In this autoethnographic video, I consider birth, parental life, illness, contingency, performing "normal," and my own eternal becoming [1] through the lens of Jean-Luc Marion's theory of the saturated phenomenon—a paradox that exceeds the Kantian categories of quantity, quality, relation, and/or modality to the point that the event itself interrupts or even conceals its own purpose.[2] I visually and verbally layer recollections, reflections, repetitions, and refrains about the ways in which parents attempt to quantify the immeasurable.[3] I obscure straightforward storytelling through contingency and reflexive collage. Embracing my hesitance to embrace, in this work I focus on three of the Kantian categories through which Marion explains his theory: Event, flesh, and icon. I explore these categories through memory work, photographic description,[4] critical autoethnography, and performative writing.
Ultimately, I consider this piece
a candid collection of family truths and fictions
a pile of photographs taken and untaken
a finalized work in progress
a celebration of living
a declaration of guilt
an excessive ode
a love letter
a surrender
a question
an archive
an echo
a wish
Notes
1. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
2. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002).
3. Anna Prushinskaya, A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother: Essays, (Des Plaines, IL: MG Press, 2017).
4. Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, (London: Verso, 2002).
» Lyndsay Michalik Gratch is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies at Syracuse University. Her research, creative work, and teaching focus on performance, adaptation, multimodal storytelling, historical and emerging technologies, and digital cultures. Gratch is author of Adaptation Online: Creating Memes, Sweding Movies, and other Digital Performances (Lexington Books, 2017) and co-author of Digital Performance in Everyday Life (Routledge, 2022).
