[-empyre-] Queerreality

[Judith Halberstam]

From Jack, still in Seoul, and wandering/wondering about the global city, hello kitty and the connections between new mega-urban centers and caffeine.

Welcome to the desert of the queer/real. I would like to introduce through this hosted discussion venue, the notion of a queerreal – a queer reinvention of the real and all of its component pieces – the authentic, the true, the normative, the right, the central, the most, the best, the found, the lost, the unintended, the inconsequential, the made up, the unmade, the empty and the unforbidden. I believe that we are living at the end of a paradigm of self/other/world made up of what Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish as a set of social structures designed around an empty middle or “norm” which functions through invisible affective networks of competition, shame, guilt, regret, longing, and so on. While these networks held people in thrall to notions of the real, the right and the true for a long time, that time is now over and the real has been remade as the queerreal, the right has re-emerged as the contingent and the true has become an algorithmic equation factoring complex social functions like in/appropriateness, in/commensurability, correspondence and mis/communication.

 Why the queerreal? – well, as the work by most of the people participating here has shown, the queer was never invested in the old real in the first place. In fact, the real was produced in the past in reference to the inauthenticity that lives in the place of the queer. So, while an early coder of queer life, Judith Butler, offered us the hackeresque formulation: “gender is a copy with no original,” other queer theorists like Patrick Johnson’s “quare theory” or Roderick Ferguson’s “aberrant Black subjects,” or Kara Keeling’s illegible Black femme subjects, or Mel Chen’s queer toxic entities, of Hoang Nyguen’s masochistic gay subjects, have all shuffled, scrambled and remade the coordinates of copies and originals to the point of no return. There is no longer a real. Only a queerreal where copies copulate and memes migrate and viruses propagate and the markers of the normal, the heterosexual, the conventional and the usual are lost in a sea of randomness and abandon.

 If this sounds like queer jouissance, let me assure you it is not. Given the tendency for queer jouissance to always be a male (not even masculine just male) and given that we are not looking for a new utopia, let’s make sure the understand that the queerreal is still a bounded space of possibility and impossibility, computation and the uncomputable.

 Some markers in the queerreal to guide us out of the desert and into a new space of desertion and abandonment –

 i. Clichés old and new: For Deleuze, of course, the cliché was the form of expression that promises not to surprise or to shock; indeed, the cliché lulls the viewer into complacency and cradles her in the affective resonance of the familiar and the sentimentally reassuring. The cliché, Deleuze seems to believe, stands between us and the new, it blocks the alternative, it shuts down the not-already-given. But for many subjects and artists, the cliché cannot and must not be ignored precisely because it speaks to a level of emotional comfort that we, none of us, want to sacrifice completely. The cliché joins us to popular modes of feeling and being; we are manipulated but willingly submit to the rough handling and so we (many of us) take great pleasure in romantic comedies, in ‘hello kitty,’ in black leather jackets, tattoos, facebook and so on…Deleuze’s commitment to a mandarin sensibility, a Frankfurt school belief in the liberatory potential of the difficult, prevents him from investing in the fetish worlds of clichéd figures.

ii. Stuffed objects – the stuffed object, an extension of the cliché, a soft alternative to the tamagotchi dolls that preoccupy their owners with a list of quiet demands. Stuffed animals, cushions, seats, beds, wet suits – all of these objects, some of which join forces with the cliché, can be described as queerreal – they offer new modes of companionship in old technical formats, they offer a fake warmth which we anyway accept; they even draw out identification in the form of furries. And they point critically to a new global obsession with the pet. While the household pet serves multiple purposes in terms of an investment or divestment in the real – it is a fake child, it is a real animal; it offers true companionship, it fakes connections; it produces real shit, it can manage reduced versions of intimacy – it is real rather queerreal because it promises true love but can only deliver fleas and poop. The queerreal animal is always stuffed. What is the stuff of stuffing?

iii. And finally for now, the queerreal is animation – animé and 3D, Pixar and Claymation, 2D and 3D. The problem with speculative realism like the problem with Heidegger’s theories of technology is that behind all the high abstraction and the neologistic gerunds indicating that the human is just a place-marker for the question of being,  lies a longing for some real real, a norm, a space separate from the technological and the engineered. In the desert of the queerreal there are were-rabbits and clay hens, 3D fish and rats, swarms, vampires and zombies and elaborated worlds of social insects. And I guarantee you this: in the best animation there is no smuggled in, sentimental attachment to the real. Rather, deep at the heart of the animated spectacle is one firm truth – behind every great animation, is an algorithm that is constantly being rewritten, a dream being reworked and a world being unmade.

Welcome to the desert of the queerreal.
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