We were returning home late the other night and came upon a strange scene on a Brooklyn street corner. An older woman, white haired, wearing large black glasses, such as those that often denote blindness (there was a cane as well), stood very still on that corner. She was surrounded by people from that neighborhood; they were asking her questions about where she had come from, about where she was going; she had an address, but no one could tell where, specifically, this place was. They had cell phones, they were doing their best to help. Wee kept walking; there didn't seem to be that much more that we could do. In the safety of our apartment, perhaps to alleviate how unsettled we really were, we began to think about procedures for a hypothetical film.
2.
These notes may be considered a procedure towards a film project. This film, if produced, may cause certain ethical hazards, in addition to certain physical hazards which should be evident from our descriptions. To which we only know ho to say - these dangers will have to be considered by those who chose to attempt completion of these procedures.
First A volunteer will be selected from a pool of applicants, the criteria being as follows - -She must be blind -She must qualify for senior citizen status -She must agree to sign each and every legal document required by out attorneys
This volunteer will take part in the following procedure.
Second
She will be given a wire tap, placed on an urban street corner in the dead of night, more or less between one and four in the morning. A camera crew, carefully concealed, will follow her "actions" at all times.The live feed from the wire tap will be sent to two locations - to the members of the camera crew (for reasons of security, more or less, and to a "command center" in a remote location from the site of filming. The blind volunteer will constantly relay, at a period of every five minutes or less (hopefully more constant, but we need to give her enough time for more elaborate descriptive passages if she so desires), describing in as"accurate" detail as possible just what she is hearing from moment to moment. This verbal description is the extent of what she is allowed to say; even in the instance that she is being quizzed by a concerned passer-by (what's your name? Are you alright?), she will not be allowed to offer any verbal information that cannot be described with the words - "an exact verbal summary of her moment to moment auditory experience."
Third
It must be to the camera crew's discretion when to interfere; they can only do so once, since as soon as they do so the filming is over and the project must be completed by what material has been gathered thus far. The volunteer must be instructed not to leave the spot, unless a moment of crisis occurs. As in many role eplay scenarios, there will be a "safe word" which will immediately terminate the fantasy at the point where it becomes physically or emotionally dangerous. If the period of filming must be terminated in such a fashion a separate testimonial by the volunteer explaining the rationale behind her decision must be arranged and recorded. This is the only scenario in which such a testimonial will be used in this project, and while this scenario may prove to be unavoidable, it should still be considered a near "last resort."
Fourth
The presentation of this procedure opens up a number of possibilities to explore. We suggest that the presentation works more or less as follows - the audio recorded straight from our volunteer's wire tap, separated and selected into different moments of description, grouped together by theme and texture more than anything else (especially chronology). This audio may be presented over black; it may be presented in accompaniment with footage of the camera crew listening, or of the crew in the remote location listening and logging; perhaps there could be a combination of the two. The audio portions would then be presented in an alternating series with the actual video (more or less in act chronological match with the audio as such), presented MOS, but with additional scoring recorded after the fact. The alternate option would be to record an additional set of testimonies from crew members, which would play in part over the footage they've shot.
Fifth
The solution to the problem of how to present the results of this procedure is one we hestitate in any sense to call definitive; this may in fact be one project that does not correspond to such a play. We may well suggest that, due to its emphasis placed already on blindness and sound, that whoever takes the project on their shoulders try, simply put, to listen carefully to the results as recorded. It may be there, after all, that the answer will present itself. That may sound like an evasive answer, and we would consider that maybe it is. Perhaps some procedures require a vague or evasive conclusion. In fact, a project born so specifically from disquiet may be inherently compromised from the outset; the existence of a pre-existing emotional state always creates the danger of suggesting a "narrative arc" entirely other than the material experience of the procedure. If it becomes apparent that this is indeed the case, we would suggest the project be gracefully shelved and ended.
from Jaspir K. Puar’s “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages.” Social Text 2005 23(3-4): 121-138.
Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly Is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. (122)
…
The strategy of encouraging subjects of study to appear in all their queernesses, rather than primarily to queer the subjects of study, provides a subject-driven temporality in tandem with a method-driven temporality. Playing on this difference, between the subject being queered versus queerness already existing within the subject (and thus dissipating the subject as such) allows for both the temporality of being and the temporality of always becoming. (127)
Queerness as a ballistic mode of becoming: one cannot finally be queer, but only go on continuing to become queer or queered: assemblage – rhizomatics – cyber-teratologies
While intersectionality and its underpinnings – an unrelenting epistemological will to truth – presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, assemblage, in its debt to ontology and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming/s beyond being/s. (128)
Necropolitics: “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who may die.”[1]
Queerness must consistently account for nationalism and race within its purview. (131)
In pondering the queer modalities of this kind of terrorist, one notes a pastiche of oddities: a body machined together through metal and flesh, an assemblage of the organic and the inorganic; a death not of the self or of the other, but both simultaneously; self-annihilation as the ultimate form of resistance and self-preservation. (128)
Orgies of death.
This body is not a beginning or an end……..
[1]From Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture 2003 15(1): 11-40.
This set of instructions may be best understood as a procedure for a hypothetical film, or as notes towards a comprehensive guide to daylight, less a script or a rule set than a group of loose guidelines to be followed and interpreted based on the understanding of the participants.
Procedure as Suggested
Each minute of the day, from 00:00 to 23:59, will be assigned to one correspondent. Each of these correspondents will operate within these simple guidelines -- each must have access to a video camera or equivalent recording device; each must be able to make a recording that documents that time to which they are assigned at those times in which visible daylight happens to occur. The specific mode of photographic representation, the specifics of implementing the recording, will be left to the judgment of the correspondents themselves. The completed footage will be sent daily to a centralized processing center, where it will be logged and archived over a period of one year. At this point it will be compiled, in order, each minute following one after another on separate screens.
Notes on Darkness
Due to the way that sunlight works, certain correspondents will be laboring through periods in which no visible sunlight is to be encountered at all. Depending of geography and the minutes assigned, it is not only conceivable but inevitable that certain correspondents will never encounter a single ray of sunlight through the entire course of the project. It is nonetheless highly advisable that, when the project has been completed and presented, that these gaps not be discounted, that they be given some kind of outlet nonetheless.
Presentation
While the most efficient form of presenting this work would no doubt be as some kind of new media piece -- through a devoted web site, for example -- we would personally advise against this; if nothing else, this is a project that is, in some fundamental way, opposed to efficiency in all its forms. While our opinion in this matter is hardly final, we cannot help but envision a genuine monument, like Rothko's Cathedral, in which each and every screen would play in unison, looping through the entire procedure again and again until the plug, somehow, is pulled.
Final Thoughts
Some eyebrows may well be raised, by the scope of the project, by the apparent futility of its aims. To this we would argue -- though not too fiercely -- that the monument resulting from our endeavor will be, in addition to being a guide to daylight, a monument to a certain kind of futility. Since there are so few of those in this world as it is.
This procedure may best be understood as notes towards a film about withholding.
1. A volunteer will be selected from a pool of applicants, gathered through the usual means (advertisements in the classified section of newspapers, online forums, the bulletin boards of laundromats, etc).
2.The volunteer must consent to be filmed for an unbroken period of no less than two hours. During this time, on of his limbs will be withheld from him. For purposes of this procedure we will assume the limb to be the right arm; in practice any limb can be used. We suggest that the arm be withheld through the simple process of tying it behind the back of our volunteer in a brace, but any other measure (deadening the arm with a local anesthetic, for instance) taken may be used so long as this measure fulfills the following criteria -- it must be temporary (so no amputation), and it must not significantly affect any other portions of the volunteer's body (it should not be a drug that would act on his entire nervous system, for example).
3. The camera crew following him as he moves through his day, minus one arm, will make sure to carefully track all of his movements and interactions; the volunteer will be instructed to move through his life during this portion of filming exactly as he would if he were not being filmed, and one of his limbs was not presently restricted. These instructions will be more or less impossible for the volunteer to carry out "to the letter," but we will consider the intention of carrying them out to be our primary concern.
4. The filmed footage will be logged, with careful notations describing the setting and actions. The footage and notations will then be given to another camera crew, who will operate under a different state of instructions. To whit:
5. This camera crew will follow the actions of another volunteer. This volunteer must be recruited based on the following criteria: they must be missing, through whatever means, the very same limb withheld from our first volunteer; in this case, they must have no right arm, from the shoulder on down. This volunteer will also view all of the tapes and notes, and be given this task -- dressed in black from head to toe, like a kuroko stage hand in a kabuki drama, they will be given a prosthetic limb to replace the one that is missing; they will proceed to act out the motions of the first volunteer in perfect symmetry, except that they must complete all actions of the missing arm as if the arm had been there all along. The camera crew will be instructed to follow the arm above all, including the world apart from the arm only as much as is needed for context.
6. All footage used for the final, edited version of this film will be the footage shot by the second camera crew; the footage shot by the first will be placed in storage and forgotten. Edited into the form of a 90 minute feature, the footage will be accompanied by the testimony of prominent neuroscience experts asked to explain "the inner life of the arm, from moment to moment," and by a soundtrack consisting entirely of the prosthetic arm played as a percussion instrument.
There looms within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. (Kristeva[1], 1)
Foreclosing the thinkability of the abject, of the unintelligible: possibilities become impossible; existence becomes nonexistent – or simply irrelevant. Normality, then, is rendered an impenetrable mold for the human. Any deviations from that mold simply do not – are not permitted/recognized to – exist as human. The abject body is a tangible, yet unintelligible vessel.
Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A “something that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture. (2)
as a corpse:
The kitschification of the abject: burial and pretty funereal traditions. The abject as death infecting life (4) … a pestilence to the living which is buried, underground, out of sight (abject (in)visibilities): in a kitschified coffin, the abject body (corpse, death, threat of death) cannot infect living bodies. The corpse, pumped with chemicals, dressed and re-personified to be buried in beautiful boxes, is made-up to deny abjection. The abject is death infecting life.
Consider the Body in terms of the aforementioned business of death and death itself, as visualized in the photographs of Sally Mann[2] in the series titled “What Remains.” Here Mann displays the corpse in all its abject reality: a body, which lies upon the earth – and is wholly subject to it. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Mann speculates that death is the “final taboo” – it used to be sex, she says, now it’s death.
(‘Heightening the display of lawful fragility – ambiguity – troubling – queering’: this is written in the margins, in my own handwriting, on page 4 of my text alongside the above discussion of death and the corpse – I have no idea what this means.)
The phobic subject causes fear: defining for the self what is fearful, and what is safe. The abject is unlivable, death – but most frightening, nonexistence:
[…] fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists […] The phobic has no other object than the abject. But what word, “fear” – a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess – no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. (6)
Regulation
The failure to conform to that which is idealized, Normalized, the model/archetypical mold of the Human – it does not exist: we are always already straying from the standard for being – entering into the unlivable zones of the Abject, indicating our borders, or existence and nonexistence. (Intolerable significance v. desire.)
(the heterosexual/normative matrix of intelligibility)
Here, on the contrary, consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories where an “I” that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying. (11)
The abject is the “hallucination of nothing” (42). Nothing: a no-thing as a (nonexistent, unintelligible) thing?
The abject is “the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality” (Undoing Gender[3], 30), regulating the boundaries of normality by providing a reference of unacceptable, deviant filth constituting and necessitating societal expulsion. The norm relies on the abject in order to recognize itself: the norm is recognized and made legible only through the recognition of the illegible, abject. Life itself becomes foreclosed by regulations, and presumed certainties.
To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not, to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in your favor. (30)
Autonomy comes with its own set of norms that are socially constructed. There are, then, “acceptable” and “devious” ways to be/act as an autonomous subject – one can only be autonomous as far as socialized norms allow. (abject autonomy)
Excretion
(Locating the abject – there should probably be some “excremental passages” along the borders)
The abject is the secretions of the body: mucus, tears, sweat, oil, shit, piss, earwax, odor, semen, saliva, vaginal discharge, puss, and blood – it’s the dead skin cells that fall off our heads as dandruff, the oil in our hair, our clammy skin – our panicked anxiety, our fevers, our fears, our hate, our love, our disgust, our nausea and the vomit our nausea produces. The abject is daily emitted from our pores: this refuse defines what is hygienic the same way the abject defines what is normal.
The boundary between the inner and outer is confounded by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes outer, and this excreting function becomes, as it were, the model by which other forms of identity-differentiation are accomplished. In effect, this is the mode by which Others become shit. (Gender Trouble[4], 182)
The origin of abjection: the body’s synecdochal signification – the abject is established or produced precisely through this expulsion.
Abjection is a discursive process: an embodied discourse. (“… discourses do actually live in bodies. They lodge in bodies; bodies in fact carry discourses as part of their own lifeblood.”[5])
[1]Julia Kristeva, “Approaching Abjection” from Powers of Horror: an essay on abjection
Consider this an introduction -- one whose necessity may only become apparent upon the appearance of its subsequent parts. Although I have no intentions of establishing an ‘historical chronology’ – or even an historical context per se -- in any form, I include this introduction merely to establish a point of reference concerning my present academic preoccupations in order to contextualize this series.
(Parts of this entry were originally prepared for a position paper on the intersections of feminism and colonialism in a class whose purpose it is to interrogate the project of history and dismantle the progress narrative of women’s liberation.)
The discourse of difference propelled by liberalism, having been conceived of pejoratively, necessitates the intervention of the unfamiliar. Due to the liberal framing and defining of the Human in limited and exclusionary terms, in order for humanity to be restored, as liberalism would have it, to uncivilized societies, a dignified and universalized notion of civilization must not only be established concretely, but be upheld as the standard of human legitimacy.
As Uday Singh Mehta relates in “Progress, Civilization, and Consent,” liberal advocate, John Stewart Mill, contrives his arguments for a progression of civilization around precise definitions of legitimate humanity, civilized social order, and, most prominently, historical progress and ascent. Likewise, as Mehta articulates, Mill’s position concerning the “equality” of women with men draws upon these same requirements of, and anxieties surrounding, progress. What liberalism’s notions of difference and progress imply for Wendy Brown in her essay, “Liberalism’s Family Values,” is hierarchical governance – wherein a singular conception of human acceptability is established and whereby all difference is measured. Failed conformity, then, to liberalism’s prescribed legitimacy not only renders the unfamiliar different, but decidedly inferior.
In his essay, “Progress, Civilization, and Consent,” Mehta establishes that the terms liberalism prescribes for proper or legitimate society are not only used to justify, but also serve to impel colonialist mentalities. For, by the terms of liberalism, the duty of the civilized is to bring to the uncivilized civilization:
Those reasons and the practices that followed from them make it clear that the commitment to democracy and pluralism were, at best, only provisional motives that allowed – indeed required – enormous temporizing in the face of the ‘backward’ and the unfamiliar. (77)
With progress as its pretext, liberalism could, thereby, proceed to grace improper civilizations with a promise for an enlightened future. Liberalism allowed Britain to expand its empire through a guise of betterment – liberals had an obligation to save the souls, as it were, of the damned (and progressively damning):
I have said in the introduction that the posture of liberal thought toward the world is judgmental. It is a corollary, if not a concrete implication, of this idea that it is also an evangelical posture in which the burning spirit has been that of politics and the eschatology that of progress. (79)
The reformation of the world through this lens of salvation quantifies a liberal progression toward universal equality – for, were all civilizations made the same, all may be equal. The conflation of equality with sameness works to justify intervention and reformation, compelling liberalism’s quest for political domination, while at the same time relying upon the very existence of difference to establish a model for sameness.
The standard by which a univocal sameness is measured requires a prototype. The liberal scale of progress and legitimacy are not only applied to unfamiliar societies, but to women within European society as well – wherein the same principles justifying colonialist efforts are, furthermore, transferred to advocate for women’s emancipation. Just as the civilized must rescue the uncivilized from their deficiencies, so men must rescue women from their subordination. (Similarly, Gayatri Spivakcharacterizes the colonialist legacy as “White men saving brown women from brown men.”) Though, the processes through which such progressive endeavors are implemented are slightly more ambiguous for Mill than Mehta might suggest. In his Considerations of Representative Government, Mill professes that European notions of proper civilization cannot simply be brought to a given people and forced upon them – particularities must be known of the subjected, knowledge of the Other. As Mill points out, the Hindu people may be resistant to Europe’s policies, its educational and religious principles, all of which must be taken into consideration. In order for progress to truly be beneficial, it cannot be obtained through force:
Such is one of the modes in which the opinion of the dominant country tends to act more injuriously than beneficially on the conduct of its deputed governors. In other respects, its interference is likely to be oftenest exercised where it will be most pertinaciously demanded, and that is, on behalf of some interest of the English settlers. (413)
Mill subsequently maintains that though a dominating country may indeed hold absolute power over a subjected country, this power is not without responsibility and should not be taken for granted. The responsibility of the power-holder, it would follow, is a responsibility to recognize the potential for future sameness in the Other, which amounts, eventually, to social and political progress.
In a similar vein, Mill addresses the subornation of women to men in “The Subjection of Women.” Framing matrimonial kinships between men and women as a variation of the master-slave dichotomy, Mill asserts that though men certainly exercise absolute control over their wives, there is a subtle nuance differentiating wife from slave: consent (202). Mill, however, is not satisfied with this reasoning or justification – proclaiming, instead, that women’s “natural” inclination to submit to men is, in fact, only understood as natural because common; education having proven this formerly presupposed female nature crudely insufficient. His admittance as to the impact of social conditioning in relation to sexual difference augments his claim that were women granted equality with men, social progress would surely follow:
The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of their faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their employments, and opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity. (232)
The argument Mill instills to support women’s equality with men is sameness: since women possess the same potential as men, equality must follow. Just as Mill insists that India’s deficiencies owed to lack of enlightenment, so, too, women’s subordination is articulated as merely a curable shortcoming, one which may be corrected through educational means. Liberalism’s consistent reliance upon sameness propels the quest toward progress – progress within Europe and beyond Europe. By rendering all people inherently “the same,” liberalism’s progressive agenda, in turn, marks difference as less than adequate, inferior or backward – a hindrance to progress – thus requiring the assistance of the more fully Human – that which has been created to supply and propel the measure of legitimacy.
As Wendy Brown contributes to the discourse of liberal humanism in “Liberalism’s Family Values,” conflating equality with sameness is inherently problematic in that a model of sameness relies upon difference – is recognized as sameness only through recognition of difference. Since Mill’s argument is not different though equal but equal because the same, it would proceed that if equality necessarily requires sameness that gender difference necessarily requires inequality:
gender in liberalism consistently emerges as a problem of difference, or simply as difference: there is human equality on the one hand, and gender difference on the other. (153)
Reliance upon a univocal understanding of human acceptability, then, necessitates inequality and the domination of one over another since the “human” prototype is understood as an exemplar of existence; all differentiation from that model is, by default, rendered inferior.
Were equality to be determined by measures of sameness, then, feminist discourse faces troubling impediments. For feminism to adhere to the concept of equality predicated upon sameness precludes the possibility of conceiving of a positivity of difference, a feminist, and political, necessity:
Equality as sameness is a gendered formulation of equality, because it secures gender privilege through naming women as different and men as the neutral standard of the same. (153)
In the same way as men become the prototype for human hegemony, so follows whiteness and heterosexuality as subsequent measures of sameness, and thus equality. A singular measure of human acceptability requires deviation from that standard, however, in order to sustain hierarchical constructs that, if not for difference, could not maintain any coherence.
Since reliance upon “universal human sameness,” as Brown asserts, denies the differences measured against the very notion of “sameness,” all feminist efforts predicated upon women’s equality with men necessarily adopt a masculinist conception of human legitimacy. A feminist adherence to such standards works within the framework of oppressive constructs that expel women from intelligible legitimacy, foreclosing subversion, and thus, human possibilities, reinforcing the delimitations of the human:
If difference (gender) is the conceptual opposite of universal human sameness (liberal humanism), then gender difference – that is, female sexual difference – is the conceptual opposite of the liberal human being, and equality as sameness is the conceptual opposite of gender as difference. (153)
As Brown articulates, the recognition of gender difference negates the possibility of equality.
The very existence of difference serves to delineate the standard for sameness. Conceiving of individuals and societies in relation to a model of legitimate humanity does not, as liberalism seems to imply, create a possibility for equality through sameness, but rather expel that which is read as “different” from the borders of acceptability: what is understood as civilized depends upon a confounding demarcation in order to be recognized as such, which necessarily separates legible humanity from the illegible. Liberalism’s reformative, emancipatory, or messianic efforts only purport to unify – instead they merely create tensions and anxieties over the sustainability of European male superiority.
Such anxieties, moreover, unveil themselves in numerous disciplinary discourses, which ultimately barricade, or obscure, ethical progress in lieu of advancing social progress. Several examples of these problematic frameworks will be addressed and discussed in the subsequent series.
