Cornel West – TROUBLE

Fragments of Grief, part 1

Here is the first of five fragments that I place beside each other in my experimental essay on living and grieving beside Judith:

…one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you, changes you possible forever, and that mourning has to do with agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which you cannot know in advance (Undoing Gender, 18).

The idea of undergoing a transformation that one cannot know in advance is a central one for Butler and her vision of social transformation. In Undoing Gender, she discusses the value of unknowingness and of not trying to securely and definitively establish one’s plan of action prior to acting (227). For Butler, grief is central to this experience of unknowingness and the risks that we take to maintain and embrace it. Overwhelmed with sadness and exhaustion and unable to compose ourselves or deny our vulnerability to loss, we cannot pretend that we have control or that we can always know with certainty how to act or who we are. In risking unknowingness, we are transformed into individuals who don’t know, but who are willing to act anyway.

Up until the last year, when she could barely speak, my mother and I loved to talk. Frequently our conversations were inspired by my mom’s curiosity and her wonder of the world and ideas. Having been a teacher for over 20 years, she asked lots of questions and always liked to learn more about what I was reading or what I thought. Her curiosity was not motivated so much by a desire to know, but by a desire to feel and experience as many different ways of understanding as she could. She found joy in contemplating the why and how and seemed to be energized by what she didn’t and might never know. Somehow she had held onto that wonder that children seem to have, but often lose as they grow up. I inherited that wonder from her and I witness it in my daughter Rosie J everyday.

To acknowledge that we don’t know, that we are uncertain about how to proceed, doesn’t always produce anxiety and isn’t always best understood in relation to grief. To be open to undergoing a transformation of who one is in ways that one can never anticipate isn’t always to risk unknowingness. It is an invitation to wonder, to be curious and to imagine the world in new and mysterious ways. My experience of being beside my mom as she was dying and then died transformed me, to be sure. But it was more her persistence in life and how she envisioned uncertainty and unknowingness in terms of wonder and joy instead of anxiety and loss that transformed me, not her death and my grief over her loss.

More of my thoughts on this fragment: The idea of not knowing in advance, of being in a state of unknowingness and uncertainty, resonate with me and my project of staying in trouble as a virtue. They also resonate with my earlier work, in my dissertation, on Butler and radical democracy (which emphasizes the unrealizability of democracy).

In an earlier draft of the fragment I added a few more lines about another way to read risking unknowingness: as a form of faith. How does thinking about that risk as faith affect how we read the first part of Butler’s passage: “one mourns when one accepts the fact that the loss one undergoes will be one that changes you…”? What are some other ways to read this acceptance? Does Butler offer any ways (outside of psychoanalysis, that is)? The idea of rethinking unknowingness as wonder and curiosity could also be read in terms of religion and/or spirituality and faith. Did I mention that I have a BA in religion and an MA in theology, ethics and culture?

Thinking about curiosity in relation to unknowingness and staying in trouble are central to my recent work on troublemaking. I refer to them repeatedly on this blog and even structured my undergraduate class, contemporary feminist debates, around the value of feminist curiosity.

In terms of wonder and its connection to children (which I mention in my brief fragment about my mom and our conversations), I am reminded of what Cornel West has to say about it in an interview with Toni Morrison for The Nation from 2004, entitled, “Blues, Love and Politics”:

I want to come back to your point about immaturity because I want to make a distinction between “childish” and “childlike.” You see, the blues and jazz are childlike, the sense of awe and wonder and the mystery and perplexity of things. “Childish” is immature.

Anxiety, the Examined Life and Staying in Trouble

The end of the semester is almost here (less than a month away!) and I am getting very excited for the thinking and writing work I hope to do this summer. In anticipation of my future work, I decided to take a break this afternoon from preparing for next week’s discussions on the Prison Industrial Complex and Hope, Utopias and Optimism to watch a recent documentary about philosophy and critical thinking called Examined Life. I have wanted to watch it ever since it came out last year, so I was very excited to see it show up on my netflix watch instantly page.

Seemingly inspired by the famous saying by Plato that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” this documentary consists of a series of interviews with famous philosophers/thinkers reflecting on their own ideas about thinking, philosophy and meaning. As an aside, I wonder why it is called the “examined life” as opposed to examining life–the past tense seems to suggest that thinking and examining is something that can, at a certain point, be accomplished. Is this ever possible? Do we want it to be? Life, even after death, can still be examined, right? Should our goal be to get to a point in which we have determined all there is to know about our life? Hmm….Anyway, here is how the film is described on the Zeitgeist Films’ website:

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets…

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

So far, I am really enjoying the film; it’s a great way to get an introduction to some of these thinkers’ big ideas, like West and his focus on finitude and blues/jazz, Appiah and cosmopolitanism or Nussbaum and human capabilities (that’s as far as I have gotten in the film). One of the first thinkers to speak is Avital Ronell. I am not that familiar with her work, having only come across it in Butler’s 2nd preface to Gender Trouble, so it was exciting to hear her thoughts on non-meaning and anxiety. Describing the search for meaning as a cover-up or a “way of dressing the wound of non-meaning,” she argues for a politics of refusing gratification and an ethics of anxiety. Here is what she says about anxiety:

Precisely where there isn’t guarantee or palpable meaning, you have to do a lot of work and you have to be mega-ethical. Because it’s much easier to live life and to say, “that you shouldn’t do and that you should do because someone said so.” If we’re not anxious, if we’re okay with things we’re not trying to explore of figure anything out. So anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity, I think.

She continues her discussion of anxiety, suggesting that the truly ethical person (which she contrasts with GW Bush) is one who is always anxious and always concerned with whether or not they are doing the right thing; the ethical person is the one who can’t sleep because they are uncertain about what they are doing or failing to do. The responsible being is not the one who does one good deed and then thinks that that makes them an ethical person. The responsible being is the one who thinks they have never done enough, that “they have never taken enough care of the other.” Wow–an ethics of anxiety seems similar to my idea of staying in trouble. I was particularly struck by how she connects this (only fleetingly) to the idea of care. Anxiety and trouble (being troubled, staying troubled) are central to being ethical responsibly and effectively caring for others. Cool. I like her discussion here. I am not sure I like how she describes it as anxiety (in the interview she indicates that she is not suggesting that we should all get anxiety disorders), however. Is anxiety the best (as in most productive, most rewarding, most hopeful, most sustainable) way in which to discuss this mood? Could we describe our vigilant effort to care for the world and others by using some other term? One final note: Ronell’s discussion of anxiety makes me think of Ahmed and her notion of unhappiness and worry (which my troublemaking class is reading about in two weeks).

Here’s the trailer for the whole movie (can I just say, having heard Cornel West speak on three different occasions, at each of the 3 institutions that I got my BA, MA and PhD from, that he is amazing!):

Troubling (and queering) religion: a few sources

My academic background is in religion. Before getting a PhD in Women’s Studies at Emory University, I got a MA in Theology, Ethics and Culture at the School of Theology at Claremont and a BA in Religion from Gustavus Adolphus College. While my work has shifted away from religion/religious ethics in recent years, my early training and interest in religion has persisted and managed to remain a big influence on my thinking.

In the past few years I have felt increasingly compelled to bring that early training back to the forefront in order to give some serious attention to the connections between ethics, religion, queer theory, feminism and troublemaking. And yes, contrary to popular opinion, there are connections (and not just negative ones!). You can be feminist and ethical! You can believe in a queer God! You can even make trouble and proudly label it religious activity! What, don’t believe me? Here are just a few sources that support my claims:

THE TROUBLEMAKER
I came across this song when I was randomly googling troublemaking. I’m Learning to Share focuses on Della Reese’s version of it from 1971, but Willie Nelson also sang it on his gospel album of the same name.

Warning Spoiler Alert: The song is all about a troublemaker who had long hair, no job and refused to join the army. He and his friend were rebels who went from town to town stirring up trouble. He was eventually arrested, tried and given the death penalty. At the end of the song, he is hung from a cross. Whoah…What a twist. Jesus as a troublemaker? Okay, the song is a little cheesy, but the connection between troublemaking and Jesus-as-prophet is pretty cool.

This connection is not limited to popular music and the likes of hippy-loving Willie Nelson, however. Cornel West writes about deep democracy, the Socratic tradition and the prophets (prophetic pragmatism) in Democracy Matters. Incidentally, when I presented on Judith Butler and the virtue of troublemaking at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in 2007, my dad (a religion and ethics scholar) suggested that I explore the prophet-troublemaker connection. Thanks AEP!

QUEER CHRIST: TRANSFORMING ANGER INTO HOPE
Reverend Dr. Carter Heyward gave a sermon (I originally linked to it, but the link doesn’t work anymore–as of April 29, 2012) in 2004 at the Episcopal Divinity School. Very cool. Here is her definition of queer. A queer is someone who has an “irrepressible interest in making connections between justice struggles and making these connections public. Not hiding [their] convictions under a barrel. Not remaining silent when everyone around [them] would be more comfortable if they were…” and who does so with compassion and love. For Heyward, being queer is being confrontational and compassionate. It is to embody apparent (but only apparent) contradictions, to be angry (about injustice) and yet to love all of humanity at the same time. For Heyward, to be queer in this way is to embody Christ–who holds together qualities that only appear to be contradictions (but aren’t–and that simultaneous embracing of seemingly contradictory qualities is what makes Christ queer).

note: Since this sermon doesn’t seem to be available online anymore, here’s a passage that I particularly liked:

What makes her, my mother so queer is not simply that she is supportive of her lesbian daughter and my friends and communities; and not simply that she is at strong odds with the prevailing political culture in both the world and church in which she has grown old. What makes my mother queer is her irrepressible interest in making connections among justice struggles and making these connections public! Not hiding her convictions under a barrel. Not remaining silent when everyone around her would be more comfortable if she were sometimes a little less in their face about Bush, the war, and gay marriage. At the same time, you will never meet a gentler, kinder, more compassionate soul than my mother Mary Ann Carter Heyward.

Is she in your face about injustice? Yes.

Is she open to you and eager to know what really makes you tick? Yes.

Is she angry about the injustices we join in and perpetuate? Yes.

Is she compassionate and forgiving toward everyone she has met who has hurt her or done her wrong? Yes.

The queerest thing of all about my mother is that she is such a bundle of apparent contradictions. She is confrontational and compassionate, angry and gentle, representing for me One through whom we meet God face to face. There are many people, including many right here in this chapel, who embody Christ for me in stunning ways. But there is no one through whom I catch stronger intimations and glimpses of the Wisdom of God, Christ herself, than my own queer mother.

This is because the most dynamic dimension of Queerness – and Christ – is the holding together of qualities that only appear to be contradictions, qualities that are not in fact contradictory or oppositional, qualities that taken together are, well, simply “queer.” Each brings out something in the other, revealing it more fully for what it is: humanity and divinity, anger and compassion, the struggle for life and the letting go of it, a capacity to wrestle fiercely against the enemies of justice and to love them concretely, which means trying to do them no harm, trying not to humiliate them, respecting them as brothers and sisters, whether or not they recognize us. Like the humanity and divinity we meet in Jesus and — through him as our spiritual lens — in one another, we also can experience anger and compassion, anger and gentleness, anger and forgiveness, anger and hope not as contradictory feelings but rather as mutually interactive dynamics of human being and divine being that work together in us and make us whole.

THE QUEER GOD
Marcella Althaus-Reid wrote this book in 2003. I wanted to use it, or at least parts of it, in my Feminist and Queer Explorations in Troublemaking class this past spring, but I couldn’t find any room for it. I am still trying to figure how to squeeze in a chapter or two in Queering Theory this fall. Is this book accessible for non-theology, non-religion students? I am not sure. I need to read it more closely to make sure. Here is part of the blurb on the back of the book:

The Queer God introduces a new theology from the margins of sexual deviance and economic exclusion. …Inspired by the transgressive spaces of Latin American spirituality, where the experiences of slum children merge with Queer interpretations of grace and holiness, The Queer God seeks to liberate god from the closet of traditional Christian thought, and to embrace God’s part in the lives of gays, lesbians and the poor.

The first chapter of this book that I want to read is “Chapter 8. Demonology: Embodying Rebellious Spirits.” Seems like I might find some interesting connections with troublemaking here.

BODILY CITATIONS: RELIGION AND JUDITH BUTLER
This collection edited by Ellen T. Armour and Susan M. St.Ville was published in 2006 and offers a wide range of essays by scholars in biblical studies, ethics, theology and ritual studies on the religious significance of Judith Butler’s work. I am particularly interested in Claudia Schippert’s essay, “Turning on/To Ethics.” Schippert wrote another essay (in 1998) that I have just started entitled, “Too Much Trouble? Negotiating Feminist and Queer Approaches to Religion.” I hope to write more on this essay later. [In the process of looking up links for this edited collection, I found this queer theology bibliography. Must check some of these sources out later.]

Queer hope: Is it possible when we have no future?

I have started the laborious (yet fun–I am a nerd, remember?) process of figuring out what readings I want to include in my syllabi for the fall. Today I am thinking about my Queering Theory course. Ever since I found out about in the spring of 2008, I have wanted to give some attention to Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. In this polemic, Edelman argues for a queer ethics that is counter to “reproductive futurism” with its emphasis on building better futures for our children. He writes:

Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children,’ the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.

So, what does this mean and what are the implications for our ethical and political projects? Some unpacking of terms is needed here. Simply put, reproductive futurism is the belief that our participation in politics–indeed, the political itself–is motivated by a belief in and a desire for creating better futures for our children. We are, in Edelman’s words, always “fighting for our children.” Reproductive futurism suggests two things: a. there is a future that we can make better–that has “unquestioned value and purpose” (4) and b. that future is emblemized by the Child. For Edelman, this reproductive futurism is linked to heteronormativity (heterosexual as the only normal, natural, right way to be) and renders any alternatives (queerings) of communal relations/kinship/visions of resistance as unthinkable–how could you possibly be against fighting for the children?–and outside of politics. Wow, I hope that makes sense. Now, why does Edelman make this radical claim? Because queerness/queering is not possible in a politics of reproductive futurism, he wants to encourage the stepping outside its logic and into the space of refusal and negativity–the space of the death drive (warning: psychoanalysis alert!)–where there is no future.

I have only just (barely) skimmed the introduction and table of contents of this book, so I am having a difficult time explaining all of this in coherent, compelling and intelligible (non-jargony) ways. Clearly, I need to engage in a much closer reading of this text. The more I think about his ideas, the more I think I want to use this in my class. It raises some great questions for my own work and for one way I am thinking of organizing the course: What would it mean to think about political and ethical projects outside of this logic of better futures on behalf of our children (especially for those of us who are parents and/or are heavily invested in children/youth)? What could a radically negative politics looks like? Are negativity and a refusal to engage in political projects aimed at transformation or ethical projects aimed at striving for the good what queer is essentially about? Is the only way in which to imagine a queer ethics negatively and in opposition to any claims, normative or otherwise?

In what I have skimmed so far, Edelman seems to be theorizing queer theory in relation to time (queer time = no future, no linear progression) and space (queer space = outside of politics/social) which makes me think of Judith Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place. In this collection of essays, Halberstam explores queer time and queer space in order to shift the perspective on queerness from an identity or set of activities to “a way of life” (1). I am fairly sure that I want to use several chapters out of this book as well. Now I just need to think about how to put them in conversation with Judith Butler, who remains a big focus of the class.

Final thought: It seems appropriate to follow my last post on Michael Jackson and hope (both the loss of it and how we might rethink it) with this one on no future and the death drive. There are some significant connections between my comments about Jackson (and my reference to k-punks posting on him) and any thinking through of Edelman’s idea of no future (which k-punk also writes about here four years earlier!). One connection between No Future/critique of reproductive futurism and Michael Jackson is found in k-punk’s post. K-punk writes:

Certainly, Edelman explicitly identifies the logic of reproductive futurism as ‘poptimism’, whose ‘locus classicus is Whitney Houston’s rendition of the secular hymn, “I believe that children are our future”, a hymn we might as well make our national anthem and be done with it.’ (143) In fact, though, ‘We are the World’ might be the better choice for reproductive futurist anthem: we are the world, we are the children (therefore it is OK for us to bomb other people’s children – because they aren’t the Future.)

Wasn’t “We are the World” a central part of the recent tribute to MJ? Interesting… In case you don’t yet have the song in your head, here it is:

There is another connection with which I want to end this post. The idea of no future, at least at first glance, indicates that we need to function without hope. If there is no future (no better world on the horizon), there is no hope that things will be different. Because isn’t hope a futural term? Edelman seems to be rejecting the possibility for queer hope. But is hope fundamentally counter to queer? Can we imagine these things together? In my last post, I pointed to Cornel West and his tragic hope as one that is counter to the vision of hope as innocent (the Child?) and naive. But is his notion of tragic hope entrenched in a heteronormative (non-queer/anti-queer) vision? After all, he is very invested in defending and revaluing parents. Hmmm…Queer hope. A future article, perhaps?

Michael Jackson, the 1970s version (pre-MTV, pre-surgery, pre-loss of hope, pre-spectacle)

So I am a little late (as usual) in commenting on the very sad death of Michael Jackson a couple of weeks ago. I never expected to write anything about it. What could I say about this that hasn’t already been said? What could his death/his tragic decline have to do with making and staying in trouble? Not much when you think about trouble as a positive, virtuous and potentially transformative attitude or set of practices. But, I do see a connection between Michael Jackson’s increasingly disturbing behavior and one common (and primarily negative) way of understanding trouble. For lack of a more clever way of putting it, Michael Jackson was troubled (in a worried, disturbed state) and his behavior/lifestyle/body/what he seemed to represent was troubling (worrisome, problematic, not quite right) to us.

There are all sorts of ways in which Jackson remains troubling to many of us–his family life, his behavior, his body–all raise questions for us: Just how many plastic surgeries can one body have? What kind of father could he possibly be? Why won’t he ever grow up? But, these questions don’t get at why I am (and have been for a while) troubled by Michael Jackson. For me, the most troubling set of questions revolve around this: What happened? What happened to him, and, more importantly, what has happened to us? What was lost when Michael went from a talented dancer and musician to a MTV spectacle and tabloid freak? And, what does this loss signify?

In their reflection on Jackson, k-punk laments the disturbing shift in Jackson (as musician, as person, as body, as image) from Off the Wall to Thriller. Jackson the wide-eyed, youthful, hopeful, happy, exuberant body in motion in the throes of disco-era Off the Wall becomes transformed (or distorted?) into the living dead, hyper-commodity, MTV staple, tabloid spectacle brought on by the enormous success of Thriller. While k-punk is disturbed by the juxtaposition of the images of Off-the-Wall Michael with Thriller Michael, there is an earlier image of Michael that has haunted me for several years now.

When I grow up, I’m gonna be happy and do what I like to do,
Like making noise and making faces and making friends like you.
And when we grow up, do you think we’ll see
That I’m still like you and you’re still like me?
I might be pretty; you might grow tall.
But we don’t have to change at all.
spoken: I don’t want to change, see, ’cause I still want to be your friend, forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.

In 1974 Jackson appeared on the ABC television special, Free to be…you and me. Singing with Roberta Flack on “When We Grow Up,” Jackson is sweet and funny and, most importantly, full of life and hope. For me, this song captures the (perhaps naive) hope and promise that some (but definitely not all) 1970s social justice movements against racism and sexism often exuded. When I watch Free to be…you and me I am always amazed at its hopeful and anti-cynical belief that anything was possible, that the freedom to be and love and do what you want was waiting for all of us if we just worked together as “Brothers and Sisters.”

Many may argue that this belief in the possibilities of a better (read: more just, more “free”) world is too naive and uncritical. Indeed, the hope represented in this special and in Jackson’s song with Flack do seem a bit too pollyannaish and ignore-ant (yes, I just made up my own word: to ignore + to be unaware = ignore-ant) of the real things that get in the way of a better present and future. But, is this the only way to think of hope and possibility? Can we be hopeful and troubled/troubling/willing to trouble at the same time? For me, one of the real tragedies that Jackson’s shift from 1974 Michael (the year I was born) to 2009 Michael is the replacement of all hope and possibility with ironic distance and cynicism. Is it really an either/or situation here? Must we either have uncritical and naive hope or realistic and thoughtful cynicism? Can’t we be both hopeful and critical, aware of injustice but still willing to believe that better futures are possible? And, is the progression of our lives (much like Jackson’s) a gradual move from hopefulness to hopelessness, from innocence to bitterness or freakishness?

What other visions of hope can we imagine/express/believe in? The prophetic pragmatism and tragic-comic hope of Cornel West or the visionary pragmatism of Patricia Hill Collins are good places to start…