#conceptualtext

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).

Tsang and Thal’s presentation worked as a response to the artwork as well as a kind of “becoming the artwork.” This formulation refers to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of “becoming.” In order to undermine binary and naturalized logics of self and other, subject and object, beholder of the gaze/knowledge and viewed/known matter, “becoming” emphasizes processes of becoming different from one’s supposed position. “Becoming an artwork,” therefore, implies a closeness to the other that was previously excluded. This form of creating intimacy complicates the ability of subjects to exploit an artwork for their own purposes.

As Channel I was screened a second time, Tsang and Thal slid into the setting. Their bodies became visible and their voices audible. They intervened in a variety of shades and postures, accompanied by a range of fragmented quotes from theorists like Beatriz Preciado, Gayatri Spivak, and Elspeth Probyn. Yet in these gestures, Tsang and Thal did not take over or change the artwork’s subject. They did not present a certain “reading” of Shah’s video installation. Rather, they staged ever-changing becomings, producing a space where it became possible to “become” the artwork on a phenomenological, perceptible level. In this sense, they did not pretend to represent their understanding of the artwork, but instead to momentarily feel its waves in order to embody and let its e-motions happen. The evolving intimacy of this encounter was prolonged in the discussion afterwards: Tsang and Thal did not enforce claims or defend arguments about the Channel. They withdrew from processes of rationalization, just as the white cube tends to elude over-interpretation.

The spatial and sequential procedures of the evening seemed to entangle with Tejal Shah’s work. The white walls of the project room merged with the white corsets of the slowly moving creatures of Channel I. In the video, the creatures are shown in the midst of desolate landscapes of trash as they stroll slowly about and melt smoothly into dirty beaches, destroyed mangrove forests, and polluted water. In their presentation, Tsang and Thal seemed to echo the creature’s movements, restaging the creatures’ intimate encounters with vulnerable landscapes but in a radically different context: Sweden, an epicenter of ecology, cleanliness, and sustainability. Tsang and Thal’s smooth movements connected the artwork and the audience and became a contact zone. Tsang and Thal’s intervention thus managed to entangle Sweden—the white cube of ecology—with the trash that is normally thrown out of the country’s master narrative of itself as an environmental paragon.

*

This sounds quite conciliatory—almost smooth—so far, doesn’t it? Should this gentle approach provoke suspicion, given that the event was titled “Bossing Images”? Does smoothness here allow us to effortlessly disappear the gap between how we feel and how we should feel about the global circulation of pollution, considering its harmful and unequally distributed effects? Sara Ahmed argues that emotional work, or “will work,” is required to oppress feelings of concern when facing the facts of destruction (2012). Considering this, I wonder whether smoothness can help subjects “will away” the ambivalence of cruel fact and optimist feelings (Berlant 2010)? Does this glossy closure of the gap reproduce what dominates the western formation of secularism: pain-reduction (Asad 2003)? Or might smoothness allow me to rethink the hierarchy of environmental injustice, as well as the hierarchies of gazing relations and subjects and objects?

Some of Tsang and Thal’s smoothly processed interventions into Shah’s video were aimed at reworking the relations of who is the subject or the object of the gaze, for instance when they slowly rotated the rear projection screen by ninety degrees, allowing Shah’s film to be projected onto the audience. In actions such as these, I wonder whether smoothness embalms hierarchical contradictions between artist, artwork, and viewer enabling the audience to become intimate with the artwork, the performers, and each other. Does smoothness foster “an immersive approach where the viewer is no longer only a viewer, but rather the subject of an embodied encounter” (Papenburg and Zarzycka 2013, 3)?

*

Earlier, watching Channel II of Between the Waves in Iaspis’s anteroom, I immediately became the video’s subject. I began to embody the images of the slowly moving, futuristic figures wandering about a landfill. Having just arrived from a stressful conference, I carnally responded to the quietness of Channel II. I calmed down and opened up to what was supposed to happen without feeling the necessity to know and to control what it would be. Smoothness, paradoxically, seemed to boss me around and to define intimate procedures not yet queer. The smoothness of the evening, in this way, could be understood as what Karen Barad describes as the “agential cut” (2003): the smoothness had its own, counterintuitive way of cutting something open and showing off, of bossing around and swaggering. An agential cut does not rely solely on destruction, but rather on the production of synergies and entanglements of things that would not normally be thought to come together or to become intimately intertwined. In its productive qualities, an agential cut is bossy—especially in the context of capitalism (production, appropriation, optimization). Yet agential cuts also carry a queer potential. Namely, the potential to cut something open in order to combine what does not fit like rational-functional procedures and intimacy. Understanding smoothness as an agential cut means identifying how it can perform actions not normally associated with it: the bossy and willful potential of smooth procedures of intimacy. Hence, smoothness can, perhaps counterintuitively, boss around and transgress normative understandings of what/who is intimate with which kind of things, visuals, and humans. As “Intimate Procedures” demonstrated, smoothness is a mode of encounter of humans, animals, toxins, tissues, and images.

*

Following this meditation on smoothness, I would like to try and complicate Sara Ahmed’s approach to “willfulness” which she discusses in her current research project (2012). Though I agree that willfulness that is not willing to support the whole in its normative framing enables a queer reading of parts, I am not convinced whether willfulness needs to be perceived as the stubborn obstruction of the smoothly flowing stream. Drawing on Judith Halberstam’s discussion of queer forms anarchy (2013), I argue that willfulness, in order to queer, does not need to be surfaced as anarchy in its radical interruption. Instead, what would it mean to think about willfulness in terms of a merging, smoothing, or gliding? Or, to invert our approach, can we think about smoothness in terms of willfulness and queer bossiness? For me, both Shah’s Between the Waves and Tsang and Thal’s presentation interrogated willfulness in this way.

*

Shah, who positions her work at the intersections of feminism and art, ecology and sexuality, and science and spiritualism, noted in regard to Between the Waves that the work arose from an accidental misreading of a list of books written by Virginia Woolf. The title of the video Between the Waves—a merging of Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) and The Waves (1931)—points at the function of waves: the wave is always the simultaneity of crests and troughs; it is the upheaval (act) and the between. Thus, the quietness of the between is what “ripples across the surface of the landscape,” as curator and art critic Gitanjali Dang wrote about Shah’s installation (2012). The stranded moment of the wave only seems to be quiet. As Dang noted, the “quietness of the title belies the velocity of the Lovewaves,” which in seismology occur “when the universe goes through a massive internal eye roll” (2012). To belie the velocity, I argue, becomes the potential of the quietness or smoothness of the Lovewave to visualize society’s trash and to compose a desolate landscape—not in the sense of destruction, but rather in Deleuze’s formulation of deterritorialization and becoming different (1996).

Thus the procedure of Between the Waves, to take up one of the terms of the subtitle of the evening, is more than destruction; it is intimacy, love, and care in the same breath. The destruction of the tsunami-wave is translated into the intimacy of the humanimals in the water, at the beach, and on the balcony. The inanimate trash in the ocean or the toxins in the air animate forms of intimacy that enable us to rewrite conditions of intimacy that must no longer be heteronormative, human-centered, and cleaned of dirt (Chen 2012a, 3). Furthermore toxins and fabrics in the video (latex, polluted air, trash) are slowly and gently—almost evolutionary—incorporated into these procedures. The generative force of the still deviant is carved out.

Ladelle McWorther has noted that “deviation in development produced this grove, this landscape, this living planet” (1999, 164). Erotics of care, like embalming trees with white paste in a sexually charged manner or breathing air via masks while having sex on a balcony—two procedures performed by the protagonists of Between the Waves—seems to be deviant in the present but might inaugurate new forms of intimacy in the future (Chen 2012b). Strategies of smoothness and erotics of care might be effective ways to attune us to deviations that cause environmental injustices that are highly racialized and gendered. These strategies might be options that make us more open to matter-induced change and better sensitized toward the quality of these changes. As Mel Chen (2011, 281; 2012a) and Stacy Alaimo (2010, 116) have shown in regard to Multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) of women and migrant laborers, it is necessary to differentiate between the utopian and dystopian dimensions of toxins.

*

“Intimate Procedures” tried to treat Between the Waves with care and calm mindfulness, just as Shah’s figures approached their natural surroundings in the video. During the carnal-performative response of Tsang and Thal, openness and vulnerability were created and shared. Framed by the white cube and the circle formed by the audience, the emotional landscape of the evening became rippled and vulnerable—not by producing bumpiness, but rather by the smooth continuity of the feedback loop of the wave that Tsang and Thal addressed. Tsang and Thal disrupted the wave of the projection by holding a CD in front of it, ricocheting the video off the back of the CD and producing a rainbow pattern on the wall beyond the screen.

These practices of diffraction can be understood as interference into normative gazing relations, as the audience’s gazes were constantly re-directed during Tsang and Thal’s performance. Yet, the diffraction of the gaze also represents the “continuity of change” or the “changeability of continuity,” as Karen Barad put it in reference to the relation of particle and wave (2012, 42). Thus, we could understand every single image in the evening as behaving like a wave—as becoming the movement of Tsang and Thal, the whispering voices of the quoted ghosts, and the body of the audience’s emotions. Could this kind of wave-response be a point of departure from which to rethink biopolitics and biotechnoethics beyond practices of externalization, institutionalization, and prohibition? Like Alaimo has noted, the contiguity of the encounter with the material world cannot assure that deviant, dirty, and toxic things can remain external of the human body (2010, 119). In this sense, Lovewaves enable smooth procedures of intimacy that ingest things not queer yet.

  References: 

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. "A Willfulness Archive." Theory & Event 15(3).

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of The Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Barad, Karen. 2003. "Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How    Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28(3): 801-31.

Barad, Karen. 2012. "Nature’s Queer Performativity." Kvinder, Køn & Forskning 1-2: 25 53.

Berlant, Lauren. 2010. "Cruel Optimism." In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Greg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, 93-117. Durham: Duke University Press.

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

Chen, Mel. 2012a. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2012b. "Masked States and the 'Screen' Between Security and Disability." WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly 40(1-2): 76-96.

Dang, Gitanjali. 2012. "On 'Between the Waves.'" Accessed August 10, 2013. http://tejalshah.in/project/between-the-waves/. 

Deleuze, Gilles. 1996. Lust und Begehren. Berlin: Merve Verlag.

Halberstam, Judith Jack. 2013. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Action / Queer Ideas). Boston: Beacon Press.

McWorther, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.