Maternal Encounters

The Ethics of Interruption

Lisa Baraitser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415455008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134050710
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2009 Feminist & Women's Studies Association (UK & Ireland) Book Award!

Many women find mothering a shocking experience in terms of the extremity of feelings it provokes, and the profound changes it seems to prompt in identity, relationship and sense of self. However, although motherhood can catapult us into a state of internal disarray, it can also provide us with a unique chance to make ourselves anew. How then do we understand this radical potential for transformation within maternal experience? In Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser takes up this question through the analysis of a series of maternal anecdotes, charting key destabilizing moments in the life of just one mother, and using these to discuss many questions that have remained resistant to theoretical analysis – the possibility for a specific feminine-maternal subjectivity, relationality and reciprocity, ethics and otherness.

Working across contemporary philosophies of feminist ethics, as well as psychoanalysis and social theory, the maternal subject, in Baraitser's account, becomes an emblematic and enigmatic formation of a subjectivity 'called into being' through a relation to another she comes to name and claim as her child. As she navigates through the peculiarity of maternal experience, Baraitser takes us on a journey in which 'the mother' emerges in the most unlikely, precarious and unstable of places as a subject of alterity, transformation, interruption, heightened sentience, viscosity, encumberment and love.

This book presents a major new theory of maternal subjectivity, and an innovative and accessible way into our understanding of contemporary motherhood. As such, it will be of interest to students of family studies, gender studies, psychoanalysis, critical psychology and feminist philosophy as well as counselling and psychotherapy.

1
MATERNAL ENCOUNTERS

A maternal anecdote

In 1980, the performance artist Bobby Baker had the first of her two children. In 1988 she created a performance entitled Drawing on a Mother’s Experience, telling the story of those eight years. For the show she used cold roast beef, skimmed milk, frozen fish pie, Guinness, sheep’s milk yoghurt, tinned blackberries, tomato chutney, sponge fingers, tea, black treacle, eggs, caster sugar, brandy and strong white flour. Her ‘canvas’ consisted of a large white cotton double sheet, which she spread on the floor. Coming from a background in visual art, Bobby enacted a kind of domestic parody of action painting, only using food instead of paint. The performance took the form of a series of anecdotes about mothering, each featuring one of her chosen food products, punctuated by moments in which she spilt, threw, poured, splashed, squashed and ground her ingredients into the sheet. At the end she poured flour over the whole painting, then wrapped herself in it, took a long look at the audience, and left the stage. Of the original performance, Griselda Pollock wrote:

Bobby creates delicate and calculated patterns on her canvas and then at key moments rubs our noses in it. She steps on the blackcurrants, grinding them into the sheet; she lies on the canvas, provoking a powerful image of immobilisation in the midst of sanity-threatening chaos…. With superb and subtle management of emotions, Baker takes us back through the years she did not make art, calling for recognition of those shared lunacies which only humour can allow us to recall, then momentarily halting the laughter with poignant moments of deep pathos.

(Pollock 1990)

Rather than an exuberant reclamation of feminine experience or a glorification of the joys and pains of motherhood, Bobby’s piece was presented as a form of research. She was dressed in a scientist’s white coat and her action-painting-in-the-making was performed as a semi-illustrated lecture. She struck a perfunctory tone as she recounted her pregnancy cravings, birth story, post-birth blues, her return to live with her mother, then working full-time while trying to put family meals on the table. The ‘subject’ of her research however was not motherhood as such, but her own elusive and unstable psychic state during those long years. Literally ‘drawing on experience’, she attempted to retrace, grasp and illuminate certain subjective moments that baffled her. These moments, though marked by both laughter and poignancy, also appeared to have aimed at capturing a pervasive traumatic quality evading representation. So, both figuratively and metaphorically, her ‘drawing on’ was a ‘drawing over’, as she attempted and failed to catch the tail of what really happened. The impossibility of representation, graphically displayed as she poured flour over the entire piece, gestured towards the real of maternal experience. Perhaps we might say that the process of attempting, and perhaps inevitably failing to catch hold of the mercurial mental and emotional currents prompted by maternity is one way to understand what we may call maternal subjectivity.

Of course I missed the original performance. In 1988 I was twenty-one. Passionately interested in the performance-art scene but arrogant to a point of perfection, I could not get excited about a performance about mothering. I have a dim memory of knowing it was on, and posturing about how motherhood was already ‘overdone’. After all, I had only just emerged from a childhood peppered with explosions of feminist-inspired maternal rage about just such sanity-threatening chaos. The impossibly paradoxical experience of motherhood and mothering,¹ both liberation and trap, exquisite pleasure and appalling drudgery, were the backdrop to my evolving womanhood. One of the stories that I absorbed from my own experience of being mothered was that mothering was at once deeply fulfilling, and precisely that which drove women away from the domestic scene into an active engagement with the world. I wanted to see performances by brilliant, powerful, sexy, imaginative, worldly women, not half-insane mothers close to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Bobby Baker went on to perform Drawing on a Mother’s Experience all over the world. It has been part of her repertoire for two decades, apparently as relevant today as it was then. While writing this book I managed to get hold of a recording of a recent performance of the piece, hoping to find something edgy, risky and raw emerging out of Bobby’s continued investigation into the maternal. However, it turned out to be like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. There was Bobby, now middle-aged, with a performance persona that seemed to deliberately court the ordinary, middle England, verging on blue stocking, teetering around in her slightly unsensible shoes, tipping flour, eggs and brandy over her sheet. The performance was tight, but seemed somehow too slick, too sewn up. She already knew in advance the effect she was aiming at, thereby covering herself over, leaving nothing at stake. I could only imagine that the original piece held something more enigmatic, disturbing, and exciting. Through the juxtaposition of the mundane tales of mothering and the violent expulsions of food-stuffs, to the white blankness of the flour obliterating her painting, I had imagined that this elusive maternal subject, the ‘real subject’ of her performance, could have been momentarily glimpsed. In its current incarnation, this was a show I could safely take my mother-in-law to (rather than my still angry feminist mother); one that would make her chortle with gentle recognition at those lost years and the confusion, chaos and mess.

This book is an attempt to glimpse what I long to have been present in Bobby’s original performance. The retroactive process of imagining something that perhaps never happened is necessarily performed, and is in fact made possible, through the haze that is my own experience and fantasy of motherhood, mothering and the maternal. It cannot, in other words, be distinguished from my own longing. In my imaginings, Bobby’s performance does not just rely on humour and poignancy as a way of marking the maternal. Neither is it pervaded purely by a traumatic quality, though I imagine this to have been present. My hope is that something truly generative, surprising and unexpected may have broken through, furnishing the maternal with another sensibility; precisely a sensibility that I cannot anticipate. I am drawn, in other words, to the notion that motherhood, perhaps through the kinds of particular and peculiar extremities that Bobby charts, opened new possibilities for her; new ways of experiencing herself, new ‘raw materials’ with which to work, or perhaps, that it even ‘made her anew’.

In this book I seek to articulate the potential within maternity for new experiences, sensations, moods, sensibilities, intensities, kinetics, tinglings, janglings, emotions, thoughts, perceptions; new coagulations of embodied and relational modes. I try to pay attention to the ways that motherhood may allow the generation of new ‘raw materials’ for experiencing ourselves, others and our worlds. In doing so, I hope to map a series of maternal constellations that we may retroactively be able to gather up into something we could name as having been a maternal subject, resisting where I can my own impulses to try to build new models for subjectivity that solidify and reify experience, processes to which ‘the mother’, as metaphor, figure or trope, is particularly vulnerable. I take as my starting point some rather mundane and usually overlooked moments of maternal experience that appear to trip us up, or throw us ‘off the subject’. It is to moments of undoing, I argue, that we need to apply ourselves theoretically, if we are to try to glimpse something we may term maternal subjectivity. These moments are presented anecdotally—I describe unexceptional incidents in which a mother crosses a street, bursts into tears without knowing why, goes to a school play, dislikes using her child’s name, loses the vital transitional object, watches her child having a tantrum, does not know how to put a nappy on, fumbles with Lego^®, waits while her stammering child tries to speak, and navigates the urban cityscape with her buggie and babies and bottles and bags. The overtones of these experiences are those of embarrassment, discomfort, exhaustion, shock, surprise, blankness, uncanniness, bewilderment, oddness, terror, frustration and absurdity. Yet, by thinking through these experiences, something we might call maternal subjectivity may emerge—characterized not by fluidity, hybridity or flow, but by physical viscosity, heightened sentience, a renewed awareness of objects, of one’s own emotional range and emotional points of weakness, an engagement with the built environment and street furniture, a renewed temporal awareness where the present is elongated and the past and future no longer felt to be so tangible, and a renewed sense of oneself as a speaking subject. The mother emerges from these investigations not only as a subject of interruption, encumbered, viscous, impeded, but also re-sensitized to sound, smell, emotions, sentient awareness, language, love.

Maternal ethics

What is this longing for motherhood to hold the generative, surprising and unexpected? Why not allow it to be a diverse yet patterned experience, both individually located and yet differing historically, culturally and particularly in relation to class, ‘race’ and ethnicity, constantly in play with dominant and normative discourses, traditionally those of patriarchy, and more recently those of our post/neo-colonial culture? Why not let motherhood alone as a particular or new experience, and join with those who now speak generically of ‘parenting’, or even abandon our studies of motherhood in preference for the new turn to fatherhood? Why allude to a potentially transhistorical, transcultural notion like ethics in relation to one of the most locally produced, specifically experienced, and simultaneously heavily regulated practices of all?²

In part, my longing for, and wish to articulate the generative, surprising and unexpected in relation to the maternal is a deliberate strategy at both a theoretical and personal level. I understand it as a kind of ethics in itself, an aspirant reaching out towards the good (the difference, that is, between what is and what ought to be). The mother’ after all, is the impossible subject, par excellence. Caught in an ever widening gap between her idealization and denigration in contemporary culture, and her indeterminate position as part object, part subject within the Western philosophical tradition,³ the mother has always been left hopelessly uncertain, with all the death-like and dreadful connotations that the abject possesses. In some senses she is everywhere, our culture saturated with her image in its varied guises, and yet theoretically she remains a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her. Perhaps this is unsurprising given that we all, as infants, may have needed to conjure up an ever-present fantasy mother whom we are told must find just the right balance of presence without impingement (Winnicott 1963:86), and who needs therefore to remain partly in the shadows, and then gradually but appropriately ‘fail’ (Winnicott 1963:87), and finally sort of… fade away. As the psychoanalyst Erna Furman put it, motherhood is the lifelong process of ‘being there to be left’ (Furman 1982:15), one, in her view, that is the hardest and most psychologically threatening to women who mother, one that never ends, that is repeated with each child and constantly stirs up early infantile experiences of separation from our own mothers. While feminist psychoanalytic thinkers have concerned themselves with articulating how the twin poles of idealization and a defensive scorn and denigration of the maternal-feminine covers over a deep-seated fear of a powerful, envied and terrifying mother on whom we were all once dependent, there has been a real struggle to rescue the maternal subject from she who is purely ‘there to be left’.⁴ However, just as maternal subjectivity is on the cusp of being articulated within the psychoanalytic literature, for instance, the mother appears to slip back into some manifestation of her traditional object-position as container, mirror, receptacle for intolerable feelings, a body with bits attached, or with supposedly vital bits missing, an object to be repudiated, hated or feared, the one who bears destruction and abandonment and still remains intact, more recently an effective and reliable cortisol manager,⁵ but ultimately she who must to some degree be left, or more forcefully abjected or killed off, in order that ‘the subject’ (so often the child in psychoanalysis, gathered up retroactively by the child-now-adult through the process of analysis) can emerge unscathed. Due to her necessary function in the developing world of the infant, and due perhaps to our continued needs for our mothers to remain simultaneously present and yet to disappear, maternal subjectivity persists as ontologically puzzling, both necessary and suspect. Jacqueline Rose (1996:421), commenting on Kristeva’s famous naming of the maternal as ‘that ambivalent principle that…stems from an identity catastrophe that causes the proper Name to topple over into the unnameable’ (Kristeva 1977:161–162), describes the catastrophe as the simple fact that there is an unconscious, that is, there is a limit to knowledge, and that the name that we give this limit is the mother. The question that then follows is ‘what does thinking about mothers do to thinking?’ (Rose 1996:413). To think about mothers is to think about the vanishing point of thinking, to do violence then to what remains resistant to knowledge, to Christopher Bollas’ ‘unthought known’ (Bollas 1987). No wonder we may not really want to know about her, not want to tease out what kind of ‘she’ is ‘there to be left’, or who has the capacity to materially produce others, or who somehow continued to love us despite our destructive attacks. My contention is that despite the vast and expanding research field on maternal practice, maternal relations, maternal embodiment and maternal representation, on the new technologies of birth and reproduction and their implications for women, and on the currently rapid rate of change that family structures and parenting patterns are undergoing, the maternal remains haunted by her link with the impossibility of knowing, and hence remains somewhat unspeakable.

In a similar but more forceful vein, Kristeva (1987a) suggests that the simultaneous presence and absence of the mother within the symbolic, thought broadly as the realm of signification, arises from our inabilities to commit a necessary ‘matricide’. In Black Sun, she writes:

Melancholy persons are foreigners in their maternal tongue. They have lost meaning—the value—of their mother tongue for want of losing the mother. The dead language they speak…conceals a ‘Thing’ buried alive. The latter will not be translated in order that it not be betrayed.

(Kristeva 1987a:53)

Instead of being able to accept the loss of the mother which would entail bearing matricidal guilt in order to achieve autonomy, the melancholic negates maternal loss, cannot murder the mother, and instead buries the maternal Thing alive within the symbolic. This unrepresentable Thing is at once lost and present in that the loss is foreclosed but not mourned or worked through in such a way as to render the mother symbolizable. She is therefore preserved in her absence and takes up a position in the symbolic only as an incarnation of the Real in the place of the Other. This gives rise to the classic characterization of the mother as the unthematizable, unrepresentable and unrecoverable presence that haunts each subject. And we can perhaps see some of this simultaneous preservation of the lost maternal thing in the way that those of us who write about maternal subjectivity appear to mourn the disappearance of the mother theoretically without seeming to be able to do anything to recover her. We are perhaps psychologically invested in maintaining her as lost for fear of having to murder her, mourn her, and move on. In addition, Paes de Barros (2004) writes:

The reality of the maternal body—its biological contingencies, its vast capacity for radical change, its evident sexuality and utility—make it truly Lacan and Zizek’s ‘Symptom.’ That maternal body harbors the inexpressible Real.

(Paes de Barros 2004:90)

It makes some sense, then, that our dealings with the maternal may attempt to keep her at bay by rendering her as either a function or object in the developing inner world of the child, a metaphorical figure used to signify particular representational modes, or an individual who engages in a set of socially controlled practices and ideologically driven fluxes of power, thereby leaving her struggling to consolidate anything that may be thought of as agency, desire or choice.

Escaping abjection

To escape the tendency for abjection to cling to the maternal we may need to deliberately approach maternal subjectivity from a position that engages with the generative, surprising and unexpected, a strategic valorization of what is excessive (but not monstrous) in maternal experience in order to counteract a discourse so mired in loss, murder and melancholia. Kristeva’s position seems to destroy the potential for maternal subjectivity at the point that it appears to rescue mothers from their silence. All that may be left to us is a strenuous ‘leap’ of the imagination. This is akin to the excessive strategy found within Irigaray’s project that seeks to run with, flaunt perhaps, feminine alterity as a way to challenge and expand both the masculine symbolic and the masculine imaginary from within. As I argue later, Irigaray’s fusion of the feminine and the maternal leads to some difficulties with holding onto the specificity of maternal subjectivity, but the sensibility of this current work is nevertheless indebted to her radical imagination. My longing, then, for Bobby Baker’s performance to have marked the maternal with the unexpected, surprising and generative is in part an ethical commitment to rethinking the maternal as a potentially life-changing event brought about by a certain response to an other whom we come to name as our child; a way to counteract the binary options—melancholia or murder.

This deliberate valorization of the generative potential of maternity may appear to be a rather alarming aim; a reactive or cheerful attempt to celebrate motherhood despite the profound psychological, emotional, relational, and financial crises (to name but a few) that it so clearly provokes in so many of our lives, a return perhaps to the rather jubilant maternalist sensibilities of some feminist writers of previous generations.⁶ However, my aim is certainly not to write an account of the joys of motherhood. Nor do I advocate elevating the maternal as a specifically feminine bodily or sociosexual experience, the ultimate sign of sexual difference. Nor am I attempting to chart in any global sense the ways motherhood changes our lives—though I would not deny that it does so. Instead my aims are deliberately more myopic. If we shift from a female subject position to encompass a maternal one when we have a child (be that an adoptive, birth, foster, community or surrogate child, or any other relationship in which one comes to name another as one’s child), then we must surely contend with the notion that motherhood produces something new. The questions that concern me are about how we might theorize this newness as a way to claim back something for the maternal that escapes the melancholia-murder binary. Does thinking in terms of changes in internal object-relations, self-image, self-representation, identifications, or social and cultural practices and locations suffice? Or are there other ways in which we could think about these changes, ways that have something more to do with the nature of the encounter between a mother and the one she names and relates to as her child?

Toni Morrison once wrote:

There was something so valuable about what happened when one became a mother. For me it was the most liberating thing that ever happened…. Liberating because the demands that children make are not the demands of a normal ‘other’. The children’s demands on me were things that nobody else ever asked me to do. To be a good manager. To have a sense of humour. To deliver something that somebody else could use…. Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that.

(Moyers and Tucher 1990:60, quoted in Bassin et al. 1994:2)

Morrison’s point is that the ‘other’ previous to motherhood had interpolated her as a certain kind of person (sensual, attractive, intelligent). The child demands something else, asks different kinds of questions, draws a different kind of ‘her’ out of her. Though I would want to problematize the notion that motherhood strips us down to ‘who we really are’, Morrison’s reflections are well taken. In part, this book seeks to instigate a dialogue, or at least manage an uneasy tension, between a notion of subjectivity that comes into being through our relation of obligation to an inassimilable otherness in the figure of the child, and a psychoanalytic and feminist tradition that has worked assiduously to flesh out mothers as desiring, fantasizing, remembering, culturally imbued, sexual, agentive subjects in their own right.

Maternal encounters, philosophical perspectives

I begin by drawing on Levinas (1947a, 1961, 1974) in seeking to understand subjectivity as that which emerges out of an encounter with an inassimilable otherness, which I explore in the figure of the child. Here the subject emerges at the point it responds to the Other that it cannot colonize, and ultimately cannot know. To reverse the link between the maternal and the vanishing point of knowledge, I argue that one formulation of the maternal is as an emblematic and enigmatic formation of this subjectivity ‘called into being’ through the relation to the child as ‘other’. I contend that this interrupting, tantruming, crying, demanding, questio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Maternal encounters
• 2 Maternal alterity: mum’s the word
• 3 Maternal transformations: oi mother, keep ye’ hair on!
• 4 Maternal interruptions: I, yi, yi yi, yi, I like you very much, Si, si, si, si, si, I think you’re grand
• 5 Maternal love: on mother love and unexpected weeping
• 6 Maternal stuff: maternity and the encumbered body
• 7 Intentions, inconsistencies, inconclusions
• Notes
• References