Abstract
Judith Butler contests Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek's argument that the limits to symbolisation which shape political action are best accounted for through Jacques Lacan's account of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Butler agrees that we each emerge as social subjects on the condition of foreclosures, but disagrees that such foreclosures are prior to the social or explicable through a universal account of kinship. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyĕwùmí has a somewhat similar critique of the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts. She argues that Western hierarchies, organised through ‘bio-logic’ or ‘body-reasoning’ with an emphasis on the sex/gender binary, are culturally particular. Oyĕwùmí distinguishes between relational, dynamic, fluid social hierarchies organised by seniority, and hierarchies organised by body-reasoning which are orientated towards fixity, and certainties. In this article I outline Bracha Ettinger's matrixial theory and argue that while it does not do what either Oyĕwùmí (transcend the terms of the nuclear family) or Butler (divest Lacan's paternal law of its power) advocate, it does provide us with the language to better account for how ‘body-reasoning’ structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes. Through an account of multiple strata of subjectivity, within an expanded Symbolic, inscribed in social life through symbolic filters based on corporeality, matrixial theory enables us to account for the embeddedness of a strong orientation towards constant individuation, alongside a persistent disavowal and fear of processes of co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity within Western thought. In their exchange, Laclau theorises social transformation through articulatory logics whereas Butler stresses the need for the work of cultural translation. Drawing on Ettinger’s and Oyĕwùmí's work, I propose that practices of translation must include a rigorous accounting for our orientations and investments within Subjectivity.
Introduction
In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (Butler et al., 2000), Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek are in agreement that there are limits to symbolisation and that these limits definitively shape political action. Žižek has long argued, and Laclau subsequently agreed, that the operation of these limits is best articulated through Jacques Lacan's account of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Within Lacanian theory, our coming into being is associated with symbolic castration, understood as a prohibition that puts an end to an imaginary unity, ushering us in to the realm of language. The child realises that their primary carer is not only devoted to them but also desires something which is elsewhere to their relationship. This ‘something else’ is symbolised by the Phallus which represents that to which we attach value in our culture, and it is also the sign of sexual difference (Grosz, 1990: 81). Social ordering is achieved through an Oedipal structure. That which Lacan calls the Name of the Father imposes the Law, and represents authority. The Lacanian subject is a barred subject. After entry to the realm of language, they have no access to any ‘before’ of representation and symbolisation. Words ‘are divided into signifiers which belong to the Symbolic and the signified which belongs to the Imaginary’ (Ettinger, 1992: 181). That which escapes human ‘entry’ into the realm of language and which language cannot contain, such as archaic psychic events, is located in the Real. The pre-Oedipal territory is lost, impossible to symbolise and unknown (Ettinger, 1992: 181–185). Individuation thus happens through the acquisition of language, splitting ‘self’ from Other(s). In this article, drawing on matrixial theory, I propose that the stress on individuation, and the severance from the pre-Oedipal territory, provides us with an illusion of self-generation. This leads to a cultural devaluation and unwarranted fears of means of differentiation and means of connectedness at a non-cognitive level within Subjectivity which needs to be fully accounted for within political action.
The Lacanian understanding of the construction of subjectivity underpins a theorisation of the political as an antagonistic hegemonic order. Lacanian subjects are subjects of lack. Their desire is structured around a lost object that will make them feel ‘whole’ once more. In political terms this translates into the pursuit of ideals, in service of a longed-for society, ordered according to our priorities. However, we have various ideas of ‘the good’ and seek different versions of an ‘absent fullness’ and so we come into conflict. Challenging existing power relations, then, for Laclau in particular, involves the operation of articulatory logics. 1 More specifically from a left perspective, Laclau (2000b: 301–306) argues that we need to articulate an expansive universal discourse and full social imaginary from the goals of a range of social movements, capture the popular imagination and substantively compete with the neoliberal consensus. He stresses that the operation of articulatory logics is a process without end and so radical democracy is essentially unknowing about its future.
In that same exchange, Judith Butler disagrees with Žižek’s and Laclau's use of Lacanian theory. Butler is concerned that the Lacanian account of individuation places untenable boundaries on the political field. If we all come into being through a definitive split (more or less) from an imaginary unity – and we are all then subject to the Name of the Father and pre-disposed to desire a lost, pre-symbolic jouissance as fullness – this limits the range of subject-formations and social transformation strategies available to us (Butler, 2000b: 140–142). They agree that we each emerge as social subjects on the condition of foreclosures, and that these are ‘internal to the social as its founding moment of exclusion’ (Butler, 2000b: 140). However, they disagree that such foreclosures are prior to the social or explicable through ‘anachronistic structuralist accounts of kinship’ (Butler, 2000b: 140), i.e. the universality of a triadic structure of gendered child in relation to ‘mother’ and ‘father’ across time and cultures. Another way of saying this perhaps is that although we each come into being through means of differentiation (from others) and means of connectedness (to others), the form these take, the subject-formations they produce and the ways they orientate our experiences are culturally, geographically and historically particular.
Responding to Žižek, Butler argues that the conditions for political action cannot be based on any one account of the psychic reality of the individual. The psychic structure of the individual is certainly related to the forms that intersubjective relations take within the social, but the psychic and social dimensions can be said to be messily entangled rather than identical (Zerilli, 1998: 12–13; Butler, 2000b: 156). Politics is a field of plurality within which subjectivity is performed in diverse ways. The assumption that we are all primarily individuating ‘lacking’ subjects in search of ‘wholeness’ which we can nonetheless never attain underpins an assumption that all social movements seek to fulfil an ‘absent fullness’ (Laclau, 2000a: 185), which in turn leads to elevating the generation of mass support for our ideals as the paramount social transformation strategy. Butler questions this, proposing that the task of cultural translation is just as important. This requires us to recognise the founding violences, and limits, of a given episteme; to relativise and transform dominant discourses through admitting that which is foreign; and to enable that which has been consigned to being ‘spectrally human’ to ‘enter into the hegemonic reformulation of universality’ (Butler, 2000b: 179). Although Butler does not have a matrixial level of transubjectivity in mind when they refer to the spectrally human, it is my argument that the Western denial and repression of psychic processes which enable transconnectedness, copoeisis and a working-through of non-cognitive knowledge within Subjectivity needs to be accounted for as part of the work of cultural translation. To do so using matrixial theory (whilst situating it as culturally and historically particular) enables us to partly account for the destructive impacts of the over-emphasis on individuation in Western thought.
Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyĕwùmí has a somewhat similar critique of the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts. She highlights how three core concepts – woman, gender and sisterhood – are rooted in the nuclear family. Oyĕwùmí argues that Western hierarchies are organised through bio-logic or ‘body-reasoning’ with an emphasis on the sex/gender binary. This establishes gender difference as a primary source of hierarchy, and ‘gender sameness as a primary source of identification and solidarity’ (Oyĕwùmí, 2004: 4). There is no ‘woman’ without ‘man’, and at a cultural level this is not a relationship of equals. It is based on a hierarchical dichotomous relation of masculine/feminine as superior/inferior, universal/particular and rational/irrational. A notable feature of ‘body-reasoning’ is that the body is considered non-essential for the rational ‘natural individual’ of Western thought, and embodiment is assigned to all ‘Others’ (Oyĕwùmí, 1997: 6–7). By virtue of inhabiting a particular kind of body (marked and organised by gender, race, sexual orientation, class and/or disability for example), people are arranged as variably lesser.
For Oyĕwùmí, a key ‘problem is not that feminist conceptualisation starts with the family. The issue is that it never transcends the narrow confines of the nuclear family’ (2004: 4). The nuclear family is ‘inappropriately universalised’ (Oyĕwùmí, 2004: 5). She highlights how, prior to colonisation, sex and gender were not meaningful societal organising principles in Yorùbá society. 2 Understandings of sex were present, but they were not encoded in social hierarchies or in the assignation of roles and occupations (Oyĕwùmí 1997, 2004, 2016). Instead, kinship was organised via seniority, with the Ìyá/child – meaning birth-giver/child – dyad as the most fundamental unit. To become an Ìyá was to attain a position of seniority (Oyĕwùmí, 2016: 71). One also attained a position of seniority through aging. Children themselves were organised via seniority, i.e. naming encoded first sibling, second sibling and third sibling rather than male or female. Given the relational character of seniority as an organising principle, wider societal hierarchies were also relational in nature, dynamic and fluid. I could be senior as a carer for children, and junior in a get-together with older family members, all in the one day. Status was thus context specific and gained or lost through a combination of time, one's actions, roles and staying with or moving away from one's lineage. Dynamic hierarchies organised through seniority stand in contrast to Western hierarchies which are organised through the bodies we inhabit. Oyĕwùmí highlights how ‘body-reasoning’ orientates us towards determining and fixing our ‘core’ gendered and racialised selves (and those of Others) in place.
In this article, I propose that we can reasonably assume that basic enigmas of human existence – where do we come from, why are we here, where are we on the way to – and experiences of coexistence, connection, co-emergence, plurality, loss, limit, lack and separateness within Subjectivity – are universal. What are arguably not universal are the symbolic filters through which these experiences are inscribed. I use the lowercase ‘subjectivity’ to refer to particular, culturally mediated experiences. I use the uppercase ‘Subjectivity’ to refer to the broadest sense of the phenomenon of all human experiences of connectedness and differentiation, never fully elaborated. I respond to two points. The first is Oyĕwùmí's argument that Western feminism needs to transcend the narrow confines of the nuclear family and critically interrogate the societal organising principles which generate hierarchies. The second is Butler's argument that Lacanian theory is a culturally particular imagining of the foreclosures through which social subjects emerge, and that to reify the castration complex places untenable boundaries on the political field. I draw on Bracha Ettinger's matrixial theory and argue that while it does not do what either Oyĕwùmí – transcend the terms of the nuclear family – or Butler – divest paternal law of its organising power and engage in translative projects – require, it does enable us to own, in the sense of more fully accounting for, how ‘body-reasoning’ structures our orientations and transformative processes in political life.
Note my presupposition that at one level of experience we seek status, or to be positioned within the human community – to belong in relation to others. This desire for positioning engenders hierarchies. What matters in my view, and what Oyĕwùmí demonstrates, is that specific means of organising positionings and hierarchies can lead to distinct community values and configurations. In a culture organised through seniority which required active attentiveness to who is present at each encounter, the perpetual navigation of social ties rather than a cutting of self from Others and – very importantly – comfort with an ever-shifting status position, there was no comparable understanding of what we take as ‘the individual’. Psychic processes which function to constantly shore up and protect the borders of an individuating self would have been relatively useless. Admittedly, this point is largely hypothetical since hierarchies organised through body-reasoning are now woven into the hierarchies of epistemes which may have structured experiences within Subjectivity differently prior to Western colonisation. 3 There is no straightforward return to pre-colonial societal organising principles. 4 In Western thought, there is not even a clear path towards the creation of dynamic relational values and hierarchies. In her reworking of psychoanalytic theory, Ettinger argues that the cultural priority given to man, the masculine and the Phallus has meant that psychic processes in service of individuation have been given undue attention. Other psychic processes, which Ettinger aligns with a concept of the matrixial feminine, or as Griselda Pollock terms it the ‘femininem’ (2022: 448), and which operate in service of particular forms of psychic asymmetrical co-emergence at a non-cognitive level, have been overlooked or their importance downplayed. That some psychic processes and dimensions within Subjectivity are easily identifiable to us and that we struggle to name and understand others is a product of our cultural context (Ettinger, 1992: 190–192). In giving us a language for how ‘body-reasoning’ (Oyĕwùmí) has shaped the foregrounding and repression of distinct levels of psychic subjectivity, I argue that Ettinger significantly deepens our understanding of how the limits of symbolisation shape political action.
In the first section, I outline some basic parameters of Lacanian theory and Ettinger's matrixial theory. I propose that elements of existence are inscribed in social and political life via culturally particular symbolic filters, such that psychic processes assume particular forms, are foregrounded, minimised or denied. These structure and orientate our experiences within Subjectivity in particular directions. By way of contrast to the socio-symbolic order from which matrixial theory emerges – and the ways we are thereby orientated within Subjectivity – I then further detail Oyĕwùmí's account of how Yorùbá society was organised through seniority. I argue that Oyĕwùmí demonstrates how culture shapes maps of relationality. In the third section, I propose that matrixial theory provides us with the language to better account for how body-reasoning structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes.
Matrixial theory
The nuclear family, heterosexual parents, the mother as the primary carer and the so-called ‘universal’ subject as male are deeply embedded norms in Western culture. Psychoanalysis as a critical interpretative process emerges from this cultural context. Rather than seek to establish who we are, it sets itself the task of understanding the processes through which we come to be, and to become repeatedly undone (Pollock, 1996: 274). For Lacan, the psychoanalytic project should aim to expose the arbitrary nature of both the order of language and the subjectivity constructed within it. He is explicit that our collective coming into being is through a linguistic order that exists prior to any ‘I’, to which we constantly refer, and that is reflective of underlying power relations. As such, our understandings of both subjectivity and sexuality are socially produced. They are not derivative of a biologically given body or processes of linear development (Grosz, 1990: 142). The feminine, femininity and woman are all produced as negative terms within language, the ‘other’ against which the masculine and man are produced. That does not mean that woman, even to the extent she culturally exists as Other, has an other essence (Rose, 2005: 80). Man has no essence either for that matter.
Yet even as there is an understanding of the socially produced nature of masculinity and femininity, sexual difference – as representative of a structure of lack/loss – is theorised as essential for entry to social and political life. To outline briefly and in a simplified manner – Sigmund Freud took a particularly biologistic approach whereas Lacan focused on how subjectivity is signified through language. Freud developed his theory for the male infant, arguing that between the ages of three and five the child experiences resentment of his father and unconscious desires for his mother. This Oedipal complex is ‘resolved’ for the boy when he renounces his desire under fear of punishment from the Father, which the child believes involves castration, and identifies with his father thereby entering a heterosexual matrix (Lloyd, 2007: 82). Freud posits that the girl child also desires her mother, but upon discovery that her mother is already castrated she renounces her mother and desires her father. She subsequently renounces her desire for her father, desires a baby instead and identifies with her mother (Lloyd, 2007: 171).
Lacan significantly departed from Freud by framing the child's desire for the mother in terms of a desire to understand what she desires and then to ‘be’ that for the mother. Submitting to the laws of language involves recognising that this is impossible, and that desire is structured through the norms of the symbolic order. As Jacqueline Rose highlights, the Phallus breaks up the mother–child relation. Castration means that the ‘child's desire for the mother does not refer to her but beyond her, to an object, the phallus, whose status is first imaginary (the object presumed to satisfy her desire) and then symbolic (recognition that desire cannot be satisfied)’ (Rose, 2005: 62; emphasis in original). Rose argues that a refusal of the phallic term translates into an attempt to conceive of subjectivity which is free of division and is thus a negation of symbolisation. Of note here is that the castration complex, as a means of entry to the Symbolic, produces a sexed individuating subject. Furthermore, Lacan proposes that the law of the Father operates invariably because the incest taboo, which defines the nuclear family positions, is the condition of any culture. 5 For Freud, the resolution of the Oedipus complex for a boy should destroy the pre-Oedipal time and through sublimation he gains complete access to the Symbolic. The girl cannot wholly destroy and sublimate this pre-Oedipal territory though, and Ettinger notes that for Freud this is ‘the first mark of women's inferiority’ (1992: 185). Lacan differs insofar as he argues that the pre-Oedipal cannot be thought of or repressed and therefore the subject, ‘female or male, cannot recognize these elements which belong to the Real and are related to the feminine’ (Ettinger, 1992: 185). For Freud, the pre-Oedipal is mysterious and unknowable, a negative to be denied, but for Lacan it is ‘simply not human’ (Ettinger, 1992: 185). A void underlies Lacanian subjectivity wherein the pre-Oedipal time is lost, impossible to symbolise and unknown at any level (Ettinger, 1992: 181–185).
That said, although that which happened prior to our entry into language is (supposedly) lost, the force of a pre-symbolic energetic substratum (the Real) remains active. Lacan is clear that there is an interrelation between symbolisation and that which is excessive to symbolisation such as affect and jouissance, contained in the Real. The Lacanian categories – Real, Symbolic, Imaginary – operate in constant relation to one another, each are ontological but none is all-encompassing (Stavrakakis, 2007: 98). Crucially, however, Lacan emphasises that we can only know something of affect and jouissance after an exhaustive exploration of the linguistic field. As Yannis Stavrakakis notes: … we need to immerse ourselves in the most extensive conceptualisation of language, to take into account the multitude of ways in which it determines/produces our reality in order to be able to envisage what is beyond language but – still – in relation to language. If in animals no distance between jouissance and the biological/instinctual body can be observed, in humans, language, the signifier, changes the picture completely. (2007: 94)
Of note is that the Western individuating subject is constituted through a particular imagining of lack, as a split from a pre-symbolic fullness. This split positions the linguistic order as a primary means of gaining some understanding of experiences of connectedness and differentiation within Subjectivity, and it enables what Ettinger refers to as the genius-male-hero complex, an imagining of ourselves as self-creating, man ‘born of himself’ (2006a: 174).
In one sense, Lacan's focus on the function of linguistic order in situating us as historically and geographically particular beings is impressive in its refusal to countenance that there is any ‘reality’ to which we could gain unmediated access. However, from the perspective of feminist social transformation it paints a bleak picture. As Elizabeth Grosz notes, even as Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is explicit about its basis in phallocentric and heteronormative structures – unless it provides a means of transformation such that the paternal function and the Phallus are not the only ‘signifiers of social power and linguistic norms (even if they are the dominant ones here, today), feminism is no better off with Lacan than without him’ (1990: 145). Certainly, we are where we are, but we exist within a profoundly unjust and limiting social ordering. Arguably we need a better account of subject-formation and meaning-donation within the Symbolic in particular if we are to better theorise how our experiences are orientated within Subjectivity, and theorise means of social transformation which would enable liveable lives for all.
One strength of Ettinger's matrixial theory is that the embeddedness and force of phallocentric and heteronormative structures remains accounted for. Ettinger leaves in place Lacan's theorisation of how, as individuating social subjects, we are within the linguistic order and orientated to desire fixity, determination and an ‘absent fullness’. However, she also argues that the Symbolic as theorised by Lacan is limited. She proposes an expanded Symbolic, wherein there are different entry passages to distinct levels of subjectivity, and distinct mechanisms of meaning-donation are operative at each level. One passage is through the castration complex. Another passage, Ettinger posits, is through the intrauterine complex. She locates Lacan's account of subjectivity at a ‘phallic stratum’ (or level) of subjectivity only. In reading this now, using your cognitive faculties – and presumably with a relatively strong sense of yourself as a bounded being – you are at that level.
The Phallus is the symbolic filter for a whole range of psychic processes in service of individuation, e.g. cutting, splitting, introjection, projection, assimilation. The womb is largely not spoken of, or it is feared. Its appearance in narratives and dreams is understood to threaten the individuating self, leading to possible overwhelm, engulfment or psychosis. This is despite Freud's recognition of the prevalence of womb phantasies in adults, and also children's curiosity about where babies come from. Fearing that recognition of the womb would be catastrophic for the male child's narcissism, Freud supported a generalised denial of its role (he later criticised himself on this point). For Lacan's part, as he rid Freud of his biologism, he completely ignored womb phantasies (Ettinger, 2006a: 174–175). In her outline of matrixial theory, Ettinger outlines how the ‘matrixial sphere is modeled on intimate sharing in jouissance, trauma, and phantasy in the feminine/prebirth sphere’ (2006a: 181). The matrix is conceived as ‘the human potentiality for differentiation-in-co-emergence’ (Ettinger, 2006b: 219). It involves choice. The becoming m/Other allows the becoming-subject to emerge through enlarging her capacity for fragilisation and compassionate hospitality. All involved in a matrixial encounter-event – based on the model of asymmetrical psychic linking between the becoming m/Other, the becoming-child and the larger matrixial webs the becoming m/Other is connected to – are partial subjects. As such, degrees of loss and ‘differenciation’ (Pollock, 2022: 461) are there from the very start and an ongoing aspect of the matrixial level of transubjectivity.
Ettinger not only argues that matrixial psychic processes of linking and differentiating-in-jointness need to be emphasised within Subjectivity. She stresses – and this is very important – that these matrixial means of connectedness and differentiation cannot be accessed from the position of the individuating subject – i.e. ‘you’ or ‘I’ – at the phallic level of subjectivity. Matrixial psychic processes are formed antecedent to those formed with the emergence of the individuating subject, and they continue to be operative throughout our lives (Ettinger, 2006b: 220). Although discussion of the pre-natal can be seen to be as essentialising and support an assumed claim that the infant has on the pregnant person, Ettinger presents matrixial theory as an act of resistance because ‘the matrixial apparatus dissolves the ground it stands on from within: it dissolves the unitary subject and transgresses it’ (2006a: 180). She argues that to avoid addressing any references to bodily experiences such as gestation and pregnancy and the histories, potentiality and phantasies that link to their inscription is to surrender unconditionally ‘to the dominant, seemingly neutral, symbolic filter that censures both women and men [sic] and moulds them in its phallic frame’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 180; emphasis mine). She emphasises that the feminine-matrixial configuration supports a pregnant person's ‘full response-ability for any event occurring with-in her own not-One corpo-Reality and transsubjectivity, and disqualifies phallic regulations of them’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 180). The phallic imaginary mistakenly presumes that the pre-natal infant is a separate entity with separate desire to the pregnant person, but this makes no sense from a matrixial perspective.
In support of her theorisation of the Matrix, Ettinger revisits Freud's (1985) essay The Uncanny, within which elements of both the intrauterine (related to being within a womb) and castration phantasy complexes appear – with both triggering feelings of the uncanny and associated anxieties. However, Ettinger argues that although anxiety is the effect of both complexes on the adult subject, before their repression they were attached to entirely different affects. She proposes that, ‘while castration phantasy is frightening at the point of the emergence of the original experience before its repression, the matrixial phantasy (from matrice for womb) is not frightening at the point of its original emergence, but becomes frightening when the experience is repressed’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 47; emphasis in original).
She argues that womb and castration phantasies coexist, each triggering a sense of the uncanny for us, regardless of identity formations. The castration complex is the passage to the phallic level of subjectivity. The intrauterine complex is the passage to a distinct, matrixial level of transubjectivity within an expanded Symbolic. As Pollock (1996: 285) stresses, this conceptualisation brings human experiences of co-emergence and unfamiliar proximities back from the foreclosure they have been subject to within the phallocentric socio-linguistic order. Ettinger stresses that she developed matrixial theory through her engagement with artworking in parallel to her psychoanalytic practice. The key concepts are not inventions, rather they are elements of human experience which have always taken place (and are always operative) but which we are averse to accessing or thinking through because they involve self-fragilisation and the transgression of psychic borders (Ducker, 1994: 9). Ettinger proposes that there is a need to analyse the particularity of the ‘matrixial phantasy and complex’, and to conceptualise a distinct subjectivising matrixial stratum (or level) of subjectivity. She argues that the denial of the prevalence of womb phantasies is counterproductive. It limits our access to a range of means of connectedness and means of differentiation and additional processes of meaning-donation/revelation/production within an expanded Symbolic.
The Matrix thus inscribes what we can think of as a map of psychic relationality leading to specific: 1) forms of encounter-event; 2) psychic processes of metramorphosis; and 3) mechanisms of meaning-donation. If I wish to share knowledge via concepts, I can upload a lecture online and (theoretically at least) have a reasonably large audience. A musician's performance will also likely affect those in the same space at the intra-intersubjective level, even if it is in an arena. However, if the ‘I’ self-fragilises, and sharing occurs via matrixial mental waves and affects at a non-cognitive level, the ‘principle of severality’ applies wherein the number of subjective instances engaged is limited (Ettinger, 2005: 214). Any access to the transubjective level requires a partial withdrawal of self, self-fragilising into a matrixial web that arises between a severality – I (as partial subject) linked with unknown non-Is (also as partial subjects) – at the transubjective level. The recognition of this limited transmissivity accessed through self-fragilisation – singular affective encounter-events restricted to a matrixial severality – is a resistance to both the endless transjectivity that traverses us all and our own narcissistic individuating self. The matrixial psychic dimension therefore side-steps the individuating subject, forms of community and endless multiplicity (Ettinger, 2010: 2). That no identifiable subject exists, and that the principle of severality applies within a transconnected matrixial encounter-event, distinguishes it from encounters that happen at the phallic level of subjectivity.
Distinct psychic processes of metramorphosis are operative within a matrixial encounter-event. Ettinger combines Metra with Morpheus to get metramorphosis which contains ‘mater’ as the womb and the mother and ‘Morpheus, the Greek God of sleep and dream’ (Ducker, 1994: 5). The matrixial subjective cluster refers to several partial subjects participating in ‘a shareable psychic eventing’ (Ettinger, 2005: 214). Through self-fragilisation, boundaries are transgressed and ‘affective vibrations and resonance, and uncognized psychic intensities and traces, interpenetrate’ (Ettinger, 2005: 214). Each psyche is a continuity of an-other psyche along a psychic string. This psychic continuity is first developed in the late pre-natal stage of intrauterine experience and results in ‘ongoing differentiating – not sameness’ (Ettinger, 2005: 214; emphasis in original). Ettinger describes the matrixial borderspace as a space of copoiesis, after Francisco Varela's autopoesis. Copoiesis bypasses autopoiesis and symbiosis and theorises connectedness in terms of mental vibrating strings (Pollock, 2004; Ettinger, 2006b). She uses terms such as jointness-in-differentiation and relations-without-relating to articulate matrixial psychic mechanisms. In many ways these are contradictory terms, yet they can be read as an effort to take the reader away from thought processes dominated by the Phallus and to present us with contradictions linked together in order to conceptualise sharing (relating without actual specific [phallic, readily identifiable] relations taking place) and becomings (co-emerging-in-differentiation in an asymmetrical way).
Finally, distinct processes of meaning-donation/revelation/production (Ettinger, 2006a: 110) are operative at the matrixial level of subjectivity. Just as our minds translate frequencies, vibrations, wavelengths and intensities from within ourselves and our perceptions of the world into thoughts, images and feelings at the phallic intra-intersubjective level of subjectivity, so too do we have the capacity to withdraw and attune to the matrixial level, elaborating and translating waves within a matrixial web into ‘affective preconceptual knowledge, images and thoughts’ (Ettinger, 2006b: 221; emphasis mine). Once the ‘I’ knows something of what has occurred, they are at the phallic level of subjectivity. Ettinger's idea that knowledge at the phallic level of subjectivity itself can be indicative of a kind of loss – the receding of a shared matrixial borderspace – is a radical shift away from the desire for control and knowing at the individuating level of subjectivity (Ducker, 1994: 7). There is also a temporal lapse between what happens within a matrixial encounter-event and the ways that it ultimately and indirectly informs social and political life (Pollock, 2022: 454). Matrixial processes of working-through and meaning-donation/revelation/production occur at a non-phallic, matrixial level of transubjectivity. They have indirect, non-immediate effects on social and political life. They are not related to the powers of the ‘I’. That which occurs or is worked through becomes relevant to wider social and political life in the long run (Ettinger, 2001: 27). As Pollock (1996: 285) notes, Ettinger elaborates a non-cognitive dimension of alliance or covenant. I posit that key elements – Is linked with unknown non-Is in asymmetrical ways as partial-subjects; the principle of severality; psychic processes of metramorphosis accessed through self-fragilisation; working-through noncognitive, preconceptual knowledge; and a temporal lapse – are all points on the map of psychic relationality at the matrixial level which could also orientate us within Subjectivity.
In service of clarity, I have outlined matrixial theory as if psychic processes at each level are operative in mutually exclusive ways. However, Ettinger is clear that psychic processes can be operative at each level at the same time within the same encounter. Indeed, this is one of my central arguments – the full range of means of connectedness and means of differentiation within Subjectivity are operative and available to us all. However, as Pollock (1996) stresses, we may be largely unaware or even fearful of psychic processes for which our cultures do not have symbolic filters. This raises the question of the effects of the repression of psychic processes which may have otherwise been inscribed in social and political life via the Matrix as a symbolic filter. A key point to be derived from matrixial theory, and which I return to in the third section, is that the prioritisation of the Phallus as the primary symbolic filter (in splendid isolation) has led to large-scale dehumanisation and annihilatory violence. Ettinger proposes that, as a result of this, never-cognised traumatic knowledge circulates, and this needs to be worked-through at the noncognitive level of transubjectivity. For now, though, let us further consider how culture shapes maps of relationality as elaborated by Oyĕwùmí.
Alternative orientations within subjectivity
In Western thought, we are accustomed to thinking of our interactions with the world as emanating from and returning to the individuating ‘I’. No matter how interconnected we imagine ourselves to be, at multiple levels, the individuating ‘I’ remains at the centre of the action. Matrixial theory requires a fundamental shift in this imaginary. To note, the ‘I’ remains in place at the phallic level of subjectivity. Given the cultural embeddedness of the individuating subject, this is politically important. The individuating ‘I’ remains accountable for their actions. We also need to continue to insist on the specificities of subordinated identities in order ‘to expose the fictions of an imperialist humanism that works through unmarked privilege’ whilst also critically reflecting on the constitutive exclusions that the assertion of identities entails (Butler, 2011: 79). That said, the individuating ‘I’ fades into the background and other means of connectedness and means of differentiation are operative at the matrixial level of transubjectivity. To further note, what happens at the matrixial level neither directly emanates from nor directly returns to the ‘I’. My paraphrasing here is awkward because of course multiple psychic processes can be operative at each level of subjectivity at the same time within the same encounter. However, this is important to highlight if we are to relativise (not eliminate) the role and place of the constantly individuating subject within Subjectivity. Ettinger theorises multiple passages to the Symbolic, leading to different levels of subjectivity, accessed through distinct means of connectedness and means of differentiation. Her reworking of psychoanalytic theory opens up the possibility of further reflection and revisions. Although differentiation is needed for symbolisation, the enabling mechanisms do not need to produce a constantly individuating gendered subject.
Oyĕwùmí argues that in a society organised through seniority, one's positioning was never fixed. Her work examines Yorùbá culture, the source of which was considered to be Ìyá or the birth-giver. Ìyá was not gendered; they were an elder (rather than a woman) because there simply is no corresponding man in the ethos: ‘Ọsun is founder, a position only open to Ìyá. There are no founding fathers in the Oseetura, a story of origin. There is no dichotomy, no duality, nor are there notions of yin and yang in the ontology’ (Oyĕwùmí, 2016: 53; emphasis mine).
Ìyá, the birth giver, is a singular category, meaning it is not one half of a binary or hierarchical dichotomy. Its meaning derives from Ìyá's role as comaker with the Creator of all humans (not sex or gender). Gestation and birth were understood more in spiritual than biological terms. As Oyĕwùmí notes, in Yorùbá discourses ‘one often gets the impression that Ìyá makes babies through a process of parthenogenesis’ (2016: 61). All children regardless of their genitalia were believed to spiritually choose their Ìyá in the same way. One becomes an Ìyá at the moment of giving birth; at that point ‘two entities are born – a baby and an Ìyá’ (Oyěwùmí, 2016: 61): Fatherhood in the tradition is socially established and need not be biological. The Ìyá-child relationship, however, is constructed as longer, stronger, and deeper than any other. The relationship is perceived to be pre-earthly, pregestational, lifelong, and even persisting into the afterlife in its vitality […] It is marriage that connects father to child; their bond is not seen as visceral in the same way that the Ìyá/child bond is perceived. (Oyěwùmí, 2016: 61)
Birth lineage membership mattered to the extent that leaving to join another lineage meant taking a junior position. Yet status was constantly shifting in relation to those present in any encounter.
That one's status was established in relation to those present required active attentiveness within each encounter and also a relatively high level of comfort with a constantly shifting status position. A sense of entitlement to, and defensiveness of, an enduring status position within a hierarchy, based on a concept of there being a continuous core gendered and racialised self, was absent. As Oyĕwùmí argues: This seniority-based organization is dynamic, fluid, and egalitarian in that all members of the lineage have the opportunity to be senior or junior depending in the situation. The seniority-based categories are relational and do not draw attention to the body. This is very much unlike gender or racial hierarchies, which are rigid, static, and exclusive in that they are permanently promoting one category over the other. (2016: 71)
In the Yorùbá cosmology, the most important task facing humans in their pre-earthly state was to choose their Ìyá, their fate on earth, and their personal God who will act as an intermediary between them and other Gods. There was an understanding of the enduring nature of relational ties and the interconnectedness of fate or destiny, particularly between an Ìyá and their children (Oyěwùmí, 2016: 59–61). In this context, one's desire was not orientated in search of a stable identity as an individual with a continuous gendered core self. Oyĕwùmí demonstrates that it is not that there was no sense of ‘the self’, or that subjectivity was imagined to be free from division (as Rose feared), but rather that degrees of separateness arose in relation to others in context-specific ways, and that there was a cultural foregrounding of the enduring nature of the relational ties, particularly between the Creator, Ìyá and womb siblings (those who have the same Ìyá).
My point here is not to idealise a nongendered, seniority-based system of dynamic hierarchy and the maps of psychic relationality it may have generated. The relational, non-gendered world-sense which Oyěwùmí outlines is not meaningfully accessible to those of us for whom subjectivity is primarily structured in line with racialised heteronormative body-reasoning. Pretending or hoping otherwise is to deny the violence of the modern/colonial gender system (Lugones, 2007: 190). 6 The socio-symbolic order which Ettinger's elaboration of matrixial theory draws from, and arguably leads to, has little to nothing in common in with the non-gendered, seniority-based socio-symbolic order which Oyěwùmí outlines. In psychoanalytic theory, itself built on Judaeo-Christian understandings of God, the idea that the spiritual, and therefore the strongest, ties are between the Creator, Ìyá, the child and then outward to the child's ‘womb siblings’ is entirely absent. Ettinger's matrixial theory has a completely different starting point, it has emerged from a different socio-symbolic order and it does not elaborate a form of matripotency, which Oyěwùmí describes as the spiritual and material powers derived from Ìyá's role as comaker, with the Creator, of humans (2016: 58–59).
Yet I posit that Oyĕwùmí's work demonstrates the cultural particularity of the Phallus as the primary symbolic filter to inscribe human experiences in social and political life. I cannot speak to the nuances of seniority as a primary societal organising principle, but the absence of concepts of duality in the ontology, the psychic investment in relational ties it generates and – importantly – the relative comfort levels with an ever-shifting status position it requires are all notable features – none of which are generated by the Phallus as the primary symbolic filter. In working with two levels of subjectivity (and possibly more yet to be theorised) – themselves inscribed in social and political life through particular symbolic filters – matrixial theory remains firmly embedded in, and necessarily limited by, the cultural context from which it emerges. That the Phallus, Matrix and possibly other primary symbolic filters in psychoanalytic theory are based on corporeality and accorded different levels of importance is arguably an outcome of the cultural embeddedness of body-reasoning as a primary societal organising principle. It sets us the challenge of working for social transformation, given the embeddedness of a strong orientation towards constant individuation, alongside a persistent cultural disavowal and fear of processes of co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity.
Historicisation and social transformation
At the core of what Oyĕwùmí argues for – historicisation, critical interrogation and transcendence of the terms of the nuclear family – and that which Butler argues for – divesting paternal law of its organising power and engaging in translative projects – are acts of relativisation, ceding ground and cultural translation, such that we enable liveable lives for all. Oyĕwùmí and Butler hold in common a focus on those who have been written out of histories and whose lives and desires are rendered illegible by dominant norms and practices. When Laclau argues that articulatory logics are at the core of social transformation, Butler, drawing on Spivak's (1988) argument in Can the Subaltern Speak?, asks what of those who are not considered to be subjects, whose claims are not heard, much less potentially universalised (2000a: 36–37; 2000b: 178). Although matrixial theory does not necessarily orientate us towards acts of cultural translation, I propose that it does provide us with the language to better account for how body-reasoning structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes. To recall, at the phallic level, the ‘feminine’ as the flip side of the masculine/feminine binary refers to that which is unknowable and unsymbolisable. It is the prioritisation of defining and placing masculine/feminine as known/unknown, self/other and universal/particular, within hierarchies orientated towards fixity that Oyĕwùmí highlights as fundamental to Western culture. At the matrixial level of subjectivity, the concept of the femininem (Pollock, 2022: 448) structures a transubjective level of partial subjects in co-emergence. Both the masculine/feminine binary and femininem refer to general subjectivising logics, based on corporeality, to which we all have access. Pollock argues, and I largely agree, that since our cultural practices are so structured by a heteronormative and phallocentric socio-linguistic order, ‘we must for a while at least, pose the question of a feminine sexual difference conceptualized and represented beyond the phallic structuring’ (2003: 130). Yet I also wish to stress that ‘sexual difference’ is a culturally particular mechanism of organising means of connectedness and means of differentiation within Subjectivity.
Lacan's position that we can only know anything through an exhaustive conceptualisation of how language produces reality has relevance. Matrixial theory highlights that there is a dimension of transubjectivity operative, which cannot be accessed from the position of the knowing individuating ‘I’, where all subjective instances are partial-subjects in co-emergence within matrixial webs, and at which waves within a matrixial web are translated into ‘affective preconceptual knowledge, images and thoughts’ (Ettinger, 2006b: 221). Lacan does not specify this level of subjectivity or the forms of meaning-donation/revelation/production operative there. Indeed, if we stay at the phallic level of subjectivity, they are inaccessible to us and so his position is limiting. That said, we do need to acknowledge that those ‘matrixial’ psychic processes, modelled on the late prenatal stage of pregnancy, referencing experiences of asymmetrical psychic differentiation-in-jointness, only accessible through self-fragilisation and concerned with the working-through of non-cognitive knowledge, are subsequently organised, inscribed and subject to disavowal in social life through culturally particular concepts such as the Matrix and femininem.
The limits of symbolisation do shape political action. Not in the sense that human experience prior to entering the realm of language cannot contribute to subjectivity. Rather, in the sense that our understandings of social power are embedded within symbolisation. We have been orientated in the direction of an imagined ‘absent fullness’, based on the foregrounding of a set of psychic processes inscribed through the Phallus, and the repression and denial of other psychic processes and mechanisms of meaning donation/revelation/production – some of which Ettinger is trying to specify and inscribe via the Matrix as a symbolic filter. As symbolic filters, the Matrix, Phallus and possibly other symbolic filters yet to be theorised within psychoanalytic theory are each supplemental to the others. The Matrix and Phallus do not exist as a duality, they are not complementary, nor are they in opposition to one another. Yet the force of binaries in Western culture is such that the presumption of duality, complementarity and/or hierarchical dichotomy generated by the Phallus is very often replicated out, even if nominally guarded against. The temptation is to see the Matrix as ‘balancing out’ the Phallus and thereby leading us (yet again) to an ‘absent fullness’, however one imagines that (a caring society, peace and harmony, the idealisation of ‘woman’ etc). Whilst we do need a better understanding of the means of connectedness and means of differentiation operative within Subjectivity, our orientation cannot be towards ‘wholeness’ or the cessation of struggle. Our desire to belong in relation to others, our need for positioning, establishes social hierarchies. We can only tend towards enabling liveable lives for all by consistently accounting for the violence of body-reasoning as a primary societal organising principle, and aiming towards a lesser violence. This involves the relativisation of Western modes of knowledge production as part of translative practices.
We could gradually divest paternal law of power by relativising its role within the Symbolic, keeping its violences in sight, supplementing it and aiming towards a lesser violence. To note, social hierarchies, reciprocity, hostility and mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are features of any society (Oyĕwùmí, 1997; Mouffe, 2005). Presumably, dehumanisation is also possible within any society. However, dehumanisation is a central feature of societies wherein body-reasoning is the primary societal organising principle. Regardless of our individual positionings, we can all use processes such as cutting, splitting, projection and assimilation in service of disassociation and shoring up the borders of the individuating self. In one sense, these are everyday psychic processes through which we operate, particularly when stressed or threatened. In such situations, when phallic psychic processes are not supplemented, they can enable extreme harm and violence. Additionally, while we can all use them, culturally positioned ‘Others’ are on the receiving end of psychic processes that enable distancing and dehumanisation to a much a greater degree at individual, structural and cultural levels. 7
A core part of Ettinger's work is an analysis of the products and inheritance of fascisms whereby ‘lacking subjects’ seek to recover a sense of ‘wholeness’ or limitless jouissance by eliminating, once and for all, those who they construct as obstacles to their ‘fantasmatic utopia’ (Stavrakakis, 2007: 261). Such fantasies generate genocidal violence and ‘continuing horroristic destruction of conditions of human life’ (Pollock, 2013: 179). In psychoanalytic terms incredibly traumatic events, so overwhelming they cannot be cognised, are encrypted by survivors in order to enable the continuation of psychic life. The survivor has no access to this crypted event but it nonetheless haunts their relationships (Ettinger, 2006a: 164–166). To the degree that there is knowledge of this pain and suffering, it is ‘never-cognised’ or ‘non-cognitive’ knowledge. Ettinger proposes that traces of the pain later emerge at the matrixial transubjective level (if we have access to that 8 ) as traces, grains and in bits and pieces. It is not part of our own history as a separate subject, nor is it transmitted through intersubjective relations. It cannot be translated into language and worked-through at the phallic level of subjectivity because it was initially encrypted as ‘non-cognitive’ knowledge and circulates at the transubjective level. Being open to the matrixial level of subjectivity entails an awareness that ‘an individual might be unconsciously metramorphosing traces of the trauma of someone else, who belongs to the same matrixial web’, and that we all carry traces of the joy and trauma of others in past and present webs (Ettinger, 2011: 22–23). The inheritance of fascisms, at least in part generated by the cultural foregrounding of the Phallus in isolation, is that the world carries ‘enormous traumatic weight’ (Ettinger, 2006a: 148). It is this insight – that we repress, disavow and fear processes of psychic co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity, not only because we are culturally orientated in the direction of constant individuation but also because the ‘traumatic weight’ of never-cognised pain and suffering circulates at this level and is in need of being worked-through – that is particularly relevant for feminist social transformation. We can draw on matrixial theory without reifying it, acknowledging that conceptualising gender and its associated concepts as universal has also been a fantasy, and has itself generated annihilatory violence.
As María Lugones emphasises, the gender system's intersection with race has both a light side (men in the public sphere / women in the private sphere) and a dark side: The dark side of the gender system was and is thoroughly violent. We have begun to see the deep reductions of anamales, anafemales, and ‘third gender’ people from their ubiquitous participation in ritual, decision making, economics, their reduction to animality, to forced sex with white colonizers, to such deep labor exploitation that often people died working. (2007: 206)
The dark side involved the destruction of local epistemes that structured orientations within Subjectivity differently, the characterisation of colonised women of colour (or anafemales in Oyĕwùmí's (1997: xii) terms) as strong enough to do any labour; as perverted and/or sexually aggressive in order to justify widespread sexual assault by white men; and as fertile, to justify being a ‘wet nurse’ to white children and emotionally nurturing white slave owners (Collins, 2000: 82, cited in Lugones, 2007: 204). The violence of colonisation, the imposition of Western hierarchies and the double inferiorisation which anafemales and third genders suffered, with the collusion of some anamales, are all notable in the context of Ettinger's theorisation of how never-cognised pain is crypted and travels within Subjectivity.
Conclusion
In their exchange, whereas Laclau theorises social transformation through articulatory logics, Butler stresses the need for the work of cultural translation. Drawing on Ettinger's and Oyĕwùmí's work, I propose that practices of translation must include a rigorous accounting for our orientations and investments within Subjectivity. The violence of body-reasoning as a primary societal organising principle, and the violence of the ongoing denial, misinterpretation and/or marginalisation of alternative societal organising principles, relations of production, cosmologies and ways of knowing, remains inadequately recognised. Ongoing excavation of our histories is needed if we are to enact less violence. We can use concepts such as the Phallus, Matrix, masculine/feminine binary and femininem whilst owning, in the sense of continually accounting for, their cultural particularity with regard to our orientations, investments, fears and transformative practices.
