[-empyre-] Aesthetics of Queer Relationality

[Christiane Robbins]

only 10 ?!


On Jul 7, 2009, at 10:27 AM, virginia solomon wrote:

> we all gotta figure for every 5 people you ask you'll get 10  
> definitions of terms!!
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Christiane Robbins <cpr at mindspring.com 
> > wrote:
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
>
>
> -- 
> Virginia Solomon
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20090707/038f550e/attachment.html