[-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement

[davin heckman]

I was reading Agamben's State of Exception, and then stumbled across
Robert's post.  It strikes me that Agamben's discussion of Benjamin's
"pure violence" might be useful here.  Also useful here might be
Agamben's discussion of anomie (lawlessness) and nomos (the law), and
the sort of lawlessness that results where the law is too weak (there
is no norm) or too strong (where the norms are impossible to follow).
In my mind, queer tactics reside in between the two poles of anomie.
On the one hand, as Foucault demonstrates, norms play a critical role
in shaping and cultivating desire.  On the other hand, where norms are
too severe, they have the effect of criminalizing everyone.

I think there is a metaphysical "violence" in queer tactics here, but
I think they are the kind of violence that the Merriam-Webster online
dictionary defines as "undue alteration (as of wording or sense in
editing a text)."  Occasionally, this violence might also describe a
category of emotional state ("fervor) or aesthetic state
("discordance").  And, as a fundamental goal, an anomic relation to
the law (which verges closer to the kind of physical confrontation
associated with "violence.")  At some point, as we progress from
"undue alteration" towards a critique of the law as a system, we move
from a discussion of improvised means towards a discussion of
strategically defined ends...  which might mean that it is impossible
to theorize a "queer tactics," as they would more properly regarded as
"strategies."

I don't know what to make of these connections.  In my mind, such a
conception of a "pure violence," if it is to be applied, veers too
close to an outright nihilism.  If it is to continue as an
abstraction, it does not offer practical utility.  And, finally, as a
pacifist (I am, I think, as I write this, a pacifist), I wonder what
the implications of an abstract pure violence would have for my
opposition to the forms of violence that we are familiar with (from
physical force to threats of force).  On the other hand, it is hard
for me to imagine a "queerness" which is not, in some way,
threatening....  not by its own design, but by the very laws written
to prevent its transient character from emerging.  I have a hard time
seeing "violence," say, in the kinds of cultural queering that takes
place in borderlands.  Rather, the laws that seek to prevent this
process...  through linguistic purity, the construction of barriers,
and nativist movements...  exert a violence on what would otherwise be
an organic process.  Yet, all the same, the very sorts of queering
that take place in the various borderlands of our structured society
are not insignificant...  they have ontological power...  they "harm"
(end, dissolve, destroy) one way of being by becoming another.

Very, very interesting reading this month.

Peace!

Davin Heckman
<www.retrotechnics.com>

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 3:19 AM, Robert Summers<robtsum at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would respectfully yet disagree with many aspects of what Judith wrote,
>
> One passage: *Robert's original call asked about the _possible_
> heteronormativity of
> *relational aesthetics.* I'm not interested in *torturing* anything, whether
> bodies or the proper names of continental theorists, but I am interested in
> *the democratic space of the *violence of participation,* though I'd add
> quite emphatically not as the repetition of violence or even the
> metaphorical torturing of anything but as the exploration of, for example,
> behaviors, obedience to authority among them. *Queering* relational
> aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it forces that metadiscursive
> activity.*
>
> Indeed, there is, I argue, a certain *violence* to/of queer(ing).  In
> the words of Sedgwick, "'[q]ueer’ is a continuing moment, movement,
> motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means
> across -- it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also
> yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torque (to twist), English
> athwart” (_Tendencies_, 1993: xii).  This *speaks* of a certain
> violence (*torque* can also be traced to torture, which is an act of
> violence), and to queer (or queering -- which I want to also use as a
> transitive verb, which would violate/torture rules of grammar) *is*
> violence against the normative (and queer _does_ do/enact more than
> just this), and we can *see* a certain *queering* as a certain
> *violence* when Derrida states, in a way that shows the slippage
> between binary oppositions, *... a caress may be a blow and vice
> versa. … And let us not exclude either that certain experience of
> touching (of 'who touches whom') do
> not simply pertain to blows and caresses.  What about a kiss?  Is it
> one caress among many?  What about a kiss on the mouth?  What about a
> biting kiss, as well as everything that can then be exchanged between
> lips, tongues, and teeth?  Are blows wanting there?  Are they absent
> in coitus, in all the penetrations or acts of homosexual or
> heterosexual sodomy?  Is a 'caress,' more so than a 'blow'? (_On
> Touching_, 2005: 69)*
>
> I do not think we need to participate in the reifying of binary
> oppositions (either/or), and I do not believe in *meta* anything.  I
> would never argue that *queering* is a *meta* anything.  Why this turn
> to the *meta* -- which implied both a transcendence and an outside?
> And it is interesting that Judith states *Queering* relational
> aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it _forces_ that metadiscursive
> activity* (emp. mine).  Here we are at a certain violence, a force,
> even as it is disavowed.
>
> I mean this to be polemical, btw.
>
> Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
> Lecturer
> Art History and Visual Culture
> Otis College of Art and Design
> e: rsummers at otis.edu
> w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>