The Nonsequitur
If-x-then-not-y: Capital’s Preemption
and Critique’s Noncausal Moods
Stefan Govaart Student number: 11788895 Supervisor: dr. Marija Cetinic Second Reader: dr. Joost de Bloois 20 June 2019
Acknowledgements. . . 3
Introduction: Theories of “To Follow”: Queer Critique, Moving Contradiction, and the Materiality of Thought. . . .4
Chapter 1: The Nonsequitur’s “Non”: Negativity, Futurity, Reproduction, Modulation. . . . .15
Chapter 2: Modulating the Rigidity of Instability: Infrastructure, Form, Sabotage. . . .29
Conclusion: X Is Weird: Immanent Critique, Nonderivative Deviance, Invested Divestment
. . . .45
Bibliography. . . .49
Acknowledgements
Thank you so much for everything, Marija. I loved our conversations. They just always kept me thinking, so helpful when feeling insecure and stuck.
Floris, Justine and Aster, you are simply wonderful and smart.
And mom, Rinske, to know you are there, for big things, small things, is beyond words. Lastly, the ones who have kept me dancing while tackling this sedentary practice that is reading and writing, Liza, Amanda, Sidney, Adriano, Chloe, Alexandra, Simon, Karima, Marie, Sandra, Angela, and others, you are irreplaceable.
Introduction
Theories of “To Follow”
Queer Critique, Moving Contradiction, and the Materiality of Thought
Nonsequitur is a phrase from the Latin: non, “not/don’t”; sequitur, the third person singular of sequi, “to follow”: It does not follow. In A Dialogue On Love Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick uses the Latin phrase in a passage that seeks out the ambivalences of cause-and-effect she, life, her therapist, and her attachment to death induce in multiple ways. The book is a memoir on recovering from breast cancer, Sedgwick’s comforting proximity to death, theincommensurabilities of therapy, desire and dialogue. It combines prose with verse with her therapist’s notes in capital letters. “At first I thought I'd know when therapy was successful because I'd stop feeling the want of being dead” (111), Sedgwick writes. But suffering from a want does not mean wanting the want to go: “I'm scared about what will be left of me” (112). Sedgwick asks questions about the stakes of change: if the expectation, the promise, of therapy is change, how to imagine change that does not look like change? Is change change when change changes “imperceptibly slowly” (112)? Does not wanting x mean wanting x? Sedgwick recounts her therapist’s response to her many uncertainties: a story about a patient of his long ago “who after many years – in fact long after the end of therapy – woke up one morning and found she no longer had multiples” (112). Or, as Sedgwick writes, “an apparent non sequitur”, that is, the “non-necessity, in therapy, of what “‘follows’” (112).
This thesis stresses the necessity of thinking “to follow” including the non-necessity of what follows. Latent in therapy’s form lie Sedgwick who sticks to the want of being dead, Sedgwick who gets rid of the latter want, scared about having lost it, Sedgwick who does not change other than “imperceptibly slowly”. My point is that Sedgwick points to a form’s (i.e. therapy’s) multiple outcomes but never without gesturing towards “the conventional genres of event [that] potentially foreclose the possibility of the event taking shape otherwise” (6), to borrow from Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. If genre is an “aesthetic structure of affective expectation", a "formalization of aesthetic or emotional conventionalities” (Berlant 2008, 4), an “affective contract” (Berlant 2011, 66), then genres, whether in aesthetic-cultural
recognizable in form. Genre thinks form’s attachment to predictability, the organization that is the rigidity-flexibility spectrum of form. Being invested in causation, this thesis also thinks and attempts to locate predictability, anticipation, and the organization of the forming of form. If Sedgwick remarks, “At first I thought I'd know when therapy was successful because I'd stop feeling the want of being dead” (111) but then highlights how such if-x-then-y story fails to do the job, then what follows is guided by the figuration and/or structuration
underwriting the social politics of causality Sedgwick sheds light on.
Broadly speaking, this scene from A Dialogue On Love points to the complexity of tracking the ideologies and normativities of recognition, expectation and causation.1 Critical
theory, such as deconstructionist, queer, feminist, antiracist and other radical theories have mapped and continue to map the stakes of this problem. Following Berlant, they “derive concepts from tracking patterns, following out the coming-into-form of activity” (2011, 13). Tracking patterns and the coming-into-form of activity means tracking causal chains to, most often, suggest “‘it could have been otherwise’” (13), as Berlant recalls Adorno’s phrase. Thus, one might ask, doesn’t the nonsequitur name critical theory’s well-established
methodology? The answer is yes but the answer is too that it aims to spotlight the debates that study the workings of this methodology. What patterns pattern the materializing of theoretical activity invested in the causal workings of the social?
The nonsequitur, in other words, does not so much suggest a subversive and/or
innovative gesture. It is more like a tempering of the clarity and inertia that come with having found one’s way to think. I pick up on but also probe the historical moment: if expressing one’s awareness of criticality’s doomed status in view of the preemptive nature of capital-induced normativities has itself become a cliché, then the nonsequitur examines what projects with critical want are left with.2 Yet rather than being cynical my writing feels out if this
cliché can be reworked. Thus, I evaluate iconic theoretical moves that make important claims about what it might mean to think this project’s conceptual placeholder “to follow”. What do non-follow-up moods look like when the monocausal is facilitated by the noncausal of criticality?3 Or, my writing is seriously guided by the question lurking in the background
1 More on ideology below. My reading of Judith Butler’s work (introduction and chapter 1) spells out
norm/normativity.
2 See, for instance, Christopher Nealon’s 2004 essay “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late
Capitalism”. Nealon examines “[recent North-American] poetry that recognizes that even its awareness of the obsolescence of its materials, as a literary strategy, is obsolete” (597). Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is
There No Alternative? observes the same with regards to the cultural field at large (9-10).
3 This project does not explicitly theorize “mood” (other than right here) but this does not stop me from using it.
Whether a mood hovers overhead in the background or in the foreground, its spatio-temporal character is difficult to pin down. It might be intense, but need not be. It clearly patterns a room, a dinner party, a public gathering, or, for that matter, the social, but resists being a delineated event, which, again, is not to say that it is not consequential. These affective-conceptual qualities compel me to suggest that thinking causality always implies thinking mood. Indeed, doing theory implies drawing out moods. For excellent mood-work, see: Ahmed “Not In The Mood” and Jonathan Flatey’s Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. If I link theory to mood, then this is also a nod to the cultural Marxist heritage that explicitly linked the theorization of history to sense/affectivity/mood via the aesthetic. I lean on Berlant’s eloquent summary here (2011, 63-7).
indeed foreground: “What stories of the intelligibility of the reproduction of the world can you imagine not re-telling in order to be able to tell something else?” (00:41:59 – 00:42:05).4
Clearly, I cannot pay tribute to the intricacies of all these different debates. My decision to spend time with one of the notions that boosted US queer theory, Judith Butler’s (gender) performativity, derives from its emblematic insistence on “the distinction between expression and performativeness” (192), as Butler’s influential Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity has it. 5 As I demonstrate below, this distinction casts the
weighty and ongoing structuration that forms gendered identity – that is, a specific (bodily) form – as noncausal rather than as predetermined. When I write “noncausal”, I do not mean to say that this structuration is “whatever” and hence not really real. Quite the opposite: its noncausal character demands constant reiteration. Without repetition, structuration cannot conceal its arbitrary nature. It is the structuration that precedes the formation of (gendered) identity that comes to reveal itself as noncausal in its very bodily repetitive enactment. I further unpack this below by close-reading the last pages of Gender Trouble. For now, let me just say that Butler’s performativity and US queer theory at large map normative structuration as not-necessarily-so (i.e. structuration as constructed), hence refuse “to advocate or
politically favor any particular category other than the (sexually) nonnormative” (69), as Mel Chen writes in her detailed linguistic analysis of the word queer. Nonnormativity becomes queer theory’s politico-bodily project once normativity is deconstructed as not-necessarily-so (which is what I mean by noncausal) via Butler’s intervention that highlights repetitive bodily acts qua acts that act as if the opposite were the case.
She terms this concept “the affectivity of the historical present relayed by an aesthetic transmission” (66-7). The historical novel is the prime “aesthetic transmission” here. Fredric Jameson’s chapter on Georg Lukács in
Marxism and Form is particularly incisive in this regard. Raymond Williams’s “structure of feeling” cannot not
be named here. Flatley’s book puts the latter to interesting use.
4 This is Berlant’s question during a roundtable at the “Sixth Annual Feminist Theory Workshop”, published on
YouTube, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wni7qAhabcY&t=2450s. I foreground this question for two reasons. Firstly, it accentuates reproduction (chapter 1 studies reproduction from a Marxist feminist
perspective). Secondly, it suggests to imagine from within the not instead of asking for imagination ex nihilo (i.e. be creative and imagine your way out). Berlant’s question thus implies structural prefiguration, crucial to this thesis throughout. For an important critique of affirmationism in continental theory and an argument for “the persistence of the negative”, see Noys (2010).
5 Butler’s 2017 book chapter “When Gesture Becomes Event” stresses and clarifies “the dual dimensions of any
account of performativity” (177, emphasis added), i.e. the body’s “corporeal susceptibility (…) exposes us from the start to objectionable forms of power” and, simultaneously, possibly induces “resistance, deviation, and new formations” (178). This locates her notion of performativity at the heart of thinking the social in terms of “to follow”. See Barad (2003) for an in-depth discussion and critique of Butler’s performativity. The introduction to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity provides more critical notes and a compact discussion of “performativity” throughout several academic disciplines. Sedgwick recalls how J.L. Austin later disowns his own initial distinction between performative and descriptive utterances and concludes: “the ‘queer’ potential of performativity is evidently related to the tenuousness of its ontological grounds”(3). Culler (2000) also returns to J.L Austin to trace performativity’s genealogy. Ahmed’s (2006)
“nonperformativity” crucially articulates performativity’s non-function. She points to institutional antiracist speech acts as specifically nonperformative: in claiming to enact transgression they precisely consolidate the status quo.
The point is that queer theory reworks the causal logic of expression. The nonsequitur embraces this, but also embraces more. It is wary of critical confidence, as I hinted at before. If the nonsequitur were a table it would have many seats.6 Seats occupied by theories that are
concerned with the causal chain of the social. Some explicitly illuminate something about “to follow” by thinking the body, the constitution of subjectivity, never disentangled from the social (introduction and chapter 1). Others zoom out and track causality across time, futurity, reproduction, that is: political economy (chapter 1). Clearly addressing the socially
constituted “you” from within political economy (specifically, reproduction), Paul B. Preciado’s column for the French newspaper Libération, “Fais tes cartons sans savoir où tu déménages”, written on the brink of 2017, provides seemingly simple yet compellingly complex phrases to think with. The critical work I undertake in chapter 2 as regards two conceptual giants, form and infrastructure, aims to bring home my argument against thinking critical form in terms of productivity. The nonsequitur treats theory as “discerning the limits to movement and change” and in so doing underlines “the change that does not change” (Mitropoulos 2018 np, see chapter 2). With the help of Juliana Spahr’s 2015 poetry-bundle That Winter The Wolf Came political economy turns political ecology where “the fine thread of deviation” sabotage proposes clarifies my project’s conceptual stakes.
But before working this out, I want to think more about queer theory’s undoing of an “agency” or “locus” from which acts follow, and how this matters to the nonsequitur.
Christopher Nealon’s take on the emergence of queer theory in North-America as both indebted and responding to “French post-structuralism” by popularizing both “affect and performativity”, which made it possible to think “not etiological” sexual identities, is informative here (2011a, 263). Nealon clarifies how Butler popularizes performativity by reworking Derrida’s notion that foregrounds the citational character of the linguistic sign: “one can read into her [Judith Butler’s] critique of Derrida a counter-allegory in which the merely ‘semantic’ functions as a social energy that can actually influence the social ‘structure’ that should, according to a Derridean scheme, work on an entirely other plane” (269, emphasis added).7 Butler’s reworking of Derrida rearticulates the body as “rhetorical
rather than linguistic” which locates the political force of her notion of performativity in its medium, i.e. the body (270).
Gender Trouble articulates it this way: “Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow, rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted through time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized
6 What do metaphors do? Sara Ahmed has extensively used the table-metaphor. Ahmed brings both mood and
table into conversation and shows how uncomfortable gatherings at tables may signify feminist projects. See especially Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, but also Living A Feminist Life and “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)”.
7 See Derrida’s “Signature Event Context”. Spargo (2000) details how US queer theory is indebted to and
repetition of acts” (191, original emphasis).8 Butler’s gender performativity asserts a thick
non-linear conception of time in its emphasis on the external structuration prior to any expressive form (i.e. no “locus” “from which various acts follow”), where external
structuration denotes the reiteration of citational acts that come to produce “a sedimentation of gender norms” (191). The latter norms – “in reified form” (191) – aim to conceal that these performative attributes “effectively constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (192). Butler spotlights the citational character of reified form, hence the paradoxical nature of “our belief in its [gender’s] necessity and naturalness” (190). The “distinction between expression and performativeness” makes it possible to think “the very notions of an essential sex and a true or abiding masculinity or femininity” as themselves part of “the strategy that conceals gender’s performative character and the performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination and
compulsory heterosexuality” (192).
My development of the nonsequitur takes from Butler the insight that reified forms of cause-and-effect aim to conceal the performative character of the social. Socially real
masculinity as well as femininity try hard to keep at bay other possible forms. Yet, trying hard includes failing: citational chains of reified forms “in their occasional discontinuity reveal the temporal and contingent groundlessness of this ‘ground’” (192). Efforts to repeat the sedimented norms reveal their construction in their susceptibility to failure: “gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status” (200). Butler, in sum, shows how the rigid fixing of causal chains at times reveals what is in fact the noncausal mood of the social.9
But as I wrote earlier, even if the nonsequitur takes seriously queer and by extension critical theory’s exposition of normativity vs. nonnormativity, it does not stop there. In what is often referred to as “the critique of critique” the insistence on revealing the noncausality of naturalized causal expression by Butler and co came under attack. Had this critical gesture itself become a monocausal project?10 Sedgwick, in her 1997 essay “Paranoid Reading and
Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You”, highlights “the current near professionwide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization” (144). I share Sedgwick’s concern: to rely on methodological commonsense diminishes “the ability to respond to environmental (e.g., political) change” (144). Sedgwick reads Gender Trouble’s closing pages, the very same ones
8 Henceforth, I only mention when italics are mine (i.e. do not appear in the original). 9 See footnote 3 on “mood”.
10 Toke Lykkeberg uses the term “monocausality” to describe the state of today’s contemporary art discourse.
The latter, according to Lykkeberg, is entirely defined by “the critique of capitalism”. Even if art works are widely divergent, they are nonetheless read through the same lens. “Such monocausality is particularly appealing in a world that is difficult to understand; a world that seems more and more complex and opaque while it expands and yet retracts as a ‘global village’” (np), Lykkeberg maintains. The nonsequitur similarly tracks how critical gestures may themselves induce monocausal, reified form.
I have just close-read, to anchor her argument. Sedgwick’s point is that Butler’s excessive faith in revealing the performative character of the social space where gender gets to be constructed as real may not be as subversive as it seems. Sedgwick does not want to assume that demystification does all the work. Indeed, the artificiality of gender representations seems rather obvious to Sedgwick, rendering its demystification redundant (141).
To illustrate her point Sedgwick recalls her friend’s response to the question whether she has ever believed that the AIDS crisis was deliberately induced rather than an accident: even if we knew for certain, what would it change? (123-4).11 That is, Sedgwick redirects the
stakes of the debate, as the essay’s central question clarifies: “How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?” (124, emphasis added). The noncausal theoretical moods I track respond to this question and do not presume that critique’s sole role is to reveal how the real is always deep down, hidden from view, under the carpet. They nonetheless presume that ideology and normativity are at work. But as Bruno Latour rhetorically asks in his 2004 article “Has Critique Run out of Steam?”: “Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency?” (228). Latour points to how critical theory’s friend easily turns into its foe. Likewise, Tamsin Spargo highlights: “Queer critiques of normativity cannot overlook the ability of dominant discourses and knowledges to appropriate and contain subversion” (62).12
Or, this is about theoretical nuance, theory trading in contradiction. The nonsequitur therefore learns from a wide-ranging tradition of Marxist dialectical thought. Reflecting on Theodor W. Adorno’s negative dialectics in Marxism and Form, Jameson writes that dialectical thinking holds on to opposites. Jameson, by examining Adorno’s relation to Hegel’s philosophy, stresses both the impossibility and indispensability of dialectical thought: if the modern problem is the impossibility to imagine a totality, dismissing all attempts to do so is throwing the baby out with the bathwater (54-5); even though the totalizing quality of Hegel’s philosophy “is no longer possible” (47), Adorno nonetheless
11 In casting doubt on the clarity of the causal chain of sociality, this question is especially relevant to the
nonsequitur. My ensuing discussion of “ideology” resonates here. For now, suffice it to say that ideology is not so much the “veil” that covers the “real”. Below I treat in greater detail Carolyn Lesjak’s point that ideologies
are acting but less like veils that cover what’s real and more like structural vicious circles of knowing that
things are clearly bad, unreal, vain, obsessive, destructive, and so on, but doing them anyways. This
understanding of ideology is also implicit in Sedgwick’s essay. Like Lesjak, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism leans on Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson to articulate ideology in this way too. Berlant’s Cruel Optimism develops this understanding of ideology into a concept (the title of the book) that indexes, for Berlant, the affective historical present of “the last three decades (…) of the post-Second World War period in the United States and Europe” (3).
12 Jasbir Puar’s “homonationalism” is an important concept in this regard. See Queer Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times. (For more on homonationalism, see chapter 1, footnote 34.) Also: the various
cunning forms of cooptation including the problems for thought they generate are key throughout this thesis on the nonsequitur that wants to think criticality from within the material limits to criticality. Chapter 1 points to Fisher’s “precorporation”, a coopting logic that underscores preemption, as such suggesting a qualitative and historical shift away from the more widely theorized incorporating logic of capitalist cooptation.
sympathizes and contends with his totalizing philosophical-dialectical system.13 Adorno’s
negative dialectics affirms the importance of the notion of “an ultimate synthesis” to thought, “while negating its possibility and reality in every concrete case that comes before it” (56).14
Jameson explains:
Perhaps the only way to keep faith with the Hegelian spirit of systematization in a fragmented universe is to be resolutely unsystematic. In this sense Adorno’s thought is profoundly Hegelian, thinking its motifs through in a genuinely Hegelian spirit, facing thereby its
principal formal problem: How to write chapters of a phenomenology when there is no longer any possibility of a whole? How to analyze the part as a part when the whole is not only no longer visible but even inconceivable? (50)
Adorno’s style of writing, according to Jameson, indexes this “unsystematicity” dialectical thinking proffers, this formal problem that is continuity (50). To Jameson, dialectical sentences increase in strength “proportionately as the realities linked are distant and distinct from each other” (54). If dialectical thought includes “thought about thought, thought to the second power”, as such tracking its own material conditioning as well as its own operations “in the very act of thinking”, then it is the very doing of this thinking that inscribes itself in the writing (53). The point is not so much to resolve any thought as such, but rather to pause and insist on thought’s material conditioning as well as material doings, that is, its
materiality. Thought’s problem is not the extent to which it can be adequate to the task of contemplating so as to come to meaningful conclusions concerning the thing intended, for this presupposes the separation of subject and object, ontology and epistemology, which is itself, according to Jameson who, in the chapter on Georg Lukács, glosses the latter’s observations in History and Class Consciousness, “a kind of distorted reflection of this initially immobile situation which is the privileged moment of middle-class knowledge” (185).15 That is, Jameson, via Lukács, clarifies that the dialectical perception of thought
refutes, as opposed to “abstract philosophy”, “to reduce the phenomenon of reflection to a static type of mental image more or less adequate to the realities outside” and puts forward “a sense of forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface of the present
13 Jameson sketches Adorno’s stance as follows: “The impossibility of the Hegelian system for us is not a proof
of its intellectual limitations, its cumbersome methods and theological superstructure; on the contrary, it is a judgment on us and on the moment of history in which we live, and in which such a vision of the totality of things is no longer possible” (47).
14 Vischmidt (2014) as well as Nilges (2009) underline the significance of Adorno’s negative dialectics as
regards “negative critique” and “contemporary Marxist formalism”, respectively.
15 In other words, “this dilemma of classical philosophy”, i.e. the degree to which the mind (that is to say, the
middleclass mind of the bourgeoisie; the ahistorical manner in which the problem is posed only signals this slide of metonymy, Jameson clarifies) is able to grasp external reality – and Kant’s system is the key referent here – is itself a “false problem” (185).
into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into the consequences of acts” (189).16
The lineage I am tracking here repudiates the autonomy of thought. Abstraction is material, it declares. Thus, it matters less what can be (truly) known and more how material realities come to “appear”, how to read and treat them. Andrew Cole’s proof of Hegel’s influence on Marx sheds more light on this. In his entry “Hegelianism” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx Cole lays out the crux of the dialectic to conclude: “there’d be no Marx without Hegel” (195).17 Cole explains Hegel’s essential contribution as follows: “Hegel’s
novelty and importance in the history of dialectical philosophy comes, then, in his embrace of identity/difference, and, specifically, in the way he uses these logical categories to make ‘contradiction’ fashionable, in a philosophical climate that was entirely hostile to it” (186). To Cole, it is a mistake to dismiss Hegel’s impact on Marx by pointing to the purportedly unbridgeable gap between the former’s idealism and the latter’s materialism. This fails to acknowledge the methodological vicinity of both thinkers.“The dialectic isn’t fundamentally about positions like idealism, materialism, etc. (…) the dialectic transcends the difference between the two” (191), writes Cole.His point is that Hegel’s dialectic posits thought as motion/movement (Bewegung, in Hegel’s and Marx’s German), quintessential to Marx analyzing the contradictory, dialectical movement of capitalism (191). Given the decidedly distinct historical contexts within which both thinkers are writing, it makes little sense to criticize Hegel “as if he were a bad Marxist” (193).
Cole, instead, is at pains to clarify: Hegel had already anticipated Marx’s criticism. Close-reading a Hegelian passage, Cole comes to conclude that for Hegel the problem of thinking the world’s complex totality “begins when the learner assumes that an ‘inverted posture’ [Hegel’s phrase] is all that’s needed to climb and do philosophy” (194). Hegel, in other words, was already aware that thinking is not a one-way street. An “inverted posture”, that is, following Cole who quotes Hegel, “to walk on one’s head for a change” (194), does not get one far in reading and treating the material realities that come before one. That is, Cole’s argument tracks how Hegel preempts Marx’s critique, “the philosophical and, I’d add, dialectical mistake: taking the air for the ground, the real for the ideal, the bone for spirit, and so forth” (194), as Cole explains. Cole therefore concludes: “We can have all sorts of theses about mind and matter, thought and world, which has priority, which is a reflection of the
16 For Lukács, crucially, it is the worker as opposed to the bourgeois thinker who has access to understanding
the world in terms of “that union of subject and object, of knower and known” (186) precisely because of the “initial alienation within himself [sic]” (187). As Jameson quotes Lukács: “‘his [sic, i.e. the worker’s] consciousness is the self-consciousness of merchandise itself’” (187). Or as Jameson writes himself: “he [sic] will see the objects around him [sic] in terms of change, rather than in the timeless ‘natural’ present of the middleclass universe” (187-8).
17 Indeed, Cole’s The Birth of Theory argues that Hegel’s (and not Marx’s) dialectic inaugurated Theory as
other, but we can never get around the difficulties already encoded there, in appearances themselves” (195, emphasis added). This is the nonsequitur’s ground zero.18
Carolyn Lesjak’s “Reading Dialectically” assumes a comparable starting point. Her lengthy, eloquent essay puts the issues raised above into conversation with multiple critical reading practices developed from within contemporary debates in the humanities.19 She
quotes Žižek to clarify, not unlike I just did, Hegel’s fundamental lesson: the major
ontological problem is not “‘can we penetrate their [appearances’] veil to the underlying true reality?’ but ‘How could – in the middle of flat, stupid reality which is just there – something like appearance emerge?’” (247). Yet, importantly, Lesjak insists, this does not imply the need for the promotion of “surface”. Lesjak’s is a critique of the emergence of “surface reading” including its nondialectical believe in “common sense”: to Lesjak, starting from a thing’s surface does not equal starting from its clean slate (249).20 This one-dimensional affirmative belief in “just reading” (as Sharon Marcus would have it [Lesjak 246]) reacts against an enemy: the ones practicing “ideology critique”, or, “depth readers”, who, as Lesjak point out, are falsely equated with “Marxist readers”. These adversaries are laborious diggers, solely occupied with blowing away foggy layers of mystical untruth. Lesjak,
however, shows how this is a simplification and turns to Marxist dialectical thinkers (Jameson and Žižek specifically) and “a nondualistic queer/affect theory” (264) à la Sedgwick to submit the evidence.
The dispute between surface and depth readers derives from having different concepts of materiality and ideology, Lesjak illuminates. Both accuse each other of having it wrong. The former (surface readers) blame the latter (Marxist readers) for not paying sufficient attention to what is given and, as such, material, i.e. the surface, the text as such. The story goes: their (depth readers’) all-too rigorous attention to all that is not surface (i.e., for surface readers, not material), that is to say, to “ideology” – where ideology equals the already mentioned simplified version of invisibility cloak – misses the point: surfaces speak for themselves, they just need an attentive pair of eyes. Marxist readers, in contrast, point out that “materiality” does not equal the text as such. The material that is the surface always includes the occlusions that constitute any such “as-such-ness”. For readers of depth, surface readers “falsely materialize texts” (249). They proceed as if in a “postideological” world, refusing to
18 Another ground zero challenging the clarity of cause-and-effect, the idioms of “reflection” and “priority”, is
the nonsequitur’s rejection of “dogmatic” Marxist approaches that pull apart “base” and “superstructure”: the former is determining; the latter determined. Ellen Meiksins Wood’s “The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism” shows how this separation denies “a materialist understanding of the world” (78). In “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Thought” Raymond Williams recalls Marx’s emphasis on dynamism and “contradictions in the relationships of production and in the consequent social relationships” (33-4).
19 For insights into fairly recent “new formalisms” in the humanities, see Levinson (2007).
20 Ruth Jennison explains how the idea of common sense, through the concept of hegemony, is bound up with
advance any substantial concept of ideology while simultaneously accusing depth readers of “dematerializing” the text in their “endless” study of what is more than “surface”.
However, what surface readers fail to acknowledge is that ideology is not merely located in knowledge, Lesjak argues by drawing on Žižek (esp. 251, 253, 257). If surface readers construct their postideological stance “by asking what the good of sheer negativity is when ideology critique has no leverage and when we already know what will be revealed” (250), then, in so doing, they demonstrate what Lesjak refers to as “Žižek’s description of the fetishistic mode of ideology” (253): the fetish, the surface, renders surface readers perfectly able to accept the way things are “since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality” (Žižek qtd. in Lesjak 251). That is, the surface turns into the de-commitment to what is. This distancing gesture that declares “it’s obvious what is going on” is, however, Lesjak points out, “the most ideological of positions in its refusal to distinguish between that which is constituted and that which is constitutive” (263). That is to say, the ways in which knowledge is acted upon, how knowing about sexism, racism, and so on may not have any effect, hidden in plain sight, to return to Sedgwick’s friend’s point, are constitutive of what is constituted even if they are not constituted “as such”. Lesjak’s is an argument for studying “the perversity of the nonidentical”, that is, in contrast with surface readers’ celebration of “knowing what we see” (as Lesjak summarizes the latter’s conceptual stakes), “seeing what we know” (252). For, as is Lesjak’s key point: “the problem isn’t a dearth of knowledge but the gap between knowing and realizing or acting” (253).
Paraphrasing Fisher and Lesjak who lean on Žižek, ideology’s bottleneck is less about not-knowing and more about “even if one knows, one does it anyways” (see Fisher 13; Lesjak 251).
Thus, Lesjak calls for more rather than less: “extreme reading” (241), depth and surface at once, in dialectical fashion.21 The call for rigor, for the commitment to what is,
without resorting to the convenience of either one option, registers my interest in developing concepts like the nonsequitur. This writing resists “common sense” as well as criticality that “reveals” what is deep down: ideologies/normativities are consequential in many freakish ways.22 The phrasal logic “even if (…) anyways” locates this freak. Cole’s point situates
21 If Sedgwick accuses Butler et al. for being “extreme” (because “paranoiacally” focused on the “veil”), then
Lesjak returns to the figure of the “extreme”, but only after having acknowledged and agreed with Sedgwick’s critique. However, even if Lesjak’s reading of Sedgwick is wholeheartedly sympathetic – and it is clear why – I note that Lesjak’s head-on refusal of “this pallid middle ground [that] tends to define reading these days” (240) is, at least in its use of the same vocabulary, at odds with Sedgwick’s celebration of “the middle ranges”. As she puts it in the introduction to Touching Feeling: “it is the middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change” (13). Yet, I also note that Lesjak’s extreme is not paranoia’s extreme (leading to anticipatory, mimetic and self-explanatory reading practices). Hence, Lesjak’s “pallid middle” does not equal Sedgwick’s “middle ranges”. Lesjak’s careful articulation of ideology, away from the metaphoric “veil” covering the “real”, is the crux of the matter here. Lesjak’s extreme is extreme for it refuses to settle on either depth or surface; Sedgwick’s for it only settles on the former (depth).
22 This project sees more in Lauren Berlant’s remarks: “For me criticality is more formal. The point is to move a
problem somewhere, to make the problem different. It involves fidelity to all of the converging knowledges, incommensurate as they are. The difficulty of a problem requires encountering and reformulating the wild
Marx in the vicinity of Hegel, spotlighting thought’s Bewegung rather than “proper” starting point. Given the density of layers of mediation, manipulation and unpredictability, this project’s phrase “It does not follow” grapples with the logic of thought including critique when saturation and capital merge. Or, I am concerned with naturalization, anticipation, cooptation, contradiction, impossibility, neither/nor, even-if-anyways, being-hidden-in-plain-sight, and more, to heed what Marx himself called capital’s “moving contradiction” (Marx [Grundrisse] qtd. in Clover 2012, 110).23 Capitalism’s undermining character is its rebooting
character too. Game over is reset. That is, the being under threat of capitalism’s follow-up is the systematic inevitability of its follow-up. If capital excels at what does not follow in the interest of “to follow”, the nonsequitur is attentive to the need for studying “to follow”. It thinks the making of critical form when the noncausal indexes capital’s monocausal logic in the social. If, as Evan Calder Williams details, “the history of sabotage is the history of capitalism unmaking itself” (np), the nonsequitur seeks out a similarly immanent logic, a committed competitor, a sabotaging of sabotage.
dynamic relation among its internal objects. It requires us to know more about the logic of that patterning, and to produce accounts or stagings that shift, sometimes radically, sometimes gesturally, a way of encountering that relation” (2012b, 1-2).
23 Endnotes collective outline Marx’s phrase as follows: “the conflictual and crisis-ridden reproduction of the
relation of exploitation between capital and proletariat” (np). Detailing the “incommensurability between value and price” (108), the key of Marx’s theory of value (i.e. “the transformation of living labor into capital
accumulation through commodities” [108]), Clover puts it this way: “[The] struggle of profit within exchange compels the cutting of production costs; the subsequent increases in productivity necessarily entail a relative decrease of living labor in the production process, expelling in the quest for profit its very source of value” (2012, 109-10).
Chapter 1
The Nonsequitur’s “Non”
Negativity, Futurity, Reproduction, Modulation
The chapter that follows turns to one of a series of columns by Paul B. Preciado for the French newspaper Libération. The column’s title “Fais tes cartons sans savoir où tu
déménages”24 is also one of its lines.25 Published online on the 23rd of December 2016, this is
Preciado’s last one for 2016. Preciado’s imperatives speak to what is soon to come: 2017. The imperative grammar of the title dominates throughout.26 The date of publication in
combination with the text’s imperative character point to a genre: new year’s resolutions. But if new year’s resolutions anticipate imaginaries that strive for the optimization of one’s most compelling and exhaustively personalized self, one’s best “you”, Preciado’s wishes wish away the assumptions of genre that pull things along into plot: his implied you is generic, could be any you; his various calls for optimization’s opposites argue against the production of the self, or, for that matter, the production of anything.27 “Fais tes cartons sans savoir où tu
déménages” redirects a genre otherwise known for the production of goodwill and belabored excellence. Or, Preciado’s new year’s resolutions do not anticipate imaginaries that seek to smoothen out what I previously called “the noncausal mood of the social”. Rather, they point to the irresolvable tensions the nonsequitur seeks to address: anticipation and naturalization, on the one hand; (non)reenactment and resignification, on the other. Preciado’s is a discursive
24 Prepare your boxes without knowing where you move to. (Translations are mine and, if not in the main text,
occur in footnotes.)
25 I first set up the theoretical framework in relation to the text as a whole. See note 27 below and further down
for quotations of lines. The column can be accessed online: https://www.liberation.fr/debats/2016/12/23/fais-tes-cartons-sans-savoir-ou-tu-demenages-par-paul-b-preciado_1537228.
26 All lines are imperatives, safe seven. The latter are Preciado’s French translations, at times slightly modified,
of the famous seven Commandments from George Orwell’s 1945 Animal Farm. I return to these lines and Orwell’s satirical novella below.
27 The column’s first line sets the tone: “Ne produis rien” (Do not produce anything). Later on: “Ne fais aucune
nouvelle oeuvre” (Do not make any new work), “Ne t’améliore pas” (Do not improve yourself), and, “N’investis pas” (Do not invest). Compact though these demands may be, they activate complex debates on (re)production, time, futurity, negation, and more, that haunt this chapter.
tactic that registers the social politics of causality where anticipation, naturalization, (non)reenactment and resignification frame the complex idioms of the nonsequitur.
Queer theory’s articulation of the rhetorical body (which I introduced earlier) draws together anticipation, naturalization, (non)reenactment and resignification by theorizing (1) naturalization qua stylized reiterative chains, (2) normativity’s reliance on abjection, and (3) the body’s susceptibility to both prior structuration and fragile re-enactment. I read
Preciado’s generic you as rhetorical body to argue that the you the imperatives imply does not compose or “cause” the social by means of enacting deliberately fashioned constructions in any direct way. This you is not the socio-cultural activator, arduously working upon “a nature, which is itself presupposed as a passive surface outside the social and yet its necessary counterpart” (4), as Butler writes in Bodies That Matter. Instead, Preciado’s you participates in the ongoing sedimentation and potential redirection of norms by which it is – simultaneously – enabled: “the materiality of the body will not be thinkable apart from the materialization of (…) norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all (…) within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (2). Thus, Butler moves away from reified interpretations of “construction” that maintain the dichotomy nature vs. culture. Instead, she argues for a “notion of matter, not as site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9).
Where Butler begins and ends thinking the social with the (sexed) body and more generally the constitution of subjectivity by articulating matter as process of materialization, “as power’s most productive effect” (2), I begin with Butler’s rhetorical body but end with considering the social beyond the body and the constitution of subjectivity. The nonsequitur’s attention to what follows, to chains of causation, wants to contribute to the momentousness of infrastructural thinking some of the most compelling recent critical work has provoked.28 If
infrastructures are “more-than-human forms that demand acknowledgement of
sociomateriality” (27, emphases added), as Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel in the introduction to the edited volume The Promise of Infrastructure underline, then an infrastructural analysis includes “the spatially and temporally extensive ways that practices are sedimented into and structure the world” (Murphy 3). Being concerned with more than the constitution of socio-political subjectivity, the nonsequitur attends to these spatially and temporally extensive ways by, post Butler, grappling with debates on time, futurity, and reproduction via queer and Marxist-feminist contributions. That is, this chapter tracks the nonsequitur across political economy to set up this infrastructural work after which the succeeding chapter explicitly engages the concept of infrastructure.
But, again, since Preciado’s demands imply a subject (and so do reproduction and futurity debates) I cannot refrain from giving an account of the constitution of Preciado’s you. Thus, I return to Butler’s Bodies That Matter to develop what I have been calling, via
28 Larkin (2013) provides an excellent overview of the concept across multiple disciplines. The Promise of
Nealon’s gloss of queer theory’s key contributions, the rhetorical body. I point out how the rhetorical body compels a structural analysis that takes heed of foreclosure. This is why I then position this project in historically situated analyses of (late) capitalism. From there I turn to what is often dubbed the queer futurity debate. Lee Edelman’s polemic against reproductive futurity, that is, queer theory’s anti-relational turn in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, and José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity which suggests quite the opposite, anti-anti-utopianism, organize this debate. James Bliss’s “Hope Against Hope: Queer Negativity, Black Feminist Theorizing, and Reproduction without Futurity” refutes both the former and the latter. Rather than having or not having hope for a future, Bliss argues for “the possibility of politics not simply as hope for a different or better world, but as the ardent refusal of this world” (93, Bliss’s emphasis) by closing “the gap between pessimism and possibility” (94). From Bliss’s “reproduction without futurity”, and with the help of Marxist-feminist social reproduction theory, I further unfold the nonsequitur from within the scenes of reproduction Preciado’s writing induces.
The rhetorical body is best understood through the oxymoron “enabling constraints”. I borrow this phrase from Donna Haraway’s acutely phrased insight: “[Butler] argued that agency is an instituted practice in a field of enabling constraints” (135). Saying that bodies are differentially produced in and by various sets of constraints does not do away with agency but seeks to unravel the conditions of any one’s body’s emergence (Butler, Bodies That Matter 7-8). That is to say: “To claim that discourse is formative is not to claim that it [i.e. discourse] originates, causes, or exhaustively composes that which it concedes; rather, it is to claim that there is no reference to a pure body which is not at the same time a further
formation of that body” (10, emphases added). Butler’s emphasis on the body’s social emergence as always in formation rebuts misconstrued versions of “construction” (Butler lists and renounces them one by one, see pp. 4-12). For Butler, construction is never “generative” or “deterministic” tout court (6). As I also underscored in the introduction, Butler precisely debunks the idea of the monocausal coming into being of gender, the subject, the social.
Construction has never meant a “unilateral process” (9), “a godlike agency which not only causes but composes everything which is its object” (6). Rather: “construction is neither a subject nor its act, but a process of reiteration by which both ‘subjects’ and ‘acts’ come to appear at all” (9). That which is cast as “outside” is never “an absolute outside’” but
constitutive of that which comes to appear in the first place, a “constitutive outside” (8). As I hinted at earlier, the claim that gender is constructed never meant that “a nature” – “a passive surface” – calmly awaits activation by “culture” (4). There is no agential counterpart
“culture” that acts upon, brings to life what is presupposed as the given.29 The acting body is
not a given but only comes to matter by being compelled by “a differential operation that
29 I follow Butler when she writes: “for the sake of the argument we will let “social” and “cultural” stand in an
produces the more and the less ‘human,’ the inhuman, the humanly unthinkable” (8). Indeed: “The paradox of subjectivation” is such that even the one who opposes the normative regime is itself enabled by this very same normative regime in the first place (15). The rhetorical body, in short, is a body that is “immanent to power” (15).
So, when Preciado writes “Change de sexe”30, or, “Deviens le maître de ton
professeur”31, or, “Exprime-toi exclusivement dans des langues que tu ne connais pas avec
des gens que tu ne connais pas”32, the you is impelled to use that which it is regulated and
constrained but also enabled by, to seek “the possibilities for rematerialization” (2). Yet the body’s immanence to power forecloses instantaneous ruptures of the reproduction of ongoing materialization, “never quite complete” (2). If sedimentation is the temporality Butler’s materialization of the social elicits, then Preciado’s “Change de sexe” is still regulated and constrained by the reiteration of the do-not-change-sex-norm. Through Butler, Preciado’s demands track the difference between causation and/or composition, on the one hand, and, emergence and/or formation, on the other (6-7). I dwell on this to avoid a possible
misreading: Preciado’s is not the heroic quality of being subversive, of acting now, or, for that matter, of production. Resistance is not a matter of being expressive. In another text published online, “The Courage of Being One’s Self”, Preciado critiques the courage the title speaks to. As opposed to courageously deviating from the norm, Preciado calls for a lack of courage: “I wish for you a lack of courage (…) I wish for you to no longer have the force to repeat the norm, to no longer have the energy to fabricate identity, to lose faith in what your papers say about you” (np).33 Preciado’s “lacking courage” debunks liberal gestures that
deem courageous those who do not inhabit the norm. These, in a Butlerian vein, only reiterate the constitutive outside the normative regime cannot do without.34 “Change de sexe” lacks
courage, calls for divestment, the opposite of inventiveness.
My point here is that the nonsequitur attends to constraint, to structural limits. If the norm needs the deviant, the nonsequitur knows that courageously expressed deviance is not deviance. The sheer act of noncompliance does not resist the reiteration of the norm (that is, the naturalized never-ending materialization of what follows) as such. Thus, the nonsequitur
30 Change sex.
31 Become your teacher’s master (next to “master” the French “maître” also covers the meaning of “school
teacher”).
32 Only express yourself in languages you do not know with people you do not know. 33 See: https://autonomies.org/2014/12/the-courage-of-being-ones-self-beatriz-preciado/
34 Puar’s concept of “homonationalism” (already mentioned in footnote 12 of the introduction) clarifies what I
here refer to as “liberal gestures”. Puar shows how the increasing purported endorsement of deviance by national states remains “contingent upon ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normativity, and bodily integrity” (xii). In other words, Puar draws out the historical moment with its politics of recognition of “deviance” that in its very gesture precisely reinstitutes its underlying normativity: “The contemporary emergence of homosexual, gay, and queer subjects—normativized through their deviance (as it becomes surveilled, managed, studied) rather than despite it—is integral to the interplay of perversion and normativity necessary to sustain in full gear the management of life” (xii). In a similar vein, lawyer and trans activist Dean Spade asks: “what’s wrong with trans rights?” (see “What’s Wrong with Rights” in Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law reads).
is not productive, instantaneous, or problem-solving. Instead, it tracks a logic that follows queer theory’s rhetorical body that locates Preciado’s imperatives in the extended temporality of sedimentation where noncomforming acts are not bringing into being what they name but are immanent to power. The nonsequitur is not a power that acts but is “only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability” (Butler, Bodies That Matter 9). Power in its persistence and instability not only points back to Haraway’s “enabling constraints” but also the conceptual spectrum I laid out at the start of this chapter: naturalization and
anticipation (power’s persistence) and (non)reenactment and resignification (power’s instability).
The nonsequitur seeks noncompliance that itself acknowledges the overt expression of noncompliance as something else than noncompliance. Or, I theoretically invest in noncompliance that does not mean, read or look like noncompliance. What form does noncompliance take when it presumes the structural foreclosure of noncompliance? What I mean to suggest, following up on my writing in the introduction, is that the nonsequitur is immersed in and therefore grapples with today’s capitalism as structuring force. Luc
Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism, for instance, demonstrate how capitalism transforms itself by incorporating its own critique. Endnotes collective point to capital’s “Sisyphean vocation”: “capital’s constant return to itself as true infinity, and its incessant driving beyond itself as false or spurious infinity” (np). They conclude:
“Paradoxically, the accumulation of capital is thus a teleology without end” (np). This is Endnotes’ emphasis but I too would have italicized without end. “Without end” requires elaboration, becomes the placeholder for tracking the complexity of contemporary capitalism inaugurated in the 1970s to rapidly gain traction from the 1980s onward as Mark Fisher illuminates in Capitalist Realism. If Fredric Jameson already characterized late capitalist logic as the ever-advancing “relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism” (Fisher 7), then Fisher suggests that the processes that structure Jameson’s paradigm “have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind” (7).
Contouring the conceptual threshold “end/without end” Endnotes evoke, I pause over Fisher substantiating his claim to begin to sketch out a temporality that is also a logic that underwrites my later discussion of reproduction without futurity. Fisher recalls: if the lived reality of communism enabled if nothing else a political imaginary that was also an imagined end to the unrelenting wants of capitalist hegemony, the coming down of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed smashed this imaginary, that is, the global implementation of an alternative system (7-8).35 Secondly, where Jameson’s
postmodern paradigm staged a relation to modernism by highlighting the incorporation of previously aesthetically autonomous modernist techniques into popular culture, Fisher’s 21st
century model (the book was published in 2009) “takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted” (8). Whether or not aesthetic innovations evoke temporary “ends” is now a nonquestion. Lastly, capitalism’s 20th century problem of incorporation, of “absorb[ing]
energies from outside”, has been overcome. Indeed, the reverse is now the problem: “how can it [capitalism] function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate” (8)?36 This is
where Fisher grasps the full meaning of Endnotes’ “without end”: the successful completion of goals never marks an end.
On what this means to the cultural-aesthetic domain, to makers of critical social form, Fisher writes:
What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture. (9)
If incorporation, making the external internal, has long been capital’s telos, Fisher highlights capitalism’s disobedience in view of telos qua closure: its teleology does not mark a
temporality of closure but one of update. That is, if the Situationists developed the practice of détournement, where, as Sadie Plant notes “the emphasis was always on the use of existing material to ends other than those for which it had been intended” (5), to counter recuperation, Fisher’s pre-emptive temporality suggests that such causal thinking (whether from the
perspective of the capitalist or the Situationist) fails to capture capital’s overwhelmingly triumphant integration-drive. Fisher’s update from in- to pre- is the difference between the future tense and a tense that is both the future perfect and the present perfect at once. The simultaneity of “It will have been” and “It has already been” replaces the idioms of becoming. This shift in temporal thinking underpins the nonsequitur’s rebuttal of the expressive qualities that signal noncompliance. These expressions remain tied to a causal logic Fisher’s preemptively formatted “anti” of form abandons. The idioms of becoming resistant, different or deviant must be updated. The question of social form and its resistance demand tracking what will have been already rather than what will follow.
What follows returns to Preciado to give further insight into thinking from within the contradiction of structural limitation whose temporal quality I have just described. I turn to the queer futurity debate and Marxist feminist analyses to draw together negativity, futurity and reproduction, thus feeling out the nonsequitur’s sense for the future. Preciado: “Si tu ne l’as pas déjà fait, ne te reproduis pas”.37 Also: “Abandonne tes enfants”.38 Does Preciado
here voice Edelman’s argument against “reproductive futurism” (2)? For Edelman,
reproductive futurism names the “political field” (2) compelled by the figure of the Child –
36 The increasing emergence of surplus populations is its symptom. See, for instance, Mbembe (2013) for an
argument that considers this to be crucial to understanding the historical present.
37 If you haven’t already done so, do not reproduce yourself. 38 Abandon your children.
“the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention” (3), “whose innocence solicits our defense” and hence “impose[s] an ideological limit on political discourse as such” (2). Yet, even if Preciado’s embrace of the negative of reproduction, of Edelman’s Kid, is undeniable, other lines complicate Edelman’s critique-inspiring intervention.39 “Pleure et
rie”40, “Tresse”41, “Tisse”42 but also, “Abandonne ton mari pour une femme de dix ans de
moins que toi”43 veer away from Edelman’s rigid claim that “the queer comes to figure the
bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form” (4, emphases added).
In other words, even if Preciado embraces rather than opposes negativity, he does not consistently treat negativity as all-resistant Omega. Edelman’s received critique for precisely that reason. As Bliss paraphrasing Jack Halberstam and Muñoz puts it: “Edelman’s stubborn refusal of futurity is structured by the privilege of having a guaranteed future”, by the
“avoidance of race”, by whiteness (85). Or, as Bliss writes further down the same article: “Edelman does not account for those modes of reproduction that are not future-oriented” (86). In Muñoz’s words: “antirelational approaches to queer theory are romances of the negative” (11). For Muñoz, “the eventual disappointment of hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical thought process” (10). Muñoz’s contention is that queer is a “doing”, and as such the “not-yet” of hope, “a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy” (3, emphasis added). According to Muñoz, the affective structure of hope calls forth a temporality of anticipation: “Hope along with its other, fear, are affective structures that can be described as anticipatory” (3).
Whereas the already invoked critical responses to Edelman’s renunciation of hope and anticipation embodied by the Child structuring for Edelman who is a Lacanian the
“underlying structure of the political (…) that is, the governing fantasy of achieving Symbolic closure through the marriage of identity to futurity in order to realize the social subject” (13-14), all of which queerness ought to radically oppose, are clear, I also want to complicate Muñoz’s advocacy of the anticipatory, indeterminate quality of hope (see especially Muñoz’s words in the last line of the previous paragraph). Here, I draw on Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural circulation of emotions, fear in particular. She writes in “Affective Economies”: “Fear is intensified by the impossibility of containment” (124). Ahmed, that is, shows that fear cannot be contained by any one object. In the social, fear circulates between objects. In so doing, it induces faulty substitutions, that is, “the work of metonymy [that] works to generate or make likeness” (136), eliciting racism, and “policies of continual surveillance of emergent forms” (135).
39 Especially from queer-of-color writing, such as Muñoz’s or Bliss’s, whose work I get to below. 40 Cry and laugh.
41 Braid. 42 Weave.
43 Abandon your husband for a woman (the French “femme” means both “woman” and “wife”) ten years
The point is that if it is hope qua affective anticipatory structure that structures Muñoz’s argument for the utopian potential of queer “indeterminacy”, Ahmed’s work complicates such argument for indeterminacy also structures her articulation of fear as circulatory emotion that cannot be contained in any one object. This moving freely between objects makes for the accumulation of racialized fantasies that materialize in the social. The theoretical capaciousness of indeterminacy, compelled by the affective structure of
anticipation, thus supports my argument for the need to think the tensions of the social in terms of “to follow”. Muñoz stresses the concrete utopian possibility of the “there” and “then” in “the anticipatory illumination of art”, specifically queer art from “that Stonewall period” (3). According to Muñoz this anticipatory capacity of art materializes, indeed, “is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling” (3). Ahmed, however, spotlights the impossibility of containment as problematic insofar as it proliferates racism including the proliferation of techniques for surveillance. Ahmed shows where and how the impossibility of containment of what follows produces the violently racialized logic of the social.44
Reading Muñoz and Ahmed together, I aim to complicate the presupposed fruitfulness of indeterminate affective structures. Ahmed’s analysis demonstrates that fear’s indeterminacy is dented by preemptively formatted racialized surveillance measurements. The need for taking heed of what follows goes without saying.
My want, in other words, is to get away from both Edelman’s negativity that is tacitly white, based on the presumption that reproductive futurity is available to all, and Muñoz’s opposing stance that articulates the queer as the not-yet doing of hope precisely because “racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity” (Muñoz qtd. in Bliss 85). Here Bliss’s article is an incisive interlocutor, since its aim is to articulate “an altogether different terrain” of queer negativity that does not rely on the arguments made by either one of these camps in the “debate on hope and hopelessness” (83). Bliss’s conceptual attention to the distinction between “position” and “politics” helps me think my effort to pay attention to the contradictory structural logic of capitalism while tracking the critical uncertainty of the non-follow-up. Bliss demonstrates this distinction in his reading of Edelman’s project: while Edelman’s queer “experience”, “archive” and “politics” are white (for which he is
appropriately critiqued), “the position of Edelman’s queer is Black” (86). For, as Bliss puts it: “‘Antiblackness’ names the energy, or the activity, of Humanity as a social structure. It does not simply name various forms of violence experienced by Blacks, but the violence that positions sentient beings outside the realm of the Human” (89).45 But, according to Bliss, this
“dissonance” in Edelman’s thesis is not its flaw (like the utopians [e.g. Muñoz] think), but “its enabling condition” (86). Bliss’s argument for constraint qua enabling condition echoes
44 Ahmed illustrates this most forcefully by quoting a passage from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (126). 45 Bliss’s definition of antiblackness as energy or activity inducing positionality returns to this project’s interest
in infrastructural analyses. Clearly, Bliss’s analytical perspective recalls Murphy’s already quoted “spatially and temporally extensive ways that practices are sedimented into and structure the world”.
my previous discussion of the rhetorical body in terms of “enabling constraints”. Writes Bliss:
Disentangling optimism from futurity is essential here. There are many ways of accessing and inhabiting the future, and the problem is not that young Black queers have no access to the future [again, this is crucial to Muñoz’s argument] but that the future is, itself, structured by an antiblackness that shapes access to future(s) for all subjects. (95)
That is, if Edelman’s political radicality of full-on negativity for some equals the structural positionality of others, then a politics of negativity is always already structured by a position of negativity. That is, if the nonsequitur looks at refusal and negation as sites of possible rematerialization, possible futures, then it never does so with critical confidence. Instead, it highlights anticipated and/or naturalized structural limits that deny negation its resignifying potential. This thesis is not only interested in the structural limits of possibility, of thinking the future, but is also oriented by them, as my analysis of Fisher’s precorporation started to indicate. With Bliss, I advocate “pessimism as a mode of political [and cultural] theorizing” (92). Preciado’s orientation meets mine when he writes:
Sors et ne reviens pas.46
Cherche à être invisible.47
Essaye de ne pas être représenté.48
The lines above press on structural limits. They index “a politics of position” that Bliss calls “reproduction without futurity” (86) and, drawing on Black feminist theory, goes on to describe as “the queer capacity of Blackness to reproduce without being productive and to orient lives extimate – simultaneously internal and external – to sociality as Edelman might understand it” (86). They do not invent the new but start from what is to ardently refuse this world, to return to Bliss’s formulation I borrowed earlier. And what is is preformatted form. Hence, this is about form that negates already formed form (Bliss’s “altogether different terrain”) and not about form that is newly invented. If nurses anticipate caretaking: “Prends soin de ton infirmière”.49 If resource extraction preempts the beating heart of human life:
“Laisse Gaïa te pénétrer”.50 If anticipation is today’s precorporated temporality: “Ne prévois
pas le future”.51 If bartenders are preformatted cocktail makers: “Prépare un cocktail pour le
barman”.52 This is about not re-telling the stories of the intelligibility of the reproduction of
46 Leave and do not return. 47 Try to be invisible. 48 Try to not be represented. 49 Take care of your nurse. 50 Have Gaia penetrate you. 51 Do not predict the future.
