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May. 16th, 2011|07:08 pm |
klik, klik un lasu:
"[..] I have used this example in order to identify a language usage, a method of speaking, with a method of domination which is integral to capitalism and its ruling apparatus - more specifically its forms of patriarchal dominion. I do so in order to introduce a work which disrupts this language usage and the power structure which it presupposes. Mary Kelly's Post-Partum document is both an answer to and an exhamination of woman's silence within and aliantation from the symbolic order as it is constituted within a capitalist society.
The work, begun in 1973 with a birth of her child, is an extended documentation of the mother-child relationship. it covers first 6 years of child's development [..] The child's entry into the patriarchal order is experienced by the mother both as a loss and as re-enactment of her own initial negative entry into the language and culture. [..]
Lacan's theories, which form the principal structure element of the Post-Partum document are a re-woking of Freudian concepts within a linguistic paradigm. Language and the unconsciousness are treated not as seperated entities, but language is seen to function as a passageway, and the only one, to the unconscious, to that which has been repressed and which has the potential to disrupt the established symbolic order, what Lacan has called the "No" or the "Name of the Father". The "Name of The father" designates that which determines submission to the law and to any "conventional language". In French "nom" (name) and "non" (no) are homophonic words. Lacan has used this resamblance to underline the role of the father in the child's coming to language and the child's separation from the desired mother. In the Lacanian paradigm, this entry into language marks the passage into the symbolic order governed by the laws of language; it is the "Oedipal moment" which, if the child is female, is the moment of her 'negative' entry into language, the awareness "of not having the priviliged signifier of the culture" (M.K.).
This initial 'negative' entry into language and culture is reiterated in the mother-child relationship where for a brief period of time the mother, at least in the realm of the imaginary, exists outside of the power of the phallus. It is a period of 'reprieve' in which the mother and the child in the fullness of the dyad experience "the sweetness of the imaginary encapsulation which reduces the 'outside world' to absurdity. But there is also the inevitable moment of separation, reiterating a "lack" always already inscribed and impossible to efface. (M.K. Notes on Post-partum Document)"
Margarit Iversen. - Discourse #4, 1981. |
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