Revisiting Kusama, with help from Deleuze and Guattari, Mona Hatoum and Kate Craig

Mona Hatoum - Corps Etranger

So I’ve recently read the chapter “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” out of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus for a course – its something I’ve been meaning to read for ages, its come up time and time again in different contexts, and I was thrilled to finally sink my teeth into it. I’ve never oscillated more frequently between being excited/thrilled/confused/irritated by a piece of writing before, haha. It’s a weird smattering of feelings, plenty of which I don’t really have the energy to work through yet, but I did find some resonance throughout the chapter for some of the concerns I raised in my last substantial post on Yayoi Kusama’s Self Obliteration, and the questions it raised about the supposedly ‘utopian’ process of liquefying one’s body – and the subsequent anxieties, fears, or forms of phenomenological discomfort that this process could entail. A total loss of control isn’t necessarily a good thing, is it?

            Again, I should reiterate that I don’t believe that Kusama is naively attaching herself to these utopian claims of her “Self-Obliteration” – it strikes me that her work is far more complex than this. As Applin mentioned in her short book on the Infinity Mirror Room project, there’s a profound ambivalence to Kusama’s work that is quite interesting, a strange oscillation between these utopian ideals of the totally equalizing powers of free love and self-dissolution to form new collectivities, and the vaguely threatening experience of gazing off into the endless recesses of her Infinity Mirror Room while feeling potentially closed off, confined, and rendered claustrophobic in the name of the infinite and free. I think there’s something in the BwO chapter that can articulate this ambivalence in a productive way.

Kate Craig - A Delicate Issue

            I’m taking this Cultural Studies course at McGill with Professor Alanna Thain (who assigned the BwO chapter) and the one thing that struck me about her explanation of its significance in class was that it’s fundamentally a chapter about caution. Envisioning a BwO is about understanding the transmission of desire in a new way – of divorcing desire from its psychoanalytic conception as a ‘lack’ – and instead seeing the ways in which a body carries desire as something generative and productive in its own right, as creating a field of transmission across which one body can open up or connect to other bodies and spaces in the world (this is my loose interpretation!). Once systems of subjectification, identity-building, and language are taken away, all that’s left behind is pure desire, a pure need for relation with other creatures in the world, as I understand it: “The BwO is what remains when you take everything away. What you take away is precisely the phantasy, and significances and subjectifications as a whole” (151). Here’s one place where I’m finding it hard to swallow their theories completely – while I find it compelling to attempt to rearticulate desire, can we really find a way to remove ourselves of our significations and subjectivities? Is such a “pure state” possible, or even warranted? Shouldn’t identity and subjectivity be productive features to discussing the nature of desire? I find this idea somewhat nebulous and hard to believe.

            However, Deleuze and Guattari get around this by discussing caution, which was the point in the chapter that I found the most compelling. I’ve just begun reading their work in A Thousand Plateaus but it strikes me that they are quite adept at articulating ideas that don’t become overly deterministic, that remain open to multiplicity and complexity. This deliberate ambivalence could reflect the practice employed by Kusama – they both espouse this utopian vision of a BwO while recognizing its fundamental impossibility as a perfect endpoint to any single individual’s understanding of their own body – that you cannot fully lose yourself in this philosophy. Here’s a long quote:

You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to: and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. Mimic the strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistence, by wildly destratifying. (160)

I guess what remains, then, (and what I’m still working through) is to figure out how to use the BwO as a productive mode for understanding intersubjective relations (or relations between bodies) in a new way. I find it a really productive philosophy for thinking through the ways in which my body could relate to the kind of self-liquification espoused by Kusama, and it also helps to articulate the deliberately-elicited anxiety or discomfort felt when experiencing Corps Etranger by Mona Hatoum, or A Delicate Issue by Kate Craig. Both are video works that involve an extreme, highly intimate relationship between the artist’s body and a video camera. In Hatoum’s case, the installation makes use of footage from an arthroscopic camera that passes along Hatoum’s body and is inserted into her various orifices. Craig’s video also involves an extreme close-up camera, which travels across her flesh, yet without the additional penetrative function (which speaks to its own issues about bodily boundaries and the socially constructed vulnerabilities of the female body) and the medicalized context of Hatoum’s (better known, to be honest) project. However, both videos envelop the viewer into the image through magnified bodily sounds (heartbeats, breathing), and both use the extreme proximity of the camera eye to the body in order to complicate the distance required for ‘objectification’ or the creation of legibility. Mediating closeness and distance becomes fraught, and as a viewing subject before these videos, despite my distance from the screen, I still feel something like a phenomenological blurring between my body and the bodies of Craig and Hatoum. (In Hatoum’s case, this becomes even more pronounced, as the installation of Corps Etranger requires the video be projected onto the floor, which gives the impression that you could somehow ‘fall into’ these pulsating orifices).

Which such closeness, how are we implicated in relation to these (female) bodies being represented on screen? How does their supposed “liquification” or dissolution into long patches of indeterminate skin and tissue interpolate my body in relation to it? Or, to add to this series of difficult questions, Craig asks a series of her own throughout A Delicate Issue: “What is the dividing line between public and private?” “At what distance does the subject read?” “How close do I want you to be? How close do you want to be?”

It’s probably not great to end on a series of open-ended questions, hmm? Maybe Deleuze and Guattari would approve. Ultimately, I’m quite interested in this BwO concept and while I feel like I understand it’s basic premise, I’m still unresolved as to its productiveness and relevance to reconsidering relations between bodies and subjects (and ultimately, the visualization of relations between bodies is what this blog boils down to) – so it’s something I’d like to keep playing with as I continue. And, for my own sake (and given my academic stresses this semester) I’m going to attempt to come at this blog with a bit of a looser writing structure for the next few months. It’s been a bit of an exercise, trying to divorce my writing from the structural limits of academic organization, and to just allow myself to string together ideas in a more organic, less rigid way. It’s a nice breather, really – helps my writing style become more fluid (haha pun), and I get to force myself to play with new ideas in an environment with non-committally, and with less formal consequences (aka grading). Basically, this is a space where I get to rant and ramble freely, that’s really nice!!

installation shot and more details from Corps Etranger

Corps Etranger on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsci0WAd_Lk
A Delicate Issue on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixadKPhSUmk