Amodern Sexualities and the New Realisms: Notes on a Hunch

the evolutionary tree of dinoflagellates, courtesy of Senckenberg Research

In a weirdly fortuitous collision prompted mostly by my recently discovered, hopefully temporary inability to hone in on any one particular text, I’ve been spending time with three works that don’t immediately appear to have many shared points of dialogue. One of these is Harman’s recent essay collection Towards Speculative Realism, which I picked up because , as someone who never had an intense romance and breakup with Heidegger (I spent those formative years reading feminist theory and tacitly boycotting the works of fascists and fascist sympathizers), I figured a needed a good primer on the Heideggerian roots of SR/OOO. Another is Karen Barad’s recent essay on “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” published in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Qui Parle. The third is Karma Lochrie’s book Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (University of Minnesota, 2005).

Each of these works are compelling in their own right. Towards Speculative Realism is, like I wrote a moment ago, a great synopsis of Harman’s revisionary reading of Heidegger’s tool-being by way of Whitehead. Barad’s essay is very much a shortened synopsis of the main philosophical interventions of agential realism more thoroughly covered in her fabulous Meeting the Universe Halfway (and useful on this count alone!), but she frames these interventions through a focus on disrupting queer-phobic discourses on ‘unnatural acts’ through beautifully and empirically destabilizing nature, emphasizing (as alluded to in the title), the radical queerness of nature, its indeterminacy, opacity, and non-taxonomic, anarchic processes. Lochrie’s work is a fabulous attempt to intervene in the study of medieval sexualities through a tightly woven argument that discussing something like pre-or-early modern European homo (or hetero) sexuality is a misled undertaking, given that these taxonomic understandings of sexuality rely on modern conceptions of normativity that had no purchase on corporeal and erotic intelligibilities, say, prior to the 19th century, with the birth of sciences of the norm so well documented by Georges Canguilheim (and Foucault, of course, partially by way of Canguilheim).

So what of the mysterious connectivity I see threading through these works? While it’s only, as I say, a relatively undeveloped hunch I’ve got at the moment, I’d like to make a few notes on the possibility of reading this recent revisionary revival of philosophical realisms – of speculative and agential varieties — as potentially linked to a set of motivations similar to those that animate projects examining a-modern, non-modern, and pre-modern modes of understanding eroticism, corporeality, and kinship.

Lochrie situates the goals of her project as such, rather tongue in cheek: “If I am on a rescue mission, it is twofold: to recuperate female sexualities from the Middle Ages (and medieval scholarship) and to rescue the Middle Ages and all of us from the terrible presumption of transhistorical heteronormativity” (xxviii). Laudable aims, both – I’m a bit more interested in the latter goal, though, at least in this line of thought. Why is it important to work against the infectious presumption of transhistorical heteronormativity? Well, for one, it produces banal scholarship. But, perhaps more importantly, it helps mediate against the force of normativity in our present moments, and (relatedly) helps shifts the future parameters of what sexualities, corporealities, and eroticisms can be and become, perhaps ameliorating the effects of reproductive futurism. Aside (well, not really aside – interwoven with) these temporal-political concerns is the reworking of nature that stems from researching sexualities in an historical moment prior to the becoming normative of nature. What I index by this phrase ‘the becoming normative of nature’ is the early nineteenth century rise of stastical sciences, particularly those relying on the technology of the bell curve, that served to map deviance as derivation from the average and position said average as provident of the acceptable (though, certainly, somewhat mutable) parameters of the normal. This is, of course, from whence modern understandings of disability, natural error, and unnatural acts stem.

This, to my mind, renders the work of Heterosyncrasies of a piece with Barad’s extensive efforts to rework the sacrosanct nature/culture divide in such a way that the phrasing of the above terms makes utterly no sense. What is an ‘unnatural act’ or a ‘natural error’ if we understand the world, or processes of worlding, in terms of phenomenal intra-action? For those who haven’t read Barad before, here’s an account of what she means by intra-action:

On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity—its iterative intra-activity. Matter is not figured as a mere effect or product of discursive practices, but rather as an agentive factor in its iterative materialization, and identity and difference are radically reworked. In particular, I have argued that what we commonly take to be individual entities are not separate determinately bounded and propertied objects, but rather are (entangled “parts of”) phenomena (materialdiscursive intra-actions) that extend across (what we commonly take to be separate places and moments in) space and time (where the notions of “material” and “discursive” and the relationship between them are unmoored from their (anti)humanist foundations and reworked). Phenomena are entanglements of spacetimematter, not in the colloquial sense of a connection or intertwining of individual entities, but rather in the technical sense of “quantum entanglements,” which are the (ontological) inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components.”

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) marks an important shift, reopening and refiguring foundational notions of classical ontology such as causality, agency, space, time, matter, discourse, responsibility, and accountability (“Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 13-14).

.

The projects of Barad and Lochrie feel like bookends of sorts, one with an eye towards alternative conceptions of matter, corporeality, and relationality at work in medieval milieus, another with an eye towards recent and contempory developments in science and technology studies that provide empirical evidence, as it were, of intra-active phenomena, illustrating – in what, I’m sure, many may take as a contentious move – by way of evidentiary example a sort of Derridean differance through demonstrating the irrevocable entanglement of entities heuristically labelled self/other, subject/object in processes of co-constitutive becoming. Some examples included in Barad’s essay: lightning, fish-killing dinoflagellates, and particle physicists.

The long history of contemporary understandings of sexed, sexual, and gendered pathology relies on the refusal of cognizing this co-constituvity, of instead establishing the patient as a bounded entity (perhaps one who transmits disease, but is for all that still a determinate and determined being) as well as an object of observation, firmly delimited from both the other beings – animate and inanimate – in their milieu as well as distinctly differentiated from the sort of corporeal (hetero)normativity established in the processes that work to constitute the becoming normative of nature.

So what of Harman’s work? How does it connect up with these lines of thought? Simply put: there’s something in his emphasis on the secret lives of objects, as it were, that resonates deeply with these efforts to queer nature, matter, and relation in a deeply historical and empirical manner. The disturbing part of Harman’s approach, for me, is his repeated call for contemporary philosophers to investigate these secret lives, these object-to-object relations in a way that cognizes both a) their relative indifference to humans and b) seeks thereby to uncover or unveil the real force of these objects. In other words, what I love about Harman’s work is the emphasis on opacity and limited knowability, insofar as this resonates, in an admittedly odd way, with the work of folks like Eduoard Glissant, who insist on the right to opacity and consider this a fundamental ethical tenet, a sort of lynchpin of non-parasitic, non-usurious relationality.

What is lacking in Harman’s approach (and for me, the reason why I thus far find agential realism so much more compelling than speculative realism), is an understanding of the ways on which ‘objecthood’ has not only or ever solely been confined to the realm of the ostensibly inanimate. When one has experienced life, or parts of living, as a conjectural object of investigation (a phenomenon not at all unfamiliar to many women, folks of color, queers, indigenous communities, disabled folks), granting agential dynamism to much more than the human becomes an important resistant task – and also an important means of ethical relating, constitutive of (to echo Ziarek’s work in An Ethics of Dissensus) a certain ethos of becoming that is deeply attentive to the affective politics of intra-activity in a universe where agency is no longer considered the province of the human.

While the granting of agency to the inanimate is a site where agential and speculative realism seem to overlap, what I think of as the ethos of estrangement called for by Harman –i.e. what he refers to as the movement beyond the sphere of intential objects and toward real ones through “reversing the work of causation itself” in “pointing to a lonely object in the distance and no longer in its relation to us” (137) — is an impossible task in Barad’s understanding of the universe. That this is an impossibility – that we are never separate from other entities, never able to encounter them essentially, does not make her work somehow less empirical or less ‘realist.’ I do think, along with Barad, that one is not necessarily a humanist for cognizing that intra-action is commensurable with opacity. I don’t think, however, that philosophy should dedicate itself to exploring objects in their “naked allure” (Toward Speculative Realism, 139) in order to move beyond the entrenchment of a sometimes-violent, often problematic humanist bent.

In other words, objecthood is never ethically or politically neutral. To affirm this is not to affirm the sovereignity of the human, but it is a way of doing justice to brutal histories of objectification that have had profound effects on human and non-human actants alike. Amodern queer becomings – that is, eroticisms, relationalities, understandings of material intra-action and the non-sovereignity of the subject that don’t cohere with the binaries and normativities constitutive of modern epistemologies — are a way of protesting these violent histories through cognizing the irrevocability of opacity, through granting that there is no full or stable determination of the naked allure of things.

–HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, Agential Realism, Graham Harman, Heterosyncrasies, Karen Barad, Karma Lochrie, Meeting the Universe Halfway, performativity, queer, Qui Parle, Speculative Realism

If you can guess, you get a hug from us both:

It’s the homeplace of

Breaking Away (1979)…

Plan-It-X Records…

Microcosm Publishing (who host group convos at Plan-It-X Fest)…

and the nation’s first Ph.D. in Gender Studies.

It’s also where I’m moving at the end of the summer, for a post-doc in Gender, Race, and Science.

–HJM

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam

Philosophizing the Manual

While this seems like a strange interest, this post is really an open call to people more well read. I am interested to know if there are texts out there that philosophize the manual. I am not so much interested in A Manual/User’s Guide to such and such a text, but a piece of writing that considers the philosophical issues of the manual itself. Any leads are greatly appreciated. If you know of anything, please post responses or send them to Matt at mappleg1@binghamton.edu.

Thanks!

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Manual

Preliminary Thoughts on This Is Not a Program

A redefinition of historical conflict is needed, not intellectually: vitally. (12)

Given Semiotext(e)’s recent translation of Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program into English, I thought I would sketch out some of my thoughts on the text.

This Is Not a Program teases out many of the complications and difficulties of their Introduction to Civil War; in many ways, the interventions made in This Is Not a Program seem to be assumed and refined in Introduction to Civil War. Embedding the work of the collective within a long history of anti-capitalist struggle, from the Black Panthers and the Red Army Faction to a more substantive engagement with the multiple and sometimes conflicting movements of Autonomia, This Is Not a Program works to thoroughly rearticulate political resistance under empire. As indicated in the quote above, the dominant problem of This Is Not a Program is that of partisanship–to redefine absolutely the terms of conflict and resistance. To continue the quote, Tiqqun writes, “I say redefinition because a definition of historical conflict precedes us in which every existence in the pre-imperial period had its part: the class struggle. That definition no longer holds. It condemns us to paralysis, bad faith, and empty talk . . . to continue the struggle today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and with it the whole entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity prostheses” (12). It is thus the eschewal of class that gives rise to a concept of partisanship that is bound neither to a dialectical operation nor its reduction to a fundamentally bi-partisan relation, something like a friend/enemy relation. Enter the form-of-life and its composition in resistance, The Imaginary Party: “When the hostis is no longer a portion of society–the bourgeoisie–but the society as such, the society as power, and when, therefore, we find ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just like every strategy, must be reinvented. The hostis is Empire, and, for Empire, we are the Imaginary Party” (27).

It is in this attempt to redefine partisan relations that Tiqqun’s aversion to Negrism is more fully fleshed out. Where, in The Introduction to Civil War, a critique of Negri is given a mere 2 to 3 pages, two full sections are dedicated to dismantling both Negri’s concept of the multitude and any attempt at fomenting a positive bio-political project. Varying somewhat wildly between biting invective and concise critique, Tiqqun’s engagement with Negri’s thought begins with a critique of citizenship:

The accidents and the rationality that produce the citizen all point to the heart of the imperial enterprise: to attenuate forms-of-life, to neutralize bodies; and the citizen advances this enterprise by self-annulling the risk he represents to the imperial environment . . . There is therefore a factory of the citizen, whose long-term implantation is Empire’s major victory; not social, or political, or economic but anthropological victory . . . The objective [is] to purge the productive center of a society in which production was becoming militarized, to purge it of all the ‘deviants,’ of all the at-risk individuals, of all the agents of the Imaginary Party. (103-104)

It is of this understanding of the citizen and the mechanism by which society is sanitized or purged that Tiqqun refutes Negri on questions of bio-politics and the multitude:

The three watchwords typical of political Negrism–for all its strength lies in its ability to provide informal neo-militants with issues on which to focus their demands–are the ‘citizens dividend,’ the right to free movement (‘Papers for everyone!’), and the right to creativity, especially if computer-assisted. In this sense, the Negrist perspective is in no way different from the imperial perspective but rather a mere instance of perfectionism within it . . . Hence political Negrism’s incestuous relationship with imperial pacification: it wants reality but not its realism. It wants Biopolitics without police, communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get it. Strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial thought; it is simply the idealist face of political thought. (117-118)

So, the importance of a redefinition of partisanship comes to the fore. Not only does Tiqqun consider class to be an antiquated and inadequate means of framing partisan relations in the contemporary moment, articulating a concept of partisanship that distinguishes itself from Negri’s multitude is what remains vital; where the multitude exists as a reconceptualized form of citizenship, citizenship in either local or cosmopolitan iterations must be refused precisely because of its status as an idealized imperial socio-political composition.

On a more general note, This Is Not a Program offers a thorough history of the movements and factions of Autonomia that pairs well with Steven Wrights’ Storming Heaven and the introductory components of Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Embedding their work firmly within German, Italian, and French Autonome movements, Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program is in many ways the contemporary antagonistic voice that works to criticize and render undesirable the reformist lines of thought and action that have resulted from Autonomia. Further, I think that This Is Not a Program would serve as a great companion piece to Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France, particularly Security, Territory Population, The Birth of Bio-Politics, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Where Foucault revisits questions of partisanship, bio-politics, and the form-of-life in these lectures, Tiqqun seems to be intent on elaborating the implications of Foucault’s genealogies of and premises on these subjects in the contemporary moment.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Foucault, Negri, partisanship, This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun

“Rather than being lovers in order to breathe, we are queer in order to escape asphyxia”: Some Reasons Why You Should Read The Screwball Asses

Guy Hocquenghem’s The Screwball Asses, recently published in English translation on Semiotext(e) by way of MIT Press (and available for free over at zine library), is a luminous work, deeply prescient and, on account of this prescience, a much-needed rejoinder to contemporary homonormative/homonationalist politics. Written in a milieu shaped by his dissatisfaction with the work of FHAR (Front homosexual d’action révolutionnaire), particularly its tendencies toward obscuring specifically lesbian feminist concerns, the work merges a critique of bourgeois understandings of sexuality (deeply inflected by Anti-Oedipus) with a set of criticisms internal to gay male socialities, sexualities, and political organizing. These paired critiques develop into a decidely queer utopic vision, a vision formed by linked hypotheses regarding the development of a truly radical queer sexuality that isn’t organized with reference to a dyad of hetero/homo. About this vision, Hocquenghem writes that it is a utopia that “might seem like science fiction,” but is nevertheless “spellbinding” (36). More on the content of this queer utopia in a bit. First, I’d like to hit on 5 or 6 really smart things he has to say regarding the bourgeois atrophy of gay politics, the intercourse of desire and the political, and the importance of pairing radical feminist critique with queer struggle.

He writes in a “one more time, homos, if you really want to be revolutionaries” sort of way that we can all benefit from, even those het readers who may think radical feminist thought – particularly of the 70s variety – couldn’t be further from their current philosophical or political work. If anything, the undeniable contemporary relevance of Hocquenghem’s work attests to the necessity of a rekindling and revalorization of feminist modes of thought considered, throughout academia and certainly within popular culture, as (variously, sometimes concurrently) outmoded, outrageous, naive, absurd, or too forthrightly incendiary or polemical to be taken seriously. We’ve too often dismissed feminist/lesbian separatist thought, ignoring the critiques that generated separatist positions on account of the ostensible non-viability of the political projects proposed.

Hocquenghem, alternately, engages deeply and carefully with these currents of thought (to be expected, given that he was thinking, writing, and acting as a contemporary of thinkers/activists like Christine Delphy and Monique Wittig) as he develops his utopic vision of queer radicalism. We ignore radical feminist theory to our detriment, consign it to the dustbin of political theory, consider it demode and thus exacerbate the already difficult task of imagining radical futures. There is very little, in the contemporary philosophico-political terrain, that can help generate, prod, and fuel these imaginaries, so we must reach back for sources that have, time and again, risked extinction (through falling out of publication, being distributed in ephemeral form, not being carefully archived, et cetera). Establishing a productive political continuity with these currents of thought, doing this sourcework, is enormously important – and not just for understanding Hocquenghem through something other than a strictly Deleuzo-Guattarian framework, which is (I fear) the primary mode in which a work like The Screwball Asses will be read. That said, here are the five or six smart things:

The importance of loving your comrades (an army of lovers can’t fail, right?), or weaving desire back into political movement rather than cordoning it off, relegating it to dark and anonymous corners of urban topographies, on account of one’s deep-seated complicities with bourgeois sexuo-social mores.

When we say that all social activity corresponds to the sublimation of homosexual interests for the public good, one must also add that this applies to gays, regardless of how comic the consequences seem. We play rugby, we play war, we play at free capitalist competition and
political activism, but those who play at revolutionary homosexuality together are very careful not to sleep together, between comrades and friends: it just isn’t the thing to do, you can’t mix apples and oranges. The prohibition of fraternal incest is latent in homosexuality. It becomes imperial once political activism or anti political activism is involved. The political-desiring normative inclination of our caste has turned this very homosexuality into exogamy between brothers (11-12).

He articulates, years before Lisa Duggan, something very much akin to what we now call homonormativity, considering the ways in which this normativity is produced through the phenomenon of subjective biunivocalization. In linking homonormativity to biunivocalization, he calls our attention to the necessity to rethink difference as non-dichotomous, in a manner that rhymes with the work of many women and queers of color (check, for instance, Audre Lorde’s “Women Redefining Difference”):

Yes, we copy normal relations, we either occupy the place of the subject or that of the object, but we copy them in any case. Today’s homosexual does not embody polymorphic desire: he moves
univocally beneath an equivocal mask. His sexual objects have already been chosen by social or political machination, and they are always the same: either weaker or stronger, older or younger, more in love with him or he more in love with them, more bourgeois or more proletarian, primitive or intellectualized, uber-male or sub-male, black or white, Arab or Viking, top or bottom, and so forth. Politics has already done its underground work (10).

He discerns the ways in which a socially inculcated guilt and shame complex has become a psychic blankie for many queers, something one clings to and cannot shake without risking a certain desubjectification. Further, he posits the way out of this quandry not as an embrace of banal iterations of identitarian pride, but rather as becoming really abnormal (what he terms ‘liberating the non-human’), implicitly considering ab- as literally “away from” rather than simply a failed iteration of its root word. These psychic complexes come from seeing ourselves as failures, making sense of ourselves within an economy of sense that is not just agonistic towards queer being, but downright hostile and bent on constant disavowal. To move away from them, to get beyond them, we must reinvent ourselves beyond the staid bounds of the human. This means destroying gay ghettoes, building new modes of sociality not condemned to marginality, as well as rethinking our anatomies, our understandings of biological material, of what it is to have the bodies we have and how the ways in which we think these bodies circumscribes their multivalent, pluralized potentialities:

Let us propose an amusing hypothesis: if, by some aberration, education were entrusted to homosexuals that were not missionaries of homosexuality, as were the Greek preceptors of Antiquity, the paranoia towards homosexuality would disappear and the very nature of homosexual desire would metamorphose by escaping guilt. (We are not at this juncture, however. The majority of homosexuals do not desire such a thing, for their bad conscience gives them a sense of equilibrium, and has even become, for some, the very basis of their security.)

While school and family made our homosexuality shameful, those institutions also made us as sick and policing as they were (14-15).

Oh! How we wish, by freeing the human, that we could liberate the non-human! How we wish to transform not only the religion or politics of the human, but and above all, its anatomy! We know full well that no masculine being in the West can experiment his sexuality without demanding penetration, unless he is a monk, a schoolboy, or prepared to lose his virility. This is what capitalism has wanted, or revealed, to the point of caricature. It is also how capitalism maintains its grasp on us. And we cannot respond to this by begging for the sex of angels.

More often than not, we homosexuals are not abnormal; rather, we have failed normalcy. We are as codified by the bourgeoisie as the latter has sexually codified workers by making them failed bourgeois. Rather than being lovers in order to breathe, we are queer in order to escape asphyxia. Rather than pretending to be virtuous, we pretend to be dissolute. And if the self-management of desire turned out to be virtue, we would refuse it, already intimating discipline and obligation there. As long as we are not burned at the stake or locked up in asylums, we continue to flounder in the ghettoes of nightclubs, public restrooms and sidelong glances, as if that misery had become the habit of our happiness. And so, with the help of the state, do we build our own prison (16).

He is all for rhizomatic and temporary queer political organizing, understanding this ephemerality as infinitely more responsive to real rifts and differences between constitutent subjects, and therefore as more mobile, more efficacious, more capable of working effectively on account of being more responsive to the import of differences in erotico-political desire, rather than contributing to the elision of difference the way molar collectivities tend to:

One bubble bursts. Other bubbles reach the surface. It is a good thing that assemblages do not turn into institutions. Better to start by pushing the real divisions of individuals to their maximum instead of collecting them in unions or corporations that contain but a minimal portion of true community (18).

In performing his rich critique of queer movement, he moves against an historically contemporary tendency to hold up homos as exemplars of deterritorialized desire, avowing that there isn’t much that is radical about the workings of desire in the gay urban enclaves in which he dwelled, primarily on account of embracing a resistant and reactive mode of social and political organizing rather than a more positively inventive mode:

Yet certain theoreticians of revolutionary homosexuality are trying to make us homosexuals believe, in a pedagogical move to rid us of guilt, that we decode our flows of desire as much as possible. Saying this, they take our desire for revolution for the practical reality of our libidinal desire. But mostly, they undermine the fact that, even if we do decode those flows, it is only to recode them again immediately. For we are just as formalized in our social geometry as those who are normal, since we define ourselves in the resistance we oppose to them (24).

Finally, he sees the necessity of revisioning a concept of love that isn’t Oedipally yoked to the family and the nation; another way of putting this is that he sees the need to see intimacy as an important part of desiring-machines; a third way – and his preferred way – of putting it is reconcieving love as the “desire to desire”:

We know what love signifies for those who shield themselves from the folly of making love through the poetic and reactionary wisdom they have placed in the word. As for us, we must rid it of that sentimental glue that socialist as well as capitalist culture has enjoined to smother raw emotion, anesthetize the sensory, render imagination banal and that has come to usurp their place. Because Order will always find defense and justification in such sentiments as it has previously injected in the people. In order to tear ourselves away from such archaic viscosity, Which we have been told since the Middle Ages is the human condition, love would have to mean nothing else but an effervescent desire to desire, that is, the opposite of falling in love (26).

For the bourgeoisie and for the Communist Party, sex is family, and family must be love. It seems clear enough. For the autonomous sexual movements that call themselves revolutionary, and particularly for homosexuals, sex is desire, and desire is politics. But love, that is, the desire to desire, has been cast off, as if it were nothing but a superstructure built as a trompe l’oeil in the structure of desire (28).

For all of these reasons, The Screwball Assesis a phenomenal read. But there’s more; there’s the positive (and positively queer!) content Hocquenghem gives to utopian enactments of desire. In these visions, he valorizes the breakdown of lines of queer identities in a manner that resonates deeply within contemporary trans and genderqueer communities and, in so doing, develops a concept of a multiply sexed self. Moreover, he bemoans the cultural embroidery woven around sexual geno and phenotyping, as if saying “enough! we are suffering an excess of gender! It is, in some instantiation, everywhere we turn, and it’s getting in the way of our desire!”

I leave you with these utopic morsels of Guy’s, as it’s time to hop on the bike and scout out a new used windbreaker for this wet New York spring:

The gays in my dream, my lovers, my friends, my enemies and myself, we can no longer distinguish desire from what is called love. And in my dream we can experience the same joys with women. For I cannot imagine the dissolution of normalcy without the so-called intersexual states becoming universal. I see no other way to get rid of the tyranny of virility, a tyranny, it should be said, that oppresses men just as much as it does women. To demand the recognition of homosexuality as it exists today, colonized by heterosexual imperialism, is simply reformism. It is not for us, it’s for those good souls in Arcadia, at a birthday party, who invite the Police commissioner to the table of honor (35).

On the contrary, we must refuse the exclusive disjunction that, by means of sexual differentiation, has exhausted the body beneath the weight of gender and caused the proliferation of extra gender everywhere, as if genetics hadn’t produced enough. Genotype and phenotype carry enough weight as it is. What is the use of tagging on a historical gender, a psychological gender and a legal one? While it was repressing the polyvocity of desire, society was creating oversexed bodies that are now nothing but sexual organs. Perhaps the time has come to live our corporality rather than speak our sexuality (35-36).

Of course, we’re not crazy enough to flood the phallocrats with female hormones. But there is a chance that the gradual disappearance of phallocracy, followed by a deep desire for intersexuality instigating a change in lifestyle, might very possibly, by the continual breakup of sexual roles, lead to biogenetic mutations in the long term. Although such a hypothesis might seem like science-fiction, it is spellbinding: it is a utopia in which our heterosexuality would no longer be molar or social, our homosexuality no longer personal and marginal, our transexuality no longer elementary and secret, since the three would connect in the same bodily place and be so melded together that we would no longer need several words to distinguish them (36).

What would happen if these natural allies, the gays and lesbians, although quite distant in their forms of desire, decided to make love between themselves. This strange perspective (that a logical mind would qualify as absurd) might allow us to discover whether pederasty hides the worst, most insidious cult of the phallus behind its revolt. Might it not instigate a desire for tenderness rather than for covetousness? The theory of desiring-machines, although helpful, is so fashionable that we use it to cover up the tenderness in desire. As if tenderness, like cynicism, was not a part of the machine, as active as the others and just as interconnected with the libidinal economic system. If we want to get to the bottom, or the dick of this, we queers will eventually have to bring our bodies closer to those of women who refuse men (42-43).

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze, desiring-machines, Guy Hocquenghem, love, queer, the Screwball Asses

Summer Reading, Parte Dos

Like MLA, writing is the main thing this summer, with two pieces in the works (one on waiting rooms and sexual synecdoche, another on Foucault and intersex issues) and a book proposal to accomplish, but there will be reading as well. Some as course prep, some for fun in tall summer grass and before bedtime, some that’s immediately relevant to the writing, and some that blurs these none-too-finely-drawn lines. In no particular order, here’s the (perhaps partial) lineup:

For Course Prep:
Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy
Crispin Sartwell, Six Names of Beauty
Jared Bell, I Mix What I Like: A Mixtape Manifesto
A newish reader on African-American Philo, for test drive purposes
From the beautifully curated MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery Series Documents in Contemporary Art, edited by Dave Beech, Beauty

For the Grass:
Joanna Russ, The Two of Them
Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To…
Clarice Lispector, Discovering the World
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
Ingeborg Bachmann, The Book of Franza/Requiem for Fanny Goldman
J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
Eileen Myles, Inferno
Dodie Bellamy, The Barf Manifesto, (with MLA!)
Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps

For Other Purposes:
Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism
Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (with MLA!)
Isabelle Stengers, Thinking With Whitehead

On a final note, I feel terrible for MLA, what with Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere on his list. One July, four summers ago, I read the same. I had the terrible habit of picking the book up while lying in a too-hot bedroom in the mid-to-late afternoon. I’d read 5 pages, fall asleep, wake up sweaty, glance at the book, get up, grab a beer, and decide I’d rather watch 3 episodes in a row of Queer as Folk on DVD. Took me forever to get through. POOR MATT.

(a classic!)

(so inspiring!)

–HJM

Filed under: Love Letters, The Jam, Lists, Summer Reading

Summer Reading

So, while much of the summer will be dedicated to writing my dissertation proposal, a book review, and conference papers for the ASLE and the Re-visioning Terrorism conference at Purdue in early September, I thought I would document my summer reading list here in an attempt to keep myself honest. The following texts are listed in no particular order.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, by Jürgen Habermas

Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori

This is Not a Program, by Tiqqun

Green is the New Red, by Will Potter

Text of S. 3880 [109th]: Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

Selections from Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Edited by Mary Ann Caws

Modernism, Race, and Manifestos, by Laura Winkiel

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, by Martin Puchner

Excitable Speech, by Judith Butler

“Everyday Barf”, by Eileen Myles

The Barf Manifesto, by Dodie Bellamy (with HJM!)

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields

“One Less Manifesto”, by Gilles Deleuze

“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Everyday Worms”, interview with Michel Foucault

“The Thought of the Outside”, by Michel Foucault

“The Law of Genre”, by Jacques Derrida

The Return of the Political, by Chantal Mouffe

The Democratic Paradox, by Chantal Mouffe

Eros and Civilization, by Herbert Marcuse (with HJM!)

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Love Letters, The Jam, Tiqqun, Lists, Summer Reading

“Yr knife doesn’t even have to be that awesome. A regular knife will do.”

Packing for the summer odyssey to New York, then to Tampa, then to Bloomington, then to the mountains, then back to Georgia. There will be much writing over the next few months, and (more than likely), less video here. So, to end the video frenzy with a doozy, I present Vegan Black Metal Chef, Episode 1: Pad Thai.

–HJM

Filed under: Love Letters, The Jam

Songs to read Guy Hocquenghem to:

Mood music for your (well, at least my) Sunday evening reading of The Screwball Asses (astoundingly good, you may expect a substantive post on it in the near future).

These selections: because lesbians creating rad club anthems is a project I’d presume very near to Guy’s queer heart.

Austra, “The Beat and the Pulse” (NSFW, folks, because work is silly. I give you the uncensored version, for reasons of integrity).

and Telepathe — much beloved because one of the two members, Melissa Livaudis, once referred to Pitchfork as ‘Prickfork’ on account of the site’s positioning of Dave Sitek, rather than Telepathe themselves, as the guru-mastermind who made the album Dance Mother compelling — with “So Fine”:

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, The Jam, Austra, Guy Hocquenghem, queer, So Fine, Telepathe, The Beat and the Pulse, the Screwball Asses

Links

First, a letter from Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis: Must We Rebuild Their Anthill? A Letter to/for Japanese Comrades. Addressing the disaster in Fukushima, Federici and Caffentzis draw a comparison to events in Libya, The Ivory Coast, and Baharain. Here is an excerpt:

What we see, then, today in Japan, is the moment of truth of a world capitalist system that, after five centuries of exploitation of millions across the planet, and after endless litanies on the fact that science opens a path of constant perfectibility of the human race, has decided that it is not their business to offer solutions to any major human problem, obviously convinced that we have become so identified with capital, and have so lost the will and capacity to construct an alternative to it, that we will not be able to prise its future apart from ours even after it has demonstrated to be totally destructive of our lives.

A new translation is up at Operaismo in English: Marx Yesterday and Today by Mario Tronti, 1962.

A newish post is up at Montevidayo by Lucas de Lima, Animal Poetics/Erotics/Necrotics. It is an analysis of both Rune Olsen’s exhibit The Sex Lives of Animals and César Vallejo’s Human Poems.

More news on Chimpanzees and their “66 gestures.”

While this isn’t a link to a post in particular, this is a blog that I have been reading for awhile, and I think it’s great: Form-of-Life. Here we have only more evidence that Comparative Studies at OSU is an amazing place to study.

Finally, Okkervil River’s Wake and Be Fine

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Jam, Chimpanzees, Okkervil River, Silvia Federici