EMIKO
     TEXT

It’s getting hot in here…

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The winds of change are a hot westerly, blowing sand and slit into our eyes and obscuring our sight. Our eyes are watering, our skin is slimy and slippery from sweat and the air con just stopped because the power has cut out again. Is this the future? No it is the now and we are walking zombie like into tomorrow.

“I’m hungry for your brains”, said the parasitic bug of capitalism, yet in the face of attack we can cannot seem to run fast enough from our demise. How did we get here? What went wrong? The so-called dark ages of the pre renaissance were meant to be the clarifying example of the danger of living life ruled by selfish autocrats and dogmatic beliefs yet the unflowering and unfolding of potential that the renaissance seemed to offer has really just led us back to the same old things, only with new rulers and new dogmas and the added issue of a world overheating and at the precipice of catastrophic climate change.. Surely there is someone or something that can be held to blame for this miasmatical state of doom.

 

Capitalism- the enemy of humanity….

It is simplistic to point the finger at one

social system as the root of a problem, however, looking at capitalism through a critical lens can help to demystify some of the fookedness of what is going on. Many theorists have turned to a critique of capitalist ideologies in an attempt to unclog our minds of stultifying inertia. However, it is the writer, Slavo Zizek, who defines so brutally many of the core problems that the capitalist structures behold.

Zizek, in referencing Nietzsche, explains that humans, unlike other animals, have the ability to know debt- to recognize when they owe a debt for something and to see that debt and its projected repayment occur in the future. This demonstrates that humans are able to see themselves act in a future capacity based on present actions- a feat that is complex in its combining of past, present and future with notions of the self and obligation. Zizek points out that with the rise of Christianity and an omnipotent God figure, the knowledge of debt and its future repayment became infinite and unpayable in this life as the idea of sin, repentance and a tiered afterlife took hold. Ultimately, these new ideologies created an internalized guilt where obedience was required in order to manage the repayment of our debt to God. Zizek then goes on to further argue that as religious rule became replaced by secular rule, the issue of debt remained.

The human, in a state of infinite indebtedness, became indebted to the state, and needed to be in an ever ready position to repay the debt. To this end, behaviour needed to be predictable in order for the present self to be able to guarantee the that the future self would be able to repay the debt. A person becomes an “entrepreneur of the self”, where they make decisions on how they wish to invest in their future through such avenues as health or education, and what level of debt they are prepared to incur in the process of self-actuation.

As we live and grow in our systems of governance we incur debt- it is the cost of our humanity and the cost of living in society. What should be free- the right to safety, the right to education, the right to sustenance, the right to equity, are merely things given to us by the state. We know they cost; we are reminded of this as we go about our daily transactions. Everything costs, nothing is for free. Yet this debt that we owe for living and being alive is no longer owed to a God, it is owed to our state, and we are never free from it. The state has the power to remove our freedoms through the mechanisms of institutional incarceration, or in some cases, state sanctioned death. The state also has the power to grant the removal of debts through amnesties and other modes of debt forgiveness. Yet it is by this very power over us that we are interred forever in indebtedness as we are constantly reminded of our debt or the removal of it through the actions of the state, just those who are granted mercy from a cruel master are forever held by the knowledge of what could have occurred but didn’t. Granting mercy isn’t the erasure of something, it is the reminding of the power of the one who grants clemency. As Zizek points out, only those with absolute power over rules can decide when and how to lift those rules.   

The philosopher Franco Berardi argues that the logic of the military in its ability to mobilise the masses for war has been transported to capitalism. As Berardi asserts, the masses are mobilised into a war to survive against each other in a brutal system of thrive or die. Money is a weapon and debt creates submission in a process Berardi terms a “metaphysical curse.” [1] In order to survive a person must have money yet much of what is needed to survive is no longer free. To create a society which does not revolt the governments enable a loan system for basic rights such as education yet this in turn creates a society of indebted people, suffering guilt and worry over the debt incurred in the process of enjoying basic human rights such as education, medical care, freedom of movement and housing.

For Berardi, capitalism creates a space of disjointedness and disconnection. Individuals are displaced onto the lands of capitalism without a handbook.  In the quest for meaning, connection and stability, we live a life of disruption and uncertainty where, due to the capitalist logic that we live under, we are never quite sure if or when the rug of economic security will be moved from under us. Because of this uncertainty, there is a drive to look to the past, the last place of seemingly certain knowing, bringing about nostalgia for old ways that are often conservative and heteronormative- memory is not always a true representation of what has occurred and history is a product of the powerful.

In a further complication of contemporary life, Paul Virilio writes of our world as facing a “twilight of places”, where the technologies of past and future cohabit, and humanity reaches its terminus. Technology, for Virilio, has created an accelerated pace of life. [2] With the increasing speed of travel, we experience a decreasing sense of space. As computer technology increases the speed of computation, we experience an increase, or acceleration of reality. Reality speeds up and we are forced to focus on what lies directly ahead, consequently losing the ability to think laterally.

“Everybody knows that life is merciless, and that time is marked by the entropic law of dispersion, loss, malady and death.” [3] This statement from Berardi encapsulates the conundrum of the world today.  Things are looking very dismal- we are trapped in a capitalist informed competition loop, living in a world increasingly sped up with technological advances that we have little accord with, and it often feels that we are living in a death spiral that is spiralling faster each moment no matter how hard we swim in the other direction.

In order to survive the everyday threat of life, we expect to be shielded from the misery of harms. This expectation is laid out in the charter of human rights that many governments are signatories to whilst conversely finding ways to abrogate the responsibilities that the signing of the charter brings. Society has become a survival of the fittest with each induvial in a fight against the other, competing for resources and hoping for the triumph of having enough money to acquire the basic necessities of life. Could things be any worse?

Life is precarious and the world is a place where precarity lurks everywhere, yet some people, as Judith Butler has pointed out, are so outside of society, so expelled from its functions, that their lives are invisible to the point of not being seen as precarious, not needing protection and not mourned once extinguished. [4] Surely the thing worse then the race to survive is not being in the race at all.

Life is in so many ways brutally grim. Caught in the malevolent grip of capitalist frameworks, we seem to be trapped and sinking fast. However, amongst this bleakness there is a sliver of light, traveling from the past into the future, showing a way out of this horrid state of affairs. This light, illuminating a future of hopeful possibilities, is refracted through the rainbow lens of queerness and shines the loving glow of difference onto the sordid mess of today. Queer- a space of outsideness, a community of care, expelled from society yet not quite invisible, held together through subjective notions of desire, creativity and the transmutation of inner to outer. The queer lens offers an alternative to the same old ways that our current path terminates in.

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Being Queer, Haunting Spaces

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Foucault argues in his thesis, “The History of Sexuality: 1” that the nineteenth century saw the completion of an historical move to hold state power over the human body. With the heterosexual male as the status quo, thus presenting society with a normative model to work from, anything that sat outside of the standard was placed in the position of abnormal. In this way, women were deficient, and their bodies medicalised, while homosexual men were seen as having a perversion in their refusal to conform to the heterosexual male standard.

Foucault goes on to argue that as the human body moved into the clinical arena and its inner and outer parts became pathologized, the social body became situated in what Foucault terms a “deployment of alliances”. The social body became governed by the intricate rules of relationships and what each relationship , or alliance, allowed.

The queer body was definitively outside of the norm. It was deviant but, in its deviousness, it was also conversely loosened from the rules that governed the normative bodies. When the queer body made alliances with other queer bodies, certain activities could be permitted and a community of queerness could be formed. This legacy is still relevant today.

The philosopher, Sarah Ahmed, in her writings on the phenomenology of queerness, describes objects as being sticky- they bring with them their histories, or what has occurred before the object’s arrival in its present place.  Similarly, humans haunt space, we immerse ourselves in a space as we move through it, bringing our past which bought us to our present and pointing ourselves toward the future as we interact with the unknown of what is yet to occur. The movement of objects, and people, is an interaction with time and place. Ahmed goes further to say that sexuality is itself a “spatial formation”. It is an orientation towards something and a description of how a body is sexualized in the actions that are taken through the inhabitation of space. Ahmed sees pervasion, the name that, as Foucault has pointed out, became applied to any sexuality that deviated from heteronormativity, as not just outside of the designated normal standard but as a state that claims  a space pushing against heteronormativity. This space of perversion, or queerness, is almost immediately political. It is an alternative space, a site of difference, of reclamation, of jouissance in the embracing of the turning away from. If we haunt spaces, inhabit them with our interaction with time and place, then the space outside of the usual- the space of perversion, or queerness, is a space also freed from the histories of patriarchal systems and hegemonies. This is a site of blissed potential. 

Bodies are sites of power and desire, of subjugations and social expulsions. In a capitalist framework, bodies are also places of labour- the capitalist body is transformed into the labouring body through the interactions with the power systems of capitalism. Silvia Federici, in her investigation into the capitalist production of labouring bodies, has argued that psychology became an important tool in the drive to create bodies that laboured. Society, organised into hierarchies of power and forms of labouring,  was also aided by the growing ideologies of psychology. When an individual revolted against the role they were allocated, they could be pathologized, a process that served to extinguish the voice of discontent. For an individual belonging to a group already suffering from a lack of power, such as women, specifically the woman of the heteronormative family, life was pre-ordained, and any aberration of this pre-set role was pathologized.  The woman who refused to conform to the role of housekeeper and mother was a deviant- a prostitute, a lesbian, a woman of loose morals or unsound mind. This was a dangerous space to be in and for many women of the previous century who refused to accept their role, the outcome was institutional or individual violence resulting in permanent disability or death. Even personal power was often not enough to shield a woman from state sanctioned violence- John F Kennedy’s sister was lobotomized during an institutional stay and lost the ability to speak, alongside other permanent outcomes.  The cultural trope of the emasculated man can also be tied to this ideology. The working man of the last century was full of machismo- muscled, labouring under the sweat of machinery, he was hard working and uncomplaining. For the male body who was assigned the social role of the labourer, there was no room for difference. The body that didn’t fit this stereotype was automatically defective and defined by their difference in dangerous ways.

The queer body was a place of danger in its refusal to conform but, sitting outside of the predetermined spaces of the heteronormative family, the queer body also held a place that could be safe in its embracing of separateness. The queer body uniquely occupied a place that theorist, Catherine Vitris describes as a “borderlands”- a space sitting on the permitter, a territory of the carnivalesque . [5] Because this carnivalesque space so eloquently throws off the normative social structures and is energised by its self-aware radicalness, it also has the power to become revolutionary. As Vtris says, “the unauthorized, unbounded carnivalesque of queer life creates a permanent liminal space to ferment a revolution against patriarchal totalitarianism”. [6] In the carnivalesque of queer space, what has been signified as grotesque in mainstream culture has the ability to become sublime and externally enforced shame is transformed into laughter, empowerment and joy.

In the queer embracing of the flesh and the use of desire as a driving force of interaction, with the gathering of bodies at night, the exultation of movement through dance and music and the co-opting of often disused spaces to meet, queerness subverts the tropes of the dominant cultural expectations and shines a light in what Vtris sees as the fragile nature of the patriarchy.

Additionally, the carnival has been allowed to remain in hetro-normative societies as a permitted break from the exhaustion of patriarchal control, where the usual players of the patriarchy can roam free. This gives the carnival space the ability to be harnessed by outsider groups as a form of trojan horse, where the usually disallowed or prohibited body can enter the places to which they have traditionally been excluded.

We are formed in language, states feminist historian, Judith Butler. Language has the power to bring people into visibility, it brings the body into the space of sociability. Language can make another visible or invisible and it has a power that can harm beyond the words spoken. In this sense, language is a tool for world building and in the case of queer spaces, language can shape the experiences of queer spaces and how the inhabitants of these spaces interact within them.

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The Ecstasy of Queerness

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The word ecstasy, or ecstatic, as Butler points out, means, in a literal interpretation, to be outside of oneself. [7] We are bounded in society through our social relations, yet we are also unbounded as we are expelled from certain social norms- such as the hetro normative mainstream or perhaps by our friendship groups or even our families. It is in the swaying of binding and unbinding that we find our grief, rage, desire. These intense feelings can build the spaces we create into sites of transformation and change that can have positive impacts in our own queer communities and also in the wider communities that we move through.

When the queer space is also an exhibition space, the power of change is amplified. If we take the idea of language as world building and transpose it to the visual imagery of the exhibition space, we can view the exhibition space as the site of change- an exhibition space has the possibility to act as a space of symbolic imagery, or a place of visual language where concepts are rarefied into signifiers of ideas. Bypassing the spoken word, they can communicate ideas in ways that are freed from the emotive power of language. The exhibition space acts as a site of mnemonics- places where memory is made and retrieved, a complete mnemonic device and a reflection of the mind’s memory mapping process. An exhibition connects object, viewer, place, past and present. It is a site of complexity that has the power to reframe ideas.  When the exhibition space is created with a queer sensibility, there arises the possibility of unravelling the layers of presumption and inserting new perspectives, differing narratives, magical meanings of queerness and alternativity.

One artist working in the arena of art and change is the performance artist, Cassils.   “I believe that art can inspire a culture of change” states Cassils, and to this end they have used their body to create artwork that steadfastly refuses to be silent in the face of an ongoing push against trans and LGTBQI rights. [8]  In their 2017 durational performance, “Pissed” Cassil collected their urine over 200 days, then presented it to the audience. One artwork showed the urine contained in a large glass box, vividly demonstrating the amount of urine that the artist was not able to expel in public due to the removal of non-binary public bathrooms by the then Trump administration in the USA.

Cassil has no doubts about art as a driver of change.” I see being an artist as being a service provider. And I will do whatever it takes to create something that is meaningful and that can make the world a safer and better place for people." [10]

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Queer ways for all

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If the queer sensibility can be a site of change, where the outsider status is a favourable location, then it would suggest that other outsider groups can also become sites of change and transformation.  The Philadelphia based group, The Peoples Paper co-op, is one such organisation. The organisation creates collaborations with artists and woman in the Justice system to amplify the voices of the incarcerated and highlight the discrimination and injustices of incarceration. Women led and woman focused, the group uses art and collaboration to design initiatives to help woman formerly incarcerated. One initiative that has been ongoing since 2018 is the collaboration with the Philadelphia community bail fund in an arts project to design posters which raise funds and awareness for the #ENDcashbail campaign. This campaign recognises that cash bails imprison disproportionately black women and compacts the trauma and discrimination they face. Working with formerly incarcerated women and artists, the campaign creates a unique poster for sale and display.

These organisations fit into the wider feminist movement for Abolitionism, that seeks to end incarceration altogether. The abolition movement has come into prominence recently with the media coverage from the USA of recent deaths in custody, notably the horrific murder in 2020 of George Floyd at the hands of police. This murder bought into focus the violent and often lethal treatment of predominately black peoples by police in America and the problems of the American justice system in general. However, this is not a problem situated only in America. In Australia we have a similar shameful record of judicial violence against Indigenous Australians. In 1991 a Royal Commission was held into the rising number of black deaths in custody. The commission ended with 339 recommendations to be put in place to stop the deaths of Indigenous people in custody. None of the recommendations have been put in place and there have been over 450 more black deaths in custody since the 1991 commission. [12]

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Go Forth and Queer

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Being queer is in many ways a superpower. It is the ability to understand desire and how it relates to selfhood, to know and value difference, to find power in being expelled to the outer, to have a voice that can critique the expectations that are handed down through society and culture and to know the strength that community brings. Being queer is not something that can be taken off or on at will, it is an integral part of being. It is the holding of a space that can be powerful and that power can be shared with the wider community to make change. My queerness is also my trojan horse into mainstream society where I, and other queers, can disrupt and dissemble the dominant conventions that are harmful. I want to agitate the accepted social modes, rumble the noxious institutions, dismantle the systems of control and rummage through the rubble to build a new queer informed world. Lets go and queer the world.

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EMIKO ARTEMIS 2023

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Bibliography

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SETHI, V. 2022. Cassils' 'PISSED' - 200 gallons of urine tank - acquired by Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art [Online]. www.stirworld.com: Stir World. Available: https://www.stirworld.com/see-news-cassils-pissed-200-gallons-of-urine-tank-acquired-by-leslie-lohman-museum-of-art#:~:text=Cassils%20began%20collecting%20every%20drop%20of [Accessed 11/02/2023].

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