#bondingtoxins

Staging an Encounter with the Toxic

I was excited about the chance to participate in Toxic Bonds (especially in my capacity as Zaungast or “observer”) because both Chen and Boudry/Lorenz have been important to my thinking about affect over the last few years.  I first encountered Mel’s work at a conference on Queer Bonds at UC-Berkeley and helped facilitate its publication in a GLQ special issue devoted to the conference. My encounters with Pauline and Renate come from the queer bonds generated by our overlapping art worlds, including our shared friendships with Ginger Brooks Takahashi and Werner Hirsch, the performers featured in Toxic, and filmmaker Karin Michalski, who did sound for the film, and with whom I have collaborated.  And, as it happens, we also wrote together on the topic of toxic feelings for Manifesta Journal.

The Bossing Images concept of staging encounters is also very close to my work with Public Feelings, a group that has sponsored writing salons and other alternative formats.  My own talk at the Affect and Art conference in Freiburg had been about collaborations between artists and academics as a form of queer affective method, including the use of art installations to create spaces in which ideas can be made material.  And I was fortunate to be able to co-present with Karin Michalski about my performance in the film installation The Alphabet of Feeling Bad, for which I helped write the script.

In coming up with the phrase radiant fish, I’m sure I was under the influence of two indelible images from Mel’s essay, “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections” (which was also the inspiration for Toxic):  a small white American boy engaged in the “queer licking” of his Thomas the Train, a toy manufactured in China, and Mel’s ailing body sinking into a couch that provides the comfort of touch in a way that humans cannot.   Mel uses these acts of queer intimacy with objects to embrace the transmission of toxins and to forge a vision of affective animacies that are shared across a diverse ontology that includes heavy metals, objects, and racialized and disabled bodies.  Mel’s influence on Toxic is especially evident in the list of “toxins” that Ginger recites in the film but, like Mel’s writing, the film also makes its impression at the level of image and affective mood especially through Ginger’s and Werner’s charismatic genderqueer performances.

Toxic Discomfort

For their cross-media encounter between film and theory, organizers Jess Dorrance and Antke Engel set up a space in which an encounter with the work could happen through the body.  The panelists -- Chen, Engel, Dorrance, and Settele –were placed in intimate contact in a living room set furnished with lamps and couch, and the audience members were then invited into a space seemingly inspired by Toxic’s messy behind the scenes staging of a performance.   There was a bed of newspaper and lots of art supplies – not just pens and paper but also sponges, scissors, plastic, shiny material – and, of course, glitter.  We were invited into a zone of play to watch the film and listen to the audio commentary – to engage with what toxic might mean for us from a space of collective and embodied sensing that included not just listening, talking, and writing, but also making and moving. 

But can you think lying down?  And can you talk lying down, especially when you have to use a microphone?  These questions came up when it turned out to be harder than all of us imagined to keep the conversation going. Lying amidst the paper – too much like a litter box maybe? – we strained to hear the words of the panelists through the distorted audio tracks.  Different kinds of “feedback” emerged from the floor.  Some felt there was too much overstimulation or distraction; some couldn’t deal with the dust; some were disturbed by the brightness of the theatrical lighting overhead; some couldn’t hear with all the rustling of paper.   Mel’s attention to disability and accessibility also prompted a set of questions about translation and language.  How accessible is the space when you have to speak in English or when the proceedings are not translated into German?  How does it feel to be one of the few native English speakers for whose benefit the conversation is conducted in English?  And, even though it is supposed to increase accessibility, how does the use of a microphone get in the way or act as a deterrent?  The images of the boy licking his train and Mel sinking into the couch were present for me as we attempted to find some kind of comfort and perhaps encountered only discomfort in the littered stage and our overly close intimacy with objects and people, with sound and light.

Depression as Intoxication

For me, the event was a way to think more intimately about my relation to these two pieces in the company of others and to do so through activities that make thinking into a more material practice – writing keywords, making objects, putting words and images together.  I found myself meditating on the overlap between Mel’s work on the toxic and mine on depression – the way that a putatively psychic state like depression has the capacity to occupy the body at the cellular level and thus complicates what we mean by the psychic.  Depression has a materiality that resembles that of toxic substances or molecules entering the body even if only in the immaterial form of moods or affects picked up from the surrounding environment.  The literal nature of toxic substances, such as heavy metals, and their capacity to produce chemical sensitivity is resonant with metaphors of depression as an amorphous weight or burden and its status as a form of environmental slow death.  In my book Depression, I argue that depression demands not only movement and transformation at the molecular level but also acceptance of slow or blocked motion, and hence the forms of disability or alternative animacy that Mel describes.

How can we maintain a sense of animacy amidst the forms of slowness created not only by grief and disability but by the ordinary discomfort of being around other people?  In the earlier keynote, we had heard about Mel’s experience of being stopped and questioned on the train to Freiburg as someone whose race and gender marks him as an alien or toxic subject in Germany.  This uncomfortable reminder of ordinary toxicity was important for a largely white audience to hear, especially one for whom “foreign” language was also at issue.  Perhaps a conversation about the capacity of the toxic to produce bonds is not as easy to have as one might hope – just bringing us together doesn’t always make it happen.  Coming to the event after Mel’s story of being stopped on the train, I was in a position to absorb or metabolize the word toxic differently, to meditate on the idea that intimacy might include sharing molecules, including toxic ones, and that we might need to create a commons from our shared experience of being slowed down by toxins or by heavy affects.           

Toxic Glitter and the Headdress

Discussing Mel’s ideas through their uptake in the film Toxic is also a reminder of what a creative encounter with theory can yield.  What Toxic provides is not necessarily a “theory” or a “statement” but an image, and perhaps not even an image but a glimpse of something.  Watching Toxic in this context, I was struck by the slow process by which Werner and Ginger adopt their poses -- Werner sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette, Ginger standing and reciting the list of toxins -- or showed themselves on the way to those poses but not quite there.  In these minor performances, they “create a scene” in part through their striking looks, which are enhanced by wigs, heels, dramatic eye-makeup, hairy cleavage, and masks.  Like the criminals and pedarasts in the 19th photographic portraits that inspired Boudry/Lorenz, or like Mel on the train, they find ways to live with a sense of alien being.  In our exercises, I kept coming to the word headdress -- a dress or costume for the head that can turn the body into an object or canvas especially when it obscures the face that is the sign of human subjectivity.  Often associated with “primitive” cultures, the headdress blurs the boundary between humans, animals, and objects enabling the forms of animacy that belong to objects. In Toxic a headdress is not just a hat, or even a mask, it could be a paper bag or some feathers.

Mel also noted an especially powerful image that was arrested for us in a still during the workshop -- that of Werner coughing up glitter.  To cough up glitter rather than blow smoke is to take the potentially toxic molecules that we imbibe and send them out into the world to be shared by others.  The transformation of smoke and dust into glitter has been a powerful tool of queer culture.  On the floor of the stage glitter has become dust. Glitter is dust that shines – radiant dust.  In the end, we had words as fragments of ideas, as the particles – dust and glitter both -- out of which ideas might be made.  Our hosts called out certain key words for us -- danger, desire, masks, screens, sociality, penetration – and asked us to congregate around them.  I chose masks to represent the constellation of costume, headdress, glitter.  But the theme of the toxic also led me to air and water and breath, and the image of Werner coughing up glitter sparked thoughts about how the dust particles that clutter our lungs are all the more visible when turned to glitter. 

Radiant Fish

My phrase radiant fish was inspired not only by the glitter but by thinking about swimming, in which a human takes on the ways of the fish.  When humans go underwater, leaving behind the air for the water that could drown us, we retreat to what can be a scene of isolation from other people, but also one of attachment to fish and to the element of water.  Fish have been on the front lines of exposure to toxins, absorbing even more than humans do through their intimate contact with water as a source of animacy – lead and mercury, radiation from Fukushima crossing the Pacific, oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, the byproducts of hydraulic fracking, which is supposed to produce the “clean energy source” of natural gas and lessen U.S. dependence on “foreign oil” but instead destroys the water table in “our own backyards.”

As we pondered our relation to different forms of environmental contamination, the question we were ultimately asked to consider was whether toxicity can be a source of bonding.  This is another version of the persistent questions queer theory has been asking about sociality – can there be a reparative or a utopian intimacy that doesn’t foreclose on negativity or toxicity?  Our answers were perhaps the uncertain ones that emerge from a commitment to dwelling in the experience of feeling bad, which has been my theoretical domain, as well as from Mel’s invitation to think of ourselves as literally contaminated or toxic.  That it was uncomfortable is perhaps a sign of failure, but, if so, it’s a form of queer failure that can point the way to what is difficult, impossible sometimes even, about being with others.   Being in contact with those we find queer or repugnant -- or those we just don’t feel like talking to -- is a necessary part of any experiment with toxic bonds.

  References

Chen, Mel Y.  “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.”  GLQ:  A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17:2-3 (2011), 265-86.

 Cvetkovich, Ann.  Depression:  A Public Feeling.  Durham:  Duke University Press, 2012.

Cvetkovich, Ann and Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz.  “Toxic Feelings.” Manifesta Journal 16 (2013), 34-45.

http://www.manifestajournal.org/issues/regret-and-other-back-pages/dialogue-between-ann-cvetkovich-and-pauline-boudry-renate-lorenz#

Cvetkovich, Ann and Karin Michalski. The Alphabet of Feeling Bad.   Film Installation.  2012 (Berlin) and 2014 (Umea).

Das empfand ich als hemmend (etwas zu tun oder zu sagen), störend (sich auf etwas/ jemanden konzentrieren zu können) und frustrierend (das Gefühl zu haben, die Dinge nicht zu verstehen). Gerne hätte ich die eingespielten Video-Audio-Informationen verstanden, gerne hätte ich die Momente der Stille verkürzt, gerne hätte ich etwas gesagt, doch es ging nicht. Wie ein Abgleiten an einer Oberfläche, die kein Greifen zulässt. Unwohlsein oder Nervosität begleitete mich über weite Strecken. Es gab allerdings auch Momente, in denen ich mich wohl fühlte, beispielsweise während des Diskutierens in Kleingruppen, in der Beschäftigung mit den Assoziationsketten oder im regungslosen Liegen zwischen Körpern. In den Kleingruppen konnte ich mein Gegenüber verstehen. Akustisch und vielleicht noch mehr. Während des Schreibens war mir meine Position und Tätigkeit völlig klar. Und im Daliegen war der Rückzug in die Sprachlosigkeit voll ok.

Womit ich allerdings am Schluss aus dem Raum hinausging, war ein Gefühl der Frustration, auch Empörung, sicher unerfüllte Erwartungen.

Inzwischen scheinen die Erinnerungen an den Nachmittag bereits verblasst oder eher verändert – das Nachdenken darüber lässt sich nicht mehr nahtlos trennen von den gemachten Erfahrungen.

Ich empfand den Nachmittag weder als ein Reden über noch mit dem Kunstwerk, sondern als Funkstille. Gleichzeitig hat mich genau diese Frustration oder vielleicht auch Enttäuschung zu einigen Auseinandersetzungen – diskutierend, erzählend, nachdenkend, schreibend – gebracht und nachträglich erscheinen mir genau diese Gedanken um Ausstellen – Ausgestellt sein, Dis-/ Comfort, Verstehen – Verstanden werden als Dialog mit dem Video von Boudry/ Lorenz.

Aber wieso diese zeitlich-räumliche Verschiebung? Wieso immer diese verfluchte Distanz? Wieso hat es nicht im Workshopraum stattgefunden? Oder hat es? Ist es eine zeitlich-räumliche Verschiebung? Oder vielmehr ein Ineinandergleiten von Gedanken und Gefühlen die, aus diversen Gründen, nicht oder nur schwerlich als Gleichzeitiges fassbar sind und deshalb verschoben auftauchen?

Wenn ich an das Video Toxic und den Nachmittag zurückdenke, erscheint mir das Bild des nicht alle am selben Strang ziehens. Im Video wurde dies zum (inszenierten) Stilmittel, das zu einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit Repräsentationslogiken und den damit einhergehenden Machtverhältnissen geführt hat. Aber was passiert, wenn dieses Auseinanderklaffen physisch und in einem nicht vollkommen abgesteckten Rahmen stattfindet? Wenn die Grenzmarkierungen schummrig werden und die Aussetzungsverhältnisse sich verändern? Wenn unklar ist, was getan wird und wer es tut und wieso und ob jede_r für sich oder alle zusammen oder irgendwas dazwischen?

Zahlreiche Stränge haben diesen seltsamen Raum durchzogen. Stränge, die von unterschiedlichsten Akteur_innen in diverse Richtungen gezogen wurden. Oder fallengelassen, verwebt, zertrampelt, vorangetrieben. Auch oder gerade die Stille schien mir durchdrungen davon.