[-empyre-] Identity ... Disruptions

[Robert Summers]

To quote from the previous post, "We have felt many times that a
discourse on finding ways to dilute identities can be systematically
(and yet almost invisibly) violent towards those who are looking for a
specific (subjective) voice."

This reminds me of a quote by Barthes, "what society will not tolerate
is that I should be ... nothing, or to be more exact, that the
something that I am should be openly expressed as provisional,
revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word: irrelevant.  Just
say 'I am,' and you will be socially saved" ("Preface" to _Tricks_,
xvii-x).

I think this also is one tactic that is employed by Vaginal Davis, and
I am attempting to make my way back to a question that Virginia asked
of me several days ago.  She complicates modernist notions of identity
-- perhaps some one can say even modes of postmodern notion.  She does
this by always remaining "trans": in-transit, trans-formative,
becoming-as-unbecoming.  I think that the objection can be raised that
not everyone is privileged to escaping identity, but i think that the
issue of identity, as discussed by Barthes and others, here, is one
that is un-fixed -- even as the State apparatus attempts at all costs
to inscribe and brand (like so many cattle -- or every time I am at an
airport going overseas and interrogated, given I "look" Arabic --
although the authorities) a (seemingly) fixed identity onto
bodies/selves.

I have been thinking about this ... Perhaps a politics without
verifiable identities and acts may be incoherent, but what of an
ethics without verifiable identities and acts?  Such an ethics would
not be a complete denial of identities and acts, but would be an
interruption in the discursive protocols that make identity and acts
verifiable.  This then, would be an ethics without sexual content,
what I am calling an erotic ethics: without a positive epistemological
ground, and therefore without a struggle for recognition.

I would assume that a thinking this (the above) through the ("queer"?)
logic/s of D&G (for example, becoming-molecular,
becoming-imperceptible, etc.) would aid in further articulating an
erotic ethics, if not to say a queer ethics, and a queering of
so-called identity.

I would, also, like to surface a quote by William Haver, which I have
been think about for about two years: "“What if queer studies were to
be something other than the hermeneutic recuperation of a history, a
sociology, an economic, or a philosophy of homosexual subjectivity?
What if, that is to say, queer research were to be something more
essentially disturbing than stories we tell ourselves of our
oppressions in order precisely to confirm, yet once more, our
abjection, our victimized subjectivity, our wounded identity" (Haver,
"Queer Research," in _Eight Technologies of Otherness_, Sue Goldin,
ed., 278.

So just some thoughts ... musings ... gesturings ...

As ever,
Robert





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