Mothers and Daughters, Mother-Daughters

When Laura Marks argues haptic cinema as always erotic -- as it puts "the object into question" and pulls the viewer "too close to see properly" -- she likens it to a child's gradual realization of separateness from its mother. This relationship of "perception of alterity" (and the problematics of its refusal) is present in Maud Mannoni's work on the "backwards child": the child who believes she is an extension of her mother's body for "too long". This belief of non-autonomy (material continuity) is created by both parent and child in a (ultimately unhealthy) partnership work of subjectivation and estrangement, identification and immersion, that also recalls the dialogic relationship between viewer and (haptic) image. It's true that the backwardness of this child who refuses autonomy via an impression of material extension (collapsing self and other) is most obvious, at least in Mannoni's work, in autistic and mentally disabled children. When the mother takes advantage of the pathological vulnerability of her child to exacerbate the child's condition so that it embodies the mother's own anxieties and lack. Yet its logic is also pertinent in thinking about 'queer' children in general and queer bodies, which is the kind of body "the digital" has, according to Marks.

This question of "where does my body begin and where does my mother's body end?", I suppose a universal "stage" of infancy, reminds me of Gregor Podgorski's photographic series "Mères & Filles", which features images of mother and daughters' naked bodies interacting with each other. In a gallery space the work is accompanied by verbal accounts of the mothers and daughters recounting the experience of being captured "together" in the same frame. The theme of "mirror, mirror" is constant, the uncanny sense of "a(n)other me" (a "me" resembling the past?) for the mother and the sense of staring at the materialized future for the daughter ("I will look like her"). Which seems to link reproduction and continuity to a kind of database of memories and expectations that get passed on from generation to generation. A kind of archive inevitably psychosomatized into subjects that can only "be" in this constant negotiation between autonomous, discrete personhood and a continued embodied history that one just cannot "shake off" or disavow.