Re: <documenta X><blast>metafields
Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger (bracha@easynet.fr)
Tue, 1 Jul 1997 20:16:25 +0200
John Beckmann wrote:
>I also think that it's ironic, that
>we have fallen into so much jargon ridden speak defined in such mechanical
>terms, that the psychological aspects of the loss of spatial articulations,
>the collapse of perspective, and so on is of little interest.
Some find meaning and pleasure in the mechanical terms, so I hope those
interested by it will continue. But alongside, why not try to articulate
the psychological loss of spatial articulations and the collapse of
perspective? if awareness of loss and collapse is an inevitable psychic
outgrowth of the netspace, how do we confront it? or are loss and collapse
artifacts that can be pushed aside? are they a blow to my narcissism and to
illusional strength? and would narcissism be defined here as individual or
as shared? and if the netspace is an affective space, as I believe it is,
what are its particularities?
If we take the machinic object to be a mental (part-)object in a Deleuze &
Guattari sense, we are confronted perhaps with the difficulties of working
through a non-Oedipal space where archaic impulses come into play but their
object, unlike the object-mother, is virtual. The need to control the
object arizes and the helplessness in front of fragmentation and
multiplicity is overwhelming, but unlike with the mother-as-part-object,
the phantasy of controlling the object immediately breaks down from several
unexpected angles. What to do then? deny the catastrophic side of new
spaces and look for unexisting unity and center? what are the possible
sources of warmth and home-feeling here? is home here behind or in front of
us, a given space or one to be co-created? shall we oscillate between
fascination of new spaces and rage infront of the breakdown of illusions,
shall we shut off when their horror manifests itself and ignore their
growing infiltration, visible or invisible, into our intimate space?
The sense of intimacy itself is transformed by joint psychic borderspaces.
"I wonder to know why virtual space is so attractive to get me wired" asked
Viktor and Olessia. Because it arizes affects, expectations, it is a new
kind of promise for hapiness - like beauty in art (I forgot who was it that
said that in art, "beauty is a promise for happinesss").
Beyond either fascination or horor, some kinds of affective streams,
depending precisely on the co-emergence with unknown other(s) in an
ephemericl space, are born by/through that very space itself. It is a
borderspace of transference and countertransference that awakes the archaic
trans-subjective rapport between I and non-I and enable a possible
transmission between different subjects and objects in a potential
in-between zone of object-and-subject. Would you find my idea absurd: that
if netspace is a part-object, it can enrage us, give us pain, and also, we
want to be caressed by it, go to sleep with it like a teddy-bear? And if
there is a potentiality here to co-engender transferential relations, the
question of responsibility towards the unknown others, towards my unknown
companions to this journey, arizes.
Bracha Lichtenberg-Ettinger