[-empyre-] Response to Virgina Re: Robert's Response on Queer Mésentente

[Marc Leger]

hi, just to jump back in, not from the middle, but from a commanding height,
like Murnau's Mephistopheles (sort of like the absent Baudelaire figure that
sustains the imaginations of the technocratic managers of neoliberal
cultural institutions - i.e. cultural attack on the system of bourgeois
productivity/as bourgeois productivity)
i would like to say a few things that may be helpful, but without
reiterating some of the strong points of queer theory

for me queer is relevant inasmuch as it takes us away from insisting on sex
acts and sexual expression/experience/taste, especially as this becomes part
of an identity politics (revealing norms through performativity), the
symptom that is in me more than me but that makes me talk about it all the
time so that no actual queering is possible.  this is to keep in mind
Lacan's "il n'y a pas de relation," which is supplanted by the plethora of
perverisons, the matrixial, virtual "plague of fantasies" that are not only
not prohibited by capitalism but encouraged as the obscene underside of the
official "fill in the boxes male/female, married/single" - as Foucault
already explained viz. the incitement to discourse.  in this sense, we could
say that queer is occupied, o-coupé, and pre-occupied, barred by the
relations of intention, which are retroactive effects of meaning.

in the Lacanian understanding the subject's desire is the desire of the
Other.  the Other's desire does not lead to my "solidification" as Virginia
mentioned, but to my castration (in jouissance, which could in fact include
Barthes' version of readerly bliss), as Lacan phrased it, "showing me my
soft watch."  if this castration is the solidification that you mean, then
at least we're able to explain social formation - like the totemism of
neocloneservative bald heads.  so let's be clear, this is not what Bersani
has in mind when he talks about the self-shattering that comes with having
oneself sodomized (or penetrated in any other sexually ecstatic way - i.e.
like being fired from a job or becoming the object of a public secret
mediated by the net), if by this one assumes that this implies undermining
bourgeois subjectivity

we need to at least be able to define the bourgeoisie as yes, a product of
ideology, which implies cultural meanings and incompleteness/alterability,
but also as part of the development of the capitalist mode of production,
the class that owns and controls the means of production.  here, when we
think of (micro) politics that are not oriented toward electoral politics,
policy and the state, i think we should not lose sight of the state mode of
production, which has been the case with people influenced, for example, by
Rancière's distinction of politics (the political) and the police/policy (if
I get these terms correctly).  not only are there mega-corporations beyond
the sign of state and electoral politics, but there are also plenty of ways
that these companies encourage, demand experiences of self-shattering
(moving in the direction of the work of Deleuze and Guattari,
autonomists/post-operaists and also those who mistakenly take from this the
idea that capitalism is friendlier than communism).

footnote: Maurice Blanchot's writing on community has some interesting
things to say about both unworking (à la Nancy) in relation to love - which
is not far from the psychoanalytic definition of love as "giving something
you don't have to somebody who doesn't want it" - the whatever subjectivity
of lovers that dissolves social bonds.

another note: the void would perhaps be a good start for understanding
virology, which Lacan develops with the concept of the Real - Derrida also
being greatly influenced by Freud's fort/da (the trauma that cannot be
mastered, only repeated; the dangerous rem(a)inder)

Micha's post makes a good point but also misses one crucial point; it is not
the death of autonomy, but autonomy as a condition of living death (Hegel
for today's creative labour).  what aesthetic strategies could stop the
vancouver olympics?  my answer is that what we have here is a job for the
perverted avant-garde - the relative autonomy of living death (i.e.
traversing the fantasy) is the way to go and i am with you.  my own approach
is anti-capitalist organization, beyond affinity - a constituted form of
power, mediated by fetishism and what i call "sinthomeopatic identification"
(identification with the symptom).  affinity will do for now but in my
marxist/communist (critical of anarchism) opinion it is not enough.

what is worth fantasizing about? good question, especially after the
disappearance of the M.S. Fantasia (Madalena). also a good follow-up to
Turbulence journal's "why is it that it's easier to imagine the end of the
world than to change things?"  fantasy actually addresses the problem of
that very formulation
(which, by the way, Turbulence left out of their issue, not liking Zizek and
not, I would say, understanding critical dialectical realism enough - and
assuming that these questions are behind us, which is, as i argued, the very
form of today's concrete universal - which is where i disagree with Mouffe's
agonism (c.f. the Lacanian split law) and Holloway & co's multiplicity,
becoming animal and what have you)

reimagining sex is one way that we ignore the (non)relations of fantasy that
structure the field of cultural production, which by the way i do not, as V
suggested, associate with a set style (did you mean set theory?).  style is
rather more like a response, an unintentional, symptomatic reaction to a
situation

sorry if this does not go in the direction of gay (art) world making.  don't
worry, i'll get mine.
but am i getting fleshy ?
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