Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Sticky Stuff / Simone Roberts

PROLOGUE: Here, several closely related terms in Irigaray's ethics get explored in relation to each other. In addition to a continuing discussion of the interval, we now connect with the terms mucous, place, and envelope. Briefly, mucous is a physical correlate for the interval. Literally, the mucous is the various liquids of the body, but for Irigaray, specifically the sexual liquids. They serve physically to facilitate sexual union, the 'communication' of sperm and egg, as well as the loving act itself. Metaphorically, mucous is also the interval, and its purpose is not only to allow abstract and physical communication, but to protect the envelopes of each subject. The envelope can be though of as a body's skin, the layer of the body that separates us from the external world, but also as the "skin" of each person's or gender's identity and individuality. Now, the hard paradoxical work comes in. Irigaray treats the body as body, but also symbolically as a manifestation of abstract concepts. The skin of the human body is continuous from outside to inside. In a loose way, the skin of our faces continues to become the lining of our mouths and throats; and also to become the walls of the vagina, the lining of the urethra. The outside and in the inside are related, not the same, but related. In this logic, location and place become indeterminate. The envelope (skin) is not perfect and impenetrable, but really quite permeable. Our human vulnerability to each other is related to this permeability. Because the envelope is imperfect, and the exact "territory" of the self or subject is always in question, the mucous and the interval are spaces and facilitators of exchange that have to be respected in order for two subjects or selves to really exist culturally or personally. Irigaray's emphasis is on the feminine side of the gender dyad here because historically the Subject and its culture have been constructed by and in the image of men and their experience of their bodies. Not surprisingly, at this point, the poet is a subject who both understands and acts according to respect for difference.

<24> The interval between subject-selves and other-subjects (or objects) is complex. It reconceptualizes both space and time in what Irigaray has called "a double loop." Thus far I have used the word "interval" in a simple fashion, generally to mean a space between two poles of a pair, or the space of exchange and wonder. The interval also resides in "the mucous" which, being bodily, does not carry the sense of great spaces; but like the interval is a sign for exchange, respect of distance and difference even at the closest range, and for the integrity of subject-selves (though most obviously of women as subject-selves). The mucous is Irigaray's carnal and corporeal symbol of the sensible transcendental, the interval. The body is the seat of the self, and so of the divine.

<25> Place, as Irigaray explicates from Plato, is very much like a container, an envelope. It must move with its contents from one place (position) to another, must expand and contract to fit its contents, and must not be identical with its contents:

When separated from place, the thing feels an attraction to place as a condition of existence . . . . I shall affirm that the masculine is attracted to the maternal-feminine as place [womb, first home]. But what place does the masculine offer to attract the feminine? His soul? His relation to the divine? . . . For the masculine has to constitute itself as a vessel to receive and welcome. And the masculine's morphology, existence, and essence do not really fit it for such an architecture of place . . . If any meeting is to be possible between man and woman, each must be a place, appropriate to and for the other, and toward which he or she may move. (An Ethics 39-40)

Woman is in part already a place, ontologically, due to her morphology, for the child, and the penis. The womb is literally an un-closed container. Her vagina and womb, her yoni, are also (among other things) a place for man, or his lingam, but how is it that woman can be a place for herself, man a place for her as well as himself (which he is assumed to already be), and how can they relate (43)?

<26> On the literal level, one's skin marks one's place and envelope; but, woman's skin, more obviously or ontologically than man's, continues inside her to form the womb which does not close her off. Men's bodies are no more closed off than women's, but the openness of men's bodies is less "essential," because less obvious, to their subjectivity than women's. The imaginary is complex in this way: visibly, women are less closed, which masculinist thought and culture has taken as a sign of incompletion. For the masculine, woman is not closed off like a category, but that analogy fails because men also are not closed off in their bodies -- though in their case, it is easier to repress or deny this fact. The imaginary's relationship to the body is direct, but troubled by the values assigned to bodies in the symbolic, while both aspects of the subject shape its experience. Woman also has containers inside containers: she is the outside of the womb, which is the outside of the placenta and mucous membranes that create a place for the child, which is inside of those as well as inside its own skin, all of which is more or less a continuous part of the woman's skin until the placenta breaks and the umbilical cord is cut. Place is a particular problem, symbolically, for women because our "porousness" has us interpreted, in the masculine symbolic, as a place and conduit for men's progeny. We are left with the question of how to become a place for ourselves as well.

<27> Place has a simultaneously discursive and subjective meaning for Irigaray:

Unless each of us returns to his or her place to find his or her cause again, and then returns toward the other place, the place of the other. Which would mean that, at each phase, there were two places interdetermining each other, fitted one in the other. Two motors of place? Two causes of place? And their coming together. Two pulses and their transformations. Of one, of the other, and their interdeterminations. At least two. . . .

If so, place would mold itself from the one to the other, from the inside to the outside, from the outside to the inside. Place would twist and turn on itself. By passing through the other? Between past and future, endlessly? (An Ethics 40-1)

For place to mold itself in this way, it must be thought in terms of the shape of the womb, the maternal-feminine: the paradox of place is that it is a container, and a gap, and contains other containers. In place there are places and intervals between them. Place can turn on itself in a chiasmus or double loop by "passing through the other" and between past and future. In this way man can make himself a place for woman. He can become a welcoming, not just a pursuing, a different kind of venture for him. He must experience and balance in himself the feminine residing in him, as she must the masculine in her. She can become a grounding for herself, not just a ground for him. A different kind of venture for her. As in Tantra, the effort would be to preserve and perfect one's sexed expression of the divine and natural, but also to balance with one's other-subject who is ontologically over there and symbolically within. The movement "to his or her place to find his or her cause again" is a retreat from the other-subject to the self, to maintain one's own integrity or for-self, in order to be able to move toward and through the other-subject again. Or, to make room for the divine. Place and the envelope, then, symbolize not only the physical integrity of the body, but alsothe subjective integrity of the self. Subject-selves have an ethical obligation not only to allow the other-subject her or his personal integrity and difference, but also to maintain, protect, and rejuvenate his or her own. Their "interdetermination" is nothing like appropriation for one or other-subject's purposes, nor like a surgical invasion, but is a negotiation, a mutual limiting and opening, a way of listening:

The interval approaches zero when skins come into contact. It goes beyond zero when a passage occurs to the mucous. Or a transgression of touch through the skin. Given that the problem of desire is to suppress the interval without suppressing the other. Since desire can eat up place, either by regressing into the other on the intrauterine model or annihilating the existence of the other in one way or another. If desire is to subsist, a double place is necessary, a double envelope. (48)

The interval, like angels, expresses the need for separation, for integrity. Understanding intimacy is impossible without the interval and place, as action becomes one-sided: I am either touching or touched instead of both. Touch is transgression, contact happens on the skin, and the effect goes all the way in. The interval also figures the between into which love or the divine may be invited, or offered. "The dissociation," Irigaray writes, "of love and desire would" in the case of the interval's maintenance, "have little meaning" (50-1). Desire would lose its sense of "take" or "use" for oneself, and love would lose its sense of passivity and imbalance. Desire in the interval would not be desire from lack, or a desire to appropriate, assimilate, shape one's other-subject into a place for oneself. This negative desire, which springs from our correct sense of being alone and vulnerable in the world, would need to be balanced by letting the other-subject be. Such a desire would spring more from wonder. Desire from lack keeps accounts, wants to be sure of getting its share. Desire from wonder has no need for these lists and tallies. In an ethics of sexual difference, the obligation to be generous with each other is profound and primary. To participate, one must realize that there is world enough. Eros is the child of Lack, and of Plenty. Patriarchy forgets the Plenty of Eros's genealogy: in patriarchy all desire is thought as lack, want – not as generosity, extra.

<28> Beyond the closest range of the interval, the intimacy of skin and of touch, there is the (im)penetrable bodily stuff of the mucous. A liquid, mucous is a decidedly feminine metaphor for relation, as liquids give way to or surround, but cannot be severed by objects introduced to them. Like the interval, liquid in the instance of the mucous is potentially everywhere in her, around him, around her. What penetrates mucous is only mucous: mixtures of saliva, of the sperm of the ejaculate with vaginal mucous confound the delineation of a masculine or a feminine liquid. Mucous symbolizes both singular integrity protected by the slimmest interval, and the possibility of intimacy in the interval is demonstrated in the most physical way. It also symbolizes ethical relation at the sheer level and mode of carnality. Where the interval may not serve, perhaps mucous will serve as a guiding metaphor of protection of the two that allows mingling, facilitates touch as pleasure. Due to its close symbolic and ontic attachment to the body, mucous does not require theory to "think it through," but requires and signifies the actions of persons. Mucous facilitates the life actions of breathing, eating, eliminating waste, kissing, conceiving, gestation, and giving birth: "The mucous, in fact, is experienced from within, in the prenatal and loving night known by both sexes. But it is far more important in setting up the intimacy of bodily perception and its threshold for women" (109). As part of men and women, and as part of both of their experiences of safety, mucous represents the carnal chiasmus of Diotiman relations, but also the possibility of alliance between and differentiation among women such that they do not fuse in a crippling co-dependency, or cut each other off in favor of competition for men. Mucous represents the mode of relation in which wonder is possible because it represents "a quest for a way into or out of the self and the other, for a meeting with the other who is never situated or expected" (111).

<29> In addition to symbolizing the carnal mode of the between, the mucous symbolizes the possibility of a social and symbolic realm for women, and thus is closely tied to a "peaceful revolution" and to "female genealogies." In each pole of a Diotiman relation there must be a relation in verticality: of men with their fathers, their divine, their history or future, and of women with their mothers, their divine, their history or future. Whether men choose to accept it or not, and regardless of the troubled relations of individual men with their fathers, the social symbolic provides them with a genealogy, a connection and continuity with the past and the future through their fathers and sons, the stories of their sex's exploits and accomplishments in history. This is not so for women; though we are well along in the excavation, the shared cultural symbolic does not support our genealogies as it does men's. Women, in the social symbolic of men, exist in isolated confinement, either as The One, or as one of many, as infinite in herself or as instance of her gender for men. Women, in short, have no culturally supported ethical relation to themselves or each other, and therefore not with men either. As Irigaray explains in "Love of Same, Love of Other:"

. . . the world of women must successfully create an ethical order and establish the conditions necessary for women's action [16]. This world of female ethics would continue to have two vertical and horizontal dimensions:

-- daughter-to-mother, mother-to-daughter;

-- among women, or among "sisters."

In some way, the vertical dimension is always being taken away from female becoming. The bond between mother and daughter, daughter and mother, has to be broken ["has"] for the daughter to become a woman. Female genealogy has to be suppressed, on behalf of the son-Father relationship, and the idealization of the father and husband as patriarchs. But without a vertical dimension (since verticality has always been confused with erection), a loving ethical order cannot take place among women . . . . [Women] need both of these dimensions . . . if they are to act ethically, either to achieve an in-itself for-itself, a move out of the plant life into the animal, or to organize their "animal" territoriality into a "state" or people with its own symbols, laws and gods. (An Ethics 108-9)

Women need place, integrity, our own version of the same in history and to project into the future. This projection cannot be achieved through a handful of women in cultural isolation from women as a group, nor through a symbolic that does not correspond to our real, to our imaginary. Never in an ethics of sexual difference, never in Tantra, is the self-subject conceived as isolated from larger symbolic, social or economic systems because for women:

this horizon has still to be built, women cannot remain merely a horizontality, ground for the male erection [we cannot remain a for-him]. Women must construct a world in all its and their dimensions. A universe not merely for the other [men], as they have been asked to do in the past: as keepers of home and children, mother, in the name of the property, the laws, the rights, and obligation's of the[men's] state. (109)

Women cannot remain only being for-men and make a world for ourselves which would reflect us, sustain us -- a female and feminine Same. Such a world would have its own laws and customs, as various as men's, and would co-exist with men's world, would interact with it, balance and be balanced by it. Mucous represents revolution: fundamental changes at the level of society and culture, of the individual self, of male and female relations, of relations among women. In other words, these relations cannot be described only in the analytical discourse available to us in and preferred by masculinist culture. And, certainly cannot be abandoned there. There is a hint of intuition, of establishing a new world not only through words and legislation, but through practice and action.

Burn the Panopticon: Irigaray's Ethics, Difference, Poetics / Simone Roberts

1. Opening Gestures 2. Diotiman Relation 3. Symbolist Philosopher 4. Erotic Angels 5. Sensible Transendental 6. Sticky Stuff

7. Caress 8. What Are Subjects For? 9. Wonder-Lust Endnotes Bibliography Printer-friendly Version

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