From Child to Adult, and Back Again

One of the arguments that Judith Halberstam makes in The Queer Art of Failure is that "low theory" can provide new alternatives to the present, by rethinking what is currently considered as being normative and natural, such as the moral weight given to reproduction (15-18). "Low theory" in this case meaning accessible theories taken from more widespread and unconventional sources, such as animation movies and popular columns (19-21). Instead, "low theory" provides us with a childlike look on the world, where revolt is given the foreground and not conformity to the system currently in place (27-28). This subversiveness dismantles how we consider success in life, which is usually measured by how well someone fits in the system, and "failure," or how one fails at fitting in. "Low theory" can provide new ways to appreciate failure, and it can also be used to subvert the current system. This can, again, can be seen in some animated films, which Halberstam dubs as being part of the genre of "Pixarvolt" (Pixar + revolt).
I agree with Halberstam that the "Pixarvolt" genre can form new alternatives to our current reality. However, I still have difficulty considering how childhood movies can work on in our adult lives. In other words, how can "low theory" spur the viewer to internalize the revolt? Or, in other words, how can one take these movies form their childhood and incorporate them into their adult lives? Considering, I also believe that it is entirely dependent on the viewer what one can take away from watching a movie. Take, for example, adult humour in family animation movies, something which some animation movies contain plenty of. It can sometimes even feel as if one is watching a different film than the one they have watched in their childhood (of course, other factors should also be taken into account, such as nostalgia). Shrek is an excellent example of this, since the movie contains a lot of crude humour, which children that are watching the movie will usually not get; such as the statement of Shrek when seeing Lord Farquad's castle that "he's compensating for something." This phrase is, of course, commonly used to refer to a probable inadequacy of one's phallus. It would be interesting to investigate if the use of adult humor undermines some of the subversive elements of animation movies.
Nonetheless, I also do not want to downplay Halberstam's observations of the effect that animation movies could have had on the viewer. For example, the generations that grew up with a lot of the "Pixarvolt" movies Halberstam talks about are ascribed of having a new way of coming to age, which can be called "kidulting." "Kidulting" can be defined as the prolonged in-between area, compared to previous generations, between childhood and adulthood, and the incorporation of childlike-elements in adult life. "Kidulting" can, for example, be seen in the vast popularity of Pokémon in many adults that grew up with this beloved animation series, and the way they still are invested in the series. This new phase can lead to change in the long run, since failure in not yet attaining adulthood is embraced as something good and creative, at least by members of their own generation. It might be that "pixarvolt" movies, or series as diverse as Spongebob Squarepants, have played a defining role in this new phenomena.
These are some of my thoughts when I read The Queer Art of Failure.

individual vs. collective, the automatic failure

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? 

Wondering about queer failure now

Pixar movies as discussed by Halberstam may help to wonder about the measures taken by many governments and about the modes of meaning-making due to Corona. Following Halberstam with regard to her ‘silly archive’ of animated feature films, survival in this (penguin) world has little to do with fitness and everything to do with collective will (p. 41). Similarly, the most valuable lesson that Nemo learns is not to “be himself” or “follow his dreams”, but to be more like Ginger in Chicken Run, he learns to think with others and to work for a more collective futurity. Halberstam argues that animated worlds have their own internal logics with growing and living matter (p. 177). They are disruptions to the habitual methods of thought, imaginative alternatives to the real. I am wondering if we may imagine alternatives to the real and a collective futurity now.

Halberstam criticizes the contemporary idea of the human as a desire for uniqueness, or an unalienated relation to work and others, or as a fantasy of liberty (p.46) and the banality of straight culture and the repetitiveness and unimaginativeness of heteronormativity (p. 117). He suggests a style of failure quite possibly a lesbian style and queerness as a mode of critique. Because to live is to fail, to struggle, to disappoint and to die (p. 187). Luckily, stupidity and forgetfulness work hand in hand to open up new and different ways of being in relation to time, truth, being, living and dying (p. 54). Therefore, anti-disciplinary forms of knowing tied to queerness: stupidity, failure and forgetfulness need to be preferred over knowing, mastering and remembering (p. 148). I wonder how we may relate failure and anti-disciplinary forms of knowing to governmental measures informed by data-driven science.

Interestingly, following Halberstam, the child is always queer and a queer form of anti-development requires a healthy doses of forgetting and disavowal and proceeds by way of series of substitutions [...] Queer culture enacts rupture as substitution as the queer child steps out of the assembly line of heterosexual production and turns toward a new project (p. 73). Halberstam finds in Dory a new version of selfhood, a queer version that depends upon the disconnection from family and contingent relations to friends and improvised relations to community. [...] Dory forgets family and tradition and lineage and biological relation and lives to create relationality anew in each moment and for each context and without a teleology and on behalf of the chaotic potentiality of the random action (p. 80). I wonder if and how our selfhood, the connection to family and the relations to friends and the community may be transformed.

To conclude, Halberstam quotes Kincaid: “I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but it’s opposite” (p. 132). Instead, Halberstam proposes that the commitment to fail and to fail better gives way to a desire of oddly normative markers of accomplishment and satisfaction (p. 187). I wonder if optimisms in relation to Corona may be cruel or if the commitment to failure may be an alternative.

Thoughts on Sang Culture and COVID-19 in China

1 Sang Culture (it is not directly related to the current quarantine period, but I find it quite interesting and perhaps relevant to the book)

The main context Halberstam situates her 'failure' in is the neoliberalism positivity in the Euro-American society. Based on my own living experience in China, I found the recent popularity of Sang (sub)culture in East Asia, especially Japan and China, can perhaps provide an alternative lens for Halberstam's sense of failure.

The original meaning of Sang 丧 includes funeral, misfortune, and loss. In Chinese youth culture, it has become a popular collective identification of a dispirited and despair attitude defeatism in daily life. One of the crucial social contexts is the intensive 9-9-6 office culture, which refers to working from 9am to 9pm, for six days a week. The co-existence of the profound sense of competition, as well as the dimming career future of youth people, has a direct impact on their work ethics and the affective atmosphere circulating in society.

The disruptive narrative of Sang appears in multiple self-loathing cultural practices, such as memes, animation, and music. For instance, (also one of my favorite) the popular Rainbow Chamber Singers' piece has humorously exemplified the 'sang' in the daily office life, including the abusive boss, overtime workload and increasing mental stress.  So far, the sofa is so far (With English subtitles)

The playful, unregulated and self-deprecating practice of Sang in Chinese cyberspace in a way resonates with Halberstam's idea of failure as a form of resistance. Confronted with the insurmountable hegemony and relentless push of conventional success, passivity/sang becomes a dynamic way as the micro-level of self-defense, preservation, and also protest.

2 Forget and Memory: the narratives of Li Wenliang's death 

In Chapter 2, Halberstam talks about the absence of memory becomes an alternative mode of knowing. It immediately reminds me of the death of the whistleblower Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan, who has warned about the outbreak of the epidemic on December 30th, 2019 but has been told to shut his mouth by the authorities.

The timeline of Li Wenliang's death in media is ironically full of mysteries. At that time, the angry and emotional Chinese netizens showed the commitment of never-forget, “We will not forget the doctor who spoke up about an illness that was called rumor,” one commenter posted in reply to the hospital’s announcement. “What else can we do? The only thing is not to forget.”

On April 4th, the Ching Ming Festival (or the tomb-sweeping festival), "Never Forget" and mourning for the loss becomes a top-down, nationalistic command where the deeds and death of Li become invisible. Halberstam also mentions it as the "moral imperative" that "tends to obliterate the complex web of relations between memory and forgetting that actually function in Holocaust memoirs"(84). What has been instead selectively memorized? What has been forced to forget? Who can decide what and whom should Chinese people commemorate in the coronavirus experience?

Moreover, on April 6th, the timeline posted by the state media manages to construct a dominant memory project, where Li Wenliang becomes an ordinary medic, leaving out his unjustified treatment and the mystery of his death untold. At the same time, the central government and Health Commission become prominent actors during the prediction, control, and regulation of the disease with all-encompassing 'powerful and effective' measures and 'the strong leadership' of the CPC.

Such memory construction implies a eulogy of achievement, even optimistic plot of progress and continuity, which violently ignores the never-resolved loss and unspoken sorrow of real people.

"Forgetting is also what allows for a new way of remembering" (92). Inspired by the analysis of Halberstam, perhaps a simple gesture of refusal towards such enforced "memory project" and the reproduction of a given timeline open up spaces for fragmented, bottom-up narratives coming from individual sufferers. Though such stories might be irrational, blurred, stupid, full of flaws, it does forcefully undermine the cruelness of hegemonic historizing.

3 The extreme vulnerability of female medics 

More than 70% of the medics in China in the frontline of coronavirus period are female, whose superiors in the hospital and government are mostly men.

Chinese state media has propagandized the female medical workers who (have been forced to) shave their heads as “the most beautiful warriors” fighting the outbreak. On the one hand, the medic becomes a gender-neutral identity. Apparently, accompanied by intensive labor, there is no room for the individual, 'unwelcome' voices such as uncertainty, pessimism, rejection, and fear in the patriotic warrior narrative. Yet, on the other hand,  the specific need for female are largely excluded and forgotten in the male-centered perspective.
Shaved Heads, Adult Diapers: Life as a Nurse in the Coronavirus Outbreak

The patriarchal violence and governance are flagrantly explicit during the time of coronavirus in China. As a Chinese woman myself, I feel extremely sorrowful and desperate myself sometimes when reading the above news and outcry of women. What I constantly ask myself recently is: what could be the weapon of the Chinese women in the increasingly-rigid hegemonic system?

Halberstam's insight on the failure as a way of life has in a way justified the queering instabilities and impossibilities in the neo-liberalism society. Personally, I strongly agree with her strategy of "working with the failure" when it comes to the Chinese feminist context, where the terrain of fear, miserable and failed is crucial for resisting the optimistic and patriarchal media discourse, especially in the coronavirus time.

Genre / Personae

'Genre' seems to be a key term for Berlant. She speaks of 'genres' as particular modes of emplotment that imply different narrative arcs, outcomes, etc to which we grow attached.

Halberstam shares this interest, but seems to have a preference for conceptual personae, figures that she uses to understand the implication of certain positions.

Like Benjamin's personae (the dandy, the collector, the flaneur) or those of Deleuze and Guattari, Halberstam's personae derive from fiction, and often from popular culture.

Two key figures interest me: the figure of 'the child' (which also played a role in Berlant's reading of the films of the brothers Dardenne), and the figure of the 'queer punk.'

(Harlberstam's figure of the child stands, I think, in opposition to Lee Edelman's notion of the Child, as he develops it in his book No Future.)

The child and the punk are both figures of the non-serious, of infantility, negativity, adolescence, refusal, etc.

Collectivity in Quarantine

Offering a healthy critique of static models of success and failure, in The Queer Art of Failure Halberstam argues for “alternative ways of knowing and being that are not unduly optimistic, but nor are they mired in nihilistic critical dead ends” (24). Engaging with low theory and popular knowledge, Halberstam explores alternatives and looks for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations (2). These alternatives dwell in the murky waters, in the often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal. Interrupting the narrative of “success” through discussing animated films (and other forms of art), Halberstam’s text rests on a single premise: “under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2). The driving force behind the text, as such, is a desire to live life otherwise and to put such a vision into practice. Queering and playing with the concept of failure, Halberstam takes us on a journey to discover the notion of failure as a tool for undoing narratives of banal, unimaginative heteronormativity. Using Pixarvolt films - films that forward themes of rebellion and revolution against established ways of being and knowing -, Halberstam argues for alternative visions to heteronormative narratives of gender, sexuality, and being.

What struck me most in the text was Halberstam’s engagement with notions of individuality and collectivity. As articulated by Halberstam, the characters in Over the Hedge (Tim Johnson 2006) rely on collective action to protect the animal habitats from consumerist humans. I find the act of protecting animal habitats from modern consumer society telling, especially now in times of the corona crisis which is, as argued by many zoologists, due to the destruction of natural habitats coupled with fast-moving people in a globalizing world. In Over the Hedge, collective action proves to be more effective than individual genius. In pixarvolt films, individualism is not connected to a neoliberal “be yourself” mentality but to selfishness and untrammeled consumption (47). I wonder, how can we engage in forms of collectivity (e.g. collective care) in quarantine times? How can we practice collectivity in times of social distancing? And who is ‘worthy’ of care in this neoliberal society? What can we learn about the notions of care, community, and collectivity from pixarvolt films? Isn't this the 'right' time to create an otherwise, to undo, to umbecome, as Halberstam proposes? If so, how do we create such an otherwise?  

The Disciplinary

Central to the first chapter is a polemics against discipline, the disciplinary and the disciplined. The embrace of 'failure,' then is also a defence of the  'undisciplined.'

Halberstam describes (on p.9) how the university's standard disciplinary way of knowing resembles the mode in which (according to James Scott's Seeing like a State (1999) the State attempts to make its citizens (or groups of citizens) legible through 'the imposition of methods of standardization and uniformity."

Scott's work, Halberstam holds, implicitly offers an argument for antidisciplinarity, "knowledge practices that refuse both the form and the content of traditional canons.... [and that] ... may lead to unbounded forms of speculation, modes of thinking that ally not with rigor and order but with inspiration and unpredictability." (10)

A few lines later: "Disciplines qualify and disqualify, legitimate and delegitimate, reward and punish; most important, they statically reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent." (10, emphasis mine)

Instead she finds inspirations in the various forms of oppositional pedagogies as described by Sedgwick, Ranciere - or before them, Paolo Freire. Pedagogies in which children are not 'disciplined' or trained to be rigorous, but which aim to liberate the creative potentialities of those it teaches.

Models for those modes of thinking are found in the fringes of culture, in the domain of the non-serious, the infantile, the childish, the stupid.

Or, as Halberstam puts it, we have to mine the Silly Archives.