If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane: An Interview with Bracha L. Ettinger

Abstract

The following conversation explores the stakes of the human(e) in the work of Bracha L. Ettinger. Ettinger has been working on this question throughout all of her art-workings as well as her theoretical work. Central elements to her feminist reworking of psychoanalytic approaches to (human) subjectivity are the insistence on the matrixial and metramorphosis, in which connectivity acquires primary importance, and supplements-questions Lacan's starting point of the cut and lack as constitutive of what becomes human. Taking the feminine matrixial as a model, Ettinger's conception of human subjectivity is always already relational-a transsubjective relationality, however, that is different from mere intersubjectivity. Relationality here crucially means also "relations-without-relating to the other based on re-attuning of distances-in-proximity" (Ettinger 2005, 65) and affective resonance. This invites the "possibility of co-respons-ability with/for the unknown Other," which also implies that we "participate in the traumatic events of the other" (ibid., 89). This interview explores the question of the human and of humane-ness along the three interwoven axes of the aesthetic, the (micro)political, and the ethical that can be found in Ettinger's oeuvre. A longer, unpublished paper by Ettinger from 2013 (working title "Carriance-for Mexico") 1 and thoughts she developed in various lectures between 2012 and 2016 served as background texts for our conversation. Inserting fragments from the text written between 2011If You Do Well, Carry! The Difference of the Humane  103 call it-and we then already dwelled on the different layers of the poeticaesthetic, political, and ethical in your art-working. At one point, we touched on your series Autistwork and you said that autistwork-I quote from our earlier conversation-"is a paradoxical notion: you enter yourself and you discover strings to the world. The poetic level is very real. One has to go there, inside, lose oneself and suddenly you find a world" (unpublished manuscript; for German, see Kaiser/Thiele 2012, 259). The title of the conversation's German translation is taken from that figure: to "lose yourself and suddenly find a world," which is possible as borderlinking in the matrixial sphere, even if our conscious being in the phallic-symbolic is not aware of this (for more details, see Ettinger 2005). In that light, you also stressed that being humane means that one "can reach another membrane of the cosmos, we can enter it like butterflies, [. . .] become ashen grains, oscillating color-lines, and we can also feel-see such a becoming in-by an other when we are borderlinking to an other, we can feel-seejoin and transform an ambient timespace of light, and in this dimension we are transconnected like ants or bees or birds" (Kaiser/Thiele 2012, 259). Perhaps we can take this as our starting point here: to lose oneself and find a world in ways that crucially also resonate with the nonhuman membranes of the cosmos.Kathrin Thiele: And perhaps I may add to this before we begin:...

Spiderly Sympoiesis: Tensegral Tentacularity and Speculative Clews

“…As artists, (re)searchers, and educators, we are encouraged by the emphasis across Bracha Ettinger’s vast artistic-theoretical oeuvre on what we call here the Æsthethical and the Æffectual. Birgit Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele describe this as the “interwoven axes of the aesthetic, the (micro)political, and the ethical” (Kaiser & Thiele, 2018, p. 101). While for Ettinger these are primarily human(e) matters (see Kaiser & Thiele, 2018), we find her development of the interconnected concepts of carriance (care-carrying) and aesthetic wit(h)nessing , alongside art-work and encounter-event (Ettinger, 2001, 2006), invaluable in attending to knotty more-than-human relationalities and Æsthethic encounters.…”

“…Birgit Kaiser and Kathrin Thiele describe this as the “interwoven axes of the aesthetic, the (micro)political, and the ethical” (Kaiser & Thiele, 2018, p. 101). While for Ettinger these are primarily human(e) matters (see Kaiser & Thiele, 2018), we find her development of the interconnected concepts of carriance (care-carrying) and aesthetic wit(h)nessing , alongside art-work and encounter-event (Ettinger, 2001, 2006), invaluable in attending to knotty more-than-human relationalities and Æsthethic encounters. 10…”

“… 11 Ettinger offers this moving summation for her nuanced conceptualization of carriance (care-carrying) as “responsibility-in-act” (Ettinger in Kaiser & Thiele, 2018, p. 104): “We are here, hence we have been carried. Each one of us” (p. 106).…”

“… 13 We think-with Ettinger’s neologism wit(h)nessing (witnessing-together) throughout this text. Witnessing as aesthetic wit(h)nessing is “dwelling with your subject-matter, taking your time, giving yourself time, remaining with it, in your body” (Ettinger in Kaiser & Thiele, 2018, p. 105). Alongside with-ness (see Despret, 2004; Ingold, 2016, 2018) and the manifold implications of witnessing in terms of scientific observation and juridical testimony (see Haraway, 1997; Oliver, 2001), this helps us unpack Æsthetic encounters which are observant rather than objectifying, relational and embodied rather than safely distanced. …”