I am pleased to say that I have sent out 44 dialogues for one, most of which were sold. Good news for me as the exercise has paid for itself and provided a few extra £s which can go towards my MA final show costs. There are just six copies left for sale.
Dialogues for one looks a little different to the LAMELLA:// project, but the research informs both and it could be thought of as a relation, or an entangled entity. When I originally wrote it, I included a letter to Lamia from Field, the character I invented to discuss life, art and universe with Lamia. This letter explained what I intended to do in the research project so functioned as an introduction. In the end, I cut it, as it would have taken the project over the word count. But I have been meaning to post it here for a while – mainly as it contains references to the word ‘field’ and why I have used it in this project and others. It may also be worth noting that my father changed his name from Fried to Field, ostensibly because he felt Fried would not work as a stage name and risked being mispronounced – instead of freed, it would be read as fried. – as in cooked. Given our Eastern European Jewish heritage, I suspect there is something deeper going on there, and am interested in the connotations and links between the various interpretations we might apply. But I do not really touch on this in the letter – although perhaps should have done. I do, however, discuss the term field in relation to psychotherapy and quantum field theory (very briefly because of word count, but also – who on earth can go there in great detail other than physicists?) I was christened Field but my father never changed it legally, so God knows what that says about me! Nevertheless, the way field is used might be a way of overcoming binarism. If identity can be everywhere all of the time, , i.e. as a field, then it does not necessarily need to sit in opposition to difference for instance. And visa versa.
Since the letter was a form that emerged in narrative during the Enlightenment – examined in the dialogue – and was used to introduce Frankenstein – also referenced – I think it’s worth publishing the letter, cut from my submission, here.
Dear Lamia,
We need to talk about art. I’ve even been wondering if you have come to murder it.
However, despite your grisly reputation, your origin story seems more concerned with birth, along with the possibility or non-possibility of becoming. That being so, I have imagined this research paper, which explores my relationship to art, along with what being human entails today, as a series of gestational “encounter-events”[1] between the two of us. Our events will be constituted via a “tissue of quotations”[2] resulting, I hope, in a cyberpunk[3] textual, dialogical collage; much as Hannah Hoch or Kurt Schwitters would have created an image, or else how information is gathered into recognisable pattern by an algorithm and manifests as a cohesive or not so cohesive text on a screen. Or how we generate the internal images of images that make up our reality. Or, indeed, how a self is born [4].
I had originally intended to write these thoughts down as a formal academic paper. But what is a thought, if not an imagined Other?[5] And so, I decided to experiment with dialogue and letters, Lamia. I hoped, at the very least, it would shift my writing away from habits driven by the insistence on so-called objectivity, which I have picked up from academia. And how fortunate that this kind of creativity is encouraged. And then, then when I started reading about Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial borderspace,[6] it became clear that multiple voices would really suit what I am exploring; i.e the turbulent transition from a deeply ingrained linear reality to one more ontologically entangled. To situate this as a dialogue inside a metaphorical womb that exists outside of me as a text seems entirely right, don’t you think? Especially considering that the question of who has agency over their own womb has lately exploded into global consciousness. It’s true, we could have entered a similar conversation via fungi, which also generates a discussion around the dissolution of lines, containers, egos, and objects; or else the impossibly difficult area of quantum science, which insists on relations as fundamental to existence. But I know the matrixial – having had infants growing, living and dying inside my body, I know the “impossibility of not sharing” very well. I cannot overstate how weird and magical it was to have another person emerging inside me, initially part of my own flesh until no longer. Or how devastating it was to feel one die and then to want its death out of me as soon as possible. And then later, with those who were born, how exhausting but also life affirming it was to exist as part of a mother-child dyad where bio-signs and bio-signals navigate seamlessly between seemingly separate bodies.
And while all of us exist in complex ecosystems that include fungi, and, fundamentally, we are all composed of matter governed by quantum mechanics at the subatomic level, not everyone is aware of these intricate connections. But most sentient humans, I hope, are aware they developed inside an organic womb (the case for now anyway) – and so the matrixial space is relevant for all of us.
I also hope and believe Ettinger’s post-Lacanian analysis has the potential to move us beyond idiosyncratic Western individualism,[7] and lead us to a a transubjective interpretation which overcomes some of those long-established habits of the dominant phallic-centric, overly sovereign, and, some might say, aggressively scopic conventions bequeathed to us by Freudian and Lacanian academies [8].
Ettinger argues that the event-encounter of the matrixial space acknowledges the inherent intra-relatedness of being and becoming, impregnated as it is with the “impossibility of not sharing”.[9] Ettinger’s event-encounters urge us to see the intra-relatedness of each other as well as the relationship between economics, politics and the “racisms, genocides, [and] xenophobias”[10] that threaten to destroy our world.
Within these encounter events that I’ve envisaged, I will manifested as a character called Field. And you, Lamia, a character plucked from a TV programme, an imaginary Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), inspired by a Greek myth and but much more besides. We are both inventions. Ultimately, “image[s] of image[s]”.[11]
And Field happens to be my, the author’s, surname, but it also infers containment in psychoanalytic theory, and so reverberates with Ettinger’s analytical matrixial space. Psychoanalyst Robert Snell, who, like Ettinger, draws on Wilfred Bion’s theory and practice, describes a field as having “several related levels of meaning”[12], a “shared mental state”, where “time is condensed to the here and now”, of synchronicity and interdependence. It may also be useful again, briefly, to think of quantum field theory[13] if we dare to. Field, the concept, is therefore another womblike container, along with you, Lamia, overlapping or intra-acting, Field could be anyone. And if you contain multiple intra-related (apocalyptic) topics, in this uncertain landscape of change and instability, Field is a container enabling readers of this paper and you to connect.
Finally, because I feel strongly that art should not be encouraged to remain distant, exclusive, parochial, or separated from the reality it purports to explore, I hope we will talk about much more than art. Ideally, we will discuss art as part of the world, as one of many threads that is formulated by, and contributes to, reality’s constant becoming. Because, Lamia, I don’t believe you have come to murder art at all, but rather to contribute to a reconfiguration of a multitude of entangled relations between forces, flows, materials, and discourses out of which art arises.
I cannot wait to see what you think.
Yours,
Field
(Edited 21st Augst 2024)
[1] Ettinger, Bracha. The Matrixial Borderspace. Theory out of Bounds, v. 28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.pp, 31-32.
[2] Barthes, Roland, and Stephen Heath. Image, Music, Text: Essays. 13. [Dr.]. London: Fontana, 1977, pp.142-148.
[3] “Because of its dreamlike and free associative qualities, there is often a loss of narrative logic and linearity in cyberpunk stories; it is a collage of visions and events”. Lombardo, ‘Science Fiction as the Mythology of the Future’, pp.44.
[4] McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 34
[5] Malabou, Plasticity, pp.19.
[6] Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace.
[7] “…highly literate societies are relatively new, and quite distinct from most societies that have ever existed. This means that modern populations are neurologically and psychologically different from those found in societies throughout history and back into our evolutionary past.” Henrich, Joseph. The WEIRDest People in the World. S.I.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020, pp.6.
[8] Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.19.
[9] See again the “The Impossibility of Not-Sharing” Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.146.
[10] Pollock in Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, pp.29.
[11] Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell. London: Penguin Books, 2022, pp. 130
[12] Snell describes a “‘field’ as a ‘transpersonal container’ and as a shared mental state (Neri, 1998, p. 59); it is a system both of synchronicity, in which time is ‘condensed into the here-and-now’ (ibid., p. 66) and of interdependence (ibid., pp. 66–8). It is fundamentally dynamic. Each element in the field, which includes the analyst and analysand, is in continuous and direct relation with every other element, and the nature of this relationship is constantly changing; the shifting identity of each element in the field is a given of its belonging within it. These parts or elements have no independent existence outside the field that they constitute together. The field itself is more than the sum of its parts; its properties are not attributable to the properties of its elements. Everything that takes place within it changes its state overall. It follows from this that the focus of analysis will be on the field itself and the transformations that are taking place within it, and on the way it changes and develops (Civitarese and Ferro, 2013)”. Snell, Robert. Cézanne and the Post-Bionian Field: An Exploration and a Meditation. New York: Routledge, 2021, pp.24
[13] Hossenfelder, Sabine. Existential Physics A Scientist’s Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions. London: Atlantic Books, 2022, pp. 50. See also quantum field theory in Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, pp.354.
Reference removed 21/8/24 [14] Zylinska explains how modern capitalist Western humans are attempting to solve the climate crisis with a sense of hubris and critiques our god complex. Zylinska, The End of Man, pp.15.