By Sára Mezei, Junior Researcher
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
– Song of Myself, Walt Whitman (2017 [1892])
I love this quote so much; the clarity of how it points toward a position that I find so challenging to take, as it requires immense effort of unlearning. These past months, my work revolved around learning to understand an anxious amount of queerness, prompted by the proposal I made for my JR application. Through queer negativity, failure, and pessimism, I explored what a continuous turning-away practice (from futurity, from dominant narratives, etc.) might entail so that we may learn the joys “to live and die well with each other in a thick present” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1).
These past months, I had the chance to be around people, many part of the ETHOS Lab, who helped and kindly oriented me to a questioning practice through queer theory. I spent an anxious amount of time listening to both internal and some external voices on what kind of actions I assume I should take as someone with a design background and part of a critical feminist methods lab during 2024-2025. During this time, I decided not to rush into practice (or activities we often associate with practice work in design), and instead, I turned towards theory and slowed down to pay attention to routines that animate my ideas around how I should be working. For this, I kept Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (2011, p. 614) advice for students by “read[ing] harder when the text seems too hard to read . . . just keep reading, letting the new language wash over [us] until it becomes familiar.” Getting familiar with the language that seems odd at first requires, as with any learning, a “leap of faith,” as Rane Willerslev and Christian Suhr (2018) quote Søren Kirkegaard. That is, a practice of a kind of speculation in our understanding of knowledge. For Dennis Atkinson (2022, p. 1) interpreting Alfred North Whithead, if the practice of a leap of faith is successful, “then new understandings of the world, of the practice from which we leapt, will be formed. Such leaps therefore involve a trust and a risk that the ground to which we return will meet us. [However, this is more complex than it sounds, as] the ground that receives our leap will not be the same as that which we leapt from.”
While the text is personal and thereby specific, I wanted to take the time and share it in hopes it helps you think in your context about what knowledges you might want to leap from and explore how such a leap reorganizes the ways you think, act, and relate in the new ground that receives you. I hope the affection I am writing these lines with overflows this page (as most things do overflow when trying to keep them in rectangular silos).
In this blog post, I want to share some thoughts from the past few months’ unlearning process. They are fragments, and in discussion with some of the materials that prompted me to think. During this text, I try to introduce the concepts I am working with briefly; however, it took me some time to understand their language, during which I likely grew also blind to the ways in which they might be challenging to follow at first hearing. I will do my best to include some brief elaborations or point towards literature where writers claim their concepts tie back into or are, as well, in dialogue with. This way, I am sharing these materials if you are interested in them; luckily, most are available freely online or sit on the bookshelf of the ETHOS Lab.
my logic ruled by the binary
What I found hardest in the past months is paying attention to things I consent to without question, driven by a binary logic. That is, the unquestioned acceptance of certain ideas based on them latching onto (or me tying them to) concepts I agree with. Personally, for me, this challenge emerged from my attitude when proposing my JR project and the inherent futurity animating my objectives articulated in it.
In the JR proposal, I stated that in my selected context, I was to “foster communities of practice and care, a sense of purpose, and the ability to [collectively] act for social justice.”
First, I did not see any issue with this proposal, because working towards social justice is the right thing to do. With an educational background as a designer, a better future is always what we build towards. But there is some tension here, isn’t there? Some force cracks under the pressure that close attention places on social justice. When I leaned towards social justice and asked myself what pushes me to wanting to work for it (and whatever an endeavor towards such a goal would mean), all I could come up with was a deep sense of duty. A deep conviction that it is the right thing to do, a task that I learned I should pursue from my privileged position.
What I found challenging then is to argue why my leftist desire and sensed duty towards social justice is above a conservative person’s aim to police reproductive rights, access to healthcare, or ensure the nation’s purity. Naturally, depending on you, the reader’s political standing reading the above line, it is one of the represented sides you will agree with, while the other seems laughable or even harmful to argue for or to even articulate it this way. However, isn’t there a similarity in logic in how we justify our actions in the present based on an imagined “better future”? Starting out this work, I would have answered this: that while there is seemingly a colonizing idea around acting in the present, based on an imaginary future, I am convinced that it is good, as it is better to open up places for others than to take away, and it is indeed the other side that is actively taking away.
But this is the trick, isn’t it? It is only a little empathy and ability to think for the Othered (who that is depends on your views); when one needs to realize that the driving logic of this argument is in reactionary nature; what is more, advocacy work towards either position is driven by an eerily similar sense of duty, a conviction under which it is unquestionable why you wouldn’t work towards a future deemed desirable from your political position. In other words, as Lee Edelman (2004) states, all politics is conservative in the sense that all is animated by the idea of a “better future” of reproductive futurism. The urge to reproduce our values into the future. To turn back to Whitman (1892), all politics is animated by an:
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
It was this loop in thinking, talking, and reading that led me to step away from the idea of social justice as something placed in the future—as a goal toward which I should organize my actions and convince others to do so as well. It seemed like a cheap thrill, used to justify my work and render it legible for a political side with which I wish to associate myself. Instead, I got interested in what working otherwise could entail. For this, Ursula Le Guin’s (1973) “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” served as a seminal reading. That is, an approach to work that rejects the essentialist duty-led conviction and utilitarian sacrifice it comes with as an organizing principle placed in our future that regulates all actions while also justifying the abuse of the ones othered to make sense of itself (here I am quoting the Lacanian lack, absence). What would a politics without the binary entail? A queer politics without the future where the idea of social justice (or any other social objective for that matter) lies. What kind of work would I be pushed to do if I refuse the idea that there is a reachable future order that makes the ideal society, towards which I should work? What does it mean to reject the future phantasm in which we embedded a picture of a better society, this way justifying our actions in the present? To disregard social justice and turn towards a “care ethic” Joan Tronto (1998) describes, instead of reducing our present into a “vanishing pivot” (Haraway, 2016, p. 1) to serve a fantasy placed in the future, it helps us grapple with the social worlds that are always “multiply partially organized and thus always multiply partially disorganized” (Povinelli, 2011, p. 8).
breathing through the anxiety of refusal
Needless to say, once I read myself to the point where I could start to think about what it means to practice with the idea of “No Future” (Edelman, 2004), I got deeply, deeply anxious, as I had no idea what that means. Turns out, it can mean a lot of things, some more antisocial than others. It can mean a queer identity that harbors the death drive (that is, a destructive force, a term coined by Freud and used by Lacan as seeking activities that cause our—normative—demise); it can mean a care ethic that truly pays attention and in “intra-action” (Barad, 2007), so much so that it is tied to the present (Tronto, 1998); it can mean a flat ontological standing that gets wrapped up in a “thick present,” a constellation of relations (Haraway, 2016, p. 1).
Unlearning to define actions through an imaginary future was a new concept for me that opened up various paths to the present and tools to trouble the future. It means that instead of contributing to paths that inevitably cast outside anything other than what is deemed normative by their measures, there is a possibility to pay attention to what is in the process of being normalized and to poke fun by poking holes in its claimed coherence. Instead of a privileged standing to claim a facilitating role in social justice by “demanding a seat at the table” or justifying action through other similar slogans, there is a path that goes beyond both conservative othering and liberal pluralism (Edelman, 2004). This third rail/path asks us to undo the table and to insist on working otherwise.
To explore this certain otherwise, I got familiar with concepts (as it is not new and not the only way) that are concerned with undoing what is expected of our position and the refusal to operate through our privilege as required, thereby contributing to a normative better future (it is important, as Leland de la Durantaye (2009) recalls Georgio Agamben’s inoperative, that refusal can be cast in contexts where we would have the privilege to operate by normative standards). This is articulated in Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” as the option to walk away from a structure that abuses the othered so that we can flourish. It prompts us to fail to comply, to fail to act happy in instances and for things we should. As Jack Halberstam (2011, p. 3) puts it, “while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects . . . it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.” What is more, it offers us to rupture, to cast the death drive on the happiness of the fabric that comes, as Erin Wunker (2016, p. 45) puts it, in the case of the feminist killjoy, “as restricted access. Happiness as a country club, a resort, an old boys club for certain boys only. Happiness as body shame, as racism, as transphobia, as misogyny. These are some joys that need killing.” It helps us not to ignore and glide over the gross inequalities that dominant narratives aim to ignore so that we can join them in reproducing their vision into the future. This ties in with Edelman’s nonontological queer that is diacritical, always shifting its locus to forms that today’s politics in certain contexts stigmatize or do not recognize as identities and therefore are cast outside the politics, as governing them as polity is impossible (The Dissenter, 2022). For Edelman, this simple existence, in its unorganized form (as any way of organizing would assume a reproductive futuristic nature), is a path to rupturing the fabric of normativity. For me, it is an interesting idea, the ways in which some aspects of our lives harbor a death drive to certain normative silos; how our identities and the ways we live have aspects that spill out of the boxes we are supposed to inhabit.
thinking the unthinkable, staying with the present
So then, through my readings (namely Edelman, Agamben, Le Guin, and Halberstam), social justice work can be less about unifying efforts into coherent actions; instead, it can become a practice of paying keen attention to dominant narratives that try to advocate for something set in stone for a better future and making them out of joint. It is something like writing this text about my own proposal, with its implications, examining the choice of words used in it, and gutting it inside out. It is the disregard of political Left or Right and pointing out when othering happens; this way puncturing holes of negativity into narratives that sacrifice for their own coherence the complexity of our present. It can be led by a practice that keeps with the present (and this is my final Whitman quote, I promise), like:
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Negativity is not for all and not necessarily a sympathetic path, but as Jack Halberstam (2011, p. 4) puts it, “the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life.” I do not aim to convince anyone to agree or to even subscribe to such beliefs. But isn’t that the point through Edelman’s queer lens? Not to advocate, not to convince, not to believe, and organize under the illusion that a coherent vision can be articulated and, most importantly, achieved. Such an idea would be not only reproductive but solidify Edelman’s queer into an identity that already is the reduction of what Edelman argues the queer is . . . well, what the queer is not (as it is nonontological, it is diacritical, always present when normativity casts out certain things to make sense of itself). For me personally, these readings are not about agreeing or disagreeing or making them “my view”; they are a lens to approach topics differently than how I learned to understand them. It is to dig deeper when I assume that I started to understand something, thereby inevitably solidifying it into some stuff. For me there is an ironic power in the othered, the force to escape anything that tries to define itself by splitting to become the One (again, Lacanian absence here) and thereby reproduce itself into the future (Edelman, 2022, p. 19). What is more, I find the kind of negativity deeply affectionate that ruptures dominant narratives by simply insisting on being and not being: on potentiality, in our thick, murky present.
references
Atkinson, D. (2022). Pedagogies of taking care: Art, pedagogy and the gift of otherness. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press.
Durantaye, L. de la. (2009). Giorgio Agamben: A critical introduction. Stanford University Press.
Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive (M. Aina Barale, J. Goldberg, M. Moon, & E. Kosofsky Sedwick, Eds.). Duke University Press.
Edelman, L. (2022). Bad education: Why queer theory teaches us nothing. Duke University Press.
Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Le Guin, U. (1973). The ones who walk away from Omelas.
Povinelli, E. A. (2011). Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Duke University Press.
St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique and the coming after. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, 4, 611–626.
The Dissenter. (2022). #715 Lee Edelman—No future: Queer theory and the death drive [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=R-kg4QRa3lc&t=240s
Tronto, J. C. (1998). An ethic of care. Generations: Journal of the American Society on Aging, 22(3), 15–20.
Whitman. (2017 [1892]). Song of Myself. The Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version
Willerslev, R., & Suhr, C. (2018). Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 8(1–2), 65–78. https://doi.org/10.1086/698407
Wunker, E. (2016). Notes from a feminist killjoy: Essays on everyday life. BookThug.