[-empyre-] Queerreality

[micha cárdenas]

Hi all,

Thanks for such a great post Jack! I'm very interested in this idea of
the queerreal and how you think it differs from my concept of the
transreal? One difference I see is that you're claiming "there is no
longer a real" where I have proposed that we live in a world of
multiple realities and we constantly slip in between them. I remember
reading Simulation and Simulacra by Baudrillard and being, the
activist I am, so offended by his claim that there is no reality when
so many people experience real violence on a daily basis. But I think
that the queerreal seems part of an important proliferation of many
realities and a strategy for dealing with the realities that people
like Karl Rove and Obama are consciously creating.

The reference to Keeling's work on the black femme and her writing
about the cliche in Deleuze is really important here, and I appreciate
you bringing it up. She discusses the ways that the cliche serves to
concretize realities by reinforcing common sense and how that happens
in cinema. I also find her concept of the black femme function, as the
way that the black femme disrupts forms of common sense like
heteronormativity and white supremacy, to be very rich and related to
my own work on femme disturbance. In that project, I've written a code
poem version of the black femme function. Here's a version of that
code:

femmeDisturbance.keeling.blackFemmeFunction () {

	delete visibility;

	if( commonSense.disrupt(racist) && commonSense.disrupt(sexist) &&
commonSense.disrupt(heteronormative) )
	{
		//once these forms of commonsense have been disrupted
		//exit this entire computational paradigm and
		//split off into a new imaginary computational system
		//yet to be defined

		fork(blackFemme(revolutionary, anticapitalist));
	}	
}

that code library also includes functions like
femmeDisturbance.ke$ha.rainGlitter(),
femmeDisturbance.janelleMonae.flickerBetweenRealities(),
femmeDisturbance.anzaldua.atravesados() and
femmeDisturbance.claireViele.absoluteCourage(), and is part of a
series of performances I'm working on. It's inspired, in part, by Zach
Blas' transcoder library.

The topic of the algorithm behind the animation as a kind of truth in
your description of queerreality is interesting. I think of algorithms
as transreal in that they are virtual, existing in software, but also
existing as source code. Essentially an algorithm is a series of steps
which must be performed, enacted. How do you see that as a truth?

I'm very interested in how code poems are a form of writing that is
partly for a non-human audience. Also, the concept of multiple
realities seems to intersect strongly with speculative reality and
say, the reality of a jellyfish that lives miles beneath the ocean.
What do we think is the reality of this lovely creature?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icKB9EfURhQ

Thank you also for bringing us back to Seoul as well. It seems like
the Tamagotchi may be a great transnational example, which brings us
back to Margaret's posts as well. It shows that concepts such as
transnational need not be restricted to issues of human identity.
Perhaps the largest non-human part of my work is the network, which is
like another performer that is in all of my works, from the internet
in becoming dragon to the mesh networks i'm creating in Autonets.
Also, Anime and Manga provides a vast, rich set of non-human examples
of animation that may be thought of as queerreal and of apocalyptic
scenes that conjure queer failure as well. Even transnational identity
seems like a non-human element within the human, as [non/in]human[e]
borders make up part of who we are. Diana Taylor discusses the rich
history of hybridity/transculturation/mestizaje in the Archive and the
Repertoire, and mestizaje is a form of low theory and low aesthetics
that has existed for centuries and can now interact with the low
theory used by you, stuart hall and david graeber.

Tattoos are another whole rich ser of conversations. Here's a piece by
Tagny Duff that Zach Blas reminded me of today, Living Viral Tattoos:

http://www.tagnyduff.net/moist_media_archives/living_viral_tattoos/en/index.php

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 5:25 AM, Judith Halberstam <halberst at usc.edu> wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
micha cárdenas
PhD Student, Media Arts and Practice, University of Southern California
Provost Fellow, University of Southern California

New Directions Scholar, USC Center for Feminist Research

MFA, Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego

Author, The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities,
http://amzn.to/x8iJcY

blog: http://transreal.org