garfield

Unsummoned

In one of Franz Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, he imagines different variations on the story of Abraham. His final re-imagining of the tale is also the most tragic:

“An Abraham who should come unsummoned! It is as if, at the end of the year, when the best student was solemnly about to receive a prize, the worst student rose in the expectant stillness and came forward from his dirty desk in the last row because he had made a mistake of hearing, and the whole class burst out laughing.”

What if, Kafka asks, the call that was meant for Abraham had reached the ears of other, unworthy Abrahams? Would these Abrahams who “should come unsummoned” be right to sacrifice their own children? After all, how are they to know the call was not meant for them? How do we decide who God does or doesn’t speak to?

Human sacrifice shows up in two of White Christianity’s foundation myths. The first, is the Christian version of the Binding, which does not tolerate ambiguity the way Jewish readings such as Kafka’s do, but rather identifies sacrifice with Christ and therefore sees in their White Isaac a prefiguration of the Word. The second is the foundational myth of colonialism, especially on the American continent. White Christianity was born from colonialism and has participated in it for as long as it has existed (that’s where the “White” bit comes in). Among colonialism’s multitude of justifications, depicting indigenous people as “savages” is nearly essential, and this depiction often emphasises violent practices such as human sacrifice.

From these two foundational myths, of the Word’s inarguable supremacy and of indigenous people’s unfettered savagery, the answer to our question, how do we decide who God speaks to, becomes clear. Today’s white Christians, when the Binding of Isaac is described as human sacrifice, are quick to offer context: it is only a parable, after all, and it is a shadow of a very distant time. No such context is afforded to indigenous people, who are still absurdly called upon to disavow their ancestors’ practices as if it were a pressing contemporary issue. The right to be contextualised is a function of being spoken to by God.

In his 2017 book, James R. Martel uses the word “misinterpellated” to describe Kafka’s unsummoned Abraham. Interpellation is the process by which we are called into existence as subjects. For White Christianity, indigenous people are subjects in the sense that they are the property of White Christian sovereignty, whereas White Christians (and Abraham is, in the White Christian imagination, himself a White Christian) are subjects in the sense that they are free, thinking and feeling agents. The sacrifices carried out by indigenous people are proof of their savage nature, while Abraham’s sacrifice is an example of his virtuous struggle with his faith as a White Christian subject.

Martel also sees Haitian revolutionaries as misinterpellated subjects: by turning the French Declaration of the Rights of Man against their colonists, and claiming the universal freedom and equality which was meant only for white Frenchmen for themselves, Haitian revolutionaries effectively chose that God (or in this case, the Declaration) spoke to them too, and acted upon this choice. Decolonisation is inseparable from this claim for active subjecthood.

Such a claim for active subjecthood naturally complements a different picture of sacrifice. One which is not carried out because it is asked of us by God, but because we ask it of ourselves. The sort of sacrifice which involves putting our own life and well-being on the line to defend the lives and well-being of those who are more vulnerable than us. The only place to begin such work is by recognising the right to context, to active subjecthood, to being summoned of those vulnerable people, the subjects of colonialism.

A Review of Females, by Andrea Long Chu (Verso, October 2019)

One of the few things I can say for certain about Andrea Long Chu’s Females is that its author really wanted to write a book. Much of the writing in this pamphlet is extremely impressive: sharp, terse, witty. At its best, it communicates a breathless enthusiasm for the act of writing, one which is too often lacking in nonfiction. But, if it is clear that Chu wanted to write a book, it isn’t so obvious that she knew quite what book to write, or what she was writing it for. Perhaps the most charitable reading one could offer of Females is that it’s an autobiography. But as a piece of life-writing, it is, at best, elliptical. It tells us that it began as an essay about Valerie Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, and it has some interesting things to say about Up Your Ass. In fact, the passages that discuss Solanas and her work are by far the most stimulating. But, as a work of literary criticism, its lack of focus prevents it from saying anything of substance about the material it discusses. The last option remaining, unfortunately, is to read Females as a work of “theory” — gender theory, or political theory, or philosophy — or, even worse yet, a manifesto. It has the misfortune of being structured like, and sometimes even sounding like, a text that makes claims about the nature of reality. It begins with its thesis statement, a statement which is repeated, defined, expanded, iterated upon. Sometimes, an attempt is even made to provide evidence for it. “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Before I discuss the precise nature of this claim and the evidence offered to support it, a few objections must be addressed. The book’s blurb describes it as “genre-defying”, and Chu occasionally refers to how “far-fetched” and “tendentious” her thesis is. Surely, the exploration of the idea, the literary exercise, the aesthetic experience, this is what matters, not the truthfulness of the argument. This, I would be inclined to agree with, if the author of Females did not specifically deny it. “Jokes are always serious”, writes Chu. Drawing a direct comparison between herself and Solanas, she asserts that they “share […] a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end”. Solanas, infamously, revealed herself to be dead serious about what she wrote. It follows that Chu must be as well. And a claim such as “everyone is female, and everyone hates it” is one which is worth taking seriously. As I’ve mentioned, Chu is a good writer, and her argument is made strenuously and assertively enough that it has the potential to persuade. But persuade this reviewer, it did not. In a pivotal passage, Chu defines what she means by “female”.

“I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. […] To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. […] When I talk about females, I am not referring to biological sex, though I’m not referring to gender, either. I’m referring to something that might as well be sex, the way that reactionaries describe it (permanent, unchanging, etc.), but whose nature is ontological, not biological. Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.”

As painful as it is for me to do, I quote this passage at length because it is the single most important (literally, the “defining”) moment of her argumentation. Some readers might find this definition fluid, perhaps even compelling. But, unfortunately for Chu, and perhaps for myself, I have received some amount of philosophical training. I know that “something whose nature is ontological” and “a universal existential condition” are not the same thing. In fact, I know that “universal” and “existential” do not really belong next to each other, especially not in a sentence like the one Chu wrote. I know that, if there is a “one and only structure of human consciousness”, it is neither “ontological” nor “universal existential”. These terms, as they appear in Females, are absolutely meaningless. They occur only as set dressing, their accumulation serving to give the appearance of philosophical substance. In addition, I know that the idea that we are irreversibly at the whim of the desires of another is not one that Chu came up with. It is clearly an iteration upon Levinas’s encounter with the Other, Sartre’s être-pour-autrui, Heidegger’s Mitsein, Hegel’s Anerkennung. While it is not my contention that Chu should have read all of these writers, I do think that it’s not unreasonable to suggest that before writing a book about this topic, she might have enquired whether other people have written about it before. In fact, I sincerely hope that she’s read Hegel; she wrote a whole article about him. Perhaps Chu is avoiding engaging with these male authors because they serve only to elide the gendered framing that she is advancing. And yet, their writings on this specific topic manage to be less misogynistic than Chu’s book, because they often resist the temptation to identify submission entirely with femaleness. They thus helpfully disprove Chu when she justifies her decision to “continue to refer to [this condition] with an obviously gendered term like females” by claiming that “everyone already does”. Not that said disproving was needed: it is plainly ridiculous to justify the perpetuation of bigotry with the fact that said bigotry already exists. Having thus shown any claim Females could make to being a philosophical text to be utterly groundless, we come to the nature of this pamphlet as a work of political theory, specifically gender theory. Here, things look even bleaker. Females’ use of its titular term is only the beginning of its many acts of political irresponsibility. Most defensible, perhaps, is Chu’s use of the terms “spade” and “sissy”, whose slur-adjacent nature she acknowledges in passing. Much more egregious is her use of Gigi Gorgeous’s deadname, and a passage in which she uses he/him pronouns to describe Gorgeous before her transition, with no apparent concern with whether Gorgeous would approve of being written about in such terms. Again, this passage could perhaps have passed as inoffensive if it did not occur in the shadow of Females’ greatest irresponsibility. If you were to read this pamphlet without paying too much attention, and thus missed its single mention of nonbinary people, you would be forgiven for thinking that Chu believes that the only types of people in existence are cis women, trans women, and cis men. Trans men are not mentioned in Females, not once. That a trans person would dare to write an entire pamphlet dedicated to claiming that “everyone is female”, and not for a second consider that there are many people to whom such an imposition of femaleness has caused immeasurable harm, is beyond comprehension. It is ethically abhorrent. What’s more, what little Females has to say about gender, apart from being stated in repulsive terms, is neither novel nor interesting. It appears that Chu’s target readership is young internet users, judging by the space she dedicates to discussing the insufficiency and hollowness of such statements as “your gender is valid” and “gender is socially constructed”. These are hardly the core tenets of gender theory; they make for very low-hanging fruits. The times where Chu comes closest to making an actual argument for her central claim are equally flat and unimpressive.

“gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of others. […] You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance. You do not get to consent to yourself — a definition of femaleness.”

A passage such as this one might, again, impress someone who has never read or heard of gender theory up to this point. Unfortunately, this is little more than a concise summary of the introduction to Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, with the notable difference that Butler manages to discuss the tensions at the heart of asking for one’s gender to be socially recognised without Chu’s irresponsible, tortuous, and unsound use of the term “femaleness”. And this is really the heart of the problem: Chu is really bad at writing about gender. Sheer incompetence is the only explanation for a text like this. One final example. In a passage about incels, Chu argues that their theory of the feminisation of the Western male is in fact an accidental revelation of their inherently “female”, desire-dependent nature. It should be plain to even an inexperienced reader that this is a dismal line of argument. Incels theorise that their true (male) nature has been masked by the feminisation process of a culture dominated by feminist interests. Chu argues instead that masculinity is a mask under which incels are attempting to hide their true (female) nature. Neither side offers any actual evidence for their claims about the true nature of the Western man, whether male or female. With such a standard of argument, when Chu begins a sentence with “if everyone is female — and I’m hoping you’re starting to believe that they are —” the bathos is so overwhelming as to become hilarious. Females is very enjoyable at times. Sometimes, it is even thought-provoking. But the thoughts it provokes only lead one to realise that this is a book that utterly fails to justify its own existence. In the end, it is a book that says very little, and what it does say is wrong, uninspiring, and harmful.

The Chorus of Somebody Told Me: A Close Reading

Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend That I had in February of last year It's not confidential, I've got potential

The first thing to note about this chorus and the question mark we might call its meaning is that the trans reading of these four lines is not far-fetched, is not ‘too deep’, or phantasmal. It is the single most obvious meaning of these four lines. This chorus does not have a trans subtext, it has a trans text. That is not to say that the text is concerned with a transgender person. It seems rather to be concerned with the possibility of transition. Blurring the lines between gender is not something that this chorus is ‘interested’ in doing or that it ‘might’ be doing. It is the first thing that it does. Before this chorus is about anything else, it is about gender fluidity. Taken as a textual object, this chorus makes use of verse lineation to multiply its potential readings. The opening clause ‘Well somebody told me’ qualifies the grammatical sentence which makes up the first three lines, so that the assertion made by this sentence is put in quotation marks, and thus coloured by the possibility of inexactitude, if not complete falsity. What’s more, these syntactical quotation marks inflect the sentence as it goes on: ‘you had’ would not be in the past tense if it wasn’t for that opening clause. When we encounter gender in this chorus, we therefore encounter it within a socially mediated discursive field. The ‘boy’-ness or ‘girl’-ness of the person in question occurs in the speech of people looking at them — gender is in the eye of the beholder, in this song. Then, the song takes on three different meanings in quick succession. These meanings are created by the pauses in between the vocalist’s delivery which are replicated in text by the line breaks. Let’s walk through these three meanings:

Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend

First meaning: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with a man.

Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend

Second meaning: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with an effeminate man, or with a butch woman, or with a nonbinary person.

Well somebody told me you had a boyfriend Who looked like a girlfriend That I had in February

I cut the line off at ‘February’ because the word is, in The Killers’ recording, dragged out for a remarkably long amount of time, so that there is effectively a pause after that word. The third meaning is therefore: the woman the speaker is attempting to seduce is reportedly in a relationship with the speaker’s ex-girlfriend, or the speaker’s ex-partner who transitioned and now presents as a man, or who performs another mode of genderfluidity which allows them to occupy the role of ‘girlfriend’ in ‘February’ and of ‘boyfriend’ in the present of the song. The reading of these lines which posits a full-blown transition is strengthened a little bit by the delayed end of the third line: ‘of last year’, which emphasises the timespan between the moment when the anonymous person was a ‘girlfriend’ and when they were a ‘boyfriend’. But, just as the gap between these moments is widened by this addition, the syntactical structure of the lines narrows it by putting the present-tense (masculine) presentation of the anonymous person before their past-tense (feminine) presentation. Instead of a clear meaning, these first three lines leave us with only a clear sense of fluidity. Fluidity, therefore, offers us a way into the final line of this chorus:

It’s not confidential, I’ve got potential

‘It’s not confidential’, that is to say, it is publicly known. That is to say, perhaps, it is publicly made — much in the way that gender is, as this song has previously established. ‘I’ve got potential’: I posses the ability to become what I am not already. Another way of phrasing this line would therefore be: ‘It’s a social fact, that I could become different.’ In the chorus’s final moment, one which is distinguished from the rest by its syntactical detachment as a standalone sentence, and thus emphasised as a conclusion, the socially mediated gender fluidity of the anonymous third party is projected back onto the speaker, who realises the full extent of their fluid possibilities.

'It's My Birthday': Aesthetic Considerations On A Piece Of Serialised Multimedia Online Networking Artistic Production

In her book, 'Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting' (2012), Sianne Ngai argues ‘that these three aesthetic categories, for all their marginality to aesthetic theory and to genealogies of postmodernism, are the ones in our current repertoire best suited for grasping how aesthetic experience has been transformed by the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.’ And if we are to respond to and to examine the response to a contemporary online phenomenon, the aesthetic categories Ngai proposes are much more likely to be of use to us than the Beautiful, or the Sublime. The online phenomenon in question is, of course, the ‘birthday bit’ by citrustwee, alternatively known as Evelien, or Eve. Through her accounts on the Fediverse under the username @citrustwee, she has for the past few months cultivated a habit of, every day, posting a variant of ‘it’s my birthday, give me boosts’. However, as we shall see over the course of this essay, while the late capitalist aesthetic categories of the cute, the zany, and the interesting are all at play in what might be tentatively referred to as a piece of serial art, citrustwee plays with these categories to subvert and reverse them, in an attempt to simultaneously reproduce and expand the field of aesthetic experience permitted by ‘the hypercommodified, information-saturated, performance-driven conditions’ of creating as a large-scale account on a social media network under late capitalism. Of Ngai’s three categories, the cute is most obviously at play in the Birthday Series. On the fediverse, the most prominent component of any account’s aesthetic is its avatar, which is repeated next to every one of that account’s posts. Evelien’s avatar (Figure 1) depicts her in a style which is evidently influenced by the Japanese ‘kawaii’ style. This aesthetic, ‘organized around a small, helpless, or deformed object, that foregrounds the violence in its production as such’ is thus highly determining of the look and feel of Evelien’s accounts, and is, in addition, used and repurposed by her in her posts, for example when she uses the emoticon ‘uwu’, which has become emblematic of the kawaii aesthetic. As Ngai demonstrates, cuteness is not merely an aesthetic of the small, or even an expression of vulnerability. Cuteness is articulated within the context of tension between our competing instincts to protect the cute being, and to exploit its helplessness. There is something dark and threatening about every expression of cuteness, and especially about kawaii representations. Citrustwee exploits this tension with her Birthday Series. Her demands for boosts are not dissimilar from the cynical ‘clout-chasing’ associated with the culture of profit-making social media platforms such as Twitter or YouTube. They deliberately evoke a commodified and profit-driven approach to social media, one which prioritises the accumulation of followers or, in this case, boosts, over the creation of socially valuable content or the formation of genuine relationships with other users. However, this cynical, almost instinctively repulsive demand, emphasised by the imperative ‘give me boosts’, is paired with a simple affirmation: ‘it’s my birthday’. What does it mean, in the 21st century, on the internet, under later capitalism, for it to be one’s birthday? ‘Birthday’ is made up, of course, of two words: birth, and day. But what’s is birth, and what is day?

Perhaps it’s time we took a step back.

One of the most popular ‘happy birthday’ songs in the Anglosphere is Stevie Wonder’s appropriately titled ‘Happy Birthday’. ‘Happy Birthday’ was written in order to promote the establishment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday as a national holiday in the United States of America. Today, it is widely listened to and sang to celebrate the birthday of one’s family or friends or self. A song which was written to promote a specific socio-political cause and celebrate the memory of an exceptional activist has become nothing more than another piece of uninspiring background music, just as Martin Luther King Jr.’s own image has been sanitised, and commodified, and put at the service of our hypercommodified world, his speeches cut and pasted onto car commercials, his legacy reduced to a few soundbites repurposed to fortify the values of Western liberal democracies.

Perhaps it’s time we stepped back a little further.

John Cage tells us, in his ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1959):

What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.

More than any other, the experience of being born is snatched away from us at the first opportunity. The ritualised repetition of the ‘day’ of one’s birth (already one step removed from the event of the birth) is less an attempt to reclaim, reconnect with, or relive this event, than it is a naked admission of the impossibility of such an operation. Birthdays are the days which declare most loudly to us ‘I, too, will pass’. Every single one of our birthdays is marked by this, the fact of both its singularity and its inevitable transience. It is true of every single one of our birthdays, of course, that we will only get one of them. But this also applies to every other day, or moment, of our lives. We will only have one 2nd of February 2019. We only had one 1st of February 2019. It is this paradox at the heart of the very concept of a birthday which Citrustwee reclaims and reverses. Rather than stage for us a performance of a birthday which proclaims its own difference even in the face of its obvious sameness, Citrustwee performs the birthday precisely as a self-conscious performance, and thus something inherently reproducible. For beyond its obvious formal properties, is not the defining characteristic of performance this marriage of uniqueness and reproducibility? Every performance of a play is inherently transient and unique, but it is also inherently a copy of an untraceable original, it is already a repetition.

All of this, of course, has been nothing but beating around the bush.

And what’s in the bush is that every iteration of a repeated pattern is unique. If each of Citrustwee’s birthday posts had been identical (which they haven’t), the thirteenth post would still have been different from the twelfth, by virtue of being the thirteenth post. In other words, the repetition of the joke fundamentally alters the joke. The joke becomes the repetition of the joke. Which is to say that the joke becomes fundamentally autonymous; it signifies itself, declares its own performativity. If the reappropriation of Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’, and its incorporation into America’s white culture is tragic, it is a tragedy of predestination. Wonder’s project was always incorporation, normalisation, let us be blunt: assimilation. What is a national holiday if not the flattening out of the features of that which is being celebrated into a universalised opportunity to celebrate the institution that grants the holiday, in this case: liberal democracy. No matter the intention behind it, the demand to turn Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday into a national holiday will always involve the reduction of Martin Luther King Jr. to the single least remarkable thing about him: his birthday. For is there anything more ordinary than to be born? And yet, even this, the one thing all human beings have in common, that regardless of the precise method of delivery, our lives begun, at some point, somewhere, even this most commonplace of events is obscured, its fleshiness, its wetness, its painfulness, disappeared under the poor approximation for a birth that is a birth day. Rather than situate us within a general trajectory of a ‘lifetime’, what our birthdays do first and foremost is situate us within the specific trajectory of the day that it is. Never more than on our birthday do we think, it’s ten hours into my birthday, only fourteen hours of my birthday left, thirteen, twelve, ten…

If our lives are a stream of piss, our birthdays are kidney stones that feel like they last much longer than they really do.

When we boost a Citrustwee birthday post, what are we doing really? Are we obeying an order? Doing someone a favour? Voicing our amusement? Acknowledging recognition? Performing a near-automated task? Mocking our followers in tandem with her? Greeting an old friend? Reaffirming our inclusion in a circle of knowing insiders? Or just wishing her a happy birthday?

The answer is, of course, all and none or one of these at the same time.

The Birthday Series uses time and memory as its medium to create a formal aesthetic event which is startling for both its essential simplicity and the multiplicity of the responses it elicits. Like any serial artwork, it has the potential never to end, and our own ongoing journey as its audience reflects this potential. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Birthday Series, by its very nature, will never end. Its potential for infinity is already realised in its original unfinished — and unfinishable — form.

2 February 2019, The Fediverse, im gay