užuojauta; Įščios; Abandonment; Aesthetic theory; Affects; Co-response-ability; Compassion; Cultural studies; Devouring; Eros; Ethics; Femininity; Feminist studies; Freud; Lacan; Maternal; Not-enoughness; Pregnancy; Psychoanalysis; Responsibility; Subjectivity; Wom

Beyond Uncanny Anxiety

The Israeli-French artist, psychoanalyst, and theoretician Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger develops in her theory of matrixial borderspace, bordertime, and borderlinking an approach that allows us to rethink subjectivity and artistic production and offers a new concept of the feminine while articulating the specificities of a time-space for this feminine. Critically referring to classical and modern psychoanalytic writings (Freud, the British Group, Intersubjectivity, Lacan), she shows the extent to which the feminine in psychoanalysis has been conceptualized within the framework of &#8216;castration anxiety&#8217;, creating associations between the feminine and threats of regression, death, or insanity. Parallel conceptions of the feminine appear in terms of loss or victimisation and resonate throughout Western culture: &#8216;the list is long, from the myth of Orpheus until Duchamp’s &#8220;Bride”&#8217; (Ettinger). Yet, Ettinger&#8217;s approach doesn&#8217;t concentrate on criticising; rather, it is a poetic emergence of a new thinking-feeling of a field of transsubjectivity. In her lecture Bracha L. Ettinger addresses the Freudian 'unheimlich' to take it beyond its links to Angst (uncanny anxiety) into other affect, which Ettinger considers to be just as primary. Ettinger introduces new ways to think aesthetic effects and art-criticality,  where the aesthetic proto-ethical matrixiality informs both art and ethics. Ettinger&#8217;s lecture and installation continues a series of what the artist calls encounter-eventing. Bracha L. Ettinger (IL/FR) is an international contemporary artist based in Paris and Tel Aviv and an intellectual associated with contemporary French psychoanalytical thought. Her most recent exhibition took place at the Tapies Foundation in Barcelona (Alma Matrix. Bracha L. Ettinger and Ria Verhaeghe, curated by Catherine de Zegher). Her recent solo exhibitions took place in the summer of 2009 at the Freud Museum, London and at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts. Her next solo exhibition will take place at the Musee des beaux-arts, Angers. Ettinger&#8217;s paintings, photos, drawings, notes from conversations, and notebooks have been exhibited extensively in major museums of contemporary art. Ettinger is the author of several books and many psychoanalytical essays (among them Copoiesis) on what she calls, since the mid-1980s, &#8216;matrix&#8217; and &#8216;matrixial trans-subjectivity&#8217;. Her book The Matrixial Borderspace (2006) contains essays written between 1994 and 1999, a preface by Judith Butler, and introduction by Griselda Pollock, afterword by Brian Massumi. Ettinger is an activist against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories affiliated with Physicians for Human Right &#8211; Israel (PHR). Welcome: Luca di Blasi Introduction by Susanne LeebBracha L. Ettinger, Beyond Uncanny Anxiety, lecture, ICI Berlin, 12 November 2010, video recording, mp4, 01:32:50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e101112

Weaving a Woman Artist With-in

On behalf of