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

[Marc Leger]

i think it's been worthwhile having this mésentente - and also i don't want
to prevent the rest of you from enjoying art, so i will be brief

thanks to both of you Robert and David for your "tarrying with the negative"
and your passionate suffering of the conditions that prevail.  a quick
response to David Chirot,
about the state, Baudelaire and Hebdige - my preferred figure in this
list is Fanon and i think that he said something in Black Skin, White
Masks about PhDs coming back from university full of themselves. in
this i am
very much interested in unpacking the "colonial complex"
of intellectuals in global capitalism.  i do this from the point of view of
something like the generation of '89 - the one that is confronted with the
task of refuting the post-political end of history.  i think that another
important figure here is Gramsci, about which i would have much to say that
is critical.

what i would ask David is simply which swarm, which state, which prison,
which institution, etc
the one presumed to know i'm sorry is not a monolithic questioner, but i do
appreciate your way of producing the master

Virginia,

to your Butlerian idea that meaning is iterative, as you could see from my
previous posts, i hold to Zizek's idea that meaning is retroactive; also, in
my visual culture jargon, i don't say objects, i say commodities and i speak
of creative labour and culture industries - though of course i can also talk
about works of art, reception, etc, though i think that much of the
museological stuff is just a status quo operation.  also, what difference
does it make if you say you're not interested in aesthetics, but you're
interested in queer aesthetics?  this is why i ask you about your
relationship to avant-garde.  also, to me, GI is very Hegelian - i don't
have a problem with saying that or with their work, which i rather like.

i do not at all agree with you that the avant-garde is a formation of
bourgeois culture - though historically you're right about the class
composition of those who formed the avant-garde (their backgrounds); the
avant-garde is the revolutionary wing of the emancipatory movement of the
working masses; it makes sense to me that would say this and also say that
the working class in the 60s and 70s voted for conservatives (which deserves
further comment and correction, esp. viz. the economic explanation of the
withdrawal of the welfare state made possible by post-industrialization,
which is a consequence of capital accumulation).  why? because that means
that we can't be bourgeois avant-gardists, and we can't be working class
populists, and so what's left?  very simple - the what i've called "absent
middle ground," the global petty bourgeoisie, which has been identified by
people like Agamben and Bill Readings as a global class (i also refer back
to Kracauer's The Salaried Masses and Mill's White Collar, and less so to
Ross, No-Collar).  if you look at Bourdieu's study of the critique of
judgement, the chapter on "petty bourgeois allodoxia" is quite a propos for
your idea that you do not wish to privilege a "politicized position" but
rather wish to open up bodies to other bodies (which you consider your
foundation and your framework) (Bourdieu's hexis, by the way, between amor
fati and odium fati, is not a bad concept for Robert's passionate image,
beyond Barthes' wounding).

on this, by the way, i am in total agreement with your criticism of identity
politics and multiculturalism - but for me this is just the beginning of the
analysis in the sense that, as i mentioned in earlier emails, i don't think
that queer operates a new hegelian overcoming of the contradictions of
patriarchy, masculinism or what have you, which replaces class struggle.  i
think that this is a problem not only for queer theory, by for post-colonial
and feminist theory as well.

post-politics is to me exactly what de-fines the limits of our moment of
capitalism.  and on this, if i could say very quickly, your defense of
interestedness and contingency is the very significant crux of the issue.
 for me it's not, as Robert likes to say, a matter of being smarter (did i
not mention Stephen Jay Gould?), or a "my way is better" narcissism (the
Deleuze book is Negotiations by the way, my mistake), which ridicules the
terms of our discussion, but a serious matter of challenging some of the
ideological workings of cultural studies and post-structuralism in today's
universities and cultural institutions - which is also a positive project.

my real critics will not be people who are trying to become animals or
machines but rather anarchists and people who deny the state as a crucial
issue in our analysis.  what is indeed the specific particular social order
that hegemonically stuctures the universal if not capitalist class
relations?  this is not to deny different forms of oppression, but i do make
the assertion that the "beyond Washington and Moscow", "beyond left and
right" of the generation of 68 is finished.  the establishment of the NPAC
in France (despite all the infighting among groups this will cause) and
recent efforts to unite the left in Australia are good examples of what is
politically possible in western countries and we, as intellectuals and
artists should be doing our best to facilitate these processes of radical
organization.

if i've failed you, comrades, i will, as Beckett wrote, try harder, fail
harder.
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