text by Juin Shieh
Floating in the "Chora"—A Remark on Pregnancy
Abstract
The "chora" (maternal space) is full of ambiguity, chaos, the unspoken, feminine jouissance, and ecstasy. Plato used it to explain the indescribable mysterious feminine principle that was "like a womb." Julia Kristeva feels that this is a body space shared by a mother and her children, and considers it to be a threat to the masculine symbolic world, which promotes rationality, stability, coherence, and logic. Kristeva borrows the chora concept to explore the driving relationship between the speaking subject and the symbolic system. I use this driving force to record and describe the unexpected space I share with my daughter, Yuan-Hao Ting.
After finding out in February 2002 that another living being had entered my body, I gained a sense of mission concerning this mysterious space. I have tried to learn about the interacting energy between the emerging life and its mother's body in my explorations of the "chora," and record the mental and perceptual process in my art. I often pondered the world with my belly while pregnant, and wondered what kind of space it was. Was it the secluded realm that Dante constructed in his "Divine Comedy"? Was it a virtual cyberspace to which people flee when they become exhausted? What kind of pixy could enter there? Were not these questions the same as when, four hundred years ago, Michelangelo asked of a big piece of stone, "What life is waiting within for me to liberate it?" I asked these questions right up to the moment that the world within my belly began to make obvious movements. Sometimes it felt like gentle wiggling, sometimes like stubborn confrontation, and sometimes like teasing provocation. I tried to be tolerant as I listened, felt, and teased. I felt that I could sense a chaotic "divine music" responding to me.
Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan might have felt that this divine music was a yet unspoken linguistics symbol and form of meaning, and its phallus-transcending characteristics belonged to the feminine jouissance of the body. It was an unsaid state that had not yet entered a symbolic system, and was composed or led by the intersection of all kinds of impulses and desires. But to Kristeva, the sound is indeed a "yet unknown region of creative impulse." Her meaning is the womb, the mother's nurturing life, and space containing energy, in which only sound or rhythm can manifest this state of existence. From the point of view of Luce Irigaray, this feminine context can be examined using a "speculum," and after using it the deconstruction strategy of eliminating principle, God, transcendence, the phallus, and symbolic order highlights the subconscious level of the feminine "Other" and its fluid cognitive values. After transcending masculine thinking, the feminine deficient (absent) space will receive unprecedented respect and acceptance. To Hélène Cixous, this is an "écriture féminine" written in "white ink"; it cannot be interrupted, it is endless, and it doesn’t need grammar. Its freely flowing text makes people feel blissfully intoxicated.
The physical experience of this period, like a kind of feminine jouissance, led me to approach an issue that I had tried to explore in the past, but certainly had not truly realized: the possibility of transcending existent symbolic systems and texts. During the inexorable course of pregnancy, I often sat in still contemplation and probed the living environment, space, medium, sleekness, and action within me. I assembled these behaviors and thoughts intelligible to the real world into the alien sensation of being parasitized. For its part, the parasitic entity kept up an intimate connection and mutually bound relationship with the subject. This ambiguous, chaotic experience was communicated solely through the "divine music," which was the only way that it could approach a state of "clarity" in visual language. In the repetitive process of communication, many images and goals variously came out into the cognition to which they were originally attached, subverted the self, and again gave voice from this subversion. This often prompted me to linger in an "incomplete" free state.
My daughter Yuan-Hao Ting afterwards left the "chora" where she had dwelt for nine months. When I recall the tune that I composed during that period of time through thought, research, physical experience, and painting, I feel a profound sense of the uniqueness and value of women's characteristics. They can experience a distinctive creative space unique to women in this journey of the "chora."
Keywords:
cyberspace, chora (maternal space), écriture féminine, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, speculum, feminine jouissance
Inspecting the concept of Space: From the Soul to Virtual Reality
Plato used the "eyes of the soul" to see the world, while Aristotle asked, "Where are the eyes?" These two thinkers initiated the break between "idealism" and "materialism" that would continue through the ages. Materialism came to predominate under the rule of the Roman Empire, causing people to gradually lose their spiritual balance. Christianity afterwards opened up room for metaphysical thinking, and let people find redemption in the present world. Now people had the opportunity to achieve peace through suffering of the flesh regardless of their gender, class, race, or nationality. People longed for the world of peace and bliss that religion assumed and constructed, and they focused their attention on this abstract mental space, forgetting the hardships and frustrations of the world.
The 14th century writer Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote the Divine Comedy on the basis of Christian spiritual space. In this work Dante leads people from this world to the nether world. He divides his medieval soul space into three kingdoms; "Paradise," "Purgatory," and "Hell." Here the saints and martyrs enter directly into the starry realm of "Heaven," while evildoers go directly to the abyss of "Hell" that lies within the earth. For their part, ordinary Christians enter "Purgatory," which is a great mountain on the surface of the earth. Here they must undergo testing and teaching before making the decision whether to go to Heaven or Hell. While Heaven and Hell are boundless abysses in space and time, Purgatory possesses the notion of time, and is therefore a hell with time. While the Divine Comedy on preceded science fiction by seven or eight hundred years, it leaves the category of the earth and spans the moon, sun, planets, and space . It structures a chaotically playful world inducing daydreams in this abstract spiritual realm with didactic intent, and the free story plot relates the desires and fears of the collective subconscious. Dante thus provides the visual artist the information needed to portray this imaginary world.
Several centuries later, at the turning point between the second and third millennia, the eremitic fate of the people of the Middle Ages again slipped into our lives, this time in the form of "cyberspace." At the end of 20th century, in a time when our material and spiritual lives were inflated and running rampant, we faced the burning anxiety and suffering of modernization. With insufficient religious faith to redeem us, the good teachers of the New Age can only iron out some limited turbulent moods. The faddish overhaul and reinterpretation of old ethical teachings cannot restrain the wild vigor ruled by drugs. In this age, the space constructed by the Internet is a real-time manifestation provided an irresistible refuge. It can take in all kinds of dissatisfactions of modern people, comfort them in their distress, and let everyone attain custom-made consolation. Men and women, old and young, first world and third world, southern hemisphere and northern hemisphere, East and West, fat and thin, ugly and beautiful, and good and bad all can receive appropriate acceptance, comfort, and solace. The CD drive indicator gives a sense of accomplishment to the operator, and "surfing" in Windows gives instant thrill. One can seemingly grasp fate in one's own hand in the instantaneous experience of virtual reality. Who said, "God is dead"? "'I' am indeed God."
Just like the religious metaphysical thinking space towards which people fled in the Middle Ages, cyberspace is where modern people flee from the real world today. And like the Church, the computer bestows boundless energy and hope on Internet believers. I am neither a Christian nor a believer in the Internet, but as an objective bystander I can appreciate the similarities between history and today. Nietzsche's law of "eternal regression" proves that the prototypical drama of mankind's escape from the fatalism of the world is destined to replay itself.
When I inspect my own creative behavior in the light of century-spanning reflections –long-term explorations of soul space and routine excursions into dualistic thinking and reflection – I see that the metaphysical religious space of the middle ages and the virtual space of the Internet both provide a dialog space that is not unfamiliar and allows escape from the body and the real world. Being a creative hermit has not caused me to be confined by a fixation while rambling in the midst of this space. "Being a hermit is not an occupation, because occupations are the results of socialization. Being a hermit is a means of escaping society, and a hermit works hard to become a person who is an "individual" in reality as well as in name. A hermit wants to be himself. The common characteristic of hermits is their voluntary solitude, because solitude is the only way to sever muddled relationships with society and others, and complete one's self." "Runaway" seems to have become a sort of inertia that individuals display in their artistic behavior: Not only are they leaving the familiar and the status quo, they are also leaving the accepted rules of the game, and leaving mundane awareness. In my creative steps, I never doubted Nietzsche's words or the human fate of leaving the mundane world to become a hermit, because this is the active attitude of throwing oneself into the chora.
One's Own Space: Women Creating Space for Themselves
Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888 )wrote about four sisters with dramatically different personalities in her novel Little Women, and used them to portray the rise of women's consciousness in the early 19th century. Charlotte Brontë (1816~1855) pondered how women could uphold both social norms and their own values. In her novel Jane Eyre, Jane is unhappy with the clothing that Mr. Rochester has bought for her, because she looks like she is dressed up like a doll. This makes Jane feel that Mr. Rochester is like a Sudanese chieftain. Mr. Rochester wants her to be a slave dressed in jeweled splendor, but all Jane wants is just a tiny bit of independence. Virginia Woolf (1882~1941) expressed in her book A Room of One's Own that Bronte's "tiny bit of independence" is the first part of personal freedom that women can possess.
Woolf encouraged women to have their own creative space. This notion ran in the face of the contemporary norms of the 19th and early 20th centuries. At that time women's creative behavior all took place in an indoor environment, usually at a small desk in a corner of indoor public space. This was a woman's working space, and she certainly had no "room of her own." A woman's "field of vision" was a public realm shaped by the masculine environment, and her every move was carried out under the "care" of the patriarchal gaze. A bourgeois woman could, like Woolf, begin to choose how to construct her living environment, but in the final analysis this environment, in terms of everything from physical living space to the mind's thoughts, could not escape socialization, and an obvious class outlook lurked behind this state of affairs. In addition, Woolf felt that women need three things if they are to write: "a space of their own," "sufficient money," and "a neutral attitude." Here the issue of "neutrality" set in motion a debate about whether the world of writing has men and women. Should women should use masculine language in their work in order to be first-class citizens in patriarchal society, or should they draw on their own unique feminine linguistic culture to express their special experiences? From another point of view, since men's language was fully respected and developed, while women's language had not yet come into favor, and was in fact still in an embryonic state, it might be premature to talk about having a "neutral" writing approach. Unless it is just an excuse for not daring to adopt a more active and aggressive approach. Its intention seems to be camouflaging Woolf's "speaker" status and putting distance between her and her readers, and between subject and object.
By the 1960's, Simone de Beauvoir (1908~86) had gotten to the crux of the problem. She said, "Women are not born, but made." John Burger likewise felt that women "are both observers and observed… She must observe herself and her own behavior, because the impression she gives other people, especially the impression she gives men, will become the key by which other people judge her life's success." The simultaneously appearance of these two statements announced that women cannot avoid the fate of being molded. Because the existential meaning of women has become a fated outcome submerged by two thousand years of civilized society, even in these looser post-modern times, when men are willing to reassess the tradition of holding back women, the vast majority of women still unconsciously uphold men's authority.
A female friend of mine once complained that she and her husband had originally planned to eat a New Year's Eve dinner at her mother's house. However, after the eldest son had to go overseas on short notice, this woman's mother-in-law, who had planned to spend New Year's Eve at her eldest son's house, decided to spend the evening with the couple instead. So the woman's mother-in-law ended up going with them to her mother's house. Her mother was extremely unhappy, and not because there was an extra mouth to feed. The mother felt that her daughter had not properly discharged her responsibility as a daughter-in-law, which should have been to entertain the mother-in-law at her own house. The friend sighed and said, "Women are actually the most loyal supporters of the patriarchy!" Looking at my own situation, there was a period of several years when I tried to make lavish offerings on the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, like lots of chicken, duck, fish, and meat. When I eventually switched to simple offerings of fruit and cookie, although the men in my family supported me, the family matriarchs refused to give me their blessing. They felt that "we shouldn’t take lightly what our ancestors had entrusted us with." While you can say that these two examples are merely instances of local customs, they are the small screws that secure the whole social order. From this point of view, mothers are just the fathers' representatives and enforcers. Luce Irigaray points out that this is because our society lacks "female genealogy." This is to say that because women must abide by their fathers' laws and guard their patriarchal inheritance, they become the silent supporting bottom stratum of patriarchal society. This is because daughters have no symbolic contract assigned to them, a contract that would give them a symbolic position in society. Irigaray therefore feels that the establishment of "female genealogy" would let the invisible history buried under the patriarchy to reconstruct and reorganize the social order and civilization.
A number of tangible activities aiming to establish a "female genealogy" gradually occurred in the field of art since the 1970's. Judy Chicago's "Woman House" used feminist art courses to open the first chapter of female aesthetics, and she let the female students use the stage and props to create as they saw fit, without the concern of the male gaze. The students proceeded to seek out the prototypical female gender and its aesthetic basis. They took the private domain onto the stage and into public venues to let men learn to identify with women, and tried to bridge the chasm between men and women. Because men were accustomed to, and been encouraged to, control everything in their lives, and always tried to stay on top of the situation, the exhibition and performance approach of "Woman House" gave men an unfathomable shock and impact. They themselves became the "Other" when they saw the "Woman House" works and performances, and they began to learn how women had always been compelled to view male art exhibits and performances from the point of view of the "Other." When she directed "A Space of One's Own," Chicago actively upended the patriarchal equation that "female = passive."
Furthermore, we see another instance of working hard to use the creation of "one's own space" to establish a female genealogy in Chen Hsing-fen's documentary Daughter's Nest. Chen had tossed out the question, "What should we do with a birdcage when the bird is gone?" in her previous documentary Dream, and Daughter's Nest gives the understanding reply, "Take the cage apart and build a nest." The cage symbolizes civilized living space, while the nest signifies a temporary dwelling exposed to the Earth. The four personalities in "Daughter's Nest" are dramatically different, and their relationships shift between the roles of classmates, sisters, lovers, peers, and – in a still fluid relationship – daughters. After jointly renting a Japanese-era wooden stable without walls in a suburb of Tao-yen city, they begin building their own living space one brick and one tile at a time. Not only is their approach to building a space quite different from the ordinary functions of life, but also the sturdiness and durability of their space is repeatedly questioned by "professionals." They go through countless intense confrontations, disputes, and discussions during the building process, and they make many compromises, understand and forgive each other, and comfort each other. When ready to show the film, they prohibit men from entering the theater. In addition, the four women take turns attending when showing the film in a public place. Because the film was made cooperatively by four individuals, and was edited by Chen Hsing-fen, the four women seamlessly record unresolved issues of youth – love friendship, and family affection – without any thought of authorship.
Entering the technological age, "Cyberpunks" first started appeared in 1980's science fiction novels. "Cyberpunks" were originally mostly white male individuals, and the novels' high-tech cyberspace plots generally reflected white male values. But as female punks starting showing up, the girl punks employed fluid, ambiguous, hermaphroditic, and homosexual sexuality to overhaul the stubbornly-held equation "men = technology." The appearance of virtual cyberspace at the end of the 20th century provided women with a timely means of finding subjective channels: "Desire Space" and "CyberSex" allowed women to escape the restraints of everyday norms. Now women could enjoy absolute power whether online or off-line, enjoying or disengaged, with one partner or several partners, or with a partner of the same sex or different sex. While cybersex involved no physical contact, it generated the same feelings as real sex. Here the emphasis was not on the naked expression of primeval human desires, but rather on the way that the process of cybersex gave both genders a common right to be in control. Women now had liberated sex and safe sex without any need to worry about the consequences. Perhaps women could aim this process right at their selves, and thereby find a subjective positioning.
The journey of finding "one's own space" has structured the context of female aesthetics, and this context has diverse directionality. For her part, Judy Chicago employed the spirit of a "fighter" to enlarge her opportunities as a woman. Chicago shattered men's traditional dominance of the art community in an effort to get men to look squarely at women's expression from the standpoint of the Other. In contrast, Chen Hsing-fen abandoned the masculine rules of the game and built a woman's self world with the spirit of a "drifter." Unlike these two individuals' rejection of or antagonism to men, online "cybersex" uses the spirit of a "wizard" to shape ideal men, and allows a relationship between two people to be freely controlled by the person who wields the mouse. This contrasts with the radical activism of trans-Atlantic feminism, where British and American scholars concerned with women's blank page in the history of literature and art strove to discover neglected works and rehabilitate deliberately silenced female authors. Because French scholars have sought to review the whole of human history and establish "her history," they are frequently judged to be idealists. Chicago's "Woman House" used a strategy of filling in the blank pages, while Chen Hsing-fen worked hard to offer "her own history." The establishment of "one's own space" in the online world encompasses the ideas of both, and is the big winner of this round.
Let's look at our circumstances today: I'm using word processing software to manipulate words, and I was just on the Yahoo website searching for information. I was sending an e-mail to a friend in the moment before that. Before that, I was still drinking my morning coffee and reading about the US-Iraq War and political gossip in the online edition of the China Times. If I still have time after finishing writing, I may do some more Web surfing. From the moment I open my eyes in the morning, my life is inextricably bound up with the pace of the Internet. This pace of life is certainly not my attempt to "escape the bitterness of the real world." Like the young drifter who wander among cybercafes, of course would be impossible for me to recapture the "mirror image" form of art. Inseparable from everyday life, the online world is indeed a medium for building "one's own space." Roaming in this space has allowed me to think about women's (my own) existence through a sort of friction. It is just like a meeting and dialog between the religious spiritual world of the Middle Ages and the virtual world of the Internet, or my own groping in metaphysical and material space.
Quasi-Chora: Chora as Used by Men
Kristeva (1941~ ) discussed "chora." The original meaning of chora is "womb," and the "mysterious feminine principle" in Plato's concept, where it is used to explain the mysteriously confused characteristics of symbols. Chora is a "womblike" chaotic space that exists prior to forms that can take names. Kristeva feels that the chora is bodily space that belongs to the mother and is also shared. It resists open manifestation and remains experienced as desires. Because of this, it has also been termed "mother's jouissance." Chora can make its existence known only through sound or rhythm. It is the driving force impelling the subject to speak and create. It is at the interface between symbolic order and maternal attachment, and is also termed "divine music."
This is such a mysterious and ineffable space! When men, who are used to controlling and using resources, realize that their creative resources have been exhausted and "there is nothing new under the sun," they are eager to try out a "pseudo-chora." We will first experience with "chora" on behalf of men from the viewpoint of women: Li Li's Kangaroo Man is the story of a man becomes pregnant when his wife cannot get pregnant. This man, who is engaged in biological research, successfully uses an artificial womb to carry a child. Li Li's own husband is a researcher studying reproductive biology, and she heard him discussing the possibility of men being pregnant with his colleagues. After suffering the greatest loss in her life, she consulted with her husband and his colleagues, and made their reproductive research the subject of a novel. This novel can be called a form of self therapy employing the male body (and where the women decide). In the movie Junior , the man played by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger also becomes pregnant. Schwarzenegger plays the role of a scientist who uses his own body to test a drug that will cause men to become pregnant (so men still decide). When, in the movie, Schwarzenegger experiences what is usually only experienced by women, although it has a certain dramatic effect, in the final analysis it is just an excursion into the female experience from a man's point of view. When men experience "chora" led by women, after appreciating the value of pregnancy, they can grasp "chora" by themselves. This sheds light on how male artists habitually borrow women's experiences in modernism.
Furthermore, Li Ming-wei produced The First Man Pregnant during 2000. This cyberspace activity expressed an unprecedented human event: a pregnant man. The website portrayed the process of the author's pregnancy, including his taking female hormone under his doctor's care. The degree of realism of this event made many people curious, and some even called Li and asked him at which hospital he was being treated – because they wanted to do the same. Even Li's mother called him and asked, "Are you really pregnant?" At the venue at Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, an artist laid out a comfortable living room so that visitors would feel like home. A computer was placed on the table so that people could view the very comfortable environment and see the little life being nurtured in his father's belly. But when Li was asked at a panel discussions about his personal feelings towards this work, he admitted that he certainly did not like this project, because this was done online in virtual space. Although realistic, it lacked any real interpersonal contact. Li plans to involve close human contact in his other works, because, in his words, "cyberspace is too cold."
When men try to imagine the idea of pregnancy in novels, movies, or art, it is a kind of virtual or performance-type transference of affection. The use of this "alternative thinking" – like material developed by women, but the result of male performance – is always able to induce much debate. While paper-cuts, woven textiles, sewn works, and even "installation art" of the nature of household chores have all been implemented and studied in women's "own space," they belong among folk customs, arts and crafts, and household chores in women's daily lives. But they acquire the packaging of "art" as soon as men establish a use relationship. While simulation of the "pseudo-chora" of pregnancy can indeed unlock creative possibilities for men, in the end the experience of human pregnancy cannot today be replicated. If a man tries to imitate pregnancy, he can only acquire a kind of a notion, and there is no exception even if this effort is made at the level of the soul. Only Li Ming-wei saw that the "king isn’t wearing any clothes," as he indicated by saying "It's too cold."
Chora: Awareness of Pregnancy and Pictorial Record
I realized in February 2002 that a living entity had taken up residence in my body. This induced the alien sensation of a being dwelling within me and a derivative feeling of the self. At the interface between these two feelings, my consciousness of the "chora" produced a clear direction and mission. Like the physical experience of feminine jouissance, the period of pregnancy led me to approach an issue that I had tried to explore in the past, but certainly had not truly realized: how to achieve transcendence from existent symbolic systems and texts. From the point of view of Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), this would be the "prelinguistic" state. I frequently pondered the world within my belly during my pregnancy, and I asked questions, "What kind of space is that?” “Was it close to the cloistered realm Dante constructed in his Divine Comedy, or was it a cyberspace to which souls were exiled?” “What kind of life dwelt within me?” and “Were not these questions the same as when, four hundred years ago, Michelangelo asked of a big piece of stone,’What life is waiting within for me to liberate it?’" The world within my belly gradually began to make obvious movements. Sometimes it felt like gentle wiggling, sometimes like stubborn confrontation, sometimes like teasing provocation, and sometimes like a fiery show of personality. I listened with an earpiece and felt and squeezed with my fingers, and it seemed as if I could sense a chaotic "divine music" responding to me. Although I urgently desired to know this world, medical and nursing information and knowledge wasn’t enough to satisfy my curiosity. I then attempted to use my confused awareness of the chora to find an exit, and I recorded this process of exploration with my brush.
A male friend once asked me, "What is the feminine essence?" I had to think about how to answer him. He then held up a wine glass full of water and asked me whether the glass or the water was the feminine essence. Of course this was a strongly suggestive question, because fluid substances are commonly used as metaphors for femininity, while the cup was a solid vessel, and thus a metaphor for masculinity. But because I happened to feel very dissatisfied with the way that the glass restricted the water's space, I looked around and answered, "Can you tell me the water's temperature?" As far as Luce Irigaray (1932~ ) was concerned, the so-called "feminine essence" was just a remnant of the masculine framework, and it manifested as pretended or imitative approaches. In contrast, "maternity – femininity" originated from the time a mother was pregnant with a child. The fluid surrounding the fetus is a direct reference to a feminine "jouissance" that cannot be stable or fixed. It is also a state that cannot be simulated. I have gone through a pregnancy myself, and I have personally experienced the unstable, unfixed state produced by the fertilized egg in the beginning. Besides the internal environmental temperature and the thick lubricating fluid in the womb, this also has to do with the nerves and muscles as the embryo implants itself.
Chora 1 (Fig. 1) records the rocking state of this period. I had some false cold symptoms during the first stage of pregnancy because my body was still resisting the new parasitic entity within. When I couldn’t control my coughing, I was scared that I would "cough out" the fetus. Bleeding followed the false cold symptoms. I experienced two extreme messages during this period: That I would lose the fetus, and that I could seemingly control the implantation of the fertilized embryo through sheer strength of will. Nevertheless, I couldn’t control my bleeding, and this left me dejected all the time. I lay helplessly on my sofa with my eyes closed, exerting body and mind trying to make sure the fetus stays in my womb. I could vaguely feel a sense of flow around the fetus, but I couldn’t make out whether it was liquid or gas. Reading Irigaray's interpretation of "hysteria" helped me shake off my feelings of crisis at that time. Irigaray feels that the psychiatric symptoms of hysteria represent resistance to the demands of the patriarchy on women and the use of the feminine essence to package the self. Hysteria is therefore a subconscious force signifying feminist resistance to the existing order. Women's personal writings make use the concept of hysteria, and their strategy is simulation close to the text of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Large amount of existing text is used without indicating the sources in attempts to read between the lines and perform line-by-line criticism and deconstruction. While Irigaray's critical technique may be strange, she is just having some fun at the expense of the central text of the patriarchy, and striking back against the masculine system using women's camouflaged language. This also means that she is trying to loosen the order of the existing text, and decode new content from familiar symbols. I have recorded this thinking in my Chora 3 (Fig. 2). I have taken back habitual lines and symbols – the male friend I mentioned earlier called them "well-behaved" lines and symbols – and used them to sketch the crisis consciousness I felt during this period. Irigaray's account of "hysteria" induced me to safely return to my original pace of life. I tried to use this fundamental key to soothe myself and reorganize my physiological disarray.
Making records with imaginary pictures is, in Lacan's interpretation, use of the "Imaginary" – which is the "prelinguistic" state. It is as if women are confined in an illusory, looking glass imaginary prison, separated from the (male) world of the external symbolic order. Lacan also uses a "mirror stage" as a metaphor for the visible image of the phallus. While the mirror stage can faithfully show the image that men reflect on the surface, it cannot be the subject of women. This is because women's reflection in the mirror stage is a deficient and partial castrated image. Irigaray used the concept of "speculum" to refute and overturn this kind of discourse. A "speculum" is a medical instrument containing a concave lens used to inspect the vagina. It is able to inspect the internal structure of the body (and not ideas), and can be used to understand the subjective existence of the self. The refraction of the speculum causes parts women originally felt to be deficient and inadequate to be reversed, and transformed into a positive and active female image. The use of this method may end the male habit of seeing reflections of themselves, and not the women's selves, when they observe women. Of course use of a speculum certainly does not imply that Irigaray is in favor of women returning to the "prelinguistic" state, and reorganizing the symbolic order. In fact there is no time or space that women can return to. In its stead, we must first take away the male symbolic language, find the suppressed subconscious part of women in the symbolic realm, and sketch the possibility of a female imagination. This kind of possible symbolic realm can thus be symbolized. Here Irigaray again emphasizes the strategy of using existing language to overturn existing ideas. This reminded me not to fall into "prelinguistic" thinking defined by men, because my paintings during this period of time were certainly not pure "imaginary" fantasy scenes – they were the true experiences of my pregnancy.
I therefore used a "speculum" to "observe" the fetus in my belly and record its interwoven peripheral context. In Chora 10 (Fig. 3), I continued to present the spots explored by the speculum using a masculine plane mirror approach, exaggerating and enlarging them. There were some vague and out-of-focus images among them, and also clearly discernable images of the human body. This forced me to acknowledge my own clear self and the fetus that was still seeking clues to growth in the midst of the chaotic, mysterious feminine principle. Perhaps it was a sincere creator, because it had to grope its way towards growth in accordance with the Creator's order without any one to teach or guide it. For my part though, I had to depend these learned external symbolic marks to break through a self symbolic entity that had already been packaged. But what gave me such creative emotions was the fact that the fetus was attached to the inside of my body, and I supplied it with all the nutrients it needed. At that time the relationship between it and me was ambiguous, unclear, dual, and heterogeneous in nature. Kristeva feels that an artist's pursuit of art is this sort of resisting search. I is a kind of urge to return to the experience of being one with one's mother.
Kristeva feels that the subject is not the pregnant mother, but rather part of the composite entity that the mother forms with the baby. This mother is not the true mother. Instead, it is a kind of maternal space (the chora), which is an inexpressible whole. All kinds of drives from activity and arresting strength are formed from movement and restraint. The chora is consequently like a linguistic symbol and ideology that has not been spoken. After I was certain that the fetus was safely implanted in my womb, and had begun growth, my womb began all the necessary preparations. These preparations included producing amniotic fluid, deploying muscles and nerves, testing its flexibility, and transporting supplies of nutrients. Of course this information had to be gotten from my medical records, and I could neither confirm nor witness their respective progress. Nevertheless, I instinctively relied on links between them to sense the existence of the fetus. For instance, the changes in my womb triggered the action of my muscles, and also stimulated my nerves. The increasing amount of amniotic fluid lubricated the movement of the fetus, and the growing lines around my naval provided visual confirmation that the skin of my belly was stretching. There were certainly no sure guidelines in the dialog between the different entities, and their interrelationships were typically in the midst of switching with each other. For me, I was between abstract rational cognition and a tangible sensory system. This was very like the way that the grain of the dissected human body was laid out in Seven Works on the Structure of the Human Body (Fig. 4) by Vasalius. Hua Shou's Action of the Fourteen Thread (Fig. 5) records the thread and aperture of the muscles. These are the anatomical drawings developed by two very different cultural systems. Kristeva's chora is indeed very close in structure to the thread and aperture of Hua Shou, but both are similar symbolic representations in the language between the fetus and the matrix.
While symbols are equated with identity within the patriarchal order, as defined in the maternal way, the cognition of symbols is transformed into a energy able to disrupt and create with regard to patriarchal symbols. In her semiotics research, Kristeva thus boldly transcended the definitions of symbols made by Lacan and Saussure, freeing her semiotics research from the restrictions of symbols and meaning. She also linked symbols (as symbolized by the anatomical drawings of Vasalius) with the Oedipus complex (as symbolized by the anatomical drawings of Hua Shou), which is the earliest primeval desire drive in the underlying relationship between mother and baby.
Chora 17 (Fig. 6) shows two pairs of hands gesturing and clinging to each other. The structure of their muscles is similar to that portrayed by Vasalius. The pairs of hands are isolated, however, and have no limbs to support them. Suspended in space in the middle of the scene is a ruler, sharp at both ends and bearing a graduated scale. Piercing the muscles of the hands, this graduated ruler provides a clue to interpreting the work. I have no zeroed ruler to measure the growth of the chora. Irigaray referred to the "chora" as repetitive, cyclical, monumental, and eternal, while referred to symbolic order space as linear and sequential. While a linear and sequential rational outlook will restrict and suppress writing, (feminine) writing emphasizing rhythm, sound, color, and transcendence of allowed article structure and grammar is a sort of redemption. Chora 20 (Fig. 7) depicts multilayered pictures. The orderly circles oppress each other through their overlapping forms, and this kind of order will suffer "dislocation" each time an incident occurs. Tremors overflow from the mutual restraint in the midst of dislocation. The repetitive small blocks of pictures stimulate the frequency of overlap between tremors. After entering the seventh month of pregnancy, my internal organs were seemingly falling all over each other to accommodate the growth of the fetus, while ignoring the subject of the mother. It was as if I was being dragged by the nose towards acceptance of this situation. But each time I looked at ultrasound images and saw the growth of the fetus, its joy seemed like an orchestral accompaniment. It was as if this joy was flitting around many tremulous spaces in my soul. The flowers depicted in the painting celebrate the abstract life, and rejoice in the birth of the as yet unborn little life. Kristeva feels that the crisscrossing interaction between symbols and marks, and the crisscrossing perturbation of chaotic order and order, is the energy of the chora. Western art derives from the maternal space during the Oedipal period, and can be considered the sublimation of an Oedipus complex. It raises the importance of the essence of marks above that of the essence of symbols, and places undue emphasis on the oral, sounds, melodies, and rhythm, etc. It causes creators to loosen the authority of symbols and ossified symbolic rules. I completed Chora 20 without any prior attempts. After encountering Kristeva's explanation, I profoundly understood and admired this energy, especially since it had become the driving force guiding my records on the paper. This energy made my creativity blaze out of control, like the "écriture féminine" uncontrolled by reason advocated by Hélène Cixous, (1937~ ), and it continued this way until a day before I gave birth.
"Écriture féminine" is a writing approach employing an open text. Unlike "masculine literature" (which Cixous usually referred to as "phallocentric" writing), "écriture féminine" does not depend on traditional dualistic logic, which is self-centered thinking in the context of masculine cognition. The remaining "Other" exists only in contrast to the self, and there are distinctions of higher and lower. In traditional texts, men inevitably write with black ink, and take painstaking care to package their own thinking in strict, coherent rules. In contrast, women write in "white ink" (like milk). They let written words flow freely in the direction they hope they will go. Because of this, Cixous' writings overflow with the joy, happiness, and desire of "feminine jouissance" instead of rational structure. The goal of her writing is to escape the restrictive ideas of traditional Western thinking, and to write herself into history. By developing a writing approach that is unrestricted by rules, women can change the thinking and writing of the Western world, and thereby change the status that women have in the world.
Because écriture féminine permits different modes of expression, it is not limited to use by women. On the other hand, women are more likely than men to approach this form of writing. For instance, Cixous writes in her Laughter of Medusa, "Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, meaning editors, and big bosses don’t like the true texts of women—female-sexed text. That kind scares them.” When all my nutrients and energy was had gathered closely in my belly due to the large size of the fetus, I playfully referred to it as a mosquito that was so full blood, it flew (walked) unsteadily. I went beyond my ability in making this painting (I didn’t discovery this until afterwards). Without warning, Chora 27 (Fig. 8) unexpectedly challenged the physical energy of my swollen belly. The canvas got so large that I couldn’t take care of it all at the same time. I felt like an ant crawling around. I just followed my intuition, but the size of the painting precluded very much thought about how to adjust the structure. Moreover, my work on this painting could be characterized as "spare-time" and "practice," because I didn’t have the grasp that I did on my other works. It was "spare-time" because I didn’t have any firm plan to finish it, and it was "practice" because I didn’t consider it an achievement.
"Flying is woman’s gesture—flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; for centuries we’ve been able to possess anything only by flying; we’ve lived in flight, stealing away, finding, when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers. It’s no accident that voler has a double meaning, that it plays on each of them and thus throws off the agents of sense. It’s no accident: women take after birds and robbers just as robbers take after women and birds. They go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down.” After my belly got so big that I couldn't climb a ladder, I finally accepted fate and sat in a chair or lay on my side on the floor while painting. It was just like the documentary film Taiwan Model where a model's mind and spirit are most free when her body is confined in a seat to be painted. The final period of my pregnancy induced me to try a time-killing "écriture féminine" in which I couldn't stop, had no goal, and was seemingly waiting for the fetus to be born. In Chora 36 (Fig. 9), a big-bellied person is climbing alone towards the top of the distant horizon. After I had worked on this painting until my intuition was shouting for me to stop, the next day I gave birth to the baby girl Ting Yuan-hao – whose name in Chinese means "originally being so good." The birth was not too extremely painful for me, and it gave the baby a chance to meet people other than myself.
Post-Conclusion: An End Without Closure
There are many ways to understand "chora." But because of my pregnancy and my dialog with it, and because I appreciate the writings and paintings of French Woman Study, I decided to perform this research during this period of time. Nevertheless, I have now discovered that I never left myself any space to bring this research to a definite conclusion. This is because my research motivation has not come to an end and I haven’t even taken my research goals into consideration. I performed this research in order to write/record my own story, the story of the chora that my daughter Ting Yuan-hao and I encountered together. While this story provided a good number of possible conclusions to choose from, I still hadn’t chosen a place to end at when my daughter was born, and this made me give up trying to decide. Perhaps I have squeezed male chivalry and extroversion out of my bones, or perhaps the drive that had pushed me on was behind my failure to choose a conclusion (though this may indicate a opportunistic attitude).
At the very end of my research, I grasped that the realization of "chora" is actually a response to post-modern feminist art. It "does not refer to a homogeneous group (a group that has been removed from privileges) nor to a group with a fixed point of view (on the periphery). It is rather a medium of intervention, an activity that persistently diversifies, weakens, or mutes centralized discourse." This notion has been profoundly influenced by French feminist research. The direction taken by Luce Irigaray, Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous – the three representative figures of this feminist philosophy – are often criticized as Utopians. Because their thought is at odds with the activist and practical thinking of British-American feminists, they take delight in "ambiguity," and feel that because the "phallocentrocistic" order is too "clear," it has no "playful" drive. They therefore live in seclusion in the paradise of knowledge, and even deny that they are feminists. Their common tendency is the boundless interest of the various possibilities of the submerged "no," "deficient," "peripheral," and "suppressed part."
This indefinable domain, which to Lacan was the chaotic state of the prelinguistic period, is women's distinctive "imaginary" (but Lacan looked down on the imaginary and considered it a prison). As far as Luce Irigaray is concerned, it is seen with a speculum, and is a "fluid state" with no fixity or values. For Kristeva, it is an unameable feminine mystery (chora) with a mysterious chaos of marks. For Hélène Cixous, it has no boundaries and rules; it is "écriture féminine" bringing feminine jouissance. My experience of pregnancy let me discover that it exists in response to changes in the surrounding environment. Its energy drove me to record my physical experiences and witness the chora that was created together by my daughter and myself.
I deliberately avoided having any volatile oil paints around while making my records, because I was concerned whether the pigments would be safe for the fetus. Although I love painting in oils, and I am dependent on this medium, I forced myself to work on paper (which brought me even closer to writing). I used charcoal, watercolors, acrylics, ink, and collages in my work. Even if I occasionally unavoidably used some spray paints and other "toxic materials," I always put on a respirator and stayed out of the workroom as much as possible. This made be suddenly realize that I always had to make compromise in my stubborn "creative" process, and these compromises were extremely persuasive.
I returned to my original living space after the end of pregnancy, but my journey through chora had become the driving force behind my writing and painting. The experience of "feminine jouissance" will continue with my memory into my painting as a mother – and écriture féminine will likewise initiate another chora in my reading and collection of knowledge. I also became aware that I actually had not "created" anything, and what I had thought was "creating" was in fact recording. The true "creator" is actually my daughter Ting Yuan-hao! Since I am not able to create, which is life's own instinct, I shall continue to "write" as a recorder.
Reference Books
Carol S. Pearson, The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By (HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1986, 1989), Hsu Shen-shu, Chu Kai-ju, Kung Chuo-chun trans. in Chinese, " New Century Publishing Co., Ltd Publishing, 2000.
Chien Ying-ying, Feminism and East/West Comparative Literature Studies, United Literary Press, 1998.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC TV series, 1991) , Tai Hsing-jung trans. in Chinese, Commercial Publishing, 1993.
Judy Chicago, Through the Flower (Loretta Barrett Books, 1975), Chen Mi-chuan trans. in Chinese, Yuan Liu Publishing, 1997.
Jo Anna Isaak, The Revolutionary Strength of Women's Laughter (Routledge, 1996), Chen Shu-chen trans. in Chinese, Yuan Liu Publishing, 2000.
Ku Yen-ling chief ed.,Feminist Theory and Schools , Fembooks publish, 1996, p. 153.
Liu Chi-hui, "Women's Space and Artistic Self-positioning in General Art Forms I", quoted from Intertextual Art Rewriting the Chinese Orientation, NSC84-2411-H-030-002, 8/1994. – 7/1995.
Li Li, Kangaroo Man, United Literary Press, 1992.
Li-shan Mao-chiu, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Shigehisa Kuriyama, 1999),Chen Hsin-hung trans. in Chinese, Chiu Ching Publishing, 2001.
Margaret Wertheim, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997), Hsueh Hsuan trans. in Chinese, Commercial Publishing, 1999.
Norma Broude, Mary D. Garrard, ed., The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History (IconEditions, 1992), Shieh Hong-Juin trans. in Chinese, Yuan Liu Publishing, 1998.
Nigel Nicolson, Virginia Woolf (Lipper Publications L.L.C. and Viking Penguin, 2000), Hung Chun trans. in Chinese, La Gauche Publishing, 2002.
Paolo Milano, ed., The Portable Dante, the Viking Press, Inc., 1975.
Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Westview Press Inc., 1989), Tiao Hsiao-hua trans. in Chinese, China Times Publishing Co., 1996. p. 402.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Editions Gallimard, 1949), Tao Tei-chu trans. in Chinese, Owl Publishing House, 2000.
Sophia Phoca, drawing by Rebecca Wrigh, Post-Feminism (Icon Books LTD, 1999), Hsieh Hsiao-chin trans. in Chinese, New Century Publishing, 1999.
Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought: A Comprehensive Introduction (Westview Press Inc., 1989), Tiao Hsiao-hua trans. in Chinese, China Times Publishing Co., 1996.
Virginia Wolf, A Room of One’s Own, A Harcourt Brace Modern Classic, Harcourt Brace & Company, first published in 1929.
Whie-Show Ho, Forward, “Searching for the self in solitude—The character of hermits”, in Peter France, Hermits: The Insights of Solitude (Arrangement with the author through Big Apple Tuttle-Mori Agency, 1996), Yun-An Lian trans in Chinese, Li Hsu Publishing, 2001.
Ku Yen-ling, Gen Chih-hei eds, Feminist Classics – Awakening in Eighteenth Century Europe to 20th Century Local Reflection, Fembooks, 1999.
Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1991), Wan Ya-geh trans. in Chinese, Yuan-Liou Publishing, 1998.
Reference Reports
Journal of Cyber Culture and Information Society (1) , Nanhua University, Graduate School of Sociology, 7/2001.
Chung Wai Literary Monthly, Volume 21, Issue 9, 2/1993.
Chung Wai Literary Monthly, Volume 28, Issue 4, 9/1999.
Chung Wai Literary Monthly, Volume 28, Issue 12, 5/2000.
Chung Wai Literary Monthly, Volume 31, Issue 2, 7/2002.
China Times, June 18, 2000.
Reference Films
Chen Hsing-fen, Daughter's Nest, Tainan National Institute of the Arts, Graduate School of Audiovisual Recording, M.S. thesis film, June 20, 2002.
Chen Hsing-fen, Dream, independent film, 1997.
Hung Ting-fu dir., Taiwan Model, 16mm documentary, 78 minutes, produced by Firefly Image, 1995-2000.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, Junior,1993.
Reference Exhibitions
Li Ming-wei, The First Man Pregnant, this work was shown at the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, Nov. 11, 2001 ~ Feb. 24, 2002, in the "Recreating Childhood" of the Fun Maze, the exhibition planner was Wang Chia-gei
Juin Shieh, Runaway, solo exhibition in Providence University Art Center, 2002.3.4-4.10. |
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