Collectivity and COVID-19

Albeit less well defined, it seems to me that Halberstam is searching for a radical form of collectivity which transgresses human and non-human, lives and lifeless things through children animation films. This is also why he argues that animation might have the potential to display radical collectivity as evidenced in animation films such as Finding Nemo (beyond oneself but the whole ocean ecology, p. 184) or Monsters Inc.(between monster and child, a queer kinship, pp. 44-45). Such a potential could be easily lost in the heroic, successful narrative of general films which assume a normalized adulthood. In this sense Halberstam interprets children animation as potentially queer world which allows failure and alternative to exist.

Virus seems to provide multiple grounds for practicing “low theory” which “locate all the in-between spaces” (Halberstam, p.2). I was caught up by Yasco’s remark that the standard of social distancing lessens among families which can be problematic for those non-family members who live under the same roof. Kinship, a critical notion in queer studies, begs to be re-examined. With the spread of the virus across borders, it is also a time to rethink what a home or nation means.

I also see the notion of collectivity vital in the time of COVID-19. Although some people see the global epidemics as commonly shared experiences, there are intersecting differences among how people experience the plague. While some of us can live and work safely at home and some citizenship gets extended, others such as homeless and unattended refugees are in precarious states. A radical form of collectivity needs to be imagined beyond the national, cultural, biological, environmental borders.

In the meantime, I am not fully content with the term collectivity which implies a certain shared experience or cultural bonding. Could people with different class, gender, racial, national, sexual, ability, religious backgrounds empathize with each other in spite of various differences? At this moment I might prefer ‘solidarity’ because it assumes different individuals or groups of people supporting each other despite their difference. To me, overcoming differences among groups or even species has a special place in Halberstam’s nuanced analysis of animation.

The Quarantine Files: Thinkers in Self-Isolation

I thought I would share this interesting file I stumbled upon today with you in which critical thinkers share their thoughts, reflections, and concerns on the current times through writing, including Halberstam, Berlant and many more (queer) thinkers! Short, 'easily' readable pieces on solidarity, survival, fear, death, neoliberalism... and more...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/quarantine-files-thinkers-self-isolation/?fbclid=IwAR0MrpV_RJvmm4D03XhNYsAErzJU-Ulg9cStYfhGwoTrfdX-_HFObFI5ujE#_ftn25

Lockdown (2)

Halberstam opens the second paragraph of the first chapter, entitled 'undisciplined' with an epitaph taken from James Scott's Seeing Like a State:

"Illegibility, then, has been a reliable source for political autonomy."

On page 9, Halberstam summaries Scott's book in the following terms: "Seeing Like a State (2008) began as a study of "why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of 'people who move around,'" but quickly became a study of the demand by the state for legibility through the imposition of methods of standardisation and uniformity."

The ultra-surveillance situation of the current Lockdown has made it all clear to us that moving around is, indeed, something that is taken as a hostile gesture. And now we're awaiting the arrival of new surveillance apps it has become unclear whether we can still opt for illegibility.

Indeed, in his 2017 book, Against the Grain, A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott seems to suggest (in a chapter on zoonoses) that the state apparatus itself was the product of attempts to contain the spread of infectious diseases. (This is, in a sense, a point that was already made by Foucault, who suggested at several points that the whole biopolitical apparatus emerged out of attempts to control the spread of viruses and bacteria.)

Anyway, if we believe that the spread of the virus is necessary - what space is their left for a politics of illegibility?

Social Distancing

Great discussion yesterday. Thanks for your contributions.

One of the things that we probed (and which was raised by Dagmar) was that the lockdown does not so much force us to live in solitude, but it forces us to retreat into into nuclear families.

The 'lockdown' is - of course - a lockdown of the public sphere. But, perhaps more troubling, the Dutch government announced, time and again, that the only form of intimacy that the state allows for (and that break the 1,5 m rule) is the onebetween members of a household.  Only members of a household (gezin) can be together in public, can share cars, hold hands, etc. .)

The funny thing, of course, is that 'household' is, on the one hand, a purely secular, economical term. People who live together in one oikos are a household. One can be a 'household' for tax purposes.

But on the other hand, the exemplary case of a 'household' - een gezin-  is still the nuclear family.

This led to a few moments of comedy. In Spain, for example young couples who do not live together have to smuggle into each others houses to remain unnoticed by the police. In the Netherlands (I think it was in Groningen) a group of students who share a flat ran into trouble with the police because they claimed that they were, indeed, forming a household.

----

So if The Queer Art of Failure invites us to think about the question how to think 'community' and 'kinship' in terms other than that of the family, or think of intimacy in other terms than those of romance, the Lockdown turns this question into an urgent one. 

This question is, perhaps, particularly urgent for students. Being a student means (in the Netherlands at least) being between families. 'Op kamers gaan' involves leaving your family and inserting yourself into all sorts of intimate  kinship structures based on friendships: from fraternities, student houses to networks of friends, activists, etc. 

The old structuralist (Levi-Straussian / Lacanian) picture of kinship was one of families, in which you were first born into a family. And then, through marriage, you became part of a different family. 

The current situation, however (at least for Dutch students) is that there is a period between different forms of family lives. This is the period in which different 'zones' or 'networks' of intimacy are created. 

 I hope that the Lockdown will not put this period in suspense. 

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.