Reading Notes: Colebrook, "How Queer Can You Go?"

[rax]

Opens with a citation from Deleuze --- YES I GET IT ALREADY I SHOULD READ DELEUZE

"model of theoria as a distanced look or regard taken upon an object is intrsinically normalizing," as opposed to queer --- lines up with Kristeva talking about eruption between subject and object, Colebrook cites Irigaray who I think of as doing similar work, and Heidegger, who I know ~nothing about. Attempts to place something fundamentally disordered under a system of order? Also on a less oh my god my brain hurts level, seems to call for more theory that isn't distanced, that is, more first-person, lived-experience, disruptive? I think.

"reversed or radical Platonism... a new and positive notion of queerness: not as destabilization or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that are no longer generated in either the subject or generating life." Looking at events that transcend bodies. "Ask not what it means but how it works" say Deleuze and Guattari. Be interested in potentiality rather than relation to system. So is Colebrook suggesting that we look at things outside of context? That to me would clash with my understanding of the first paragraph, the suggestion not to take a distanced look. 

Colebrook talks a lot about how "subjective" things are "implicated in a highly normalizing ethos" and I don't think she's using "subjective" the way I would normally read it. Or maybe in a sense she is --- defined by the subject, that is, experienced from within a conscious mind that parses itself as having gender? I think there's more to the subject/object dichotomy a lot of these theorists throw around than just "self/other" in the Lacanian sense that I sort of understand it. Is Colebrook saying that a theory is insufficiently queer, or that a way of thinking is insufficiently queer, if it recognizes the boundary between self and other and treats that as axiomatic in its analysis? Actually that might be what she's getting at.

Oh look: "...not simply to challenge the norms that dominate a theory --- for example interrogating psychoanalysis from within by isolating its unquestioned assumption of male-female relations --- but would contest just what it means to theorize. Only then would our theory be queer." Also: "A radical metaphysic of transcendental empiricism would free sexuality from organized bodies." Have to stop and think here for a minute. This is related to Deleuze's whole "body without organs" thing which of course I haven't read and is in the reading for week 4. (Not reading these things in chronological order is actually very challenging for me.) What would it mean to free sexuality from organized bodies? I'm going to step away from the text for a while and muse on that. Right now I think of sexuality as something that's enacted or desired or imagined between one or more embodied people --- their bodies may be modified (surgery) or augmented (strapons) or even virtualized (Tapestries) but it's still fundamentally somatic. But I guess desire or longing doesn't necessarily have to be directed toward a body --- I could desire a feeling or a locus of ideas, and in some ways, do. Could desire or longing also not come from a body? Some sort of primordial ooze that wants to bang itself? I dunno. I'm gonna go back to the text for now and come back to this maybe.

Whoah this is critiquing a privileging of life? And here I was nervous about applying our ideas about subjectivity to animals when thinking about animal abolitionism, radical veganism, &c. --- Colebrook's leapfrogged me and is saying not "we should apply subjectivity to things that aren't us" but "maybe we shouldn't apply subjectivity to ourselves either," at least if we're going to have a really queer theory. Deleuze wants to go back to Plato's discussion of Ideas "beyond the lived experience of self" but rather than cover them up with subjectivity, create "a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world." For my later notes, this doesn't help the rest of you, footnote five is BADASS BADASS BADASS. It makes sense to me. Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman." I need to read this, like, five more times. ...this paper's footnotes are way more cogent than the core paper to me.

"Once something is clear --- recognizable as this or that delimited and perceived object --- it loses its distinction." Um. What? I think the previous sentences are supposed to make this one make sense, but they don't.

"The subject is not the foundation of experience but is effected through experience." OK, I can buy into that. We talked last week in class about making a fundamental cut across all things in order to define the self and indeed to define the world of the self/other boundary, and how we could choose to parse that cut as a wound best left open. "The self is nothing other than repeated performances, and is at once always different from itself." OK. Except that's not going far enough either? According to Deleuze, "intensities are potentialities for differential relations which, when enountering other intensities, produce quantities of this or that quality." This feels very scifi to me, very "there are various potential vectors that could add up to outcomes depending on how they happen to interact." I feel like I'm looking at the whiteboard in the lounge where the math majors at MIT collaborated on their homework, except the process of doing mathematics has been queered and they are using words instead. It would almost be easier if it were math because the words wouldn't all already mean something when I looked at them outside of Special Theory Context Time.

This is really making me think of the mythology of Last and First Men by Otto Stapledon. Ideas that exist outside and beyond any actualizing or understanding of them? Thought liberated from the Image. Huh. This is like the opposite of everything I understand about Barthes, which admittedly isn't that much.

"becoming-woman" as the first move away from "the image of thought of bourgeois thermodynamics." "At least one other possibility for thinking beyond the man of reason." 

Whoah Billy Budd?? Did queer theorists have a huge thing for Billy Budd before Sedgwick? Because she's the one who got me thinking about it. (Also, a TEXT! I love texts! (I love Bastiodon!)) ...Reading of the Idea of Reading? Immanence? (Oh, immanence.) "Qualities or predicates that are actualized but not exhausted by bodies." Actually I can see that in Claggart's view of Budd. It's not just the body that Budd has, it's the ideas that that body represents; and it's not even necessarily Claggart's desire for those ideas, but the potentiality of said desire. I guess that comes back to the earlier point about freeing sexuality from bodies.

We were supposed to read this week's reading with an eye to how the transsexual disrupted the traditional ideas of Australian third-wave feminism. I do not see the connection. Clearly I need to read the rest of the papers and then come back and synthesize. And then read this one, at least, again --- but I pulled a few connections between it and other things, and between parts of it, out and named them. I'll take that for now, and go do an easier reading for another class for a while. Oof.

Comments

[bookofjude.livejournal.com]

Australian third-wave feminism? Here I show my lack of knowledge.

... Germaine Greer?

I have no point here, I just like to sing

[rax.livejournal.com]

she spoke of Germaine Greer and Freidan, I didn't know what to think (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PxocKgCeJc)

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I know no theory of really any sort, but that Middle-eastern political theory horror novel that I was reading mentioned Deleuze and Guattari together so often that they might as well have been a symbiont of dust and oil lurking at the heart of monothesim...yeah, that won't get out of my head.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that lovely image!

[eredien]

"model of theoria as a distanced look or regard taken upon an object is intrsinically normalizing,"

Is there a word left out there, or not? Is there a "that" between "object" and "is," or not? Because otherwise I can't actually parse this sentence, though perhaps it would make more sense in-context.

I've never heard of Irigaray. Thoughts on where to start reading?

Forgive me, but WTF does "a fundamental cut across all things" mean? Is it cut in the sense of mental dissection, getting deeper into the heart of the self through interrogating everything? How is one supposed to perform this cut?

I read this twice:
Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman."

And then I understood this:
a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world."

Ok, so. But does it somehow...sully those Platonic ideals, sully the queering of the theory, when they're brought into the real world to be enacted, by men in drag or whomever? (If so, then does that make platonic ideals that cannot yet be enacted in the real world, like phantom wing syndrome, more queer as ideas than, say, gender theory?)

Also, holy shit. Are all these people you cited here just things you downed in your spare time while no one noticed?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Is there a word left out there, or not? Is there a "that" between "object" and "is," or not? Because otherwise I can't actually parse this sentence, though perhaps it would make more sense in-context.

No but that's the best way to parse it out of context.


I've never heard of Irigaray. Thoughts on where to start reading?

I've only read secondary sources here, sorry.

Forgive me, but WTF does "a fundamental cut across all things" mean? Is it cut in the sense of mental dissection, getting deeper into the heart of the self through interrogating everything? How is one supposed to perform this cut?

The cut of the umbilical cord? The use of language as prosthesis for understanding the world? Umm... I really only sort of get this part. It's a psychoanalytic thing.


Ok, so. But does it somehow...sully those Platonic ideals, sully the queering of the theory, when they're brought into the real world to be enacted, by men in drag or whomever? (If so, then does that make platonic ideals that cannot yet be enacted in the real world, like phantom wing syndrome, more queer as ideas than, say, gender theory?)


Deleuze and Colebrook don't think so --- it's not about sullying, it's just about the enactment in reality of those Ideals as being not the totality of those ideals. Enacting something doesn't sully it, it just isn't it? If that makes sense? However the idea of phantom wings being more queer than queer theory is fascinating.

Also, holy shit. Are all these people you cited here just things you downed in your spare time while no one noticed?

Hardly. :) I mean the Barthes and the Sedgwick were spare time reading but everything else I mentioned was for some class or another, and I was introduced to Sedgwick by a class, I just read extra stuff I wasn't required to. I haven't actually read much Deleuze/Guattari at all --- this class is covering them in a five-hour mega-epic week 5, and so I have not tried to catch up on the theory that I am busy enough anyway and the professor put them in that order for a reason even though it doesn't make sense to me.

[eredien]

Is there a word left out there, or not? Is there a "that" between "object" and "is," or not? Because otherwise I can't actually parse this sentence, though perhaps it would make more sense in-context.

No but that's the best way to parse it out of context.

I think that that sentence would read better for me if it had commas. It looks like they are saying that particular "distanced look" model of theoria is the thing that intrinsically normalizing, but the clause in between made it hard for me to parse.


I've never heard of Irigaray. Thoughts on where to start reading?
I've only read secondary sources here, sorry.

Ok.

Forgive me, but WTF does "a fundamental cut across all things" mean? Is it cut in the sense of mental dissection, getting deeper into the heart of the self through interrogating everything? How is one supposed to perform this cut?

The cut of the umbilical cord? The use of language as prosthesis for understanding the world? Umm... I really only sort of get this part. It's a psychoanalytic thing.

If they are really arguing against using language as a prosthesis in that way, or arguing that one should cut through the idea of language as a prosthesis for understanding the world. I find it ironic that they're doing so using language, but such is the way of the world.


Ok, so. But does it somehow...sully those Platonic ideals, sully the queering of the theory, when they're brought into the real world to be enacted, by men in drag or whomever? (If so, then does that make platonic ideals that cannot yet be enacted in the real world, like phantom wing syndrome, more queer as ideas than, say, gender theory?)

Deleuze and Colebrook don't think so --- it's not about sullying, it's just about the enactment in reality of those Ideals as being not the totality of those ideals. Enacting something doesn't sully it, it just isn't it? If that makes sense? However the idea of phantom wings being more queer than queer theory is fascinating.

Hm. I think that when I read Deleuze wants to go back to Plato's discussion of Ideas "beyond the lived experience of self" but rather than cover them up with subjectivity, create "a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world."

I read that "covering up with subjectivity" as inherently a sullying, because if the goal is to create "a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world," then bringing those ideas into the lived world to be enacted necessarily covers at least part of the idea with the subjectivity you are trying so hard to get away from. I suppose as long as you recognize that there is a part of the idea that you cannot necessarily enact in the lived world that the entire thing is not necessarily covered up with a subjective, lived experience, but the twin goals of "enacting in the real world" and "distinction from the real world" seem at odds with each other. And what about ideas where the totality of them can be enacted in the real world? I'm having trouble thinking of a great many ideas where parts of them are, by necessity, not enacted in a real space in a subjective way.

Also, holy shit. Are all these people you cited here just things you downed in your spare time while no one noticed?

Hardly. :) I mean the Barthes and the Sedgwick were spare time reading but everything else I mentioned was for some class or another, and I was introduced to Sedgwick by a class, I just read extra stuff I wasn't required to. I haven't actually read much Deleuze/Guattari at all --- this class is covering them in a five-hour mega-epic week 5, and so I have not tried to catch up on the theory that I am busy enough anyway and the professor put them in that order for a reason even though it doesn't make sense to me.

Hopefully by the time you get there you'll have figured out why they're in there that way.

[eredien]

However the idea of phantom wings being more queer than queer theory is fascinating.

Hm--what I was trying to say is that if this is about a general queering of theory (rather than "queer theory", even if the author is applying the queering of the theory to queer theory in the below example), then phantom wings might not be necessarily more queer in a queer-theory-gendered sense, but queer in a queered-theory sense.

Actually here: The gist is that rather than drag being an embodied man taking on a female presentation in some gendered matrix of understanding, it's a particular enactment of the non-inherently-bodied-vector "becoming-woman."

And here is where I think maybe therianthropy fits in--there is this non-inherently-bodied vector "becoming-animal," which can be *enacted* in the sense of a play, and that enactment can be...performed by individual bodies, but that vector in and of itself can't be bodied--just the enactment, the performance, of the vector can be bodied. There is something about that vector that has to stay necessarily in the realm of non-inherently-bodied ideas for it to be played, enacted, performed as a role by individuals. That seems to be really queering the idea of theory as a whole.

Maybe this is the case with other ideas, too, but that was the one that immediately sprang to mind for me. Then again, it would.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

My lay understanding of the cut across all things comes out of self-psychology, though I don't know if that's where this description comes from in particular. The idea there is that "self" becomes those pieces of consciousness that the mental/biological homeostasis apparatus has control over, basically. So as an infant a person will be in unbearable mental distress and a caretaker will comfort them. But the caretaker, not being "self", is always imperfect. Eventually, the infant learns to perform functions previously performed by the imperfect caretaker, integrating into the self what was previously external. Through these therapeutic failures and adaptation, the "self" is formed as an independent concept, separate from the external world.

This theory also suggests that the concept of self is inherently based on betrayals, no matter how minor and understandable (parents can't read minds). This leaves the options of trusting a world that will disappoint that trust or distrusting the world, isolating the self and trying to be mentally self-sufficient (which may or may not be possible, which is where this starts overlapping with theories of ablism). This conflict between needs and sufficiency creates the cut between the self and other, and colors all action and perception.

[eredien]

Hm. "Making a fundamental cut," as Rachel states here, seemed to me to be more of an active/interrogative process rather than a process which was theorized to happen anyway, as consciousness arose. I think maybe I took it to be more active than it was. Thanks for the summary.

I'm working on the original

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

So this is mostly just some ramblings most based off your notes. Hope it's not too presumptuous to stick them here.

Footnote five is badass, but wouldn't the push back against embodied theory run into conflict whith the desire for less-distanced theory?

Even vectors have a system of planes in which they are embedded. One of my math/vision professors constantly complained about people ignoring the imaginary spectrum of the Forier transform because that is where the shape-informations is. You can find all sorts of patterns and typical structures in the real domain, but not the whole of any one thing.

Actually it kind of fits. In the frequency domain you'd have a cluster of "becoming women", but it wouldn't tell you anything about the performers. Were they transgressing or normalizing? Motivated by self or others? We'd need the phase domain to know. A perfectly queer image would be white noise? I have clearly taken this analogy far to far, but I think part of my resistance is that vectors are always incomplete descriptions of the world.

Re: wound of self-definition: I wonder how body mod/bdsm re-interpretations of wounds/pain/desire could influence the separation of self and resistance to emeshment (if that's the right word for the opposite). If such things are taken on willingly and consciously... I'm curious now about traditions of conscious self-other separation in place of unconscious and Othering separation. It might lead to true celebration of diversity/queerness?

Re: I'm working on the original

[rax.livejournal.com]

So this is mostly just some ramblings most based off your notes. Hope it's not too presumptuous to stick them here.

Of course not!


Footnote five is badass, but wouldn't the push back against embodied theory run into conflict whith the desire for less-distanced theory?

Yeah I'm not sure about that either.

Actually it kind of fits. In the frequency domain you'd have a cluster of "becoming women", but it wouldn't tell you anything about the performers. Were they transgressing or normalizing? Motivated by self or others? We'd need the phase domain to know. A perfectly queer image would be white noise? I have clearly taken this analogy far to far, but I think part of my resistance is that vectors are always incomplete descriptions of the world.

Actually I find this really useful in describing what rubbed me the wrong way about this idea, thank you.


Re: wound of self-definition: I wonder how body mod/bdsm re-interpretations of wounds/pain/desire could influence the separation of self and resistance to emeshment (if that's the right word for the opposite). If such things are taken on willingly and consciously... I'm curious now about traditions of conscious self-other separation in place of unconscious and Othering separation. It might lead to true celebration of diversity/queerness?

Somatechnics came out of body modification studies and so I bet I will have more to say about this as the semester goes on :) Without having done all of that reading, I would say yes, although it's not the only way, and what might be more important about it is the way that intense bodily experiences challenge the boundary between self and other. (Certainly that's been my feeling around those kinds of experiences; I enjoy body modifications because they perturb the boundaries of my skin, which is supposedly where I end and the world begins, and I enjoy certain aspects of BDSM because they perturb the boundaries between my and another's will. Your mileage may vary.)

Re: I'm working on the original

[eredien]

There is a field of body modification studies? Argh why don't I hear about these things?

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

"becoming-woman" as the first move away from "the image of thought of bourgeois thermodynamics." "At least one other possibility for thinking beyond the man of reason."

Most of this post, I can at least sort of follow, but I have to admit, this bit looked to me like a bunch of random words strung together. :D

Thermodynamics? I think that's the word that threw me most here. I'm having trouble understanding the concept of bourgeois thermodynamics, or how thermodynamics relate to queer theory.