Identity, diasporas and subjective change: The role of ... - Springer Link

Original Article

Identity, diasporas and subjective change: The role of affect, the relation to the other, and the aesthetic Couze Venn E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract If subjectivity is relational and metastable by reference to the material, discursive and psychological conditions that constitute it, it would follow that dislocations provoked by diasporic displacement occasion mutations in subjectivity and identity. The problems concern finding ways of understanding the mechanisms and means that enable subjects to explore dissident or disjunct identities, and that provide the supports for the critical distancing which is integral to the process of disidentification. This paper argues that this requires a radical break with either essentialist or egological conceptualisations of identity and the subject, together with the development of approaches that address the effects of the affective machinery, including the domain of the aesthetic, that binds subjects to particular socio-cultural complexes, be they ‘consumer capitalism’ or ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. Re-theorising the inter-relationship between the psychic and the social, beyond the limitations in psychoanalytic discourse, is integral to this project. Subjectivity (2009) 26, 3–28. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.37 Keywords: diasporic identity; affect; the other; Merleau-Ponty; Stiegler

The Disorder of Identity Population displacement, forced or otherwise, in the form of migration, dispersion, expulsion, exile or transportation have been endemic in human settlement throughout history. In recent times, incited by the forces of corporate capitalism and new technological developments, this process has become speeded up and globalised beyond the diasporic dispersions provoked by European colonial expansion. These shifts in the global circuits of people, money, labour, media, culture, information have provoked all manner of reflections on the consequences for a sense of belonging or unbelonging arising from the crossing of routes and roots. In

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the context of continuing and intensifying inequalities of wealth and power, and the focus on difference, the phenomenon of diasporas and the effects of displacement for subjectivity have been relayed to the ‘politics of identity’, a development which is now the object of a problematisation, for example, from the standpoint of radical pluralism as well as political projects that support varieties of cosmopolitanism. In addition, the analysis of global diasporas has demonstrated the suspect character of the assumption that identities or cultures are basically unchanging, homogenous entities, rather than heterogenous, polyglot, plural, relational, existential and in-process. If subjectivity is relational and metastable by reference to the material, discursive and psychological conditions that constitute it, it would follow that dislocations provoked by displacement occasion mutations in subjectivity and identity. A rich vocabulary has emerged to address the range of issues involved: roots/ routes (P. Gilroy), doubleness (W.E.B. Du Bois), hybridity (Bhabha), transculturation (Canclini), belonging/unbelonging, uprooting/regrounding (S. Ahmed), syncretism, creolisation, translation (see Venn, 2006, for an analysis). They signal the recognition that the transactions between cultures and peoples brought together through migration, trade, war, environmental pressures and so on, result in profound disruptions and adjustments that require an active process of forging new identities. Although the social sciences and cultural history have shed light on the mechanisms of the mutation of cultures, today, at the level of the lived, we have to look to expressive forms such as the ‘postcolonial’ novel and visual and audio–visual artworks – photography, film, video, painting, multi-media – for the thick descriptions and depictions of the making and remaking of identities in the context of simultaneous displacement across many kinds of frontiers or borders: geographical, cultural, temporal, ‘ethnic’, environmental. One is prompted to ask therefore: What does the artwork, and expressive forms generally, tell us about this process that exceeds what analytical and historical accounts by themselves can reveal? Are there more general lessons to be learnt here about the problematic of subjectivity, particularly regarding the role of affect? And are these the forms through which identities and ways of life can be refigured? In the wake of these questions, another set of issues about subjective transformation appear, relating affective economy to the role of the aesthetic in specific conditions, so that we now have to re-examine the problematic of change in the light of what Stiegler (2005) calls an ‘aesthetic war’, that is, a struggle that pits the cultivation of radical identities against the recruitment of subjectivities by ‘hyperindustrial capitalism’, for what he sees as a ‘selfdestructive’ culture of consumption. This ‘cultural capitalism’, according to him, works by way of capturing and diverting libidinal energy for an affective economy in which capitalism itself operates both as an aesthetics and a ‘libidinal machine’ (Stiegler, 2008, pp. 35 and 36). The struggle therefore involves the spaces and the narratives for transformative becomings against the containment 4

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Identity, diasporas and subjective change

of subjectivities in recent times within the norms characterising homo oeconomicus as the ‘enterprising subject’ (Foucault, 2004), or as enclosed within essentialising or fundamentalist ideologies of identity. The problems for theory concern finding ways of understanding the mechanisms and the means that enable subjects to explore and express dissident or disjunct identities, and/ or that provide the supports for the critical distancing which is integral to the process of disidentification (Venn, 2000). So, on the one hand, it means a radical break with what Levinas calls egological conceptualisations of the subject – complicit with homo oeconomicus (Venn, 2000) – and the development of alternative approaches, together with the need to address the effects today of the affective machinery that binds subjects to particular socio-cultural complexes, be they ‘consumer capitalism’ or ‘traditional’ forms of sociality. On the other hand, at the level of individuation, it means finding ways to theorise the interrelationship between the psychic and the social in ways that overcome the now well-known limitations presented in Freudian or Lacanian approaches. Already, quite diverse discourses and problematics about subjectivity seem relevant for this interrogation of the disorder of identity and the exploration of the wider issue of social change. To begin with, one must foreground the general standpoint about subjectivity as relational, emplaced and embodied, existing as a nexus of relations with others and with a lifeworld. It is within this complex that cognitive–affective mechanisms are at work in determining the process of the figuration and refiguration of identity. More specifically, there are the theories that attempt to understand displacement, often forced, in terms of trauma and cultural conflict as well as in terms of creolisation and ‘hybridisation’. I am adding a further set of theoretical issues because of the choice of the affective-aesthetic as the field in which to reconstruct an analytical apparatus appropriate for deepening our understanding of the mechanisms involved, mechanisms that throw light on the linkages between individualisation and trans-subjective processes. The difficulty in inter-relating the quite diverse discourses and paradigms associated with this task is made a little less acute in two ways. First, the strategic use or location of the work of Merleau-Ponty who, in his ontology, not only proposed a conceptual apparatus that emphasises relationality, embodiment and being-with as fundamental dimensions of being; he has besides been the key thinker in the development of the central figures – Stiegler, via Simondon, Ettinger, Varela – whose work I draw on in elaborating the possibilities I will explore in this paper. The advantages are that his approach, although developed at a general philosophical level, establishes the principles for thinking embodiment, world, cognition within the same epistemological framework so that it functions as transdisciplinary ground, something which is necessary if cross-disciplinary work is to avoid incoherence. Furthermore, his work already provides a theorisation of being that opens the way for conceptualising the affective, the ethical and the aesthetic dimensions of r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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subjectivity in terms of relationality, a position shared by the authors I have mentioned. This is not a coincidence, as these authors acknowledge the debt to Merleau-Ponty, so that the epistemological and ontological coherence I am striving for is immanent, although the conceptual framework needs to be made explicit, particularly given that they do not elaborate this framework, although the discourses involved – philosophy, psycholoanalytic theory, postcolonial theory, the neurosciences – have not been brought together in the way I propose (see Venn, 2006, 2007 for initial explorations). In the space available I can but gesture towards the fuller elaboration of this apparatus (see Venn, forthcoming).

Dislocating Identity I will start my exploration of diasporic or transcultural identity and subjective change with concrete cases in the form of specific artworks from the postcolony, on the ground that such works not only try to give form to feelings and experiences that are difficult, if not impossible, to convey through other registers, they incite a level of participation in the events and experiences represented that encourage emotional-cognitive engagement with the reality of displacement, provoking dislocations in the viewer/reader/addressee conducive to subjective dissonance; they thus operate as critical material that disrupt the familiar and the normative. Increasingly, it is in the register of the expressive that the experience of migrancy and cultural translation is inserted into contemporary public culture, with effects that have made such works canonical for interrogating identities today. The comments that follow will address the underlying issues, using as a point of entry the work of the South-African artist Leora Farber whose exhibition ‘Dis-Location/Re-Location’ explicitly sets out to explore the disjunctures of identity through the juxtaposition of the lives and works of three Jewish women, Farber herself, Freda Farber (the artist’s mother) and Bertha Marks, a nineteenth century settler in South Africa. The latter is the subject of ‘Dis-Location/Re-Location’, showed at the Johannesburg Art Gallery 10 February to 13 April 2008, combining videos, photography, sculpture, juxtaposed objects/installation and music, to speak the ‘disorder of identity’ (Derrida, 1998). Farber’s artwork, like other works I will discuss below, allows another set of terms, less analytical and more diffused, inscrypted, that is, simultaneously inscribed and encrypted or buried within the works presented, to open up analysis to different registers, those of the aesthetic, the affective and the ethical. The first thing which is striking about the set of pieces displayed or moments created is the play of stasis and metamorphosis, of fixity and movement, of order and dissolution. They are meant to convey the restlessness and turmoil behind the reposed/posed surface of the enigmatic figure of Bertha Marks, whose migration to colonial South Africa is the trigger for Farber’s exploration 6


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of similarly traumatic disruptions of identity in conditions of diasporic displacement. We know little about her, except for some details that the catalogue summarises, namely, that she was an English Jewish woman who was brought, or rather transplanted, from England in 1884 to be the wife of entrepreneur Sammy Marks, who later prospered so that the family lived in the comfort of an estate outside the capital, Pretoria. There are a number of photographs, a few letters, and accounts written by contemporaries from which we gather that this figure, already marked by diasporic hybridity, tried to recreate or transplant a part of England in the form of an English rose garden and a Victorian interior space composed of mansion, boudoir, music room, servants’ quarters, imported furniture. In the Exhibition, the tropes of stasis and movement, and the sense of being overwhelmed by the strange/r, contrasted with the urge to mutate and adapt, are played out in the scenes that depict the at times calm, methodical, purposive, indeed literal grafting or sewing of an alien botanical life form into incisions and cuts made into the body of the woman whose life-in-transit is presented (in the video, in the piece entitled ‘A Room of Her Own: Generation’ (Figure 1), and in her Aloerosa pieces: ‘Propagation’ (Figure 2), ‘Maturation II’ (Figure 3), ‘Induction’ (Figure 4) and Transplant. The video recreates this transmutation, so that we see a hybrid, in-between life form taking root in this new place. At other times, the alienation of being out-of-place and out-of-time is intimated in the images of the body reduced to extreme morbidity, as if in suspension, taken over by biologico-botanical forces (Aloerosa: Propagation, also Maturation II and other pieces). No pain is etched on the face of Bertha, but death or a semblance of death stalks her in the decaying surroundings and the morbid, objectified representations of the body, perhaps signalling the end of the old life and the beginning of the new. The carefully reconstructed Englishness depicted

Figure 1: ‘A Room of Her Own: Generation’ (2006–2007). r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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Figure 2: Aloerosa: Propagation (2004–2007).

Figure 3: Aloerosa: Maturation II (2006–2007).

in the photograph ‘A Room of Her Own’, and signified in the decor and the flowers, appears at once familiar and strange, for we recognise these objects, yet they are in constant process of morphing into something else: the wallpaper flowers slide down the walls of the room and decay; Bertha’s/Farber’s body is pierced by the grafts of tropical plants; it is as if everything has been invaded by a viral contagion already accomplishing transmutation. The room may well be a prison, or purgatorio, an in-between place where one awaits deliverance: from 8


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Figure 4: Aloerosa: Induction (2004–2007).

the past, from dislocation, from the unfamiliar or unhomely: we have to guess, a labour of interpretation is necessary, but there are no certainties here. Some scenes are located in the grounds of the estate, again in settings that are at once familiar and strange, so that the uncanny disrupts one’s pre-conceptions about both place and the figure. Bertha always appears alone, although the trace of other presences weighs on the scenes, reminding one of the invisibilities and losses that crowd the colonial imaginary. In Farber’s artworks, the places of belonging, the attachments left behind, the world of objects depicted are curiously devoid of the presence of the other, as if the ‘other’ should remain a veiled presence, to emphasis that the white colonial settler, separated by language, race, class, gender and place must live her life in the doubleness of an intimately bound yet separated social world. In her reconstruction of Bertha’s life, the memory of apartheid simultaneously joining and cleaving white settler and black ‘native’ haunts the iconography of the migrant’s space. Here the body becomes the script or template for the telling of migrant dislocation and the cultivation of new life. But it is not any body; it is the white, female body of a Jewish settler, living her displacement in the in-betweenness of an elsewhere which is at once new home and unhomely, subject to incessant mutation, whilst the most intimate places – one’s room, one’s body – morph into their estranged other. It may appear that the incisions in the skin through which alien growths take hold are the openings through which the integrity of the body and of ‘identity’ is transgressed, mirroring other transgressions: of culture, of place, of the proper. And, one may ask, does the dream or wish of r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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integrity disavow or resist the always-already plural, relational character of identity? Yet, Farber’s artwork also depicts the desire to graft a new world onto the body to create a hybrid lifeform. Is this body then the ‘libidinal body’ (Lyotard, 2004 [1974]) already open through its cuts and invaginations to investments from its outside, welcoming implantation? Another discourse appears here, delving beneath the skin of representation, in the same way that the incisions in Bertha’s body reach beyond skin, attuned to the intensities of the libidinal body, refusing the closures that representation operates, driven as the latter is by the impulse of power to exclude what it makes invisible and thus demarcate ‘the this from the not-this’ (Lyotard, 2004 [1974], p. 12). Power in this way can assert its truth, and banish the possibility of the co-existence of this and not-this: ‘The operator of disintensification is exclusion: either this, or not-this. Not both. The disjunctive bar’ (Lyotard, op. cit., p. 13). Farber’s artwork plays with inclusion; but is there something missing in Bertha Marks’s embodied implantation of otherness within her world? Does the fissure of being which strangeness inhabits welcome the other? The lasting impression one is left with is that of the uncanny, the unheimlich or unhomely; this feeling brings to mind the out-of-jointness that Derrida (1993) related to an ‘hauntology’, that is, a thinking of being haunted by disjunct, invisible-yet-present traces of a traumatic or troubled past, and the disquieting figure of the other. In the context of displacement, one can relate it to the process of the reinvention or refiguring of oneself which is shadowed by a recalcitrant and disorientating memory of place and space that must be worked through for newness to emerge. Of course, sometimes newness does not come, re-location remains unfinished or stuck in repetitions of the same. One is reminded of another Bertha, the creole wife of Mr Rochester in Bronte¨’s novel Jane Eyre, transplanted from the West Indies to England, who does not cope with the trauma of this unhomely displacement troubled by racism; she becomes mad Bertha, locked up in the attic, an invisibly dark presence, creating havoc for bourgeois domesticity and the imperial household financed – and haunted – by plantation economy and its iniquities, as Said (1993) has demonstrated. Her tragic experience is refigured, maybe transfigured, in Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966 [1981]), the Caribbean writer Jean Rhys’s re-telling of this story of ‘creole identity’ and colonial diasporic dislocation, a re-telling that allows the invisible other to speak. Voice, then, is central in the kind of stories we are made to hear. Not necessarily as agency or as the authorial voice, but because the roots and routes of every telling always-already decentre the subject, put the subject out of joint. In a way this is the place from which the artist – the painter, novelist, poet, musician – proceeds. Art, of course, is meant to defamiliarise. More than that, art is the incision in the real which allows something unexpected to emerge or erupt, and let us glimpse or guess at what lies beneath the surface of things; this is clear in 10


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Farber’s work. The artwork brings to presence the unrepresentable and the unpresentable, whatever exceeds representation. It thus evokes a presence, that of the ineffable, of the transcendent-yet-tangible, the immemorial too, accessed through an experience that can be aesthetic, but is often religious, or spiritual in the broad sense. It is in the gap between representation and the un(re)presentable that something dwells which ushers in the question of the ‘there is’ which is the signifier of the ‘thrownness’ as well as the ex-centredness of the subject. Thus, the questioning of the the experiential which the artwork prompts can relay another questioning: that of oneself and one’s way of being. It thus participates in the process of becoming, and of becoming different. Of course, art does not always do this, for example in the case of the ‘decorative arts’, or art colonised or recruited into the service of mass consumption or devotion – say, Damien Hirst’s Butterflies series. The Kantian distinction between the sublime and the beautiful, between the experience that disorders being and one which is oriented to aesthetic pleasure alone, arises here too, as Lyotard (1994) has examined. It must be said that for Kant, the judgement of beauty is aligned with the making of the community, sensus communis, and so beckons to the other as a sign of inclusion in subjective universality grounded in a transsubjective domain of signification. Yet, the Western discourse of the aesthetic excluded the colonised other, judging their art ugly (Nuttall, 2006), although modernism ambivalently borrowed from that same art to reconstitute itself; this fracturing of human collectivity is something I will link, later, with Stiegler’s argument about ‘aesthetic war’. Along that train of thought, relaying the splittings in the economy of desire, other concepts appear that once more call up the uncanny, namely jouissance and the Thing as understood in psychoanalytic discourse, that is, as the signifier of desire, standing in for an impossible plenitude (including that intimited in the idea of the self-present subject or Logos). Yet, visual art cannot escape the aporia of representation, as all representation makes some things visible at the same time as they make invisible other aspects of the world. Narratives of power too operate in this way, banishing the less powerful and the subjugated to the domain of the invisible. Complicities between power and art arise because of this, so that not all art allows newness to emerge in the form of new insights, new identities, new ways of being. So, then: What is the role of art in exploring the issues involved in the dislocation and relocation of ‘identities’, and what is the role of the aesthetic in culture and cultural transformation? Let me note that the artwork speaks for itself only up to a point. For it is a matter of its staging and of what the viewer/ spectator/reader/listener brings to the text, in the form of a particular formation, and thus of particular discursive framings, or in the form of specific experiences, say, of diasporic displacement; it is in short a matter of a gaze (or of what one hears) – that can for example be that of the critic, the cultural analyst or the excluded ‘other’. The work speaks through these experiential or theoretical r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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codings and retranscriptions. And, because the gaze overflows the parameters of visibility and cognition alone (Venn, 2004), the artwork speaks through an affective substratum too. Its framing as object or intervention is thus equally important, for instance in a museum, a private collection, the street. In the case of Farber’s exhibition, the pieces are staged to prompt questions about transcultural identities, and one may wonder if the register of the visual needs to be complemented by other expressive forms to translate the multiplicity of diasporic experience. In the field of the expressive, music as well as narratives are the registers through which the lived experience of displacement or dislocation has been more often expressed. Toni Morrison (1993) for example values music above other forms; speaking about the legacy of slavery, she has this to say: ‘Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art, above all in the music’ (cited in P. Gilroy, 1993, p. 181). Music indeed plays a part in the staging of the exhibition, setting the mood of Victorian domesticity, relocated in South Africa, thus adding to the estrangement, the sense of body-out-of-place.

Narrating Displacement and the Disorder of Identity The juxtaposition of narratives from the ex-Third-World will enable me to address the question of dislocation/relocation as a theme intrinsic to the experience of living in the postcolony. Displacement in these narratives is experienced at many levels simultaneously: of place, of cultural space, of temporalities, of ways of being, of imaginaries, of inner space, so that one could say that the diasporic condition is in a sense the defining experiential reality of contemporary times. The violence of conflict is never far from the lifeworld of the characters whose stories we read in the postcolonial novel, conflicts that are racial, patriarchal, economic, ethnic, experienced in the form of exclusion, oppression and exploitation, that is, dispossession of one kind or another, including of language and voice. In these novels, European colonisation and its legacy, alongside displacement, has become inscrypted in the worlds inhabited by the characters, so that displacement is always embedded in this history of violence and subjugation, lived in the materiality and the heterogenous, indeed, disjunct, temporalities of these worlds. At its most traumatic, this legacy is lived as psychic violence as well as in the more visible forms; they constitute a trans-subjective stratum of subjectivity, participating in the construction of imaginaries framing action and dispositions. Fanon’s (1970) insights into the subjectivity of the colonised, highlighting psychic trauma and its consequences, initiated approaches that remain to be fully explored within the psychsciences. Rethinking the relation to the other remains central for this task, both at the level of theory in breaking with egocentric conceptual frameworks, and at the level of the lived; the two are relayed by 12


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a concept of the gaze that I can only partially sketch below. One first step, however, is to address the issues from the side of the experiential, so that we recognise how ‘postcolonial’ actants invent new ways of being amidst these ruptures, out of the ‘languages of life y (inhabiting) the field y where they exercise existence – that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death’ (Mbembe, 2001, p. 15). Candidates for my analysis include Nervous Conditions by the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga (Dangarembga, 1988) which explores different forms of displacement and loss: from the rural to the urban, from the postcolony to the old imperial centre, from ‘traditional’ life to modern living. The story tells of conflicting experiences of roots and uprootings, of journeys in which different kinds of dislocation and relocation co-mingle to produce new identities and new existences that are not necessarily disabling, for the effects of transculturation are the resultant of a whole host of conditions and contingencies, and hope survives in the form of new subjective and political projects. The narrative dramatises the way the conflicts and ambivalences of ‘modernisation’ and ‘Westernisation’, as well as the effects of displacement become invisibly folded inside the psyche of subjects, in the form of ‘an inner twoness’ (Mbembe, 2001), and ‘hybrid’ material environments. These are routinised in the everyday, occasioning traumas as well as transfigurations of ‘identity’ that have unpredictable consequences (see Venn, 2006, for a fuller analysis). Indeed this narration itself, thus the novel as artwork, functions as critical discourse for the exploration of subjectivity in transition, providing a vocabulary and descriptions that enable one to engage with this reality. One finds a contrasting account in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, (Adichie, 2007), for here the displacements and dislocations are internal to fractures in the postcolonial nation-state, buried as fault-lines inside colonial territorialisation, which, as we know, paid scant attention to the precolonial geography of ethnic belonging, as carving out new territory was a matter determined solely by European interests and rivalries. The setting is the Biafran civil war, 1967–1970, splitting Nigeria, established as part of the Scramble for Africa in 1884, although the displacements concern those imposed by war, and are all the more traumatic because older friendships and understandings, and a commitment to a political project for radical change, previously uniting the parties later thrown into conflict, are torn asunder by the violence of genocide that suddenly re-constituted some Nigerians as the ‘other’ who can be cast outside pity or respect. Their fate, it could be argued, became refigured within the ‘discourse of race war’ as understood within the logic of the form of power Foucault (2003, p. 240) describes as the ‘classical theory of sovereignty’ that monopolised ‘the right of life and death’, which is ‘the right to kill’, and that distinguished us and them by reference to a struggle for survival in which the other must be eliminated or completely subjugated. Within colonialism, this form of power continued to exist alongside elements of r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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bio-politics, establishing an imperial governmentality (Venn, 2000) that survived formal decolonisation. Thus, the legacy of colonialism haunts the events at many levels, from the reanimation of older rivalries and ethnic and class differences to their recruitment in the service of neo-imperial and cold war and economic interests. Although Half of a Yellow Sun provides us with a bigger canvas than Nervous Conditions for the exploration of contemporary diasporas, my third example, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (Desai, 2006), more explicitly illustrates the fact that diasporas and displacement have become endemic in the everyday existence of people everywhere. The resultant disorder of identity is more acutely felt by people located in those cultures brought to crisis by colonisation and by the disruptions provoked by capitalist modernisation. The global scale of the circuits of people, money, labour and obligations is in evidence in the calculations many of the characters make in deciding to risk uprooting for the prospects of a better life or the slim hope of making enough money in precarious occupations to expatriate some back home. The dispositifs sustaining these circuits are made visible too, that is, the technologies of displacement like planes, trains, safe houses, phones, the postal service, the physical places of work and living conditions and the apparatuses for policing migrant populations. They are the ‘associated milieus’ – of technologies, of symbolic exchange, of social imaginaries (Simondon, 2005; Stiegler, 2005) – in relation to which subjects are constituted, destinies unfold and new cultural worlds come into being. Loss of one kind or another haunts all the main characters, all involving displacement as well as more intimate and intractable losses. The question of identity, and the recognition of subjective emplacement in a lifeworld, as in the two other novels, suffuses everything without determining events in a didactic way. Yet, we also come to realise that conflicts of identity are often the visible part of the iceberg of economies based on systemic inequalities of wealth and/or power. Furthermore, the lines of fractures of identity are seen to be multiple, and much happens below the threshold of conscious calculations, so that the reality of displacement does not easily fit social sciences’ attempt to categorise diasporic phenomena, as in Safran’s (1991) or Cohen’s (1997) admittedly useful typologies. For instance, the latter distinguishes five types of diaspora, depending on whether they are the effects of trade, labour movements, imperial expansion or driven by factors relating to culture or to exclusion/persecution, yet we know that historically diasporas have been uneven combinations of all these. At the level of the expressive or the artwork, as my examples show, the spatial and temporal configurations of dislocation and relocation are shown to be fuzzy and complex, incribing plural subjectivities-in-becoming. These are shaped by the indeterminate dynamics of class, caste, race and gender co-relations, inflected by the effects of occidentalism on the psyche (see Venn, 2000), and the bonds and shackles of family relations; the context in these 14


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examples is the insiduous consequences of (neo)colonial ‘restructurings’ of subjugated economies, and deterritorialisations of one kind or another. One could note also the question of generational differences arising from the effects of inhabitance (Ahmed, 2003) and disjunct cultural imaginaries and ‘languages of life’, thus the anticipation of different subjective projects, so insightfully explored in the work of Lahiri (2003, 2008). There is much that I have had to skip, as space allows me to only signpost the elements and forces in the wider cultural and socio-economic domain that have effects on the psyche, yet are often neglected in theorisation of the interrelationship of the psychic and the social, a theorisation which is central for understanding subjective change. I hope it is clear enough that such works trigger issues for cultural theory, that exceed the now conventional invocations of networks and flows or the idea of complexity, for it is a matter of understanding the processes in terms of, for example, the actual mechanisms at work in the unstable combinations of symbolic, technical and affective ‘associated milieus’ determining action, the effects of ‘collective unconscious’ in these processes (Halwachs, 1980) or the effects of nonconscious, preindividual and transindividual, strata in conditioning behaviour and dispositions. In this paper, I am limiting my analysis to the purchase on these processes that the artwork and the aesthetic experience generally can provide. I have already noted that expressive or creative media such as novels, painting, film and so on are themselves the means or vehicles whereby what cannot be presented in the form of critiques or sociological data can be intimated or presented at the affective and emotional levels. The importance from the point of view of transformation in subjectivity and identity is in emphasising the aesthetic-affective labour which is necessary for this to happen, in the from of an anamnesis, that is, a process of working through that produces a rememorisation (cf. Toni Morrison’s rememory in Beloved; Morrison, 1987) and in the form of self-reflection working at the thresholds between unconscious psychic economy and conscious activity, individual identity and collective identity, the process of individualisation and the trans-subjective domain. This will enable me to link the discussion to the problem of the place of the artwork in participating in this labour and thus in opening the way for the welcoming of the other in subjective becoming. In the context of Farber’s work and the novels I have presented, the point of view of identity as being in-process has been shadowed by another, perhaps more elusive, question: that of the relation to the other, to the stranger. Fundamental ethical and political issues are at stake here, that I begin to explore in what follows.

The Relation to the Other To begin with, I would like to broaden the approaches so far sketched by introducing Santner’s question concerning ‘what it means to be genuinely open r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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to another human being or culture and to share and take responsibility for one’s implication in the dilemma of difference’ (Santner, 2001, p. 5). This will enable me to link the discussion to the problem of the place of the artwork in participating in the labour necessary for the welcoming of the other, with implications for both the question of ethical responsibility and of subjective refiguration which the gesture of welcoming the other triggers. His analysis of Freud and of the Jewish theologian Rosenzweig leads him to propose ‘the possibility of a ‘we’ of community, granted on the possibility of the fact that every familiar is ultimately strange and that, indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself y of strangeness itself as the locus of new possibilities of neighbourliness and community’ (op. cit., p. 6). He further says that it is precisely when we, in the singularity of our own out-of-jointness, open to this ‘hindered’ dimension – the internal alienness – of the Other that we pass from one logic of being-together to another, that we shift from the register of the global to that of the universal which remains as such a universal-in-becoming y (T)his shift of logics marks the point at which we truly enter the midst of life, that is, when we truly inhabit the proximity to our neighbor, assume responsibility for the claims his or her singular and uncanny presence makes on us not only in extreme circumstances but every day’. (Santner, 2001, p. 7, emph. in the original) Although this position takes us some way towards the problem of the foundation of the relation to the other, and, related to it, the problem of what forms of sociality enables one to ‘live well with and for others in just institutions’ (Ricœur, 1992), another important element must be added that provides a more clearly ethical framework for the standpoint of responsibility for and hospitality towards the other. This goes beyond for example the well established argument in psychoanalytic theory that theorises the necessity of an other for the subject to emerge, operating through primary, secondary and tertiary recognition and identification whereby individuation occurs and a self-conscious agent or actant emerges. It is the ‘critical phenomenological’ view that the ‘I’ already inscribes an other in the very process of emergence of the individuated self, so that the other-in-me is always-already an intrinsic and necessary part of my being (Venn, 2000). Thus, Jean-Luc Nancy, speaking about the ‘singular plural’ character of being says: ‘Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence’ (J-L. Nancy, 2000, p. 3, orig. emph.). Ricœur (1992) similarly insists that ‘an I by itself does not exist’, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s view that the I-Other relation is one of compossibility, thus emphasising relationality regarding identity as well as subjectivity. In Merleau-Ponty, the theorisation of the relation to the other is furthermore 16


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framed within the understanding of the constitutive relationship between world and body. Thus, in The Visible and the Invisible, he says: The I-other relation to be conceived y as complementary roles neither one of which can be upheld without the other also: masculinity implies femininity etc. Fundamental polymorphism which means that I have no need to constitute the other prior to the Ego: he is there already, and the Ego is conquered from him as basis. Describe the pre-egology, the ‘syncretism’, the indivision or transitivism. What is it that there is at this level. There is the vertical or corporeal universe and its polymorphic matrix. Absurdity of the tabula rasa upon which knowledges would be established: not that knowledges could exist prior to cognitions, but because there is the field. The I-other problem, an occidental problem. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 270 [November, 1959]) This view extends Santner whilst radically problematising ego-centred conceptualisations or expressions of subjectivity or identity, not only at the level of ontology, but also, by pointing to the occidentalist framing of projects of becoming that focus on an individualist reduction of the other to the role of the supplement. One implication is that changing identity is not a matter of individuals’ autonomous decisions, but the product of a process in which the relation to the other, and to others, is constitutive. This is clear in the tragic destiny of some of the characters in Adichie’s novel (Adichie, 2007), who could only overcome the trauma of dislocation and the loss of ‘identity’ and loved ones through re-energising the relation to significant others and a re-immersion in a wider project of becoming – and dealing with the difficult question of what Ricœur describes as a ‘non-forgetful forgiveness’ to overcome the sufferings inflicted by collective violence (see Venn, 2005). In the context of the explorations of embodiment and displacement in Farber’s work, and in the examples I have discussed, it is appropriate to juxtapose Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body here, starting with the proposition that an indivisible connection binds the being who feels with what is felt, such that: A human body comes into existence when, in-between the being who sees and the visible, between touching and what is touched, between one eye and the next, between each of one’s hands, a kind of folding over occurs, when the spark of the sensing-sensed is kindled, when this fire begins that will not cease to burn, until some accident of the body tears apart what no accident could have put together y’. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 22) It is clear from this, and many other passages in his work that elaborate this standpoint, that the relationship of body and world is understood in terms of r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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the chiasm binding the outside and the inside so that the one cannot be reduced to the other, but each is enfolded into the other. The point is that this experience of a dynamic and constitutive relation between the world and myself, between embodied experience and consciousness, doubles the perception of the world with an interior experience such that I come to know the world according to an experience which is not that of the givenness or raw data or the factuality of things. It is instead to be understood in terms of the notion of dwelling, of emplacement, calling up both the homely and the unhomely. This is indicated in Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the ‘flesh’ of the world as the interior and exterior horizon of being: The thickness of the body, far from rivalling that of the world, is on the contrary the only means which I have for reaching into the heart of things, by making a world of myself and by making them into flesh y (as insertion in the text: In any case, once we recognize a body-world relation, there is ramification of my body and ramification of the world and correspondance between its interior and my exterior, beween my exterior and its interior) y The body unites us to things directly through its own ontogenesis, by welding together the two outlines of which it is composed, its two lips: the sensible mass which it is and the mass of the sensible from which it is born through segregation, and to which, as the one who sees, it remains open. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, pp. 176 and 177) This view of the body-world chiasm relates to the recognition that the gaze has an interior dimension and that the perceptible exterior ‘has a prolongation, in the enclosure of my body, which is part of its being’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 319, [1968, p. 271]; see also Lakoff and Johnson, 1999). However, to the doubling or folding of the body and world in their coemergence, another dimension must be recognised, relating to the fact that the body both belongs among the things of the world, as one among its objects, yet is the being who sees and touches them as ‘subject’, so that it is at the same time detached from the world of things, and appears as a third element. Merleau-Ponty refuses the obvious choices: ‘The flesh is neither matter, nor spirit, or substance’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 181); thus, is avoided three familiar solutions – materialism, spiritualism and substantialism – to the problem of the transcendent-yet-immanent, relating to the reflexivity that sentient beings experience, a reflexivity that, in complex beings, opens onto the problematic of consciousness and of time, indeed their mutual imbrication at the level of ontology. The body, therefore, and being, cannot be reduced simply to what one sees, to the order of visibility. This is because, on the one hand, it is ‘neither the visible thing alone, nor the seeing being alone, it is the now wandering, now assembled Visibility, and, to that extent, it is not in the world’ 18


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(Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, p. 179); on the other hand, as ‘all vision is y as Husserl aptly puts it, ‘barred’’ (op. cit., p. 182), and, as there is no split between the object and one’s consciousness of the object, the body is the ‘synergetic’, ‘pre-reflexive’ folding of a sentient being within a multiplicity of consciences’ (op. cit., p. 184). An important link to the idea of the transindividual is made in this passage, to which I will briefly return later. Equally, the concept of ‘flesh’ enables MerleauPonty to extend the concept of world and the apprehension of a world and of myself beyond ‘each individual’s private little world’ (op. cit., p. 184), for, the generality which ‘flesh’ denotes opens onto other bodies just as well, so that synergy operates between different organisms (op. cit., p. 185). There is reflexivity of the body’s senses and ‘transitivity from one body to another’ (op. cit., p. 186), enacted not only in terms of sight, touch, but of less visible experiences, particularly sound: ‘Like the crystal, metals, and many other substances, I am a sonorous/sonic (sonore) being’ (op. cit., p. 187, see also Henriques’, 2007, work on the sonic body). Reflexivity, reversibility and transitivity, by pointing to a universal dimension to being, also intimate the sublimation of flesh, namely in the form of thought: ‘Thought is relation to oneself and to the world as well as relation to the other, it is therefore established in the three dimensions at once’ (op cit., p. 188). The attempt to describe the dehiscence of the sensible and the intuition of something intangibly present inside these dimensions of being, as a ‘fold’ in the visible, makes one confront the problem of what there is at the basis of thought, in particular the thesis that ‘thought in the restricted sense y can only be understood as the accomplishment by other means of the wish of the there is’ (op cit., pp. 188 and 189). Thought relates to flesh and to world without any of these dimensions being reduced to the other. Flesh is the ‘constitutive milieu of the object and the subject’ (op. cit., p. 191), although there is no hiatus between the sensing and the seen, no ‘ontological vacuum’, for the hiatus is ‘traversed by the total being of my body, and by that of the world, y so that they adhere to each other’ (op cit., p. 192). This for Merleau-Ponty suggests a ‘second visibility’ wrapped round the ‘first visibility’ relating to things, ‘lines of force’ and ‘dimensions’, suggestive of Husserl’s notions of interior and exterior horizons, that is, the space of emergence of ‘a new type of being, a being existing as porous, or provisionally stabilised/crystallised (pregnance), or as generality’ (op. cit., p. 193). Merleau-Ponty’s discussion appears to be trying to express relationality, or allagmatic operation, between constituting-constituted entities, signalled later (in his rejection of the Freudian philosophy of the body) when he says that psychological notions such as perception, affect, desire, love, Eros, make sense when we cease to think of them in terms of either ‘positivities’ or ‘negativities’, but ‘as differentiations of the same and massive adhesion to Being that flesh is’ (op. cit., p. 318). Once again we have this reference to differentiation as r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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fundamental process, that we encounter in the important work of people such as Simondon and Stiegler, including the stress on the centrality of the relation, the theorisation of field and milieu as space of emergence. In thinking about this issue of emergence, Merleau-Ponty pointed to Bergson’s notion of the living as ‘centre of indetermination’ (in Matter and Memory) when attempting to understand Being as the primary ground, or abyss (abgrund, the reference in Merleau-Ponty’s text is to Heidegger’s 1959 essay on language; Heidegger, 1959), and thus to a transindividual ground, yet one that is not reducible to the fixity or facticity of world. In a sense it is better to understand this as referring to an ungrounded ground (because transcendent yet ontic), functioning as ‘flesh of the world’ for locating concrete bodies (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, pp. 298 and 299). One must add alongside this ontology his emphasis on the importance of signification and intentionality, and, at the end of the Working Notes, the integration of the ‘wrought’, that is, the technical, as one of the constitutive dimensions of the human, as Stiegler’s work has demonstrated. The reference to interior and exterior horizons brings up the issue of their co-articulation in constituting specific subjectivities, not developed in Merleau-Ponty, but that we encounter both in the artworks I have introduced and in the further theorisation necessary to elucidate this dynamic relationship; the relay for this is the functioning of imaginaries, thus memory, historical narratives, psychic forces, nonconscious apprehensions of the lifeworld and their phenomenological counterparts. It is worth adding though that this ontology, in Merleau-Ponty, while clearly phenomenological in approach, equally recognises the existence of a transcendent-yet-worldly dimension which one can understand as invisibility or as the ungrounded ground – recalling the role that Stiegler assigns to the noetic or spiritual, that he connects to the aesthetic. Merleau-Ponty similarly argues that this dimension opens up a place for aesthetic experience and the expressive: painting, he says: ‘grants visible existence to that which profane vision thinks is invisible, y this all-consuming vision, beyond ‘visual data’, opens onto a texture of Being, whose discrete sensory messages are but the punctuations or pauses (ce´sures) that the eye inhabits, as the human being does its home’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 27). Lyotard too in Anamnesis: Of the Visible, theorises the dimension of the unpresentable, that is, whatever exceeds the visible and is unrepresentable in language, by turning to art as the practice that apprehends it at the level of a sublime experience: ‘The painter is not the one who sees best, but the one who can no longer make sense of the visible, and wants to see and makes visible this nothing y Just as ‘language’ halts writing, the visible prevents one from painting. Visual art emancipates the vision that sight imprisons’ (2004, p. 113). He relates this domain of the un(re)presentable to the labour of memory in working through and to the dictinction between Voice and Thing. 20


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As I indicated above, Farber’s work struggles with precisely this question of the un(re)presentable in the work of presenting identities-in-transit, and the difficult and inconclusive work of memory which is needed to move from here to there, requiring the supplement of a grafting that connects interior space with visible exteriors. The novels I mentioned, because of the register of writing, deal with the issue in a different way, but the question of memory, both personal and historical, is central is all of them. Indeed the more intractable theoretical issues appear at this level of understanding the mechanisms operating to connect the individual to the collective, the specific to the general. For, while at the level of description or expression such as in narrations or multi-media artworks, one can put in play a world of individuals and things and events, and while at the level of general theory, such as in Merleau-Ponty, one can propose an analytical framework, there remains the problem of correlating the two such that the mechanisms constituting particular individuals can be understood by reference to general theoretical protocols and vice-versa. What is at issue here is the question posed in terms of the relation of the psychic and the social, the individual and the transindividual, primary identification and secondary and tertiary identifications. This is the problem which I am trying to understand by way of the concept of the gaze. The gaze would be the mechanism inscribing both a history of encounters with others and a world of things (experienced as ‘flesh’ in Merleau-Ponty’s discourse), and narrativisations and representations of a history of communities, their values, their beliefs, expectations, their projects. The gaze is both the visible (as embodiment) and invisible (as interior to the imaginary) dispositif through which particular compositions of dispositions (or ‘personalities’) are performatively enacted. An interesting elaboration of this line of thought applicable to the functioning of the artwork is to be found in the theorisation by Ettinger, the artist and post-Lacanian psychoanalyst, of the functioning of the ‘matrixial gaze’ in aesthetic experience and subjective transformation when she says: Voyance (Merleau-Ponty) and Voyure (Lacan) – ‘that which makes present what is absent’ – define ‘both the place of art and access to being’, both the aesthetic object and the instant of the emergence of meaning. The pact between the scopic drive and desire in the field of vision beyond appearance is located by Lacan in the gaze as object-a. Jean-Francois Lyotard finds this same complicity in the matrix-figure, which dwells alongside the imagefigure and the form-figure in the visual field’. (Ettinger, 1995, p. 33) Developing Merleau-Ponty’s symbiotic view of the gaze, Ettinger distinguishes three dimensions of the scopic field in terms of the phallic, the symbiotic and the matrixial gazes (Johnson, 2006, p. 154), understood as separate but linked, and thus not suggestive of undifferentiation, and thus quite distinct from Lacan’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘symbiotic gaze’. I think that this sense of the gaze r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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undermines the privileging of vision in the analysis of the artwork, painting in particular, and opens the way for the co-presence in the work of different sensory registers and affective economies, as well as the ‘the intertwining of phantasy and painting as a locus of shareability between artist and viewer(s)’ (Johnson, 2006, p. 150). Besides, the object-a, and its relation to Thing, brings into the picture the figure of lack and the economy of desire – although, for Ettinger, within a conceptual framework which explicitly undermines Freudian phallocentrism, namely one defined in terms of the matrixial stratum of subjectivization proposing a matrixial subjectivityas-encounter as a beyond-the-phallus feminine field related (in both men and women) to plural, partial, and shared unconscious, trauma, phantasy, and desire having imaginary and symbolic impact y (If) we conceive of traces of links and relations, from the angle of a co-emerging I and non-I prior to I versus others, then there arises a different kind of passageway proper to these links y (making a) connection between the feminine and creation. (Ettinger, 2006, pp. 63 and 64) What is opened up is a different premise for understanding subjectivity and identity from the point of view of the other-in-me – the withness of beingwith-the other – and not as stranger or an uncanny presence alone, and a different premise for the role of the artwork in the possibility of the ‘shareability of trauma and phantasy and co-response-ability with/for the unknown Other y Beyond the field of aesthetics, the matrix has ethical implications’ (Ettinger, 2006, pp. 89 and 10). This different role assigned to the artwork in Ettinger’s analysis is premised on a different conceptualisation of the object-a, which is not framed within the repressive topography of Freud (thus rejection and castration), but linked to the archaic ‘severality’ or plurality of the co-emerging I and non-I, as nonconscious trace of the other, intimating the (non-repressive) loss of the other. The other thus continues to inhabit the ‘transforming borderspace of encounter of the co-emerging I and neither fused nor rejected unrecognized non-I’ (op. cit., pp. 63 and 4), a shareable space in part occupying the domain of the uncanny as theorised in Ettinger. The non-I is ‘not an intruder’ but a ‘partner-in-difference of the I’ (op.cit., pp. 64 and 65) – recall Merleau-Ponty: the other is ‘not prior to the other’ y ‘he is already there’. We can thus align the distinction between Voice and Thing with that between the economy of the debt and the economy of the gift: the one places us under an obligation and commands that we respond to the call of the other; the other convokes the indeterminable and the incalculable: presence of the Other, thus of the transindividual (as in the hau, cf. M. Mauss [1985], cited in Stiegler, 2005), loss too: ‘loss is legion’, as Gillian Rose, tells us in Love’s Work (1995); yet the two relay each other, by way of an immemorial trace or the idea of an immanent transcendence (see also Venn, 2004). Ettinger’s paintings, say, the 22


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Eurydice series (1992–1996), try to intimate or ‘transcrypt’ this space, where the imprint of the other, and the imprint of trauma remain as unworked-through space: ‘Thinking memory and art together involves articulating art with trauma and its foreclosure, around the impossibility of accessing a psychic Thing and a psychic Event, encapsulated out-of-sight in a kind of outside that is captured inside – in an ‘extimate’, nonconscious space unreachable by memory’ (Ettinger, 2006, p. 162). I should note for clarity that the Lacanian ‘extimate’ suggests the dynamic relationship between, on the one hand, the most intimate, unknowable place and the outside, thus, what is signified by object-a and, on the other hand, the domain of the Symbolic; it links jouissance with the desire of/for the other, however theorised (for example, by Lacan in the ‘che vuoi’ addressed to the other). What I would like to underline is the implication that the other, in Merleau-Ponty and Ettinger, is not the outsider but is already there as the otherin-me, what Ettinger calls the ‘partner-in-difference’, thus as the immanent ground of identity and subjectivity. The reference to matrix and womb in Ettinger, or the reference to neuronal or mind-brain activity in Varela et al’s (1993) extension of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment, point to the different understanding of this ground, decentred by reference to a self, and thus irreducible to a psychoanalytic problematic alone. This is another sense of the there is, that I cannot elaborate here, except to point to its effects for subjectivity at two levels, that of the phenomenological in terms of the notions of pre- and transindividual, in both Simondon’s and Ettinger’s senses, and that of the transcendent-yet-immanent, that is, the historical/spiritual/noetic dimension of being (recognised in Merleau-Ponty and Stiegler). The latter relates to temporality inasmuch as the self-reflexive consciousness folds time into its constitution, and it relates to what exceeds representation: the ineffable as a quality of being. Together they frame a different problematic of the relation to the other, one that implicates a non-egocentric and non-calculative politics of identity. It is possible to imagine that in Farber’s works the grafting of a botanical life form onto the body-in-transit of Bertha Marks intimates the incalculability of the relation to the other, although in these works this relation is not the face relation as elaborated in Levinas, or as we encounter experientially in some scenes in the novels I discussed, which is more in tune with Ettinger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualisation of the relation to the other as constitutive and primary. A further step is necessary in order to explore how the domain of the expressive and the affective participates in either the repetition of trauma or in transformative change.

‘Aesthetic War’ and Emancipatory Politics What I have been trying to develop in this paper is an approach to theorising the mechanisms and experiences that condition both the provisional stabilisation of r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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subjectivity/identity and subjective change, given that most people do not have recourse to critical theory for this. I have argued that it is the domain of the aesthetic and the expressive which play a key role in the process of formation and transformation of subjectivity and identity. This standpoint is developed in Stiegler’s work – distantly echoed in aspects of the Frankfurt School’s work – in a way that adds a clear political dimension to the discussion by bringing into focus the space of the invisible or the ineffable in the everyday, whereby a breach is made, or a path opened up, through which enters newness in its multiple forms: as opening, as event, as challenge, as putting into question, as transfigurative, as space of transcendence. For Stiegler (2005), the aesthetic is associated with the ‘spiritual’, intellectual or mindful dimension of being – the French esprit convokes all these meanings – what he theorises in terms of the ‘noetic’ economy of desire, extending Aristotle’s notion of the nous as an element proper to the human, as opposed to the purely animal or vegetative (one could also compare Heidegger’s [1995] arguments here about the distinction between the human, the animal and the stone). The point is that the noetic, which also implicates theos, opens onto an enactive process of the becoming of being, specifically the possibility of becoming different, thus leading to the constitution of singularity, a process which is quite distinct from repetition and simple reproduction. This is because it involves projection towards a to-come, and, therefore, suggests being itself as project involving the anticipation of the unexpected, the welcoming of difference, one’s own and the other’s. For Stiegler, it also involves participation in the noetic in the form of a questioning of oneself, a suspension of oneself as identity, thus an estrangement. This questioning entails participation in the symbolic, particularly in the form of the ‘exclamative’ and the ‘sensational’ (Stiegler, 2005), hence the role of the artwork and the domain of the aesthetic. Stiegler says: ‘The question of participation is primordial because a work without a public cannot be a work, whilst a public without works cannot be constituted: it is this relation which works, that is to say, which opens y (T)here must be a circuit and a participation – the relation between work and public constituting a transductive relation’ (Stiegler, 2005, p. 39) [the transductive, in Simondon’s usage, is a relation inscribing the ontogenetic mechanism for the transformation of constituents of the same system from one phase or form to another; one can also understand this in terms of relationality, specifically the allagmatic relation, as understood in Simondon]. The symbolic circuit for Stiegler is a central element of his analysis of being as technical being (Stiegler, 1998) and the elaboration of the latter standpoint in terms of the role of hypomnematas – technical means for the exteriorisation of memory, constituting tertiary forms of retention/memorisation (re´tention tertiaire, op. cit., p. 48 ff); the latter are part of the constitution of the noetic soul (Stiegler, 2005, p. 63). They thus function as prosthetics that enable the linkage between nous and tekhne. Given also that 24


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‘art y is y intrinsically tekhne’ (Stiegler, 2005, p. 56), participation means both that the artwork necessarily involves an other or a public and the ability to act in order to change oneself as part of a project of producing a singularity (at the level of aletheia, op. cit., p. 52). One could note here Ettinger’s reference to Duchamp’s notion of an ‘aesthetic osmosis’ between the artist and the spectator, and her own notion of a triangular relation between art, matrixiality and transference. It could be argued that the transferential space of art connects not only with libidinal economy, but with a trans-subjective space, in which affect is grounded, and which can be retranscrypted through signifying activity and symbolic chains that traverse the space of the social (via poetry, music, painting and so on; the important role of memory and technique in this process needs to be underlined). It connects too with Stiegler’s understanding of participation, following Leroi-Gourhan, in terms of the power to act, or puissance, especially in the sense of action that makes a difference to/for oneself and in the world, distinguished from power as force, that is, as the assemblage of mechanisms that command obedience to the norm or the law: ‘y participation is a passage from puissance to action, whilst loss of participation is a regression of action to power’ (Stiegler, 2005, p. 53). Furthermore, participation, because it tries to bring about or apprehend what is not given directly to consciousness, that is, what exists as projection or anticipation, awaiting an interminable completion, belongs to the economy of desire, suggestive of what remains incalculable, beyond the grasp of the calculus of power (op. cit., p. 41). The point of view of an aesthetic war arises because the aesthetic has become the target for appropriation on the side of ‘hyperindustrial’ capital through ‘a refunctionalisation of the aesthetic typical of the age of societies of control’ (Stiegler, 2005, p. 80), operating by means of new aesthetic dispositifs, including objects of consumption that although unavoidably inscribing aesthetic values, often in an immanent or non-conscious way, take charge of the organisation and circulation of what he calls ‘libidinal’ energy, thus an affective economy. In this way, ‘cultural capitalism’ recruits the economy of desire, inducing in individuals’ bodily conducts and affective dispositions that are integral to that process; this means that the incalculable is folded back into the calculable, although the anticipation and welcoming of the unexpected which is an aspect of ‘noetic becoming’ is redireted into consumption and cycles of repetition and compulsion. This results in the loss of aesthetic participation and in ‘symbolic destitution’, the consequences of which short-circuit the link between psychic individuation and collective individuation (Simondon, 2005). For Stiegler, ‘Symbolic destitution, as loss of aesthetic participation, generates in its turn psychological and libidinal poverty. It results inevitably in the elimination of primordial narcissism y without which no libidinal investment, no desire, no affect, no recognition of the other and no philia would be r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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possible’(Stiegler, 2005, p. 51). There are problems with the psychoanalytic apparatus which Stiegler uses, that I cannot address here, except to note that his reference to primordial narcissism, and (elsewhere) repression and sublimation, does not sit well with the alternative psychic economy that Ettinger elaborates, or the analytical ground elaborated in Merleau-Ponty. The positive indication nevertheless is his claim that the struggle againt these tendencies in consumer capitalism aims to break with this circuit, by re-introducing the possibility of participation and of common works, and by underlying the necessity of maintaining a discourse critical of a new ‘grammatisation’ of technical and artistic possibilities – that is, their reinscription within the logic and idiom of capital (op. cit., p. 193). To that extent Stiegler claims that the aesthetic question can be posed as a question of political economy (ibid.). In spite of problems with Stiegler’s theorisation of the libidinal, his analysis foregrounds the interconnections between affective economy, aesthetic experience or capability and the noetic impulse towards new becomings – for which the technical exteriorisation of memory and capabilites in the form of prosthetic culture is central. I have been arguing that the artwork, when allied to a disruptive experience of identity, performs this interconnection. One could also note here the views of Leroi Gourhan (1965, 1971), a key reference in Stiegler, for whom the ‘humanisation’ of the human is inseparable from the invention of prosthetics and hypomnematas, such as the novel, the painting (see also Simondon (2005) for a development of the idea that prosthesis and ontogenesis are co-articulated in the formation of technical milieu, a central element in the process of individuation). It also keeps the analysis open to the understanding of affect, desire, philia, Eros, ‘as differentiations of the same and massive adhesion to Being that flesh is’, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, or in terms of co-constitution and co-emergence indicated in Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of the singular plural. The examples I have used of what one could call ‘art engage´’ show how these interconnections are played out at the level of the lived or that of the expressive, that we can learn to interpret, involving a practice of reading requiring what Arendt called the ‘reversal of perspective’ or that Ettinger locates in the reactivation of the matrixial affective economy, or, indeed what Ricœur (1996, Venn, 2005) indicates in the idea of a ‘translation ethos’. This affectivo-aesthetico-ethical participation is in solidarity with a critical labour grounded in a politicisation that challenges the normative ego-centric discourse of identity and subjectivity, proposing instead the primacy of the relation to the other and the mutual constitution of singularity and collectivity. The point is that the issues for theorising subjectivity thrown up by diasporic displacement bring to crises older paradigms about what is involved in identification and dis-identification, although the working notes I have presented, I hope, show there are ways out of this crisis, both for theory and for politics. 26


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About the Author Couze Venn is Professor of Cultural Theory with the Theory, Culture & Society Centre. He is co-author of Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (Methuen, 1984; Routledge, 1998); author of Occidentalism. Modernity and Subjectivity (Sage, 2000), The Postcolonial Challenge: Towards Alternative Worlds (2006) and numerous papers in refereed journals. His research interest include political economy, affect, theorising the living, emancipatory politics.

References Adichie, C.N. (2007) Half of a Yellow Sun. London: Harper Perennial. Ahmed, S. (2003) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. London: Routledge. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University of London Press. Dangarembga, T. (1988) Nervous Conditions. London: The Women’s Press. Derrida, J. (1993) Spectres de Marx. Paris: Editions Galilee. Derrida, J. (1998) Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Desai, K. (2006) The Inheritance of Loss. London: Penguin Books. Ettinger, B.L. (1995) The Matrixial Gaze. Leeds: University of Leeds. Ettinger, B.L. (2006) The Matrixial Borderspace, Edited and with an afterword by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fanon, F. (1970) Black Skin, White Masks, Translated by C.L. Markmann. London: Paladin. Foucault, M. (2003) Society Must be Defended, Translated by D. Macey. New York: Picador. Foucault, M. (2004) Naissance de la Biopolitique: Cours au College de France, 1978–1979. Paris: Gallimard. Halwachs, M. (1980) The Collective Memory. London: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (ed.) (1959) Der Weg zur Sprache, In: Unterwegs zur Sprache. Pfullingen: Neske. Heidegger, M. (1995) Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Translated by W. McNeill and N. Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, A. (2006) Bracha Ettinger’s Theory of the Matrix. PhD dissertation. School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies: University of Leeds. Lahiri, J. (2003) The Namesake. New York: Houghton Griffin. Lahiri, J. (2008) Unaccustomed Earth. London: Bloomsbury. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenges to the Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lyotard, J.-F. (1994) Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Translated by E. Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press. r 2009 Palgrave Macmillan 1755-6341

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Venn Lyotard, J.-F. (2004 [1974]) Libidinal Economy, Translated by I.H. Grant. London: Continuum. Mbembe, A. (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a) Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b) L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Gallimard. Merlwau-Porty, M. (1968) The visible and the Invisible, Translated by Alfonso Luigis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved. New York: Knopf. Morrison, T. (1993) Living memory: A meeting with Toni Morrison. In: P. Gilroy (ed.) Small Acts. London: Serpent’s Tail, pp. 175–182. Nancy, J.-L. (2000) Being Singular Plural, Translated by R.D. Richardson and A.E. O’Byrne. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nuttall, S. (2006) Beautiful-Ugly. African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Cape Town: Kwela Book. Rhys, J. (1966 [1981]) Wide Sargasso Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ricœur, P. (1992) Oneself as Another, Translated by K. Blamey Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricœur, P. (1996) Reflections on a New Ethos for Europe. In: R. Kearney (ed.) Paul Ricœur. The Hermeneutics of Action. London: Sage. Rose, G. (1995) Love’s Work. London: Chatto & Windus. Safran, W. (1991) Diasporas in modern societies: Myths of homeland and return. Diaspora 1: 83–99. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus. Santner, E. (2001) On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simondon, G. (2005) L’individuation a la lumiere des notions de forme et d’information. Grenoble: Millon. Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time. Vol. 1, The Fault of Epimetheus, Translated by R. Beardsworth and G. Collins. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, B. (2005) De la mise`re symbolique: Tome 2, La catastrophe du sensible. Paris: Galile´e. Stiegler, B. (2008) Economie de l’hypermate´riel et psychopouvoir. Paris: Mille et une Nuits. Varela, J.F., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1993) The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Venn, C. (2000) Occidentalism. Modernity and Subjectivity. London: Sage. Venn, C. (2004) Post-Lacanian affective economy, being-in-the world, and the critique of the present: Lessons from Bracha Ettinger. Theory, Culture & Society 21(1): 149–158. Venn, C. (2005) The repetition of violence: Dialogue, the exchange of memory, and the question of convivial socialities. Social Identities 11(3): 283–298. Venn, C. (2006) The Postcolonial Challenge. Towards Alternative Worlds. London: Sage. Venn, C. (forthcoming) Parables for the Living: Relationality, Affect, Being-in-the World. London: Sage, in press.

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