[-empyre-] queer art practices

[Marc Leger]

hi all,
sorry for the repetition of my text - some problems with the server resulted
in mine and Christina's efforts to fix the problem leading to repetition.

i would like to first respond to Christiane and then to something that
Robert has written

first, from my perspective, one cannot simply map on heteronormativity to
biopower - of course you can do things with words but from a political
viewpoint it relies on taking Hegelian dialectics (or is it Agamben's use of
Foucault in Homo Sacer) and suggesting that the concrete universal is
heterosexuality - as I stated in my text, from a psychoanalytic perspective,
this just doesn't work - it's the flip side of the equally problematic
utopia of polymorphous perversity

in this sense, I also disagree with the idea that we could divide
institutional critique into "two camps" (again, mapping straight/gay onto
the idea of class struggle, if I understand this assertion correctly): one
that derives from the queer initiatives of the exhibition at American Fine
Arts and an earlier stage based on Asher, Buren, Haacke, Willats.  as well,
what do you do with people like Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser and Sylvia
Kolbowski? this to me is an especially significant problem in the
historiography of the shift from Abstract Expressionism to Neo Dada and Pop
Art.

lastly, I would say that I'm not in any way interested in "queer art
practices" in the same way that, as a theorist (rather than as a critic
working in a manner before the death of the author), I am not interested in
aesthetic models (dialogical aesthetic, relational aesthetics, etc) but in
the avant-garde critique of aesthetics.  Bourdieu, who insists in his own
way on the shift from desire to drive, is an important reference for me.
 again, from my perspective, you can't map queer on top of avant-garde and
use the same Hegelian Marxist underpinnings.  in some ways Judith Butler's
work has been the best effort at this though of course it begins - in Gender
Trouble - with a rich mix of sources in feminist theory and psychoanalysis.

about Robert's response to Christine's request, if I could, I would like to
include something I've written about performatives in relation to Bruce
Barber's work on politicized [performance| practice. (even though Christina
has asked me to keep things brief - maybe this last tiny morcel).  this
essay is as of yet unpublished and I would appreciate your responses.  so
here is an excerpt that is a propos since it is about "littoral art," which
was developed at the same time that relational aesthetics was being
developed by Bourriaud and before Kester published his "dialogical
aesthetics":


*excerpt from Squat II and the operationalization of littoral art*

In some of his most recent writings, Bruce Barber states that what he seeks
to do is momentarily suspend the category of class rather than relativize
it, and this, so that difference can figure alongside struggle.  However,
today's ideologization of democracy, as noticed in the writings of Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, combines difference with contingency.  It does
not, Žižek argues, combine contingency with struggle.

[Zizek, *Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle*. To avoid criticism, and while Žižek's
argument is that the empty place of power is always, so to speak, barred or
uncannily fetishized rather than only temporarily occupied/hegemonized, it
should be specified that Laclau and Mouffe's distinct terms are contingency,
equivalence and *antagonism*.  It is the structuralist overlap of
contingency and equivalence, derived from Saussure, that Žižek rejects with
the concept of displaced and vanishing mediation: the place of the overlap
of genus and species – the particular element in the series that stands for
all of the others.]* *

* *

In his well-known essay, "Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes Please!,"
Žižek refuses the blackmail of the current predicament – defend liberal
capitalism or else support totalitarianism – without renouncing class
struggle as a universal problematic. [Slavoj Žižek, "Class Struggle or
Postmodernism? Yes Please!" in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj
Žižek, *Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left *(London: Verso, 2000) 90-135.]  His refusal of choice implies not only
provocative writing but a serious theoretical challenge to the terms of the
choice, especially as these are encrypted in contemporary political and
cultural theory.



In his reading of Žižek's essay, Barber suggests that the Yes Please! –
which Groucho Marx provided as a humourous response to the question "Tea or
coffee?" – can be understood as a performative speech act.  Barber takes
this to imply that the choice between class struggle and transcultural
mobility is not a problem for artists. [Bruce Barber, "Introduction: Class
Issues in the Work of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge," in Barber, ed. *Condé
and Beveridge: Class Works *(Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College
of Art and Design, 2008) 8-14.]  Groucho's infraction, voiced under duress,
is performed as a constative, effecting, indeed, an illocutionary
transaction.  A key issue for a performative, according to the philosopher
J.L. Austin, is whether the circumstances are appropriate for words to be
uttered in a certain way.  In a gesture of unconscious subversion, the
irreverent Groucho keeps up appearances and responds with what could
otherwise be taken to be a simple misunderstanding.  However, according to
Austin, appropriate circumstances are not the main issue.  The performative
in this case is subject to unsatisfactoriness; it is said in a particular
way and is parasitic upon normal use.  In other words, it is symptomatic in
the Freudian sense and not in the sense that post-structuralists tend to
read the symptom – as proof of the mutual contamination of categories.  So
it is with genuine cultural subversion.



Groucho's predicament, unfortunately, is also the predicament of the
contemporary collaborative artist who refuses to choose.  In relating to the
plight of the homeless or labour unions, or what have you, *artists relate
to themselves* and to the conditions in which they live.  In this sense, we
could assert that today's artists live between two deaths: between formal
autonomy and the hegemony of the culture industries.  Because of this,
Groucho's anti-establishment humour, which developed at the time of major
ideological confrontations between communism, fascism and capitalism,
retains for us some of the ambivalence of what is missing in today's rather
inappropriately felicitous view that power is diffuse.  To perform a
perlocutionary act is to emphasize the illocutionary force of an utterance.
Ultimately, this does not rely on a correspondence with the way things are
but nevertheless posits the possibility of effecting change.  Is this not,
however, the famous Freudian formula for denial: *I know very well, but I
choose to ignore...*?  And do we not have here another way of restating
Pierre Bourdieu's thesis that the field of (bourgeois) cultural production
operates a fundamental social misrecognition?



Barbers link emancipation through interaction to Austin's idea of
perlocutionary speech acts. [See J.L. Austin, *How to do Things with
Words*(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, [1962] 1975).]
Just as reading is a form of writing in Derrida's account, a performance of
something, the perlocutionary speech act is tied to the illocutionary act of
saying something.  A perlocutionary act is based on an interactive
competence that is oriented toward mutual understanding.  It operates,
however, as an instrumental or strategic action designed to produce certain
effects and is not necessarily oriented toward consensual coordination.  The
performative contradictions of communication do not require specific
commitments but do imply the communicative use of language to reach certain
goals.  Moreover, interaction implies a process of emancipatory action that
does something, that changes the coordinates of norms and statements.



This leads us to consider some of the limitations of Barber's model of
politicized [performance] inasmuch as it is based on Austin's theory of the
speech act.  Sentence number 37 of Barber's "Excision, Détournement, and
Reading the Open Text" reads: "The performativity of language (Austin,
Derrida) is a simple acknowledgement of textual openness." [Barber,
"Excision, Détournement, and Reading the Open Text," in *Reading Rooms
*(Halifax:
Eyelevel Gallery, 1992) 91.]  An open reading of institutional frameworks,
he argues, assists in the promotion of critical education.  As we have seen,
for Austin the effectiveness of a performative does not rely on the
objective correspondence of speech with the actually existing situation.  Do
we not have here the conditions that define the Lacanian split subject,
caught between the speculative "I" and the workings of the
unconscious?  Barber's
Reading and Writing Rooms involve two points of reference: the given works
or squat(wri)ters in the gallery space and the gallery space itself, which
we could expand to the level of aesthetic discourse.  Given the
temporariness of the artist's intervention and the seemingly structural
necessity of the gallery space/art system, there is clearly an asymmetry
involved.  Because the institutional frame appears to be more permanent, it
is less markedly visible, especially at the moment that the audience comes
to consider the "works proper."  This awareness, which functions as a kind
of construction principle, comes to resemble a virtual model of the way that
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan defined as the structure of subjectivity
in a situation of situational apperception.  Reading and writing in these
situations require that the subject consider the art system's "superego
injunctions" to ratify the social function of culture and thus to accept
their own status as political subjects.



The limitation of Austin's performative speech act for a further
politicization of operative art is perhaps analogous to the weaknesses of
most social theories that rely on models of textuality.  A performative
implies, I would argue, a coincidence between the enunciation and the
enunciated content.  In this we encounter the trap of taking culture to be
directly analogous to society.  The strength of a performative, as is the
case with artworks in general, is that it is not limited by the
non-coincidence of speech and situation.  The problem is that the speech is
self-contained, precluding the dimension of fantasy, and by extension, an
adequate model of subject formation – which would also, incidentally, help
to explain why it is that audiences may not accept their status as political
subjects.  In this sense, the participant may very well wonder what it is
that the artist wants from them.  I would argue that Barber's work in fact
courts this moment of "non-discursive" confusion and in this way I would not
hesitate to suggest that Barber's "open text" can equally be understood as
something that operates in the manner of the Lacanian *objet petit a*, the
object-cause of desire that causes anxiety inasmuch as it brings on the
disappearance of desire, the imaginary screen that masks the void of being
that lies behind it.
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