[-empyre-] Aesthetics of Queer Relationality

[virginia solomon]

Hi Everyone

Like everyone else, I'd like to thank Christina for inviting me to be
involved in what is turning into quite the rich conversation, and also to my
co-conversants for engagement!

I have SO much to say about what everyone else has posted, but I'll start
here with just saying a bit about my connection to this topic, which will
pick up a bit on what Robert alluded to in his last parasite post.

First to loosely define a few terms, as I understand them.

Aesthetics - this term has come up already on this post, and I share Marc's
distrust of how the word and the concept have circulated in philosophical
and modernist discourse, but I use it a bit differently here.  Rather than a
set style, I think of aesthetics as an operation, as a mode of engagement
that takes up a different kind of logic, a different kind of sense-making,
than language per se, in terms of presenting theory and offering ways of
imagining alternative modes of being and producing knowledge.  Clearly this
is neither a Kantian nor a Hegelian aesthetic, but I think that the
practices that interest me still fit within the allusive capabilities of the
term precisely because of their explorations of alterative, less oppressive
forms of communicability.  This is what aesthetics can offer, I think, in
relation to queerness.

Queer - Queer, to me, is not an identity.  This is really important.  It is
not a noun.  It is a verb, it is a performative as Bulter describes it as an
enactment that brings something into being but is precisely that enactment
that demonstrates the unnatrualness of the norm.  The queer is that which,
ontologically, and this is its only ontology, undermines dominant structures
of meaning making, which then dictate how we understand knowledge of and
being in the world.  There is some danger of idealizing the queer, of seeing
it as some utopian space of absolute radicality and opposition.  But this is
to misunderstand queerness.  It isn't a space that one can occupy.  And the
idea of absolute radicality is anatametic to queerness, because absolutes
are precisely a part of the system of meaning making that the queer, AS AN
OPERATION, seeks to interrogate.

Relationality - To recite a story with which I'm sure many of us are
familiar, the bourgeois subject is defined precisely by 'his' autonomy,
'his' fixity as a self and 'his' absolute ability for self-determination.
That is the dominant narrative of being that we inherit from the
Enlightenment, from Modernism, etc.  This is one of the primary sites in
which I see the queer operation, queerness as an embodied and lived
interrogation, operating.  Queerness, since Sedgwick and Butler, has
insisted on the way in which 'we' form the 'I.'  By relationality I mean
both the way in which how we understand our very bodies is a relational
process, but I also mean the ways we relate to each other in the world, as
simple and as complicated as sociability, social life, socializing.

Thus for me the aesthetics of queer relationality circulate throughout all
spheres of social production, and I am interested in art practices that draw
upon this, that enact this operation, as part of a world-making, or rather a
space-for-imagination-opening, project.

This has gotten long so maybe I'll talk about more stuff under another
post?  As an art historian, I sort of see my position here as talking about
stuff, and the theory that comes from stuff rather than theory that comes
from theory (impossible to distinguish as that is).

-- 
Virginia Solomon
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