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

[David Chirot]

Not being a philosopher, i hope these questions are interesting  ones for
others-
i apologize this reply is so far behind the brilliant latest posts--
i found the question of Queer aggression very interesting as the recent
anniversary of Stonewall marked a great moment of liberation into the
realization of Queer Force--to fight back, to protect, to attack--no loner a
victim, but a fighter--
i remember at the time what an immense moment and example this was, like the
lid had been blown off the streets, the sewer lid, and suddenly swarming
forth from the degrading darkness into ful view were these gladiators, tough
guys, men on the move with weapons against the forces endlessly making them
stay "in the closest" or bars, behind the scenes--

that was huge huge moment and i remember scared the hel out of a lot of
people!

a friend mine in Boston at the time eventually moved in with me as he had
exhausted the beneficence of al his other friends--charlie was an
amphetamine dealer who paid rent i abt double the amount but in speed--we
ere both heavy addicts so this was the perfect arrangement

at night sometime while cutting the huge rocks of meth up and stepping on
them putting them into fake capsules etc i wad take down some of this talks
abt his life--
one thing that always surprised me was that on some nights over the years
when he was in a certain mood he oulld go over to the Backbay area and beat
Queers--sometimes pretty badly and steal al their belongings--

his one explanation was that for him it was the working class Queer taking
itout on those with more privileges, who could lead a diffrentl ife in his
eyes to the one he lead--

also one time he said it made him feel like a real man to whup these
sissies-

when we went out clubbing with friends people wd say--you're in chargeof
him--he was al iablitly as when he lost it he'd attack persons in the bar in
a flash--so my job was to keep him under control a bit by keeping his mind
occupied by talk--as we could talk for hours--being jacked up on meth-

(being on meag methloads with other drugs added on as boosters as we called
them)

one time Charlie told me that the worst violence he had ever seen towards
Queers--then called Gays--was tha done by other Gays, though not simply as S
and M games, but for real, savage beatings

niether one of us  were the types  to get into the pop psychology of why he
might want to be showing off his being male by beating up sissie males--
because i pointed out what is the point-shdnt you pick on somebody your own
size so to speak--

he explained again for him it was a class thing--and gave me a great many
more examples of al kinds of things he had learned to work on since he began
chrusing the bus station bathroom  at age 15 to find marks--some of the
things he told me of were more sublte yet just as vioent in other, more
aesthetic ways--

on the rare times our days off somewhat converged we wd work on his autobio
and i wd read Genet aloud to him and hims mangy dog--while he cut up the
meth--
the cutting it was also a form of violence against the middle and upper
class customers-
working kids and women like ourselves got the good stuff--

this is by way of an intro to some more thoughts re Genet and violence as
Genet is in love so often with criminals and men of far more violence than
himself--

Is the violence of Queering built on the acceptance of Queering as
"abnormal," "transgressive" in the laws of the institutions in which one
participates and lives?

Does Queering have a violence only if it considers itself as others do, as
an exclusion from the "normality" of the laws, society institutions--

In what ways might Queering be understood in relation to/with "the Outsider"
in its various representations, philosophies through history?

Are some aspects of Queering analogous to the Province de Quebec as an
autonomous society and culture within the "united states of Canada" as a
whole.
That is, is this a desire for being at once "a part of" and "apart from"-
which is desired in relation to the laws, institutions, etc--

Is Queering also a mode of "defining, and creating a market for the
targeting by sellers-"
not in the already "demographic" sense. but on a much larger scale and wider
range and deeper sense--than it already is--

The reason  am asking these questions because of a statement by Jean Genet
to the effect that he supported the Black Panthers and the Palestinians as
long as they were not States.

The irony is that one is for and alongside and lives with if possible, those
against the State as an institution controlling one's oppression, one's
rights, one's material welfare and very being in terms of withholding every
supply of daily life possible to withold--

until--trhe unmasking-

The irony which Genet "unmasks" is that the very thing which attracts him as
desirable,   aesthetic-erotic-political qualities relationships in
rebellions against the State
will vanish once the rebellion is achieved.

The violence in Genet's Queering of these relationships with rebellions and
his refusals to accompany them once they cease being rebellions--
is that he chooses to remain the outsider--
an ally for a time and then one who disappears when his own status is
threatened by his comrades turning into  the myriad representations and
constructions of the State.
and in a sense becoming no longer  "Queer" for him.

One of the questions that Genet poses, from an artist's viewpoint (i.e my
own limited one) is that of the interrelations "between art and life." In
Genet's works revolutions, changings of roles, games of power and realities
of power take place IN THE THEATER. (Theater of War--).--
and the breaking out of the theater into the world--creates the reversals,
trans-gendering, falling away of maks--or, perhaps the opposite occurs when
the spectator exits the theater--even more confirmed that acting the role of
the bland asexul bourgouis is "for the best, the most dafe way--)
(the Painter Cezanne, in order to ward of the continual rumorsof his
Anarchism primitivism , anti-social behaviours, deliverately wore themost
bland suits to attnd mass and chose to read the most conservative newspapers
so that if asked for an opion o nanything he could parrot back the news
items and op-eds as though his own thinking, and so, he thought, camouflage
himself in order to be left alone to do his work--
fotos of Genet never show what looks "like an artist" but rather the role he
chose as hislife--petty criminal, tough guym smal time hooldum, orhaned
child of the State--and obviously a friend of primarily young Arab men--see
the great Mohamed Choukri's little book Jean Genet in Tangier"--

Genet's fascaintion with the beauty of the vioent aspectsof State and
Men--Burroughs noticied with horr that while the two were covering the
Chicago 1968 Democtatic Cnvention for Esquire--that genet was fascainted by
the area of the crotch of the police men's uniforms--and inhis pieceon the
"pigs" genet finds an eroticism in these violent State sponsored thugs--
this attraction to viooence as an erotic imagery rather than acts--that is
the fantasies of the cocksof criminals pasted to the insideof lockers or
tiny mirros i one's cell--islinked with the fascation for the outer images
which give evidence bybulgesof the interior life of the trousers so to
speak-
itis the surfaces which indicate depths thatcontradict the surfaces that
genet enjoys pullingout fo the hat continually for the reader--)




In life, the rebellions of the Black Panthers and Palestinians are only
aesthetic-erotic as long as they take place as a form of theater--and when
the play suddenly bursts in to life, it no longer interests him, in fact he
refuses it. he walks out just like any other person leaving the theater,
ironically "playing" on the "play being finished,punkt, fin fine over--
having reached its end."

leaving the theater "like any one else" yet bringing the vision of the
theater, a Queering vision, into the streets with him.as himself, his living
being.

In Genet's vision at a certain point one may consider that what is "Queer,"
"theatrical" "the writing out of masturbatory fantasies using men's images
glued with bread to the inside of locker door as material"--is a site of
Freedom which is where he lives.  From this point of view, those who are in
prison are those who do not see this world he is seeing and creating art
works from --"messages in a bottle," the Purloined letter hidden in plain
sight"--
prisoners of the State--(the son of prostitute and an unknown father, he
grew up in State run institutions)--
which he turns in to Prisoner of Love, his final book, about the rwo years
of his life among the Palestinians--a book which took him a great long time
to write--as in a sense, after reaching a certain point in writing, Genet
for along refused this also--

>From an artist's viewpoint then I think an sect of  Genet's method of
Queering in part accomplishes is that "overturning of all values,"
(Nietzsche??-yet in a Queered way ---)  that is, the artist's vision, the
Queer's, the criminals, the street person, the guerrilla fighters, the
panthers--these are the actualities which exist as long as they do not
betray themselves.  Genet believesin a way that his status as Queer is not
simply desiring, wanting to be "accepted" but that his viewpoint is "above"
the law--his transgressions the are not transgressions but that which exists
and exists as a refuasal to relinquish the Truth, the Beauty, the Eroticism
and Aestheticism of his way of seeing and touching and responding with and
againt the world.

It is the refusal of any less than the Freedom that is one's own existence
and art.
I think this "droit de refus" right to refuse is a deeply profound act, a
way of being--that is in continual refusal against norms it sees as the
aberrations of a world that the artists sees and lives and also creates a
theater, guidebooks--for some other to find this also where they are, who
they are --













On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 8:25 AM, davin heckman <davinheckman at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
> >
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