Below the quotations, I am sharing the introduction to my assessment document. I have rewritten it in a friendlier style and expanded it for a publication I am trying to bring together before the MA graduation show at the end of the month. After submitting, I was pleased to see a book by Jennifer Banks called Natality: Towards a Philosophy of Birth recently published. Banks writes in a short adaptation,
“…woven through my intellectual inheritance was a pronounced wrestling with mortality, a constant facing up to the fact of our eventual deaths. But there wasn’t a real shared sense of what Hannah Arendt called natality, of birth as a fundamental part of the human experience that must be faced, thought about, talked about, and taught. Birth instead was fragmented into billions of individualized (sic) pieces, privatized (sic), and understood in the context of families, not societies.”
Jennifer Banks, 2023
Since reading that article, I have also started Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex. (How have I not read this before??? She writes about what I am exploring so brilliantly, and a decade before we began to see these questions unfold in the context of woke and anti-woke narratives that bombard us daily. Her description of Platonic/Cartesian binarism and why it’s unhelpful is perfect!). Parisi writes,
“The post-gender world of the cyborg brings to the extreme post-modern claims about the end of certitudes where biological destiny is threatened by the saturating proliferation of technologies of communication and reproduction in our daily life. As opposed to the post-modern nostalgia for a lost world of stable boundaries between nature and culture, the cyborg embraced the challenge of bio-informatic technologies affirming that our assumptions about nature are the results of intricate cultural constructions articulated by specific technoscientific discourses”
Luciana Parisi, 2004
And so to the paragraphs about my inquiry:
“We are all born,” says Imogen Tyler in the introduction to Birth – Feminist Review 93 (2009). At which point, says Lacan (2004; 187-205), we enter into language, become sexed, and a “pure life instinct […] flies off” and haunts us throughout life. Lacan calls this “most profound lost object” (Ibid; 198) ‘lamella’ (Ibid; 197) or else, he jokes, ‘l’hommelette’. Bracha Ettinger (2020; §21 – 24) rejects Lacan’s reduction of human individuals to “unicellular living substances, amoebae, and lamellae” and a debate around linguistics and evolving materialisms ensues.
But what is meant by language in the 21st century and who speaks it? Who or what ingests it? And who or what is being born?
While playing with artificial intelligence (AI) platforms, I picked up on the phrase ‘prompt-engineer’ – a term coined to define people who feed words into AI generators to produce images – and noticed its etymology links to childbirth. As I ventured further down that path, the BoW evolved into an inquiry grounded in “the concept of natality as a political, humanist response to the terror, horror, alienation and banality of contemporary life” (Tyler, 2019;6). Western culture’s historical orientation towards death (Ibid; Ettinger, 2020), along with the alternatives that emerge in feminist critiques, are also key. I have done this by digitally kneading an entanglement of old and new media, objects and process, and various forms of language materials into a representational/performative project called LAMELLA://. I did this publicly, publishing the LAMELLA:// website before it was remotely ‘finished’ and by inviting others to comment, contribute or critique the process. I have documented that on the blog (see Research and Contributions section herein).
Initially, I wondered if Ettinger’s argument was somehow less hysterical, perhaps more accepting of a generative, cyclical view of life. But it is more than that. Ettinger (Ibid; §21 – 24) rejects the strictest versions of materialism, saying, “metaphors of symbiosis and plasticity […] undermine the possibility of ethics.” Given Ettinger’s long-term artistic/psychoanalytic inquiry revolving around women and children who died in the Shoah, her concern is hard to ignore. How can we tolerate a universe where “life thrives [or death happens for that matter] with no consideration for the human individual” (Ibid)? As we live through the decoding and recoding of reality, where everything, it seems, is reduced to quantifiable data, perhaps it behoves us to stop and take note of Ettinger’s concerns.
Although I sympathise with Ettinger’s humanist view, I do not necessarily see materialism in these terms, and it would be interesting to look at Ettinger through Christian Fuchs’ Digital Humanism (2022). In any case, life, even when reduced to germ cells, lamellae or quanta seems wonderous to me – because of emergence, which is amazing!
The big question for us humans today is whether we will see a form of emergence in our technologies. Perhaps we already have. Will the undead combination of metal and code destroy us, as so many warn? Are we giving birth to our ultimate destruction as we move closer and closer to creating creatures that were never born; who were, instead, manufactured? Or will we find a way to overcome the dualisms and separations that persist, forcing us to see everything in terms of US and THEM, or THIS and THAT?
(See previous post for a shorter, simpler version)
Refs:
Arendt, H., Allen, D. S. and Canovan, M. (2018) The human condition. (Second edition) Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Banks, J. (2023) Philosophy obsesses about death. Instead, we need “natality” — a focus on birth, Philosophy-death-natality-birth/. Available at: Philosophy obsesses about death. Instead, we need “natality” — a focus on birth (Accessed: 09 June 2023).
Ettinger, B. (2020) ‘Beyond the Death-Drive, beyond the Life-Drive: Being-toward- Birthing with Being-toward-Birth; Copoiesis and the Matrixial Eros—Metafeminist Notes’ In: de Assis, P. and Giudici, P. (eds.) Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2. Leuven, BELGIUM: Leuven University Press. At: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ual/detail.action?docID=5983407 (Accessed 11/10/2022).
Ettinger, B. (2006) The matrixial borderspace. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fuchs, Christian. (2022). Digital Humanism: A Philosophy for 21st Century Digital Society. United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing.
Heidegger, M., Stambaugh, J. and Schmidt, D. J. (2010) Being and time. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Lacan, J. (2004) The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. (Reprinted) London: Karnac Books.
Loveless, N. (2019) How to make art at the end of the world: a manifesto for research-creation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Parisi, L. (2004) Abstract sex: Philosophy, biotechnology and the mutations of desire. New York: Continuum.
Tyler, I. (2009) ‘Introduction: Birth’ In: Feminist Review 93 (1) p.1-7
Zizek, S. (2006) How to read Lacan. London: Granta. At: http://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781847085405 (Accessed 19/06/2022).