Queering the Non/Human

Myra J. Hird, Myra J. Hird, Noreen Giffney, Myra J. Hird, Noreen Giffney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317072423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What might it mean to queer the Human? By extension, how is the Human employed within queer theory? These questions invite a reconsideration of the way we think about queer theory, the category of the Human and the act of queering itself. This interdisciplinary volume of essays gathers together essays by international pioneering scholars in queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies and science studies who have written on topics as diverse as Christ, the Antichrist, dogs, starfish, werewolves, vampires, murderous dolls, cartoons, corpses, bacteria, nanoengineering, biomesis, the incest taboo, the death drive and the 'queer' in queer theory. Contributors include Robert Azzarello, Karen Barad, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Noreen Giffney, Judith Halberstam, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Myra J. Hird, Karalyn Kendall, Vicki Kirby, Alice Kuzniar, Patricia MacCormack, Robert Mills, Luciana Parisi and Erin Runions.

Chapter 1
How Queer Can You Go? Theory, Normality and Normativity

Claire Colebrook

… no ‘gay liberation movement’ is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes them both to a common Oedipal and castrating stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two noncommunicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of desire (included disjunctions, local connections, nomadic conjunction). [Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 350]

Consider a number of possibilities for what might count as a queer theory: the use of theory (any theory) to expose bias; the criticism of theories themselves for implicit biases; or, a redescription of theory that identifies its orientation as essentially queer. It is this last mode that I wish to pursue in this chapter, and will do so by looking at the ways in which the long-standing model of theoria as a distanced look or regard taken upon an object is intrinsically normalising. Such a model of theory as the imposition of order and judgement on chaos via a transcendent norm of logic has been identified by a number of thinkers as having its origin in Platonism. John Protevi has identified this model as hylomorphic: the ordering of chaotic matter by an external and stable system of reason (Protevi 2001). Luce Irigaray has, following Heidegger, not only criticised the notion of underlying matter (as hypokeimenon) that is then rendered intelligent through representation as subjective (for then matter becomes what it ought to be through the perceiving subject’s act of knowledge); she has also identified such a notion of theory as phallogocentric. That which is other than the self is the medium through which the self comes to know and affect itself (Irigaray 1985). Perhaps the clearest critique of this notion of theoria comes from Martin Heidegger, who argues that the original experience of the world as unfolding and disclosing itself through a time of presencing becomes covered over with the idea of ‘a’ logic which it is, eventually, the task of man to arbitrate (Heidegger 1998, 240). Rather than pursuing Heidegger’s own way beyond this forgetting of the unfolding of Being, I wish to pursue Gilles Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism. This is not because Deleuze manages to move further beyond Plato than Heidegger – rejecting Heidegger’s calls to dwelling, caring and attending to the four-fold – but because Deleuze returns to a higher Platonism (Deleuze 1994, 265).

The reversal of Platonism, for Deleuze, is not the overcoming of a transcendent logic in favour of the primacy of lived experience, but an overturning of experience and the lived in favour of radically inhuman Ideas beyond judgement. This reversed or radical Platonism, I will argue, generates not only a new mode of theory, and a new relation between theory and sexuality, but also a new and positive notion of queerness: not as destabilisation or solicitation of norms, but as a creation of differences that are no longer grounded in either the subject or generating life. To anticipate my conclusion, this would yield different ways of thinking about practices, and different ways of thinking about sexual identities. In the case of practices, rather than examining the actions of subjects against existing regulations – are civil partnerships a reconfiguration of norms or a submission to normality? – we would look at the ways in which bodies enter into relations to produce events, events that transcend those bodies. To use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase from Anti-Oedipus, ‘ask not what it means but how it works’: when faced with a practice try to determine its range of potentiality in the future, not its relation to the present system (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 206). In the case of sexual identities, rather than thinking of masculinity and femininity as constitutive norms to which bodies submit, we can see the ways in which bodies play with the ‘pure predicates’ of sexuality (Deleuze 1990, 186): in the case of trans-gender and trans-sexual bodies, such bodies may at one and the same time, experience their bodies as female, dress as male, and have sexual relations with partners who are similarly ‘counter-actualising’ or enjoying sexuality in its ideal and inhuman form (Deleuze 1990, 238).

If we think of normal theory as the establishment of a paradigm or norm for thinking which criticises the unthinking absurdities, illusions and stupidities of everyday thinking, then Deleuze’s theory is, or aims to be, queer in its liberation from a normative ‘image of thought’ (Deleuze 1994, 131). It does not follow, however, that such a queer theory would be a form of relativism, or the use of ‘a’ theory (Deleuze) by a group that takes itself to be the exemplification of libratory sexual practice; on the contrary, as a radical Platonism and a commitment to taking thought beyond itself to Ideas, Deleuze presents thought with the challenge of a radical transcendentalism. Before pursuing that option I want to explore the ways in which thought approaches the queer: how can thinking, from its base of norms and recognition (or what it takes itself to be), approach the queer?

One could use theory to isolate and criticise biases and prejudices within putatively neutral positions and paradigms. Not only would there be nothing queer about theory, there would be no relation between theoretical paradigms and one’s political objectives. One could criticise heterosexual or normalising assumptions from a liberal, deconstructive, communitarian or even psychoanalytic point of view. Liberalism, for example, defining itself ideally as a pure formalism devoid of any conception of the good life, would necessarily be opposed to any political or social system that discriminated against persons on the basis of some unacknowledged presupposition regarding personhood.1 Deconstruction could, in turn, criticise such a liberalist ideal of pure formalism by arguing that there would always be an exemplary or privileged supplement in any system that could not be rendered transparent by the system.2 It is possible to imagine this deconstructive orientation to metaphysics’ unthought or radically stylistic figurations as being of service to a politics that wished to expose normative and normalising conceptions of the self at the heart of figures of supposedly ‘pure thought’. While psychoanalysis from its inception bears an originally normalising bias, either by positing the Oedipus complex as the transcendental frame for the constitution of subjectivity, or the phallus as the signifier of presence, it can nevertheless be used against its own assumptions. Again, this would be possible only through a critical manoeuvre, where instead of placing a different notion of the body or subject at the heart of psychoanalysis, the queer theorist would open the genealogy of the psychic subject to permutations not recognised by the original heterosexual frame.3

The second possibility for queer theorising would deploy the notion of queerness in a stronger sense, not only arguing that certain positions are narrowed by an overly normalising conception of the subject or life, but would go on to point out the ways in which the very structure of a certain notion of theory was normalising. One might contrast here, for example, the difference between Judith Butler’s early criticism of psychoanalytic Oedipalism with Deleuze and Guattari’s criticism of the Freudian subject. Butler accepts the structural premises of psychoanalyis – the constitution of the subject in relation to others, the fantasy frame of the self and the other’s body, the vicissitudes of the libido in relation to the structures of desire through which the self is constituted as human, and (most importantly) the originally subjected nature of the subject:4 one becomes a self only through abandonment of potentialities not allowed by the heterosexual matrix, and exists in a relation of mourning, melancholia and negativity (even if that which the self mourns is constituted after the event and fantasmatically). For Butler, then, there is nothing intrinsically normalising about psychoanalysis per se, and so a queer theorist can at one and the same time criticise and deploy Freud’s corpus. For Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, it is that negative notion of desire and anxiety – the very structure of psychoanalysis as a theory – which remains tied to normalising notions of ‘man’ (1983, 348). For Freud it is anxiety which effects repression: the subject, faced with a world of intensity and affect, must delimit and organise the libido into a state of equilibrium or constancy. And we can see that notion of the very economy of desire in Butler’s work and its influence on queer theory, where the becoming-human of the self occurs through a process of recognition which must necessarily abandon and repress desire’s more fluid potentialities.

For Deleuze, the notion of theory that begins from the conditions for the possibility of a constituted and normative subject, is not only intrinsically bourgeois in its ideology of placing thought within a position of compromise and contradiction. It is also committed to a normalising metaphysics (Deleuze 1994, 283–84). The psychoanalytic model of a pool of energy which is then structured by attachments to desired objects – as opposed to an intensive life that harbours tendencies towards expansive and creative desires – can only produce the man of common sense and good sense. If subjects are understood as having been effected from a general and undifferentiated ‘life’, understood along the lines of nineteenth-century thermodynamics, then the relation between the queer and the normal would be entirely conventional. Were we to pursue a queer theory along these lines we would have to argue that queerness would operate as a criticism of presupposed but unavowed norms. It is because there is a heterosexual matrix that constitutes and delimits subjective possibilities that we could pay attention to those modes of performance and enactment that disturbed normative structures. Our theory would not be queer, for we might well be in agreement with the general structure of subjects being constituted through social norms and structures; the queerness would lie in the attention we paid to those supposedly failed or extrinsic modes of subjectivity, to which we may accord a privileged transgressive value. Our approach would be queer only in its difference and distinction from effected models of the subject. Such a theory might also appear to be ‘posthuman’, for rather than beginning from the man of reason or the subject of phenomenology who synthesises given experiences into some coherent whole, we would begin from a general pool of force, life or energy that – through action or performance – constitutes subjects. Those subjects may, through misrecognition and metalepsis take themselves to be originators of the act. Theory would set itself the task of demystifying such illusions of agency, demonstrating the ways in which everything begins with performance, act and relationality – the substance or true ‘sex’ of the subject being constituted ex post facto. (I will argue, in the sections that follow that this seemingly post-human theoretical approach remains entirely subjective, and still implicated in a highly normalising ethics).

In principle, then, it would be a mistake to use the term ‘queer theory’, for what we would really be doing would be queer studies. Queer studies would be related to gay or lesbian studies, in its criticism of the assumed normality of heterosexuality, but would go beyond such identified groups to consider the fragility of identity and its excessive character in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘molar politics’. Queer studies might appear to be concerned with molecular or minor forms of politics: not the contestation of paradigms from the point of view of recognisable (even if marginalised) groupings, but the interrogation of constituted subjects from the point of view of a life or desire not yet identifiable as this or that specifiable form, a ‘people to come’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 106). I would argue, though, that the true challenge of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought lies in its difference from critical models, and in its transformation of the ways in which we understand theoretical relations, and relationality in general.

The third possibility would be 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 theorise. Only then would our theory be queer; it would not be the use of theory for queer politics, nor would it be an interrogation of our theoretical premises or figures regarding implicit normative and normalising assumptions. Instead we would shift the ‘image of thought’ – mind constituted as an effected point within life – to thought without an image: would it be possible to think of the emergence of qualities, potentialities or Ideas that effect an aleatory point? This would not be a position of judgement or critique, but a virtual line of sense. If life can be thought of not as substance from which predicates are then differentiated, performed or effected, but as a plane of force that allows for the creation of relatively stable points, we can think of theory as the creation of a potential which is no longer the power of this or that aspect of life (this or that body) so much as the thought of the transcendental potentiality of life as such, life liberated from any normative image. This is why sexuality would come to the fore in the task of new thinking. If it is the case that our metaphysics – our image of what it is to think – is effected from the bodies around us, or the ways in which we ‘fold’ images around our own imagined egoism, then a radical metaphysic of transcendental empiricism would free sexuality from organised bodies. The sexual body would not be ‘a’ body constituted in a social field, but a ‘body without organs’ – all those predicates partial objects, affects and perceptions from which we are composed.

To understand how theory as such might be ‘queered’ we can distinguish between two senses of the word ‘queer’: the first would be primarily critical and would concern a difference or distinction from a constituted norm or centre. The second sense, which I wish to pursue here, concerns a critique of substance and subjectivism, and requires a reference back to what I referred to as the thermodynamic model of desire that underpins psychoanalysis and bourgeois ideology. A theory would be queer if it challenged the supposed neutrality or undifferentiated nature of life. Queerness would not concern deviation from constituted limits, nor even the acknowledgment – following deconstruction – that the condition for any constituted and repeatable identity is a structure of iteration which bears the necessary possibility of disruption. The possibility of a genuinely queer theory begins, I would argue, only when we challenge the normative image of life which underpins the Western image of theoria. Perhaps unexpectedly it is Platonism in its most radical sense which would allow us to rethink theory beyond its vitalist normativity. In order to make sense of this claim I want first to look at the ways in which the thermodynamic model of life is normalising and grounded upon an image of thought as good sense and common sense.

According to Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition there is an originally violent, disruptive and impersonal potential in Plato that is immediately covered over by normative images of the thinking and theorising subject (Deleuze 1994, 244). What does it mean to theorise? If everyday thinking is directed towards constancy, recognition and efficiency, it achieves this structure through a certain synthesis of time: experience is lived as continuous, and a self is constituted as the ground for that living and open-ended continuity. Such recognition and order for experience was deemed to be possible, according to Plato, only because there existed Ideas that were beyond the lived experience of the self. Such Ideas could not be considered as concepts or categories imposed by subjects onto experience for the sake of creating coherence, and were radically impersonal and radically alien to any sense of time as a coherent and lived sequence. Within Plato’s own thought this radical nature of the Ideas is, however, immediately domesticated; for instead of considering a memory in which an Idea could be given to thought that was not thought’s own, and that was at odds with the lived order of the world, Plato introduced a moral distinction between those experiences that truly reflected the Ideas which they actualised, and the simulated and dangerous doubles which bore a fragile and unreliable relation to the Ideas which were their pure potentiality. Deleuze’s overturning of Platonism is a return to the Idea: it is not a liberation of life from all order, distinction, difference and essence. Instead, it is a liberation of essence and distinction from the lived world.5 All our actual experiences that are lived as experiences of this or that identifiable and specified form need to be understood not as constructed and arbitrary impositions on an otherwise undifferentiated life, a life that is only known as lived and ordered; rather, actuality needs to be understood as the actualisation of an Idea, but the Idea does not – as it would in Plato – issue in a proper form. For the Idea is nothing other than a potentiality for difference, a difference that is given and lived as simulation of an Idea that can never be given as such: this is not because the Idea exists in some clear from that our understanding or world can never achieve. On the contrary, it is the distinctness of the Idea, its absolutely differential nature – its capacity to make differences – that means that it can only be experienced as obscure. Once something is clear – recognisable as this or that delimited and perceived object – it loses its distinction. Theory, then, is not the adjudication of this lived world according to the extent to which it properly incarnates an Idea; theory is the intuition of our lived and actual reality as simulacrum, as a becoming-clear or identifiable of an Idea. In turn, once we see the given as the actualisation of an Idea which loses its distinction by becoming-actual, we can then take the next step of theorisation which would be ‘becoming-imperceptible’: can we try to think of those movements, distinctions and potentialities which make our sensibly given world open to being sensed but which themselves – as Ideas – are only given as simulations?

How then do we move from this level of abstraction to queer theory? We can begin by going back to the thermodynamic model, which Deleuze aligns both with bourgeois ideology and good sense and common sense. If we follow the modern paradigm and argue that subjectivity is not some natural and transcendent norm but is constituted through the synthesis of relations, then we seem to have demystified all notions of a grounding normality. The subject is not the foundation of experience but is effected through experience. There would be nothing natural or insistent about the structure of the self or concepts. Indeed, each concept would be – as constituted in relation to an otherwise undifferentiated ‘life’ – an essential compromise and limitation. The subject of such an anti-metaphysical or post-foundational understanding would bear a number of features. It would, Deleuze insists, be thoroughly at home with contradiction: any constituted concept could never master or express the general life which it represents, and so one would have to deal with the essentially limited and conflictual nature of the terms and figures of our theory (Deleuze 1994, 337). Further, such a subject would be oriented towards judgement, rather than action: aware of the essentially provisional nature of our grasp of our selves and our world, we would always be compelled to ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface: The Open by Michael O’Rourke
• Foreword: Companion Species, Mis-recognition, and Queer Worlding by Donna J. Haraway
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Queering the Non/Human
• 1 How Queer Can You Go? Theory, Normality and Normativity
• 2 (Con)founding ‘the Human’: Incestuous Beginnings
• 3 Queer Apocal(o)ptic/ism: The Death Drive and the Human
• 4 Queering the Beast: The Antichrists’ Gay Wedding
• 5 Queering the Un/Godly: Christ’s Humanities and Medieval Sexualities
• 6 Unnatural Predators: Queer Theory Meets Environmental Studies in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
• 7 The Werewolf as Queer, the Queer as Werewolf, and Queer Werewolves
• 8 The Face of a Dog: Levinasian Ethics and Human/Dog Co-evolution
• 9 ‘I Married My Dog’: On Queer Canine Literature
• 10 Animal Trans
• 11 Lessons From a Starfish
• 12 Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Queer Nonhuman
• 13 The Nanoengineering of Desire
• 14 Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering
• 15 Necrosexuality
• Afterword: An Unfinished Conversation About Glowing Green Bunnies
• Index