1.
As implied by its name, the video-art piece I created, Braidotti’s Pussy, references the philosophy of post-humanistic researcher Rosi Braidotti, who seeks to challenge the humanistic anthropocentric worldview, which holds that humans are special, among other things, in their supremacy over nature. According to Braidotti, in order to rethink an inclusive future, it is necessary to dismantle the perception of humans as discrete subjects who need others in order to perceive themselves.
Braidotti substitutes the dialectic for the relativistic, and argues that subjects are characterized by the relationships they maintain with their world – with human and other entities. She employs a humoristic metaphor, the Vitruvian Cat, as an alternative to Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man – a classic symbol that, from Braidotti’s perspective, and that of other feminists, portrays a biased version of the concept of “Man”, thus creating a uniform standard.
Man, or the Vitruvian subject, is a privileged creature: healthy, White, European, cisgender. Its assimilation as a basic subject, according to Braidotti, creates a paradigm whereby anyone seeking to be perceived as a subject with equal rights is, in effect, seeking to be perceived in accordance with these terms: healthy, White, European, cisgender, and male.
Braidotti argues that since this classic humanistic perspective underpins numerous post-humanistic theories, they do not challenge the concept of Man, nor do they expand the entitlement to human rights and status to include people from spaces of otherness – such as (wo)men with atypical neurological abilities, refugees, (wo)men from Third World countries, (wo)men on the trans spectrum, nature itself and the animals in it, and even artificial intelligence, if and when it arrives.
* Braidotti’s Pussy, Kim Teitelbaum, 2022
2.
In Braidotti’s Pussy, a figure wearing a cat mask moves against a velvet theatre curtain to the sound of a purring cat. Its movements echo those of a cat’s paws, and at times, according to the nature of the movement, the sound of a knife being sharpened is added synchronously. After a while, the figure begins to rapidly shake its head to the sound of a hissing snake, as if in a shamanic trance. Then, the sound of human growling is added to the sonar space, becoming increasingly louder, until the cat dissolves back into nothingness.
As a dance creator, my interest in the piece ironically began with a cat’s purring – a sound that possesses, so I’ve heard, healing properties. Since the exhibition Maintaining the Question, for which this video was created, was initially slated to be a sound exhibition, I started with the sound a cat produces when it is calm and content. This purring, which we take for granted, and which by its very nature is not human, infuses simultaneously into and out of us, stimulating a sense of physical and mental wellbeing.
The exhibition, which, together with the artists presenting their works, sought to understand how we think and create non-hierarchically in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, impelled me to focus on Braidotti’s work. I was interested in exploring how Braidotti’s subject is not autonomous, but infuses its environment into it, then expels it from its pores as air, as waste, as a thought. This disordered quality of life energy was my focus in the video; through it I sought to express something of the persona of Rosi Braidotti herself, a fervent and humorous speaker, who creates a space of passion in her lectures.
I sought to argue that, whether Braidotti is aware of it or not, the cat metaphor does not only symbolize the sum total of possible connections with what she calls the “naturalized other”, but also alludes to pussy, as in vagina. The name of my piece is designed to propose a reversal of “balls” as a metaphor for courage – and link Braidotti’s act of courage and passion to the sex organ that functions, in the words of psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray, as a kind of “[…] body roll[ing] itself up around the body of the Other so completely as to include and incorporate it by phagocytosis. […] What is at issue is thus ‘the enjoying of a body, of the body that, as Other, symbolizes it, and perhaps includes something that serves to bring about the delineation of another form of substance, the enjoying substance.’”
Braidotti’s Pussy takes place in the space where the cat image is the vanishing point of these thematic spaces. The cat is Braidotti’s sex organ, thinking, life energy, and body, and it is also a queer artistic metaphor that dialogues with her body of work and critique. Through its dance moves against the curtain, the cat seeks to add a sensory-poetic space to the academic post-humanistic discourse, and marry the archaic with the imagined. The pussy, despite its name, is not presented as the sexualized other, but is covered in a mask reminiscent of Balinese masks, which play a significant role in the summoning and manifestation of sacred entities in traditional Balinese dance.
* Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One (from French: Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
The cat asks: Why don’t we create or revive shamanic cultures by means of advanced technologies? Why don’t we look into our pets, and see them as an extension of our humanity? Thus, it references philosopher Donna Haraway, who holds that the canine species has been absorbed into the human body, just as mitochondria have become part of cellular organisms on Earth.
Whether it is the sleeping, dreaming sphynx, the smiling cat who speaks in riddles, or the witch’s sidekick – the cat is a persistent piece of nature with a will of its own. Ancient, unpredictable, and mysterious. Semi-domesticated and clairvoyant, the cat reminds us that as time passes, concepts such as “Man” or “human” are changing; humans contemplate the future by means of art and philosophy, and endeavor, in vain, to influence the unknown; but ultimately, all that remains of their contemplations is a message in a bottle, carried along endless currents of information, populism, and discourse, that attempts to entice the reader or observer to pay attention to it for a brief moment.