Wow, I’m on a roll this afternoon. 3 posts! J Halberstam’s book The Queer Art of Failure is inspiring me. In part one of my posts on notes about the book, I mention Barbara Ehrenreich’s RSA Animate Smile or Die. The idea of resisting the need demand to smile and being happy is a theme that I’ve read/thought about for some time. And it’s a key theme within some versions of queer theory.
I don’t have time to offer an exhaustive list of theorists/theories that resist positive thinking/feeling, so I thought I used the idea of “smile or die” to inspire another problematizer image. This image features one of my favorites subjects/muses, my daughter Rosie (who looks a little like Tina Yothers in Family Ties here).
Within the image are various references to feminist and queer theories that critique happiness/goodness/positivity as a goal and that embrace “outlaw emotions” and “negative feelings” (like rage). I hope to write more specifically about these theories in a post later this week. For now, here’s the image:
Here’s part two of my notes on Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure for my Queering Theory class: (here’s part one)
chapter three: The Queer Art of Failure
failure goes hand in hand with capitalism
history of pessimism is a tale of:
anti-capitalist queer struggle
anti-colonial struggle
refusal of legibility
art of unbecoming
impossible improbable unlikely unremarkable
weapons of the weak: STALLING recategorize what looks like inaction, passivity, lack of resistance (88)
Trainspotting and unqueer failure: failure leads to while male rage directed against women/people of color
OUTLINE OF REST OF CH: An examination of what happens when failure is productively linked to racial awareness, anticolonial struggle, gender variance, and different formulations of the temporality of success (92).
Moffat and 4th Place: The Art of Losing
The L Word, the Anti-Aesthetic of the Lesbian, and the butch lesbian as loser/failure
Darkness, Shadows, Failure-as-style, Limits, Hopelessness, Punk politics, Fucking shit up, and the Queer Art of Failure
Children, Queer Fairy Tales, Shrek/Babe/Chicken Run/Finding Nemo, and Bringing down the winner and discovering our inner dweeb
A rallying cry of England’s dispossessed?
A snarling rejection of the tradition of the monarchy and national investment in it?
No future for Edelman…seems to mean (too) much about Lacan…and not enough about the powerful negativity of punk politics (108).
Negativity may be anti-politics, but it should not register as a-political.
three: Halberstam, expanding of the archive of negative affects and “fucking shit-up”
our: A queer archive? Inspired by JH’s call to discover our inner dweeb…
The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery…” (121).
The following are the online notes for my Queering Theory class in fall 2011. I’m in the process of bringing my various lectures over from my 18 course blogs to this site. Eventually, I’d like to do more with these lectures. Maybe combine them into a few key themes, particularly ones that connect to my work on making and staying in trouble. I also might want to reflect further on how to use the blog as a platform for lectures and discussions in class.
NOTES FOR JHALBERSTAM’S The Queer Art of Failure
see pdf of full notes (with embedded tweets) here.
Introduction: Low Theory sources of knowledge? Sponge Bob Square Pants
What is the alternative to cynical recognition on the one hand and naive optimism on the other? What’s at stake with this question? hope future anti-social thesis utopia see MLA Forum on Anti-social thesis in Queer Theory
This book loses the idealism of hope in order to gain wisdom and a new, spongy relation to life, culture, knowledge and pleasure (2).
live life otherwise
Low theory tries to locate all of the in-between spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop (2).
standing outside of success: failure = not succeeding, not achieving success
goal = dismantling logic of Success/Failure
re-envisioning failure (and losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing) as offering more creative ways of being parallels with Luhmann and ignorance, Butler and undoing
Failure’s rewards (3)?
escape punishing norms that discipline behavior/manage development
preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood
disturbs “clean” boundary between childhood/adulthood, winner/loser
allows us to use negative effects (disappointment, disillusionment, despair) to poke holes in toxic positivity and myth of power of positive thinking and positivity/personal responsibilitysee Ehrenreich and RSAnimate’s “Smile or Die”
Is failure necessarily negative? Does it demand that we embrace and value our negative, “whiny,” grouchy attitudes?
Little Miss Sunshine and a new kind of optimism: not based on positive thinking or the bright side at all costs, but a little ray of sunshine that produces shade and light in equal measure (5).
UNDISCIPLINED
not being taken seriously, lack of rigor, frivolous, promiscuous, irrelevant (7).
What should count as “serious” and rigorous academic work?
Benjamin: strolling down the paths, going the wrong way, not knowing exactly which way to go
Disciplinary knowledge, the sciences and rogue intellectuals
Do we really want to shore up the ragged boundaries of our shared interests and intellectual commitments, or might we rather take this opportunity to rethink the project of learning and thinking altogether (7)? Is this possible in academic spaces, especially at the U?
Let me explain how universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than promote quirky and original thought (7).
produces experts and administrative forms of governance
disciplines qualify/disqualify, legitimate/delegitimate, reward/punish; reproduce themselves and inhibit dissent (10)
crossroads between university-as-corporation and university-as-new-public-sphere
need for subversive intellectuals not more critical, professionalized intellectuals (8)
What kind of intellectuals/thinkers does the University produce? What could it produce? How?
Illegibility may in fact be one way of escaping the political manipulation to which all university fields and disciplines are subject (10).
How so? What would this look like? What impact does illegibility have on the ability to survive in the academy? How do those forms get evaluated/graded?
Foucault and subjugated knowledges
steal from the university (11)
adding to the 7 theses (including, worry about university, refuse professionalization, forge collectivity, retreat to external world):
resist mastery (11-12)
privilege the naive or nonsensical
suspect memorialization
responses to colonial knowledge formations:
violent (Fanon)
homeopathic…one learns dominant system and undermines from within
negative…subject refuses knowledge, refuses to be knowing subject (14)
JH’s book works with violent and negative responses
LOWTHEORY
accessible (17)
theoretical model that flies below the radar, assembled from eccentric texts and examples (17)
JH on hegemony (from Gramsci and Hall): “the multilayered system by which a dominant group achieves power not through coercion but through the production of an interlocking system of ideas which persuades people of the rightness of any given set of often contradictory ideas and perspectives” (17).
traditional vs. organic intellectual
Low theory = counterhegemonic form of theorizing, the theorization of alternatives within an undisciplined zone of knowledge production (18).
Pirate Cultures
Linebaugh’s/Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors,Slaves, Commoners, and The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic and the history of alternative political formations
flesh out alternatives: how to live, how to think about time/space, how to inhabit space with others, how to spend time separate from the logic of work (19)
Animated films deliver queer/socialist messages:
work together
revel in difference
fight exploitation
decode ideology
invest in resistance
“the art of getting lost?”
FAILURE AS A WAY OF LIFE
goals of book:
“I hold on to what have been characterized as childish and immature notions of possibility and look for alternatives in the form of what Foucault calls “subjugated knowledge” across the culture: in subcultures, countercultures, and even popular cultures.”
Turn the meaning of failure in a different direction, away from happy/productive failure to the “dark heart of the negativity that failure conjures”–modes of unbecoming
Early chapters (1-3) chart the meaning of failure
Later chapters (4-6) allow for fact that failure is also unbeing
It is a book about failing well, failing often, and learning how to fail better (24). Reminds me of JB’s passage: “Trouble is inevitable, and the task, how best to make it, how best to be in it.”
JHalb hopes this book is accessible to a wider audience. What do you think? How do we put Halberstam’s desire for intelligibility/accessibility beside our discussion of Butler’s value of difficult writing?
Master the art of getting and staying lost (25).
chapter one: Animating Revolt and Revolting Animation
explain the title: A cynical reading of the world of animation will always return to the notion that difficult topics are raised and contained in children’s films precisely so that they do not have to be discussed elsewhere and also so that the politics of rebellion can be cast as immature, pre-Oedipal, childish, foolish, fantastical, and rooted in a commitment to failure. But a more dynamic and radical engagement with animation understands that the rebellion is ongoing and that the new technologies of children’s fantasy do much more than produce revolting animation. They also offer us the real and compelling possibilities of animating revolt (52).
connection to failure:
Animated films for children revel in the domain of failure
Childhood is a long lesson in humility, awkwardness, limitation, “growing sideways”
Animated films address the disorderly child
PIXARVOLT: new genre of animated films that use CGI and foreground themes of revolution and revolt, making connections between communitarian revolt and queer embodiment (29)
Pixarvolt films draw upon standard narratives, but is also interested in:
social hierarchies
relations between inside/outside
desire for revolution, transformation, rebellion
self-conscious about own relation to innovation, tradition, transformation (30)
Films: Chicken Run (collective rebellion, imagining and realizing utopian elsewhere), The March of the Penguins (resolutely animal narrative about cooperation, affiliation, anachronism of homo-hetero divide), Monsters, inc (anti-humanist, anti-capitalist), Bee Movie (oppositional groups rising up to subvert the singularity of the human w/unruly mob)
difference between Pixarvolt and merely Pixilated? difference between collective revolutionary selves and conventional notion of a fully realized individual…Pixarvolts desire for difference is not connected to a neoliberal “Be Yourself” mentality or to exceptionalism; it connects individualism to selfishness, overconsumption (47).
chapter two: Dude, Where’s My Phallus? Forgetting, Losing, Looping
“we can argue for queerness as a set of spatialized relations that are permitted through the while male’s stupidity, his disorientation in time and space” (65).
How?
The beauty of Dude is that it acknowledges the borrowed and imitative forms of white male subjectivity and traces for us the temporal order of dominant culture that forgets what it has borrowed and never pays back (67).
dude, seriously: forgetting, unknowing, losing, lacking, bumbling, stumbling, these all seem like hopeful developments in the location of the white male (68).
Dude offers a potent allegory of memory, forgetting, remembering, and forgetting again which we can use to describe and invent this moment in the university, poised as it is and as we are between offering a distinction “negative” strand of critical consciousness to a public that would rather not know and using more common idioms to engage those who don’t why they should care (68) EXPLAIN
Forgetting: forgetfulness as useful tool for women/queer people for jamming smooth operations of normal and ordinary (71), allows for rupture of present/break w/past/opportunity for new, non-hetero future (71), delink historical change from family/generations, forget family (71-72), Dory forgets family and opens up new modes of relating/belonging/caring (72
Edelman and heterofuturity + the Child (73)
Stockton and growing up sideways (73)
Finding Nemo (key argument 80-81) and 50 First Dates (key argument on 77) both deploy forgetting to represent a disordering of social bonds, employ transgender motifs to represent queer disruption in logic of normal, and both understand queer time os operating against progress/tradition (74-75).
The example of Dory in Finding Nemo in fact encourages us to rest a while in the weird but hopeful temporal space of the lost, the ephemeral, and the forgetful (82).
I don’t like TED talks. I’ve discussed my dislike of them here on the blog before. In writing about one of the reasons I am troubled by Brain Pickings I wrote the following:
Her love of TED, with its business self-helpy tone and its pedagogical model that idolizes Experts-who-enlighten, influences the overall tone of the blog. For a number of reasons, which I’ll leave for another post or a series of posts, I don’t like business self-helpy shtuff and my vision of pedagogy comes into conflict with the Expert-as-awesome model.
One of these days I might have to get around to writing a post/article in which I critique TED by drawing upon feminist and queer pedagogical tools. Has anyone done this yet? For now, I’ll use this post to mention a recent New Yorker article that critically discusses “how the conference has turned ideas into an industry.” Although I haven’t read the article yet, I’m intrigued and amused by the opening image which humorously breaks down the standard format of the TED talk (overly polished and formulaic) performance. I especially like the Head Tilt at 12 degrees. While searching for this article online, I also found a post the author did about the article for the New Yorker blog: Five Key TED Talks. In this post, he illustrates some of the features of the TED format through a description of five talks. One of these talks just happens to be about a book I’m currently reading: Quiet.
I have some misgivings about this book (and Cain’s broad generalizations), but I’ll suspend my critique until I finish reading it. Teaser: I’m troubled by her failure to consider how race, gender, class or geographical positioning complicates our experiences and understandings of being introverted or extroverted. And, I can’t help but wonder, in what ways is the introversion she wants to claim a privileged position (one that requires time + money + space) that many can’t afford? Maybe she addresses these questions in later chapters? I should stop writing and start reading…
About 6 weeks ago, while in the process of doing some research on the history and critiques of self-help books, I came across an interview with Sheila Heti. In the interview she discusses two of her recent books, The Chairs are Where the People Go and How Should a Person Be? I immediately put The Chairs on my Pinterest reading list–I’m not sure why I didn’t add How Should at the same time, but I remedied that by adding it to the list this morning–and about a month later, I requested it from the Minneapolis public library. A few days ago, I finally had a chance to read it while sitting at Lake Nokomis and the Highland Park pool. Here’s a picture that I took at Lake Nokomis, right after finishing one of the chapters on manners:
I really enjoyed reading this book! Such a great twist on the usual advice/self-help book (on the back, it is described as a “self-help book for people who feel they don’t need help”). It’s a collaboration between writer Sheila Heti and her friend, Misha Glouberman, in which Heti interviewed and then recorded (almost word for word) Glouberman’s thoughts on a wide range of topics that he cares most about. While Glouberman gives some advice on wide-ranging topics like, How to Make Friends in a New City (ch 2), How to be Good at Playing Charades (ch 5), Don’t Pretend There is No Leader (ch 6), Seeing your Parents Once a Week (ch 45) and Get Louder or Quit (ch 49), this book isn’t about advising you on how-to do anything in particular. Instead, it is about documenting one (very interesting and thoughtful) person’s ethos/approach to life. After reading (almost) all of the brief 1-2 page chapters, I feel that I have some sense of who Glouberman is–what he believes, what he does, what he cares about–and I feel inspired to both incorporate some of his ideas into my own ethos and to document some of my thoughts (and the thoughts of other interesting people) in a similar way.
As I was writing the line about this book not being about how-to do anything in the above paragraph, I began reflecting more on my own aversion to “how-to manuals.” I really don’t like giving advice to others, or telling them how exactly to do things (which sometimes gets me into trouble as a teacher, especially with students who expect demand that I give them explicit instructions/directions on how to do things). I like to help/encourage/inspire others by giving them tools to figure things out for themselves. Of course, this doesn’t always work; some people/students need more explicit guidance and strongly want to be told “this is how you do x.” I have a lot of difficulty fulfilling this need/want. Does that make me an ineffective (bad?) teacher or parent? I struggle with this question sometimes.
A few of Glouberman’s chapters really resonated with me. In chapter one–“People’s Protective Bubbles are Okay”–he talks about how people sometimes need to not be interacting with others. In response to those who view this non-interaction as a problem and who try to force people to interact in public spaces through public art projects, he says:
It’s necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. So don’t try to fix this. There is no problem.
Yes! As I read through this passage again I wonder, what does it mean to “perceive every single person in the fullness of their humanity”? And how does this differ (if, at all) from recognizing their humanity…or their right to be perceived as human? Also, what counts as interaction?
Another chapter I really enjoyed was #46, Asking a Good Question. This chapter focuses on the rules that Glouberman offers to people who wish to participate in the Q & A portion of his lectures. Here are a few that I’ve paraphrased: (Admittedly, I’m reluctant to paraphrase because I really like how he writes. However, for brevity’s sake, I’ve decided to condense/summarize here.)
1. A question has to be a question. You can’t turn a statement into a question by raising your voice at the end of your sentence. You’re not fooling anyone.
2. There are no two-part questions. They are 2 separate questions. Pick the best one and ask it.
3. Think about the feelings that motivate you to ask the question. Curiosity and anger are good motivators for effective/productive/engaging questions. Pride and a desire to look smart (or to make others look stupid/small) are not.
I love how he provides these rules for participants. It would be wonderful if all academic conference attendees were instructed in this way! His statements here make me want to come up with my own list of rules for asking a good question. Sounds like a great project for my staying in trouble tumblr!
