Mignon Nixon Bad Enough Mother

Bad Enough Mother Author(s): Mignon Nixon Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol.
71, feminist issueS (Winter, 1995), pp. 70-92 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778742 . Accessed: 19/02/2013 14:38
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Bad Enough Mother
MIGNON NIXON
Mouths the Wecameto recognize father's feeling of penisand a growing the to it againstit in many aggression forms, desire eatand destroy For on being specially prominent. example, oneoccasion, four[my Dick lifted little man tohis mouth, a year-old patient] toy gnashed his teeth said "Tea Daddy," which meant"EatDaddy." and he by He then asked a drink water. for of -Melanie Klein Oncewhen were we at I white table, took sitting together thedining mixed with it a When bread, spit,and molded figure my of father. the I was I with knife. see a figure done, started cutting the off limbs this my sculptural as first solution. -Louise Bourgeois I was interestedthe because both in bite it's intimate destructive; and itsort sumsup my to of relationshiparthistory. -Janine Antoni Pondick'screatures seemto experience through their mouths, life rather thantheir as ifthey babies. were eyes, -Elizabeth Hess As MaryJacobushas recently returnto Klein ... feels observed,"the current like eating one's words."1Or, to put it another way,maybe it feels like eating
1. "'Tea Daddy': Poor Mrs. Klein and the Pencil Shavings," A Women: Cultural Review 2 MaryJacobus, (Summer1990), special issue,"Positioning Klein,"p. 160. OCTOBER 71, Winter Nixon. 1995,pp. 71-92. ? 1995 Mignon
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LouiseBourgeois. (Eyesand Cell Mirrors).1989-93. Peter (Photo: Bellamy.)
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Lacan. And how betterto enact this cannibalisticdesire to eat-Lacan-by-eatinghis-words than through a return to Klein-the psychoanalystwhose object relationsschool Lacan himselfdeemed "incapable of even so much as suspectif ing the existence of the categoryof the signifier"--even that returnrisks,as regression"?2 Jacobussays,"a kindof theoretical The putative regression of some feministpsychoanalytic theory from is Lacanian to Kleinianmodes of analysis not so much myconcernhere,however, feminist practicesthatalso are often art as are uses of the body in contemporary framedin termsof theoreticalregression.This regressionis chartedas moving of froman investigation the signifier theoryand a grounded in poststructuralist to Lacanian account of sexual difference a literaland essentialist conception of the body. as It willbe mypurpose here to read thisrecentshift it appears in specific as terms: workin psychoanalytic instancesof feminist namely, a turnto the drives.3 and but it I Accordingly,willbe analyzing not as a regression as a repositioning not as the revengeof the essentializedninetiesbody on the textualeightiesbodybut feminist workof the 1970s and '80s as as, in part, a critique of psychoanalytic For as Jacqueline pleasure and desire over hatred and aggression.4 privileging tabloidof our culture is Rose observedin 1988, "Ifpsychoanalysis the intellectual ('sex' and 'violence' being its chief objects of concern), then we have recently on privileged-ought indeed to base the politicization of psychoanalysis that firstover the second."5 And as Kobena Mercer noted in 1994, privilege-the studiesof pleasure and desire,but where "There is no shortageof text-centered of structures feelingtoo?"6I will are the analysesof pain and hatred as everyday workcan be of that the investigation aggressionin some recentfeminist suggest And I willpropose studies. relatedto thiscritiqueof Lacanian-based psychoanalytic and fromsexualityto the that the shiftin emphasis fromneurosisto psychosis death drive effectedby Melanie Klein's work in the 1940s and '50s offersa
to return Klein: it feelslike reads in full:"One responseto the current Ibid. 2. Jacobus'sstatement for immersedin Lacanian theory has feminism been so thoroughly eating one's words.Psychoanalytic as the past decade thattakingKlein at her word-reading her literally, she asks to be read-seems to riska kindof theoretical regression." 3. Insofaras I willbe arguingthatthisturnorganizesa fieldthatoperatesoutside the binariesof betweenthe operationsof the gender,myanalysisintendsto open up a thirdoption in the conflict In and my signifier of biologicalessentialism. thissense,thistextoffers own responseto Question 1 as and me as editorsof thisissue. posed bySilviaKolbowski as of 4. For a discussionof how recentreexaminations Klein function a critiqueof the Lacanian in model, see Ann Scott's"Melanie Klein and the Questionsof Feminism" "Positioning psychoanalytic of "This movement thoughtremainsdialectical,to-and-fro; Klein,"p. 129. As Scottobserves,however, on the JulietMitchelland VivienBar have reinstated commentary Klein froma Lacanian perspective set within and remindus thatall theorisations psychoanalysis up theirown counterpoint." ed. and Visuality, Hal Foster and Vision:Some Questions,"in Vision 5. Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality vol. (Seattle: Bay Press,1988), p. 121. Quoted in Kobena Mercer,"Fear of a Black Penis,"Artforum 32 (April 1994), p. 122. "Fear of a Black Penis,"p. 122. 6. Mercer,
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for possible framework analyzingthis tension between Lacanian-based feminist of the 1970s and '80s and recentworkthatI willargue is Kleinian-based.7 projects art The turnin some recentfeminist froma Lacanian-based semiotic analysis of the body to a Kleinian-based object-relationsanalysis does not enact a regression,at least in Kleinian terms,preciselybecause regressionis no more Accordingto Klein, psychic operativein the Kleinian model than is the signifier. life is structuredby unconscious fantasies driven by bodily experiences, and these fantasies,present fromearly infancy, persistnot as states into which the but as ever-present subject mayregress, positionsin which,as JulietMitchellhas "one is sometimeslodged."8In the Kleinian model of subjectivity, then, written, exists. like the signifier, scarcely regression, As Mitchellhas noted, "forKlein the past and the presentare one . . . what she is observing, and of describing,and theorizingis the veryabsence of history historical time."9For counter to a historical,or developmental, model of the psyche,Klein theorizes a nonlinear, horizontal play of positions in which the radicallydecentered subject, defined by its relation to objects, moves between positions that are never either secured or foreclosed.Thus, the move fromthe would constitutea gendered to the infantile body thatin a Lacanian framework functionsin Kleinian termssimplyas a shiftof position along the regression, horizontal axis of a model that theorizes, as Mitchell has written,"the very absence of history."10 Kleinian-based work, structured by object relations, operates in the field atemporalfieldof infantile experience ratherthan the temporal-linguistic of the Oedipal subject that is mapped by Lacanian-based work.A Kleinian-based of as would,then,have to be groundedin Klein's theory fantasy produced analysis as by bodily drives,of such fantasy the primarystructuring principle of psychic her model of subjectivity around the infant, and so in experience. Constructing relation to an immediate and fragmentedbodily experience unmediated by language, Klein places at the center of her model not the unconscious, but understoodnot as a workof the unconsciousmind,but as a bodily fantasy-fantasy as operation. The Kleinian subjectrelatesto its environment a fieldof objects to be fused or split,possessed or destroyed, means of fantasiesof introjection, by thatare produced bybodilydrives. projection,and splitting To return,then, to the epigraphswithwhich I began, eating,forexample, of a mightproduce a complexfantasy incorporating good object and of devouring
7. This is not to suggesta fixed temporalor theoreticaldivide between body-centered feminist art projectsof the 1970s and '80s and those of the 1990s; in fact,feminist practicesof both periods are diverse.But theredoes appear to be a shift of extremely awayfroma semioticanalysis the bodyof pleasure and desire to an object-relations analysisof the body of aggressionand the death drivein some recentwork, and it is thismove thatI willconsiderhere. 8. Melanie Klein(NewYork:The Free Press,1986), Introduction, 28. Mitchell, ed., TheSelected Juliet p. 9. Ibid.,p. 29. 10. Ibid.
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a bad one-of cuttingan object into bits that,once swallowed, mightturninto a of swarm internal Klein assertsthatit is through infantile oral sadism persecutors. thatthe subjectexperiencesthe destructive effects itsown aggression. effect, In of formsaround an experience of loss enacted throughdestructive fansubjectivity tasies;it is, we could say,formedby the mouthin the act of biting.Using Klein's of case history her four-year-old patientDick to mediatethreeexhibitions-a 1974 installation by Louise Bourgeois entitled TheDestruction theFather, Janine of Antoni's 1992 Gnaws,and a 1994 exhibitionof Rona Pondick'sLegs,Mouth, and of Milk Milk-I will examine the structuring these worksthroughoral-sadistic and fantasy willalso considerhow they positionthe subjectof aggression. of and her fantasy dismembering devouring father's Bourgeois'soral-sadistic body is the double of another one, the desire to eat his words,for the fantasy enacted in TheDestruction the stated,is thatin order to shut the of Father, simply to father it is necessary eat himup. This is Bourgeois'snowwell-known descripup tion of the work: dinnertable headed by a It is basically table,the awful, family terrifying the father who sitsand gloats.And the others,the wife,the children, whatcan theydo? Theysitthere,in silence.The motherof course tries to satisfy tyrant, the her husband. The childrenare fullof exasperaThere and myself. tion. We were threechildren:mybrother, sister, my were also two extra childrenmyparentsadopted because theirfather wouldgetnervous had been killedin thewar.So we werefive. father My at us, and he would explain to all of us whata greatman he looking him on the table, we was. So, in exasperation, grabbedthe man, threw dismembered him,and proceeded to devourhim."I In this fantasyof devouring the father, eating takes the place of naming in a of substitution oral sadismforspeech thatis at once Kleinianand anti-Lacanian.12 at The littlegirl'sdesire to speak and her frustration being silencedis transposed into another desire for oral power and pleasure-the desire to bite, to cut, to devour the one who oppresses with his speech. The desire to talk back to the in into the desireto turnthe social ritualof the famis father transformed fantasy meal withits sublimatedconditionsof cuttingand bitinginto a cannibalistic ily his in power, words,are consumedand incorporated ceremony whichthe father's the childrenin the eatingof his flesh. by Thus, Bourgeois turns"a Kleinian account of eating (cannibalism,even), incorporation, and primaryidentification,"as Jacobus describes the case of
1947-1984,exhibition 11. Louise Bourgeois,quoted in Jean Fremon,LouiseBourgeois: Retrospective catalogue (Paris: Galerie MaeghtLelong, 1984). of 12. Bourgeois'svigorouscriticism Lacan is well known.It is worthnotingin thiscontextthather of as antagonismforhim is specifically a figure the father.
of LouiseBourgeois. Destruction The Peter the Father.1974. (Photo: Moore.)
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Klein'spatientlittleDick, againsta Lacanian account of the entry intosubjectivity this Performed via language.13 under the title The Destruction the Father, critique of of Lacan through Klein, framed as an attack on language throughbiting,on Oedipal namingthroughpre-Oedipaloral sadism,stagesan assaulton patriarchy fromthe infantile position.Draggingthe paternalbody onto the table, and thus it on the horizontalaxis of infantile repositioning experiencewhereit functions as an object of oral-sadisticfantasy, subvertsthe name-of-the-father Bourgeois logic of Lacanian theorythrougha destruction-of-the-father, part-objectlogic based in the Kleinianmodel. And,as I willsuggest, is in partthrough recepit the tion of Bourgeois'sworkthatthe Kleinianmodel has recently been takenup and in employedcritically a numberof artists relationto 1970s and '80s Lacanianby based work. The desire to eat the father and to eat his wordsis, as Bourgeois'sstatement for solutionsor,we could say, makesexplicit,turnedinto the desireforsculptural one thatpersolutions-a sculpturalsolutionbeing, in Bourgeois'sterms, object formsan aggressive desiringoperation on an object. For as she demonstrates or with her dinner table story,the sculpture comes into being as the object of aggressive fantasy-as somethingto bite or to cut, to incorporateor to destroy.14
13. Jacobus,"Poor Mrs.Klein,"p. 162. of 14. of Bourgeois'ssculptural operationsmayalso be organizedbyfantasies reparation, restoring the object perceivedto be damaged bydestructive fantasies.
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In Klein's case history the affectless of four-year-old named Dick (a case anaboy at lyzedin greatdetail byJacques Lacan), the littlepatientarrives a similar object solution.15 Dick, Klein reported, seldom played or spoke, except to stringsounds detached fromthe togetherin meaninglesssequences, and seemed completely as people around him,includinghis parentsand nurse,whomhe tendedto treat, Klein observed,like so manypieces of furniture. The analyst theorizedthather littlepatientwas the victimof an anxiety intenseit manifested so itself an eerie as of her model of absence, the absence, precisely, any trace of anxiety. Employing infantile Klein concluded thatDick had as a babybecome deeplydisturbed fantasy, byhis own sadisticimpulsesto attackhis mother'sbody,a bodythatcontained,in the thatis the fantasy, father's penis (among otherthings).Throughan interplay pivotpoint of the Kleinianmodel, Dick feared,accordingto Klein,both his own sadisticdesires and retaliatory assaultsfromthe object of those attacks.And in order to defend himself by againstthis fantasieddestruction the father'spenis, off Dick closed himself from desire,and all by precipitated his own sadisticfantasy, thusall anxiety. to One keysymptom Dick's inability tolerateanxiety his refusal bite of to was to into food. Anotherwas his inability grip knivesor scissors.On one occasion,
15. Melanie Klein,"The Importanceof SymbolFormationin the Developmentof the Ego" (1930), and Ego in The Selected see MelanieKlein.For Lacan's critique of this case study, "DiscourseAnalysis in and "The Topic of the Imaginary" The Seminar Lacan, BookI, Freud's Paperson Analysis" ofJacques 1953-1954), ed. Jacques-AlainMiller,trans.John Forrester(New York: W. W. Norton & Technique Lacan and of Jacques Company,1991). For discussions Lacan's readingof Klein,see Shoshana Felman, in Culture theAdventure Insight: Press, Psychoanalysis Contemporary (Cambridge: Harvard University of and 1987), chapter5, "BeyondOedipus: The Specimen Studyof Psychoanalysis" Jacobus,"Poor Mrs. Klein." thatKlein has conwhichturnson his assessment Lacan's complex critique of thiscase study, cannot be summarizedhere. But it should be of and the imaginary, fused the registers the symbolic shifts betweencondemnationofwhathe sees as Klein'sliteralistic noted thatLacan's analysis approach for she and acknowledgment the breakthrough achieveswithher patient.He writes, example: of does Melanie Klein, on little on She slams the symbolism him withcompletebrutality, She him large-scale Dick! Straight interpretations. hitshim a awayshe startsoffhitting for almostas revolting us as forany readerof brutalverbalisation the Oedipal myth, You are the littletrain, yourmother. youwantto fuck discussions whichcannot thiswayof doing things leads to theoretical Quite clearly of a But be dissociatedfrom case-diagnostic. itis clear thatas a result thisinterpretation is something happens.Everything there.(p. 68) is and the suspicion that "everything It is this uneasy tension between Klein's "completebrutality" there"that,asJacobusnotes,seems to driveLacan's own aggressive readingof thiscase, a readingthat the within Lacanian model itself: of role forthe imaginary seems to open the possibility a greater What is it, then,thatLacan mayfearto discoverin his own ideas? Surely, nothingother than the domain which Lacan associates loosely with Klein's the crucial role of the imaginary, is but whichin his system subordiand identification its allied processes, account of projective and to language. (p. 170) nated to the symbolic
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a the however, analyst reportedthather patient"lifted littletoyman to his mouth, gnashed his teethand said 'Tea Daddy,'bywhichhe meant 'Eat Daddy.' He then tea asked fora drinkofwater."16 Turning intoeat, he had turnedthe tables,turned the tea table into a scene of cannibalistic incorporation. This is how Jacobus describesthe challengeto Lacan producedbythe littleboy'splaywithanxiety: Here little Dick, in Lacanian terms,acts out his foreclosureof 'the Name of the Father,' the big Dick of language. For little Dick, the paternal phallus is a penile body-part-a part that he wants to eat whole. Making a meal of the phallus, instead of naming the father, little Dick seems to say,in this primitivepsychicgesture: I am both little Dick and daddy-Dick,Saturn's child and Saturn himself.The undifferentiated little Dick and daddy-Dick constitutea primitive, 1'7 devouringidentity. If littleDick became a subject by bitingratherthan by naming,and if he turned the fathernot into a name but into a part-object-something eat and be eaten to thatis, he came into playvia the logic of the part-object, then thatis also by--if, whatLouise Bourgeois did in her first solution and in the multiplicity sculptural of objects-part-objects-that followedin itstrain. This destruction-of-the-father grounded in the drives that Bourgeois logic enacts in her 1974 work mightalso be expected to operate in Antoni's Gnaws, oral-sadistic worksin whichthe artist bit repeatedly into large blocksof chocolate and lard,spitting the mouthfuls out and collectingthe expelled fatand chocolate to produce tubes of lipstick and heart-shaped candy boxes. And the critical reception of the Gnaws, employing a range of psychoanalyticconcepts that included regression, oral fixation,and repetition-compulsion,did place the Gnawsin the register infantileexperience. Relatingthe Gnawsto 1970s transof worksbyBourgeois,Hannah Wilke,and Eva Hesse, critics gressive body-centered tended to read her attack on Minimalism-her biting into art history-as a uses of the body.18 whatwas not But repetitionof seventiesfeminist performative discussedwas the structure the workin whichthe aggressive of acts of bitingand became a logic for producing not part-objects like those spittingor swallowing or little Dick, but conventional objects of female produced by Bourgeois masochistic and candyboxes. desire,lipstick
16. Klein,"The Importanceof SymbolFormation," 104. p. 17. Jacobus,"Poor Mrs. Klein and the Pencil Shavings," 165-66. NotingLacan's analysis little of pp. Dick that"everything equally real forhim,equallyindifferent," is Jacobusobservesthat"littleDick has difference a T) withoutbeing able to applyit to his own condi(to grasped the principleof linguistic tion" (p. 166). Dick's own condition,of course, is a psychosis within whichdifference not operative. is And as Jacobus remindsus, "The characteristic Kleinian psychoanalysis its empathy of is with-its feeling for-psychosis"(166). 18. Gnawand Lard Gnawin Artin America, See, forexample, Simon Taylor'sreviewof Chocolate vol. 80 (October 1992), p. 149.
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If,as I would like to suggest,performative practicesgroundedin a Kleinian model of'infantilefantasyhave the potential to constructrepresentationsof in to aggressionthat do not revert essentialism, the case of Antoni'sGnaws this possibility is foreclosed by turning the enactment of aggression into an in The structure thiswork, which of essentializing spectacleof femalemasochism. performative practicesenactinginfantile aggression(biting) lead to a compulsive behaviorin the form an eatingdisorder(gnawing of and spitting out) thatin turn is recuperatedby the productionof objects of conventionalized femininedesire (lipstick and chocolate displayed in mirroredcases) does, however,point to anothercrucial problemin Kleinian theory--the to struggle suppressaggression or to repairitsperceivedeffects. In the Gnaws,it is this effort suppressaggressionthat,like littleDick's to to whatKlein calls the capacityfor inability grip scissorsor bite into food,arrests art symbolformation.In the context of 1990s feminist practice, this capacity of of of thatdoes not mightbe thought as the possibility an enactment aggression fall back into essentialism. Antoni'suse of her own body to produce worksthat reinforce ratherthan destabilize, de-essentialize, conventional or the construction of femininity however raises the question of how a Kleinian-based analysis, of groundedin a theory fantasy might producedbybodilydrives, operatecritically in relationto practicesthat are themselves enacted throughthe body in performativestrategies hostile to the signifier. Would not such an analysisrisk,if not at regression, leastessentialism? Klein's emphasison innatedrives, in her elisionof language and history the
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RonaPondick. Mouth. 1992-93.
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foregrounding of pre-Oedipal, nonverbal experience, her indifference to the effects of social structures-all point to the biological essentialism, "incapable of for even so much as suspecting the existence of the signifier," which her work has so often been criticized. But the implicit biologism and insistent literalism of Kleinian theory have obscured one of its crucial insights-one that I will argue bears upon the recent feministwork I will consider here-and that is her analysis of aggression as deeply structuringunconscious fantasyin both sexes from infancy through life. For what interests Klein, in contrast to Freud, is not the neurotic symptom that is an effectof sexuality but the psychoses that arise as effectsof the death drive. And through this shift of emphasis from sexual development to aggression and the death drive, the conventional construction of femininityand aggression and nurturingmasculinityas opposed on axes of agency and passivity, axes drawn to diagram the negotiation of the castration complex-is radically,if inadvertently, destabilized. I would, then, suggest that the significance of the Kleinian model for recent psychoanalytic feministwork is at least in part its analysis of aggression not as a function of sexual difference, but as structural to all subjectivities. For if the enactment of aggression in body-centered feministwork depends upon the possibilityof constituting a female subject of aggression (just as other feministwork has confronted the problem of constituting a female desiring subject), then one way of producing such a subject is through a turn to the drives. For Klein, aggression-and especially efforts to suppress it-rather than sexual development, is the pivotal psychic site of struggle. Thus, her most dramatic divergence from Freudian theory is her refusal of the primacy of castration. This
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Rona Pondick. Legs and Mouth. 1993. Below: MilkMilk.1993. (Photos:]. Kotter.)
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refusalhas manyimplications,including the possibility a less fixed model of of But what I would like to emphasize here is Klein's suggestionthat the sexuality. infant plagued fromthe beginning is withfantasies destroying itsownviolent of by means the objects of its love and envy, thatis, thatthe infant fearsnot the loss of the motherto the father, the loss of the penis, but the loss of all objects to its or own destructiveimpulses. The firstobject of aggression is not, as it is in the and not even the mother,but a Oedipal-centered Freudian model, the father, series of part-objects-breast,milk,penis, children,womb-to which the infant fantasizesthe connection of other part-objects-mouth,teeth,urine, feces-in frenzied attacksenacting,accordingto Klein,the forceof the death drive. Stringing, lumping, and stickingtogether, piling and hanging up rubber, plastic,and wax mouths,feet,legs, teeth,nipples,breasts,penises,vaginas,Rona Pondick all but speaks the name Melanie Klein. If criticshave not spoken it for of her,theyhave describedits Kleinianoperations,its enactments biting, sucking, and excretion,its fragmentation the bodyand conflations its parts.19 of of What I would like to consider here is the way in which these objects are structured by aggressive fantasy. In Pondick's installations,oral-sadisticand anal-sadisticinfantilefantasies are staged not onlyby the play of objects-as in the conflationof greedytearing mouth and persecutory Treats, devouringbreastin such worksas Mouth,Charms, or Little and arrangement. Bathers-butby theirstructure Hung fromthe ceiling, these partspillingacross the floor,piled in a corner,molded into the furniture, object works resist the integrityand vertical orientation of the adult body, drive. operatinginsteadat the levelof the infantile Pondick's 1993 installation, example, included threeworks, for Legs,Mouth, and MilkMilk, whichfunctionedless as discreteobjects than as object systems. In tubular cushions conflatingleg and penis Legs,double-footedpink-upholstered were stuffed into men's ready-made shoes, tied by the foot,and suspended from the ceiling by ribbons that trailed onto the floor.Legs swingingat graduated was strewn across the floor, hundredsof teethedor its heightsfromabove, Mouth scattered around the room. nippled,sticky scratchy blotchy bloodyballs randomly Placed on the floorin a corner, MilkMilkin turnwas a collectionof whitebulbous clusters of breasts fittedwith baby-bottle nipples. The three accumulations of objects functionednot as series or as multiplesbut as interconnecting systems defined throughtheir relations to the ceiling, the floor,and the corner,or in other words by their positions, and through their relations to other object systems-asin the connectionof bitingand suckingmouthsto the breast/milk. Organized by the logic of the part-object, this installation enacted the an experience of the bodyrivenbythe drives, experience thatmuch otherrecent feministwork has also investigated.One might think of Maxine Hayt's Licks,
19. See especiallyElizabeth Hess, "Basic Instincts," Village the Voice, June 1, 1993, p. 83, and "Nasty the Village Girl," Voice, 7, 1991,p. 85. May
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gaping slipperylumpymouthsfromwhichfoamytonguesstickout; of the partobject assemblages of Nancy Bowen and Ava Gerber; of the inside-out of constructions the body in worksbyRachel Whiteread; of the evocationof a or maternalvoice in Maureen Connor's Three to Female Voices, citejust a pre-Oedipal fewexamples.The criticalreceptionof thisrecentfeminist workorganizedbythe Kleinian logic of the part-object, however, places it withina specificlineage of of the 1960s and '70s, a lineage that is body-centeredpractices transgressive oftenframedin termsof returnor regression, at othertimesas a function but of The recent "Bad Girls"showsstaged in New Yorkand Los Angeles, mothering. for example, constructeda genealogy of "bad girl" mothers of the 1960s and '70s and "bad girl" daughters of the 1990s. I would like now to consider this construction feminist of withinthe contextof the Kleinian model in mothering much recentworkis based as a model thatboth foreas I am suggesting, which, relation. groundsand insistently problematizesthe mother-infant Mothers The artists Bad Girls and Bad Girls West have takenthe in work that's toheart. Somemake parexamples theirforemothers of somemischievously maletropes; odic and satirical,"humoring" the rewrite revise "master"'scripts a different ofview. or from point new and new Others invent narratives, images, metaphors, modes their and female experiofrepresenting projecting ownspecifically technically, conceptually-that stylistically, ence-formally, constructs circumvent altogether. paternal -Marcia Tanner overtheidea of the critics have expressed Somefeminist worry withtheboundaries the mother not,playing or of female subject, havein attaining in women ourculture giventhedifficulties self, womenartistsin particular-mustbe strong enoughto allow isfor suchstrength this themselves kindofplay;onewaytoachieve mothers toimagine see)their (or playing. girls -Susan Suleiman In the widely discussed recent "Bad Girls" shows, the mother-daughter the was artists framedprimarily relationof feminist through desireon the partof for youngerartists bad enough mothersamong older ones. In her catalogue essay a MarciaTannerconstructed matrilineageof bad-girlmothers forthe exhibition, beginning with Artemisia Gentileschi and proceeding to Meret Oppenheim, Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois,Faith Ringgold,Linda Benglis,and CindySherman
a sense of selfhood to begin with .... I believe that women-
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:: ?.: ~:??
Bourgeois. 1982.
Robert Louise Mapplethorpe.
artist to argue that through their identificationwith irreverent, transgressive mothersthe youngergenerationof bad-girlartistsis able to subvert patriarchal in of law, to "ignore the entire mythof male hegemony, paternal lawgivers art and everywhere else."20The suggestion that through their relation to strong of mothersthese daughtersare able to workoutside the framework individuated to patriarchy, evade the termsof the Oedipus and castrationcomplexes, is of course a claim grounded in feminist psychoanalytic work on the motherdaughterrelationthatis anti-Lacanianboth in its positingof an extrapatriarchal relation and in its emphasis on pre-Oedipal experience. And this model of an the "Bad Girls"shows as the relation structured empoweringmother-daughter as subversion, the comingof age profoundly displayof mother-taught liberatory of a new generation of feministartists who, unlike their predecessors, are positioned not only to produce critiques of the patriarchal construction of paternal gender but also to produce worksthat,as Tanner puts it, "circumvent constructs altogether."21 artists, If, then, Lacan is the bad fatherof this new generationof feminist herself bad girl,withwhomthe a the bad enough motheris a seventiesfeminist, and in relation to whom she can position herselfin a daughter can identify workof the 1970s and '80s, a repressed The Lacanian-basedfeminist genealogy.
in exhibitioncataMarcia Tanner,"MotherLaughed: The Bad Girls' Avant-Garde," Bad Girls 20. Art logue (NewYorkand Cambridge:The New Museumof Contemporary and MIT Press,1994), p. 77. Ibid. 21.
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termin the maternalgenealogyconstructed the "Bad Girls"shows,meanwhile by seems to function a kind of parentalfoilto the transgressive as tacticsof the badgirlgenerations.That is, the "Bad Girls"showswere organizednot onlythrough but also through identification withbad enough mothers rejectionofbad feminist mothers. workon But in the Kleinian model in which much recent body-centered aggression is grounded, the mother-infantrelation is not one of positive identification but of radical alienation. Aggression toward the mother and of effects this aggression,ratherthan depressiveanxietyabout the destructive relation.In the "Bad Girls" the Kleinian mother-infant structure identification, with a transgressive mother,but shows,the girl is positioned in identification and is this identification achieved only by rigidly separatingtransgressive nonmothers. And this splittingof the "mother"into good and bad transgressive of objectsreproducesa centralfantasy the Kleiniansubject. was of the In the "Bad Girls" shows, division good and bad mothers portrayed And this use of a thematicof verydifferently-asa disruptionof stereotypes. of of inverted stereotypes good and bad girlsas the principalcuratorialstrategy the "Bad Girls"exhibitions-pervadingnot only the selection of worksbut also the extensivewall texts and the shows' catalogue essays-was strikingin the and dichotomy, thatexplicitly contextof exhibitions takingas rejectedhierarchy For the strict model the Bakhtinian theircentraltheoretical oppocarnivalesque. at seemed markedly odds with whichthe showswerestructured through sitionality hierarchiesof gender,race, and class and of the stated purpose of overturning and masculine of and especially displacingfeminine high and low culturalforms, to thisdetermination So stereotypes. the question I would like to pose is whether of or an separate the bad girlsfromthe good can be seen as manifesting anxiety in about feminist practice.And ifso, mightthe stagingof thisanxiety exhibitions devoted to the displayof aggressionbe seen as enacting what for Klein is the problem-anxietyabout one's ownaggression? pivotalpsychoanalytic relationgroundedin a The "Bad Girls"showsconstructed mother-daughter in aggression partby takingup Susan Suleiman'squestionabout whathappens to whenthe motherlaughs.In answerto her own question,Suleiman the avant-garde imagines what she calls the displacementfromthe patriarchalmother to the and bringinginto (psychoanalytic) motheras both subverting patriarchy playful and behaviorsof laughter the existencethe motheras a subjectthrough aggressive to wantto make the motherlaugh, But play.22 whilethe "Bad Girls"showsseemed to all. she didn'tlaugh after For despiteabundantreferences the subversive power forms like cartoonsand gag propslikewhoopie of and the display comic of humor, of cushions,the compulsivesplitting bad and good objects-and bad and good
in Susan Suleiman, "Playingand Motherhood;or, How to Get the Most of the Avant-Garde," 22. ed. of RepresentationsMotherhood, Donna Bassin, MargaretHoney, and MeryleMahrer Kaplan (New Haven: Yale University Press,1994).
Mother Bad Enough
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mothers-enacted in the showsblocked the doublingand crossing of meaning up whichhumoris constructed. through or The effect a kind of structural of elasticity ambivalence,humor is itself use of produced by a splitsubject,humor being, according to Freud, a strategic traumaintopleasure.23 with So denial, a comedythatdeflectssuffering turning by humor,play,or the movementbetween positions, displaces anxiety.Projective anxiety. splitting, on the other hand, has the reverse effectof intensifying to the Incapable of tolerating ambivalencethatis structural humor,such splitting produces good and bad objects thatare held veryfarapart. And it is thiskind of set the of splitting, up byopposition,thatI would suggeststructured presentation the "Bad Girls"shows. In constructingher matrilineageof a bad-girlsavant-garde, example, for Marcia Tanner cites,almost,an emblematicpairing of icons fromthe history of in feministart: Linda Benglis's 1974 ad for Artforum, which the nude Benglis, masked by dark glasses, deploys a double dildo between her legs, and a 1982 of portrait Louise BourgeoisbyRobertMapplethorpein whichBourgeois,dressed in a fuzzycoat, clutchesunder her arm an outsized latex phallus-doll,her 1968 WhatTanner actuallyreproduces,however, the Benglisad and is sculptureFillette. a photographof Fillette alone, hangingon a hook as it is displayedin exhibition, rather than the Mapplethorpe photograph.And this omission of the grinning, a phallus-toting Bourgeois allowed Tanner to claim thatBenglis'swork"displayed a theatricalflair, degree of bold insouciance,mischief, daringthatmighthave and made the shyBourgeoisrecoil."24 facilitated, otherwords,a repression the It in of motherat the very sitethatwas to be chargedwithher laughter. playful, aggressive under Positioningherselfas the motherof the phallus-dollshe gripsfirmly her elbow,Bourgeois,as we remember well,laughed; and her laugh did effect so a displacement from the patriarchal mother to the playful,aggressivemother. Performing a fantasy of aggression toward the phallus and the infant, she demonstratedhow the artist/mother as mightbe constituted a subject through aggression. In Mapplethorpe's photograph, Bourgeois made herself the very image of the bad enough mother: the mother who grins at the patriarchal of overvaluation the phallus,who parodies the metonymy infant of and penis,and in whose hands the phallus becomes penis, or in otherwordsslipsfromits status as privilegedsignifier become one more object of aggression to and desire. This is not a Kleinian fantasy se, but rathera fantasy turning of per psychoanalysisagainst itself.For if in Kleinian theorythe mother does not exist as a subject, but only as the object of the infant'saggressiveprojections,Bourgeois like produces a maternalsubjectconstituted, the infant subject,througha playof introjectionsand projections. So by turningthe motheragainst the infant,the
23. EditionoftheComplete Works Sigmund Sigmund Freud, "Humor,"in TheStandard Psychological of ed. Freud, JamesStrachey(London: HogarthPress,1953-64), vol. 21, pp. 160-66. 24. Tanner,"MotherLaughed," p. 73.
Fillette.1968. LouiseBourgeois.
-::,'4W4
againstthe phallus,and humoragainstthe fetish-thatis,byexploiting part-object modelsthe tensionbetween Kleinian,Lacanian, and Freudian psychoanalytic to And psychoanalysis, borrow mother. the playful, aggressive Bourgeoisproduces her Lacan's phraseonce again,is incapableofso muchas suspecting existence. Nor does she existin the "Bad Girls"catalogue,whereshe is displacedbyan in that stands fetish-like place of the Mapplethorpe picture,a image of Fillette a in reverseof the one performed decade beforein anothermuseum repression is of For thissubstitution the object forthe portrait the reverseof the catalogue. omissionperformed the Museum of Modern Artin its catalogue forthe 1982 by Fillette croppedout of the photograph, in was Bourgeoisretrospective: thatinstance, off the grin fromits gag to produce a more enigmatic smile for the cutting motherby Both of these deletions elide the playful catalogue's frontispiece.25 whichshe is constructed, dividing the object relationthrough object by disrupting And in both cases, one mightsuppose, it is an and subject into discreteframes. motherthatis in of anxietyabout the aggressionregistered the figure the playful of the image. defendedbythisinsistent splitting motherenacted by In the "Bad Girls"catalogue, the figureof the playful in the Mapplethorpe picture is displaced by the Benglis ad. There, Bourgeois of is a appropriation the phallus, aggression enacted through morestraightforward and aggression, which fullyretains its conventionalvalences of power,virility,
as For a discussionof MOMA's croppingof the photograph,see my"Pretty a Picture:Louise 25. Parkett (March 1991), pp. 48-57. 27 Bourgeois'sFillette,"
Mother Bad Enough
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albeit parodically exaggerated.In takingon the phallus (ratherthan takingit up, becomes both phallic and aggressive, and as Bourgeois does), Benglis'sbody itself thisassumptionof aggressionthroughthe phallus is indeed, as Tanner suggests, a centraltropein the stagingof the "Bad Girls"shows. But I would like to turnnow to the different problematicof aggressionthatI and thatis anxietyabout aggression much recentfeminist believe structures work, and its destructive effects.For it will be my argument that recent work by Bourgeois and others points not in the direction of the thematicof liberatory but toward more complex a thatwas presentedin the "Bad Girls"shows, aggression structuralanalysisof aggression.In that analysis,which is Kleinian-basedin its organizationthroughobject relations,loss is a functionof fantasieddestructive of actions performedby the subject, a subject that is also capable, in fantasy, itsdamaged objects. repairing Beds Thematerial there was all room bothering bothand me, taking that And somehow idea ofthe the eringmebyits aggressive presence. mother mother tome.Thisis the came me, waymy impressed as very the stupowerful, silent, judging,and controlling whole very very dio. And naturally piecebecame mother. thatpoint,I this At my I had my whatI felttoward subject. was goingto express her.... First all I cutherhead,and I slitherthroat. And after ... weeks of I and weeks work, thought, thisis thewayI saw mymother, of if then didnotlike How couldshepossibly meifI treat she me. like her thatway?At thatpointsomething turned around.I could not standtheidea that wouldn't me.I couldn't ifI thought she like live that didn'tlikeme.The she I her cut factthat hadpushed around, her to it. has off head,had nothing do with What do toa person you to what expect person feeltoward the to nothing do with you you.... Now at theend I became very, very depressed, terribly, terribly depressed. -Louise Bourgeois Theego's and leads growing capacity integration synthesis more for and more, during firstfew even these tostates which in love months, and hatred, and correspondingly good and bad aspectsof the are and objects, being synthesized; this givesriseto thesecond form the ofanxiety-depressive anxiety-for infant's aggressive impulses and desires toward bad breast the are (mother) now tobea danfelt tothe breast as (mother) well. ger good -Melanie Klein
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Having begun, then, with the fatherdragged onto the dinner table and to whichis to eaten, I would like to end byreturning the table,the bed, the floor, say to the horizontal field of the infant,to what Mitchell has called infancy's durationratherthana historical, punctuated "perpetualpresent... [a] horizontal, For if Kleinian fantasyis a structuralspace, vertical temporal perspective."26 vectoredbythe axis of the horizontal, thisis a very than different model offantasy that which formsaround the gendered body. Enacted through processes of and multiplying the fantasies conflation,splitting, performedon part-objects, of the Kleinian subject are fantasies of the body riven by the drives and undifferentiated gender. by are To returnto one of myearlier examples,Rona Pondick's installations structured a part-object logic in whichthe decenteringof the body takes the by as of and splitting objects thatfunction part-object formof a conflation systemshanging, scattered,or clustered in relation to the floor,the ceiling, and the corners of the room. Workslike DoubleBed (1989), an impossibly long twinned mattress tied up with a gridded network of cord to which baby bottles are attached, and Loveseat(1992), constructedof two facing breasted chairs with nipples,a raised pink plastic hole sunk between the seats,enact the baby-bottle projection of infantile drives onto external objects, or in other words the conflation through fantasyof the body and the structuresthat support and of literalness theiruse of objects,and in the interaction contain it. In the insistent whichthe part-object and projectionthrough of processesof introjection logic of the impulseto the infantile object relations-so that,forexample, bodystructures suck or to bite produces an entiresucking/biting system-theseworksconstruct Klein called the paranoid-schizoid the pre-Oedipalsubjectalong the lines of what position. Through this position,the subject produces the bad object, projectingits fantasiesin externalobject. These aggressive own aggressiononto a destructive in which the subject is consumed turnset up the so-called depressiveposition, fantasies and mournsthe loss of of about the effects thesedestructive withanxiety between the aggressive the good object through its own aggression. Shifting paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position, the subject produces its of fantasies destroying own good objects (as wellas bad ones) and of restoring them in turn. And through the interplayof these two positions, and of the Klein constructs in fantasies whichtheyare articulated, and destructive reparative one's own aggression,but also loss-loss suffered through through subjectivity work. one's own reparative recoverable through potentially of is acted out in a frenzy aggression The paranoid-schizoid position,then, and the depressiveposition throughinertiaand despair,feelingsthat are overand reparation.Pondick'sworkcan of in come, temporarily, fantasies destruction
26.
Selected Introduction, 26. Mitchell, Klein, p.
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fantasiesof the infantin the grips of parabe seen as enacting the destructive noid anxiety. Rachel Whiteread's casts of bathtubs, beds, rooms, and other of abandoned objects bearing the impressions bodilyuse-stains, cracks,dents, and punctures-evoke, on the other hand, depressive vacatingof desire. anxiety's a literalprocessof evacuation,the object is lost,leavingthe plaster Through as or rubbermold of itsspatialcontaineror core to function the work, workthat a constitutes loss of the object. In casts of the underside of a bathtubor a bed, the or the inside of a closet, drawer, room, or house-spaces that contain or repeat the body-Whiteread materializes this loss literallyas a metonymically an inertregistration the space the bodyonce occupied. of negative, These casts of space occupied and then vacated by the body also manifest the collapse throughwhichobject and desire,like selfand other,are enfoldedby infantile The distinctions inside and outside or bodyand environment of fantasy. thatare foundationalforthe gendered bodyare not observedbyinfantile fantasy. So these worksproduced throughconflationand splitting-the collapse of body and environment, peeling awayof inside fromoutside-materialize a world the structured the part-object. by In Whiteread's less bythe playof objects thanby case, thislogic is articulated the construction a space thatis the condition of infantile of For fantasy. it is not the part-object itselfthatconfronts in Whiteread'swork,but thatelision us body of bodyand environment, insideand outside,through whichthe infantile worldis made. Working, of then,at the limitsof the body,at the interface the bodyand its structures withevidentparallels to the supports,Whitereadexamines interstitial in-betweenness infantile of experience. The inside-outconstruction, which,forexample, a cast of the underside in of the bathtubthatcontains the body forms another tub,or the space beneath a mattress makesa bed, in reversing functions object and container, inside the of of and outside,performs decenteringof the body.In otherpieces, such as a recent a seriesof beds in whichthe worksometimesis a cast of the object itself ratherthan of its interioror surrounding the limitof the body is defined,or eroded, space, not byits surrounding and to whichit molds space but bythe supportit impresses and plastercasts of mattresses and box springs itself.The beds are foam,rubber, stacked or folded over,propped or slung againstthe wall,the tracery springs of vein-like fromunder the stained surfacesof the amber,yellow, and pushing up whiteskins.Dense and inert,these beds bear the hardened imprintof the body stretched out in the horizontalfieldof infantile experience,the fieldstructured, accordingto Klein,bythe death drive. I have suggestedthatworksby Pondick and Whitereadmaterializeinfantile fantasythroughthe interactionof the positions Klein called paranoid-schizoid and depressive, both of whichare functions aggression(or the struggle supof to workthatis press it), and of loss. These are only two examples of recentfeminist in structured these terms, and I have offered themtogether evoke something to of the structural dimensionof thismodel, a model thatexceeds the thematics the of
RachelWhiteread. Untitled(Double AmberBed). 1991. Untitled.1991. Left:
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infantile and the part-object whichit is oftenread. I have also attempted to through demonstrate how the Kleinianmodel,withitsemphasison aggression the pivotal as and othersin psychoanalytic problem,has been employedcritically theseartists by relation to Lacanian-basedfeminist workof the 1970s and '80s thatcenteredon of investigations pleasureand desire.Organizedstructurally positionratherthan by temporally stage, the Kleinian model displaces concepts of essentialismand by regressionto open a space in which fantasiesof aggressioncan be examined as structural the subjectof eithersex and of any gender,in which the subjectof to is not but terms. aggression constituted in essential in relational The fieldof infantile as a space in whichto investigate in fantasy aggression a feminist contexthas been articulatedmostfully the workof Louise Bourgeois, in and the practicesI have discussedhere mustbe read in relationto that body of workand as part of its delayed reception.The part-object logic of Pondick'swork in particular closely follows Bourgeois's complex development of that logic, Those moves include: strategies of repeatingmanyof its moves almostverbatim. inside-out construction and of multiplication, and conflation thatsubvert splitting, the phallic logic of gender and disarticulatethe Oedipal body; techniques of that enact the ferocity the of pouring, cutting,scratching,and fragmentation drives-or alternatively stitching, of and polishingthateffect repair the wrapping, of damage inflicted throughaggression;and the stagingof objects in installations or setups structuredas part-object fantasyspaces. All of these are processes throughwhichBourgeois has enacted the subjectof the drivesand bodilyfantasy and throughwhich the currentgeneration of feminist artistshas received and reexaminedthe investigation the drivesas a projectoffeminist of art. For while Bourgeois's workreceived increasingcriticalattentionfollowing her retrospective MOMA in 1982, it has been in the early1990s in the context at of critiquesof Lacanian psychoanalysis semiotics, and and of intensive concentration focused on the body as subject to aggressionand pain, that her work has assumed a pivotal position in mediating feminist practices. Bourgeois's recent exhibitionof worksfromthe past decade at the Brooklyn Museum,and especially the series of workscalled Cells (1989-94), staged the part-object logic of infantile as fantasy a play of position. In domestic spaces encaged by screens,doors, and broken and soot-covered windows occupied by part-objects-a giant pair of marble eyes,a pair of folded hands, glass globes, an ear-Bourgeois materialized the Kleinian notion of position as "a place in which one is sometimeslodged." With great insistenceon the concretenessof the objects, the corporeality the of and the six sides of the cube as the markersof real space, she deployed viewer, objects to which pastness seemed to cling-weathered architecturalremnants, broken mirrors,schoolroom chairs, and narrowbeds-in the constructionof itself a "perpetualpresent." as memory As a numberof feminist theoristshave pointed out, Klein's object relations as model, focusing it does on the internal and fantasies of experience of the infant the mother, who always functions an originary as and neveras a real subject, object
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This is also the case withBourgeois'swork, failsto open an intersubjective space.27 whichconcernsitself witha problemdefinedin the titleofan early workas thatof who talk to each other withoutseeing each other."In the Cells, the "figures screens occluding intersubjectivity literalizedin the meshed wire or are fantasy of dirtthroughwhichwe viewersglimpseone anotherpartially. When the gloss of the Cell is articulated hingedmirrors to disrupt and cut up the space angled by field of vision,we inhabit a play of projections,staringback at our own faces of reflectedbehind the emprisoningtracery the screen. The experience of the of Cells is of an interplay introjectionand projectionin which it is structurally impossibleto "see each other." And thisis the veryconditionof aggression, Klein describesit. Loss, the as in of loss of the otherthatis destroyed fantasy, embedded in the structure one's is of own aggression. when Kobena Mercercomplainedrecently "a stubborn Thus, of as resistanceto the recognition unconsciousfantasy a structuring principleof of and called foranalysis "the oppressive our social, emotional,and politicallife," and unhappyphantasiesof love and hate thatconditionour mutualenmeshment," it was not surprisingthat he pointed toward Melanie Klein. For Klein, as he and giveform "defined as the observed, perceive, phantasy merely waywe organize, of conflicted the coexistence loveand hate."28 to our feelings, whichare always by Klein's model of unconsciousfantasy a structural as space articulated the by one possible approach to the problem of developing infantilebody offers only thatare not groundedin concepts feminist readingsof aggression psychoanalytic of essentialismor regression.But, as I have attemptedto demonstratehere, a as workcallsforreadingsof aggression complex bodyof recentfeminist significant art in as the analysesof pleasure and desire offered Lacanian-basedfeminist and of criticaltheory the 1970sand '80s.
Feminism KleintoKristeva: 27. See, forexample, Psychoanalytic JaniceDoane and Devon Hodges, From " of Search the"Good and the (AnnArbor:University MichiganPress,1992). for Enough Mother "Fear of a Black Penis,"p. 122. 28. Mercer,

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Bad Enough Mother Author(s): Mignon Nixon Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol.

Bad Enough Mother

N-I x "I f1wh

LouiseBourgeois. (Eyesand Cell Mirrors).1989-93. Peter (Photo: Bellamy.)

Mother Bad Enough

of LouiseBourgeois. Destruction The Peter the Father.1974. (Photo: Moore.)

Mother Bad Enough

MaxineHayt.Lick#2.1993. AdamReich.) (Photo:

Bad Enough Mother

Bad Enough Mother

Robert Louise Mapplethorpe.

Mother Bad Enough

Mother Bad Enough

Selected Introduction, 26. Mitchell, Klein, p.

Bad Enough Mother

RachelWhiteread. Untitled(Double AmberBed). 1991. Untitled.1991. Left:

Bad Enough Mother

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