Trinh Minh-Ha on ‘New Ways of Seeing’ & the ‘Witnessing Self’

Trinh Minh-Ha was part of a panel at MOMA last night (April 11), talking about women and film, with Laura Mulvey (moderator) and Chantal Ackerman.

“Soliciting A New Seeing”

Trinh talked about digital film and the new kinds of seeing that it opens up. The politics of form that she is interested in has to do with a ‘form of witnessing’, with reflexive forms that allow for a ‘witnessing of the self’, or a ’science of the self’…

——>>>When Trinh talks, the sense comes from not just the words themselves but from their entwinement and the melodic flow of their sounds rising and falling…

Anyway, this science of the self (quote: “a science of the self, if I can call it that…”) is exactly what Ricki and I are trying to locate within the practice of educational research, but there isn’t a clear language for that yet, instead we have to make up words like ’selfother’ following Lous Heshusius.

“Witnessing the Self”

Witnessing has to do with awareness and seeing; or seeing with awareness. This kind of seeing is the middle way between subjectivity and objectivity, between dualistic categories of knowing, and to quote: “practicing the middle way doesn’t mean half-way, the middle is where there is no duality, hence there are no foreclosures, what comes to our senses is already on go”… The middle way is the passage, it is the journey, life is what takes place in the ‘middles’, life is the movement and unfolding of passages, middles, or (another term) intervals:  “Life is the unfolding of intervals within intervals.”

Buddhism also talks about  the ‘middle way’, and also about the middles, the intervals, the gaps where consciousness is free to manifest in any direction, any form. The sanskrit (?) is ‘bardo’, meaning a space in between, where life emerges but cannot be grasped or fixed by words. And yet there are words, and yet we use categories, words, terms, forms to speak of the invisible. Trinh: “form is attained to address the formless”.

Trinh invoked traditional Asian arts several times as examples of a seeing that is a form of witnessing, a seeing that arises in the middle. For example, painters in ancient China spent lifetimes painting the same landscape, the same objects. And the reason for this was not for the accumulation of expertise of knowing about the object, but in order to develop their capacity for seeing. The instance of seeing the object was an enactment of awareness, of witnessing, of a certain kind of seeing.

Well, I’m obviously a fan of Trinh’s.  We approached her after the talk to say hi and how much we llllove her writing. She was incredibly gracious.