LA MACHINE ET LA LIBERTÉ

What does it mean to produce milk under the mechanical solicitation of a machine?

One might have thought it would lend itself to the instrumentalization of female bodies (surrogate mothers)

But it’s quite the opposite: the breastpump machine was invented so that women could breastfeed and work at the same time. 

Mais la “nourrice de lait” existait pendant des siècles.

In the past this job was performed by another woman “the wet nurse”, something like two thirds of women were not breastfeeding their own children. The fetishization of the mother / child relationship in the XX century has increased the burden of motherhood. The argument against the “wet nurse“ was the fear of class and racial contamination originally and it’s only  recently that it became for the “well being of the baby”. The difficulty for society to accept women’s body labor as labor that needs to be paid for (prostitution, wet job, surrogate mother).

Une femme peut allaiter n’importe quel bébé, même un animal.

Inversement la louve qui allaite Romulus et Remus

The absurdity of animal-human distinction, considering the biology of being “mammals”, meaning the ability to feed one’s offspring

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"Everywhere motherhood is mystified" - Susan Griffin

Maybe the breast pump and the activity of breast pumping is unpleasant, and because of its unpleasantness, it can play a role in demystifying motherhood. Why is it upsetting?

The breast pump has become a symbol of women’s ability and ‘freedom’ to work and pump milk at the same time, but this freedom also provokes a certain alienation (doing two things at the same time creates an eternal inner conflict: I’m never doing the thing I should be doing)

Pumping milk is like working from home - an advantage and an inconvenience.

It’s also a symbol of capitalist exploitation of intimacy (scene from The Big Short) for more efficiency. The hope to make women doubly subjected to the demands of productivity (produce children and work at the same time - at the same second, says the machine). I saw  an image of woman breastfeeding twins while working on her laptops (by an artist whose name I can’t remember)

I don’t know how to resolve the ambivalence that these images provoke. The image is one of both alienation and agency at the same time.

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Productivity but also enslavement but also powerlessness (passive action): is the milk being expressed, or is she expressing her milk?  If expressing the milk means getting it out then what does the milk have to say? 

The sounds of the machine – a breath

The cycle of human life

The moment – an interruption of everything that is carefully timed (cycle of 1 to 20 minutes)

Time passes in milk like sand passes through an hourglass

The drops: an image of time, a flux or flow that is not one

Attached to a machine that breathes, counting the seconds like a prisoner, crossing off the days before you can leave

En l’absence de contact avec l'enfant, comment donner un sens à ce moment?

C’est comme si c’était une abstraction de la mère, la notion de sujet est effacée par la machine (la solitude avec la machine), this notion of ‘subject’ is so complex in the institution of motherhood.

She is never an actor of her own identity. She is written about, painted, loved and hated, yet she never speaks, writes, or paints on her own. 

“The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body” - Roland Barthes

Reconsidérer la notion d’abondance et de manque: abundance and scarcity as something where the subject is totally passive, if passivity exists in degrees

How to define this type of passivity where you do nothing, but things are extracted from you, aspiré en dehors du corps

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“We have only brief illuminations which we must record between interruption, set down side by side, hoping to make sense of it all someday later” - Susan Griffin

When thinking about intermission, the idea of motherhood came to mind. Motherhood  is only interrupted by death from a certain point of view. But from the point of view of the woman/mother activity, from now on her life will be full of interruptions and intermissions, her life will be full of in-between moments and conflictual transitions. The activity that she was pursuing before having a child will be necessarily interrupted  and mothering (not being a mother) will also be interrupted.

What will also be interrupted or discontinued is the consistency of her own identity - as something cohesive, something she can control or understand. That is why there is so little written from the point of view of the mother because to write or to produce artwork, you need a certain sense of cohesiveness as an acting subject (and also not to be interrupted).

Another reason: “When a woman is finally free of her children’s needs, she wants to forget” -- “The way people don’t want to think about poverty or sickness or death” - Susan Griffin

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There are no images of breastfeeding women, even though this activity has existed since… (find date)

Pourquoi? Alors que je m’interroge sur ce manque de référence (sur internet mais aussi dans l’histoire de l’art), une amie (Jenny Schlenzka) m’envoie ce texte de Maggie Nelson qui pose la même question dans Les Argonautes

L’explication est bien sûr dans la domination du male gaze over image making (but maybe only in western art history?), because the subject has long existed in Egyptian and African art. 

How comfortable are we as women about this image? I invited different women writers who said “They have nothing to say about motherhood”and when I hear that I feel the same too

It’s not about motherhood, it’s about waiting, about being sucked by a machine, breastfeeding a machine being sucked by air

It is about fluxus – time, thoughts

It is about becoming animal and animal becoming human

It is about getting rid of these subcategories in order to recognize ourselves as mammals

It is about being trapped, being passive and understanding what abundance and scarcity mean, what hunger and satisfaction mean

The link with thought, finding fertile ground for the spirit (« patience patience dans l’azur les déserts sont la chance d’un fruit mûr » Paul Valéry)

The link with thought, stomach, except that I am feeding another stomach than mine with these thought-drops of milk (I don’t digest my ideas)

The hunger that accompanies breastfeeding - that overbearing hunger (but less than that of the child). The ease of satisfaction (a given for the child, achieved as a result of eating)

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L’absence de représentation du tire-lait pourtant invention du XVIII eme siècle . Les activités maternelles sont codés négativement à la fois par la culture patriarcale traditionnelle et à la fois par la culture féministe qui lui reproche d’essentialisme, de confondre féminité et maternité ou tout simplement d’être un obstacle à la liberté de le femme

The censoring of this scene and of the machine’s breath makes me think of a phrase from Cixous: “When we censor the body, we censor the breath at the same time. Write to yourself: your body must be heard. Then the immense resources of the unconscious will come forth. Our naphtha, it will spread, without golden or black money, across the world, an unrecognized quota that will change the rules of the game.” (loose translation from French)

The symbolic link - fluidity, abundance, fear of loss

The archetypal breast - the image of that which is soft and supple - the link with sexuality, oral and genital. That which is liquid, the jet that spurts, an archetype of abundance (like the jet of petrol or liquid gold) which can be distributed, used, consumed, digested. 

Do we not say in financial terms: liquidate our assets, our fortune, a “liquid” asset is one that is easily transferable

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Obstacle et difficulté dans mon projet System of Attachment: la biographie

Les élément biographiques sont utilisées contre les femmes artistes, intellectuelles pour “expliquer” mais surtout discréditer, refaire basculer dans la marge, dans la spécificité de l'intime et du personnel - Luce Irigaray

Avant les femmes n’avaient pas le temps de s’exprimer / témoigner / “recollect in silence” (Bartleby) à ce moment là car à peine le temps de dormir ou de manger

Maintenant où il y a un tout petit peu plus le temps, il y a le dénigrement 

Women have been trained to believe it is not “good material”, et la peur de renforcer les clichés, la peur que cette expérience ne soit perçue que comme personnelle et anecdotique.

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“Maternal voices have been drowned by professional theory, ideologies of motherhood, sexist arrogance and childhood fantasy. Voices that have been distorted and censored can only be developing voices” - Moyra Davey

The silence of this moment, the respiration of the machine, the impression of this silence, le moment où on entend cette respiration - me semblait être le son du silence des femmes mères. When thinking about intermission - this in-between moment that breast pumping represents in the day came to mind as an iconic representation of a discontinuity. The discontinuity of being a woman in a world of men, the discontinuity of being an artist while also being a mother. Continuity can only be made of sequences of discontinuity - also the way we breathe - alternation of inspiration and exhalation - in life nothing is continuous.

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Mother Tongue ist bis zum 8. August in der Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover.

Read the print version or this piece in the upcoming issue, FOOD EATS THE SOUL!