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

[virginia solomon]

I have a general response to Marc's questions, overall, a response which
deals more with methodology, and then I will do what I can with clarifying
the others.

I am an art historian. As such, I look to the objects, to the work, to the
practices to make the theory, not to the canon of continental philosophy and
theory. To the extent that, as a social art historian, I am interested in
the texts that inform practices - written texts, but also the whole other
range of texts - I am interested in continental theory (Butler included),
but it is not the first place I go in terms of making sense of these
questions. As a historian, I don't think that there are definitions or solid
answers for any of the clarifications that you seek. Precisely my work
considers how these things develop, morph, change over the course of the
20th century, and in particular the second half of the 20th century. Words
come from someplace, and in clarifying what I mean it can be helpful to
define against what might be a more common understanding (ie Hegel, Kant)
but really for me the meaning of the terms comes from the practices I
consider. If we are to take meaning-as-iterative seriously I think it is
even more important for us to be clear about the terminology that we are
using.

* what do you mean when you say the avant-garde's "being"? does this refer
> to the subjectivity of the proletariat?
>
I'm not sure I can find where I say "the avant-garde's being." Maybe if you
give me the sentence? I in any event certainly wouldn't have meant the
subjectivity of the proletariat because none of the artists I look at think
of the avant-garde as being of the proletariat. They all understand the
avant-garde as a formation of bourgeois culture connected to bourgeois
culture through relations of engagement and disengagement. My research has
not revealed any of the artists I research after GI considering themselves
in relation to 'avant-garde,' and GI certainly do it with a sense of irony
about those who might take the avant-garde as a reflection of the
subjectivity of the proletariat. Also, if we keep in mind what, for example,
Julia Bryan-Wilson writes about in relation to art and politics in terms of
Robert Morris and the Hard Hat Riots of 1970, in connections to general
developments in cultural politics, the consideration of the proletariat as
the site of revolutionary politics falls out of favor with the rise of
working class support for conservative politics in the late 1960s and early
1970s.  So I'm not sure what I meant in the moment you have in mind, but
that is my response to the avant-garde as the subjectivity of the
proletariat.

* what is wrong with a negative assertion? (i.e. is this a reference to
> Deleuze's Negations?)
>

Rather than being a reference to Deleuze's Negations, this is a reference to
historical discussions about building political movements outside of the
rubric of identity politics that consider the importance of not just
offering a critique, but also offering an alternative. So not just saying
bourgeois culture and its notion of subjectivity is bad, but providing a
space to imagine an alternative. Not provide an alternative, because then
that gets to the problem of universalism and of identity politics and
liberal pluralism, but rather a space for imagining, a space of
possibility.  Negation is an important relation but when I used the term
negative I was not using it with its theoretical connotation.  This comes
from being educated after the critiques of post modernism and earlier
moments of queer theory's focus only on offering a critique of late capital
without providing alternatives, and identity politics and
multi-culturalism's attempts to provide alternatives that really reproduced
the structures of subjectivity available within late capital but opened them
up to different bodies. That is my foundation and my framework, and the
context in which I use negative.  Negative versus positive, destructive
versus constructive.  When I talk about thinks not being negative, I am
thinking outside of that binary system and that's what I'm trying to get at
with talking about spaces of imagination and possibility.

* how is Nancy's being-in-common-in-difference, as you see it, different
> from liberal pluralism?  in other words, is there room here for a common
> political project, which is what i've tried to do with Nancy, linking him
> with Rancière and Badiou (against, by the way, Grant Kester's critique of
> the "non-discursive" strategies of the avant-garde - which would probably
> exclude GI)
>

Nancy and liberal pluralism use entirely different models of subjectivity.
Nancy sees identification whereas liberal pluralism structures itself upon
identity.  Why does Nancy preclude a common political project?

* how can "the aesthetic" have a "cultural politics" in and of itself?  more
> importantly, what assumptions are you making about aesthetics if you eschew
> both Kantian and Hegelian (and by implication, Marxist) philosophy?
>

My understanding of cultural politics comes precisely from Marxist
philosophy, which in its own right formed in part in consideration of some
of the problems of Kant and Hegel.  As I mentioned earlier, however, rather
than go to aesthetic philosophy I am going to General Idea and the artists
that General Idea bring into the fold in its practice.  To be honest to me
'aesthetics' is the least important term in what I am trying to trace.

But I set it apart from Kant because he discusses the aesthetic in terms of
judgment, in terms of an elitist understanding of culture.  His aesthetic
carries with it an understanding of absolutes and universalisms that I think
is antithetical to the history of artistic practices that formalize queer
sociability in the context of a world making project based on imagining and
on possibility, not on a "my way is better" mode of thinking.  Also, you
know, nothing is disinterested.

And I set it apart from Hegel because he too is trying to set a kind of
definition and a judgment of practices that I don't see in the practices
with which GI engage, and who I see operating in its legacy - that of
formalizing modes of queer sociality in the interest of offering a different
model of understanding subjectivity and thereby engaging in a cultural
politics of subjectivity.

Aesthetics as such as a general term might not have a cultural politics of
itself, but I am not entirely interested in aesthetics as a general
phenomenon.  I am interested in the queer aesthetic we see alluded to by GI
and its political operation as such.

But I toss that back at you - are you invested in maintaining Kantian and
Hegelian aesthetics?

* what do you mean when you refer to "the limits of a certain kind of
> understanding under our moment of capital" (from Dada to Surrealism to
> today) that formalizes queer sociality and queer relationality?  doesn't the
> idea of queer relational/queer aesthetics do that more insidiously than a
> politicizing position with regard to the social function and production of
> art - from whatever prevalent theoretical position you may articulate this -
> i.e. Deleuze, Rancière, Nancy, etc...  [my sense and concern is that in
> wishing to criticize *certain* political articulations, one risks conceding
> the space to that which one seeks to challenge - academic liberalism
> supplying the conservative right with criticism of the left - Bourdieu's
> late political writings and campaigning make a good counterpoint]
>

I will start by correcting a type-o, that I meant that sentence to read -
GI, I think, establishes an archive of a queer avant-garde (the latter term
I use because it was theirs, but also because I think what GI set up carries
many of the problems that we see in the formulation of the avant-garde as a
concept, problems and contradictions that are important both to the
avant-garde's being but also as an indicator or the limits of a certain kind
of understanding under our moment of capital) from Dada and Surrealism
through to their contemporary moment that formalizes queer sociality, queer
relationality.

So the limits of ... do not formalize queer sociality and relationality, but
rather the queer stuff highlights those limits and opens spaces in which we
can imagine formations outside of those limits.  I think that the
priveliging of the "politicized position" disavows cultural politics and the
political operation of positions that do not directly or explicitly address
themselves to one notion of politics or another.  It establishes a hegemony
of politics itself that negates practics that are very political within
another framework.  But maybe I misunderstand your point?


* related to the latter, how do you (following the discussions among Butler,
> Zerilli/Zirelli, Laclau, Zizek, Rancière, Balibar, Badiou) connect this to
> the concept of universality and emancipation - or do you, as much postmodern
> and post-structural theory in the 90s typically asserted, associate all
> universalizing theory with masculinism, hypostatization, totalization, etc?
>

I firmly believe that politics is contingent.  What is emancipatory in one
moment and space is possibly, maybe even probably, not in another.  This is
not a postmodern idea.  We see Brecht and Benjamin talk about it, we see the
Panthers talk about it, etc.  I follow their lead.



-- 
Virginia Solomon
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