Essay / NOWLESSNESS, Temporality
Essay deals with phenomenons of identity, relationships, normalising powers, temporality, queerness, queer art, the Anthropocene, the climate change, the apocalypse etc...The whole essay consists of four chapters which are published separately as a four-part serie.
The term ‘queer’ was originally used as a derogatory expression for homosexual individuals in the late 19th century. It was reclaimed by the LGBTQIA community in 1980s, stripped of its negative connotations and then used to display their pride (and fierceness). The term was also generally used to address something ‘odd’, ‘weird’ and/or ‘non-main- stream’. Today, after the word was linguistically reappropriated and politically reclaimed, we understand ‘queer’ as ‘non-normative’/’as-opposed-to-something’/’out of status quo’. ‘Queer’ represents a paradox within itself since its very task is to challenge binary standards and static definitions. It blurs and deconstructs our assumptions about the world, as well as our place(s) in it. It rejects legacy of dominance and works to explore otherness in all its variety. It is also widely used by LGBTQIA people, who feel an urge to escape traditional gender identities as well as labels for their sexuality – to identify themselves in a broader, more deliberate way. The ‘queer community’ contains all subjects who live their life (at least partly) in opposition to generally promoted cis/hetero-reproductive expectations of the sociopolitical order. By this definition, it is possible to think about the queer umbrella containing not only members of the LGBTQIA community; we can as well include “ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, home- less people, drug dealers, and the unemployed,” by “the way they live (deliberately, accidentally, or out of necessity) during the hours that others sleep and in spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned , and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family.”[1] These are, as well, the meanings I am referring to when using the word ‘queer’ throughout this thesis.
“Eternity is very long, especially towards the end.”[2]
The concept of ‘queer time’ emerged most prominently under the shadow of the AIDS crisis – a new perspective on longevity (and more specifically the ‘individual future’) brought into attention the term of ‘temporality’. Moreover, a ‘queer way of life’ (as Michel Foucault defined it) offered another perspective on our understanding of relationships, maturity and, in general, the structure of an individual lifetime itself. The current socio-political cis/hetero-reproductive capitalist regime is, from its core, based on a strictly linear com- prehension of an individual’s lifetime – we are born, we get married, we reproduce, we die. The time for reproduction is set biologically (for women) and, of course, by moral (bourgeois) standards of the society(ies). The need for reproduction is generally promoted and comprehended as universally natural and desirable. It is a social norm for married couples to accumulate the capital (wealth such as house(s), car(s), financial savings etc.), as well to subordinate their daily routine to the needs of the child (wake up early in the morning, go to sleep early in the evening), as those are the conditions and environment(s) considered appropriate and healthy for the development of the Child. It is long periods of stability that are desired in the ideal vision of the family life. Therefore capital accumulation in combination with physical reproduction (under marital bond) are considered equal to an individual’s success (under capitalism), while non-conforming and non-reproductive life styles are widely understood as a failure. Capitalism sees its homosexuals as ‘a subject that fails to embody the connections between production and reproduction, …as inauthentic and unreal, incapable of proper love and unable to make the appropriate connections between sociality, relationality, family, sex, desire and consumption’.[3]
Despite the fact that toward the end of the first decade of the 21st century we’ve experienced one of the most striking financial crisis with global consequences, that the divorce rates are constantly rising while the overall amount of population is uncontrollably growing and that we are consuming the amount of natural resources that are way over the capacity of the Earth (which I would, personally, brand as major fails), reproductive futurism still reigns in the election campaigns, political interests and discussions for both the right and the left. The non-yet-existent ‘Child’ represents an imaginary embodiment of the future generations that the ‘real’ citizens must take into account, limiting their own personal freedom ‘now’ on behalf of ‘then’. The ‘Child’ serves as a guarantee of an individual ‘immortality’ through biological/material heredity and/or passing of the family name from one generation onto another, as well as it secures the durability and/or stability of the nation(s) as a whole, its(their) culture(s), tradition(s), language(s) etc. for the future. Therefore, heteronormativity as a concept is directly bound to the past through the figure of a parent, while at the same time it projects itself into the future through the figure of a not-yet-existent ‘Child’.
A ‘queer subject’ stands in between heterosexual optivism and its realization.
In heteronormative standards, death and finitude are fundamental essences of queerness, for non-normative(non-reproductive) lifestyle(s) by its(their) very nature. Fighting for proper recognition, acceptance, for equal rights and the possibility to enter national military forces in the end serves as an endorsement, reinforcement, and a confirmation of the rightness of the idea of reproductive futurism. That means the ‘queer community’ should fully embrace all the failure, negativity, non-production, purposelessness, and nonsense, which it already represents anyhow, and refuse the very notion of hope altogether. As Lee Edelman puts it: “…so what is queerest about us, queerest within us, and queerest despite us is this willingness to insist intransitively – to insist that the future stop here.”[4] The challenge for longevity in the ‘queer context’ is then established on several levels – not only stands ‘queer subject’ in direct opposition to the (linear) (successful) lifetime on a basis of an individual, by means of strict rejection of (hetero)normative forces it also stands in opposition to the very concept of the future. ‘Queer time’ is an expression for the present moment, for its exaggerated form and experience, it is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance.”[5]
Thinking about the new conception of time also requires that we come up with new conceptions of space. Contemporary ‘queer theory’ is trying to divide ‘queer spaces’ from their direct relation to places where sexual acts take part, despite the fact their connection to gay or lesbian subjects and subcultures is clear. ‘Queer space’ refers to certain environ- ments in which mostly ‘queer people’ engage – it proposes new understanding of space and its purposes in general, enabled by creation of the ‘queer community(ies)’ within these environments. As Michel Foucault famously noted, the fatal intersection of time and space in the western tradition can’t be denied. For example, in the Middle Ages the space was understood as static (flat Earth theory combined with geocentrism) and hierarchically constituted (supercelestial as opposed to celestial as opposed to terrestrial), with literally everything and everybody fixed in ‘place’ by the ‘higher order’. This perception of space was then disrupted by Galileo, not only because he put it into motion, but mostly by his conception of the ‘infinity’. From that time, any object’s placement became only a point in the trajectory of its movement; “extension was substituted by localization”.[6] In post- modernity, the questions about space have become not only concerned with its capacity (Will there be enough space for the mankind?), but also with the marking, classification and storage of the human element within it. In the current epoch, which is “the epoch of space”, space takes the form of relations for us, while time appears to us only as one of the elements that are spread out around us.
Foucault explains the concept of a ‘queer space’ as a platform for formation of new kinds of experimental relationships between its subjects. Relationships between men have been significantly limited and structured by normalising powers – homophobia and gender stereotypes have basically robbed men of touch. From a very early age, boys are encouraged to just ‘shake it off’ and ‘be tough’, since any expression of weakness and emotionality is considered ‘too feminine’. We are being taught to link gentle touches directly to dating and sexualiaty, thus physical contact between men has been sentenced to take part mostly as an accidental by-product of mostly aggressive team sports. Foucault sees homosexual relationship as a possibility for men to be together outside of institutional relations. This ‘new kind of friendship’ is mostly separated from the ruling normalising forces, even though homosexual culture is not completely detached from power – it functions on a set of (fewer) rules which are being created by the involved subjects themselves. In opposition to social normative forces, these set of rules remains both dynamic and unstable. There- fore, homosexual culture is a place for greater personal freedom with significant effect on forming its subjects’ identities. He refuses the idea of homosexuality as a ‘fixed identity’, arguing that ‘homosexual identity’ (if anything like that exists) has been oppressed by heteronormative standards. This oppression leads homosexual subjects to the task of creating their own subjectivity – an identity that is constituted primarily through their relation(ship)s with others. ‘Queer spaces’ give the subject an opportunity to refuse social normalisation and create its own subjectivity in a collaborative environment. Foucault defines this process as ‘collaborative construction of subjectivity’.
The new concept of friendship, if used in a wider manner across society(ies), would challenge normative ways in which our relationships are being constituted under constant oppression of totalising powers. ‘Experimental relationships’ established around ‘queer spaces’ (as a site where the community engages) in a ‘queer time’ (power relations ruling these relationships, as well as subjectivites, stay flexible and dynamic – temporal), could lead the society at large towards greater freedom – that is through subverting dangerous normalising systems of power relations. As David M. Halperin pointed out: “The future Foucault envisages for us is not exclusively or categorically gay. But it is definitely queer.”[7]
Kotlár, Ľuboš: Untitled (from the series Nowlessness), 2018.