[-empyre-] Aesthetics of Queer Relationality

[Christiane Robbins]

Virginia - Hi -

Many thanks for proferring your definitions below as the basis for  
elaborating further upon our "dinner conversation"  and as a means of  
departure ...




On Jul 7, 2009, at 8:20 AM, virginia solomon wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre




C h r i s t i a n e   R o b b i n s


														- JETZTZEIT -
... the space between zero and one  ...
Walter Benjamin


LOS ANGELES    I    SAN FRANCISCO


The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to  
the original, fancy to reality,
the appearance to the essence
for in these days
  illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872,


http://www.jetztzeit.net

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