Judith/Jack Halberstam purposefully takes Low Theory and Low Culture/Entertainment as her starting points in The Queer Art of Failure. He opens Chapter Six with Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher that has often used Popular Culture to illustrate his Marxist and Lacanian Theories. I think it is Halberstam's greatest asset in this book that he opposes that strategy. Žižek's purpose is to either illustrate a theory or to demonstrate a certain symbolic, progandist layer (hegemony) in it. Halberstam, on the other hand, refuses to merely analyze the cultural object in a symbolic way, but to rethink a hegemonic practice grounded within masculinity, ambition.
Halberstam doesn't necessarily (as I expected before I started reading the book) advocate the losers to be re-evaluated as being the winners, but rather finds resignation, solace in not striving towards the highest ambition. S/he also states how the winners rely upon the losers to lose, just to "prove" the cultural "natural order" of things. In times of growing populist support, this proving of hegemonic assumptions seems to be such an easy way to prove one's right, which has immense political consequence. In Dutch contemporary politics, Populist politicians depend upon the criminality numbers of minorities to be able to denounce their place in our society, and so on. Using examples from SpongeBob SquarePants, Pixar and, my favorite in this book: Wallace and Gromit/Chicken Run, Halberstam indicates how, going against Žižek's strategy, these animations are not merely about political topics (whether or not obvious or symbolic), but in what way their stories are told and what it implies for the hegemony (184). It seems to find strength in José Esteban Muñoz' desidentification, actively choosing to not actively choose. At the same time, he finds strength in the actual diegeses of the films, not themes of i.e. bravery and the individual suffering under Tiranny (the allegory), but characters moving as a crowd in A Bug's Life.
This might be the result of adults watching "children's cartoons": we tend to analyze it in deeper layers and forgetting about what it actually displays: for instance pedagogical standpoints for moral education or values for society. By focussing on the context rather than on the content, people tend to miss the way in which the characters provoke the system by either opposing it or by finding value in failing the expectations.
Recently, the recent Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk noted that when borders close for COVID-19, a new xenofobic chauvinism reawoke in Poland (and the rest of the world). Populism felt it had proven that the outside world had meant a threat to the public health of one's own country. This is a wonderful example of the natural working (and conservation) of hegemonic thought. Ones that fail, here i.e. people who have recently travelled, will be cast out as the queer other, suspected of being a carrier or even a cause of the spreading of the disease. By focussing on the broader context of the existing ideals, populism will gain, whilst by analyzing how this form of xenofobia and new nationalism came to prominence, one could see the actual working of the hegemonic system, but only through analyzing the cast outs.
Modern politics prosper on the idea of a Truth. This would mean to follow a hegemonic ideal and to further cast out Failure. Whereas Halberstam has attention for the individual within the collective, one could ask if the collective would not automatically mean to be in union and therefore still be averse to Failure. I think that modern Populism follows Žižek in analyzing allegory over content questions (even though Žižek himself is rather left wing). What are the implications for Halberstam's theory if the individual and the failure is still cast out? Is personal resignation enough to attend for the overall hegemonic conservation?
Thanks, Laurens!
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