The Perils of (Non) Identification

< Presumably in line with his reception as unidentifiable and otherworldly, many biographical accounts of Nomi aestheticize his death as his "departure." Page Wood and George Elliott, the "living authors" of Za Bakdaz, a Nomi-themed opera, talk of August 6, 1983, as the day when "Klaus Nomi left the Earth." (36) The British periodical Attitude summarizes his career as a heavenly event: "Like a shooting star, he exploded into the world then fell from the heavens after a glittering, all-too-brief career." (37) The Nomi Song, Andrew Horn's documentary, presents a more elaborate version of the same narrative. The film, whose subtitle reads "He Came from Outer Space to Save the Human Race," opens with a clip from Jack Arnold's 1953 science-fiction picture It Came from Outer Space, which features the landing of aliens on Earth. The clip is then reinterpreted as Nomi's "arrival" on Earth and followed by his contemporaries' descriptions of him as "alien," "artificial," and the like. Jack Arnold's film does not return until the very end of the documentary, when another clip, this time showing the aliens' departure from Earth, serves to allegorize Nomi's death.

In this way Horn's film achieves a neat formal closure and an overall elegant arc structure, but only at the price of aestheticizing Nomi's death and presenting it as logical, even inevitable, while the voice-over in Arnold's film informs us that the aliens are leaving because humanity was not yet ready for them. But, of course, Nomi's death was neither logical nor inevitable, nor was there anything in it worth rescuing through aestheticization. Because he was suffering from an unfamiliar disease, most of Nomi's friends were, perhaps understandably, too afraid to visit him in the hospital. One of the few who were not was his friend and collaborator Joey Arias, whose written account of Nomi in his last days focuses on the visible manifestations of AIDS on Nomi's body rather than on the man himself:


He developed kaposis [Kaposi's sarcoma] and

started taking interferon. That messed him real 
 bad. He had dots all over his body and his eyes 
 became purple slits. It was like someone was 
 destroying him.... Then he got real weak and 
 was rushed back to the hospital. He couldn't 
 eat for days because he had cancer in his stomach. 
 Herpes popped out all over his body. He 
 turned into a monster. (38)

Unfortunately, such dehumanizing accounts of people suffering and dying of AIDS were by no means rare at the time.  In a visualization of that dehumanization, Horn's film ends with footage of a visibly emaciated, dying Nomi's performance of "The Cold Song," an air from Purcell's King Arthur, in Munich shortly before his death. As though to confirm my critique of the film's treatment of Nomi's death, the footage is combined with an interview with Tony Frere, another Nomi collaborator, who comes dangerously close to rationalizing and justifying Nomi's death:

It was definitely a very dramatic ending, and 
 you don't wanna say it was appropriate, but--at 
 the time it was extremely surprising--but 
 now, thinking about it, it was perfect, you 
 know, sort of like a perfect coda to everything. 
 You know, just like "Wow," it was like an ending 
 to this crazy, lavish opera in a way. 

The alien, the unrecognizable, the unidentifiable  then simply had to go, the film seems to tell us; as such, he was never sustainable anyway. Frere's words, heard over the last chords of Purcell's somber air and Nomi's leaving the stage  bedecked in a seventeenth-century aristocratic  costume, provide for a suitably poignant operatic exit. The most useful conclusion that I have been  able to draw from studying the reception  ofKlaus Nomi is that such a radical refusal to identify  with any normative identities cannot ultimately rescue  us from the exigencies of identification. Having to identify with already existing  identity norms in order to achieve both  a recognized identity of our own and the  cultural recognition of others can and often  does feel stifling.  Yet the radical alternative that Nomi embodied is not a viable answer, because cultural recognition  will be withheld from those refusing  to sufficiently adhere to a recognizable  identity. What is needed for a  more livable life is probably a third way,  winding between a slavish  identification with normative identities and a radical  nonidentification that results in the loss of recognizability. (This passage is taken from "Do You Nomi?" Klaus Nomi  and the Politics of (Non)identification.  Contributors: Zarko Cvejic - author. Journal Title:  Women & Music. Volume: 13. Publication Year: 2009). My (brief) comment on the conclusion I've just quoted. Very  interesting indeed. Still, it begs the question of whether the symbolic interactionist paradigm in sociology will ever receive the acknowledgement it deserves from Cvejic and other like minded readers/theorists. For if one stops to recall Mead's description of the interweaving of the "me" and "I" respectively, it quickly becomes apparent that we  already have a "third way" that can enable us to navigate  between the positions Cvejic describes. Of course, a  Deleuzian would merely snort in derision because such  people have no vested interest  in a "me"; the "I" is all that matters to them. One can make an educated guess then as to how a Deleuzian would  respond to Cvejic, who at least manages to peel back the "radical" sci fi garb to see the kinds of problems that may be associated with a "politics of nonidentity". I hasten to add that Nancy Fraser's advocacy of a dual emphasis on a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution is also highly significant. Please note that redistribution is conspicuous by its absence in Cvejic's essay. This song is from Klaus Nomi's unfinished space-western  opera ZABAKDAZ. ZABAKDAZ is a collection of songs Klaus Nomi was working on  up until his death in 1983, released posthumously in 2007.  The large majority of the tracks have never before seen a studio  release. Some of those involved with the project hint that the  album was nowhere near completed at the time of Klaus' passing. http://zabakdaz.com/

The Sodometries of the Invisible Empire

Revisiting Salo recently led me to some disturbing mashups by Jeff Wells of imagery from that film with the infamous photographs from Abu Ghraib (the "human pyramid" at left, for example). Whenever I think of that film from now on, I'll have an immediate association with Abu Ghraib. Other sequences in the film, such as when the fascists parade their naked victims on all fours wearing dog leashes, clearly parallel the picture of Lynndie England humiliating her prisoner.

To my mind, this demonstrates Pasolini's acute understanding of how power functions in "zones of exception". Mirzoeff in effect builds on these insights by referring to [the inspiration behind Salo] the Marquis de Sade, along with some other theorists, by arguing that the "sodometries", as originally described by Jonathan Golberg, are mobilised as part of a wider strategy. I try to read as widely as possible, and certainly don't pretend to always understand or agree with queer theory, but here is an argument almost as compelling as Michael Warner's work on the public sphere:

Indeed, as Hazel Carby has pointed out, in their mode of address and dissemination, the photographs at Abu Ghraib are crucially unlike lynching photographs, despite the apparent similarities.Lynching was in all senses a public and visible event. Special trains were laid on to the most celebrated lynchings, while newspapers ran special editions and the photographs taken were quickly produced as postcards and sent across the country by mail. While such souvenirs
may be hidden now, in the heyday of American segregation their visibility was precisely the point. It was the sight in a shop window of the preserved knuckles of Sam Hose, a man who had been lynched in Atlanta, that drove W. E. B. Du Bois into a career of activism. By contrast, the photographs of Abu Ghraib were intended only for the consumption of the Army and its associates. The public interpellation of the racialized subject by the trophies of lynching has been replaced by the invisible visibility of a police culture that claims that there is nothing to see while circulating its pixelated documents of imperial hierarchy around the Internet.

Far from constituting the accidental, this representation of enforced sodomy is that chosen by the military itself. For the Pentagon could have released a wider range of photographs, also depicting assaults on women and children, which Seymour Hersh has shown to exist....

...As the Marquis de Sade himself put it: “If we discover a hemisphere, we will find sodomy there. Cook sailed into a new world: there it was king. If our balloons floated to the moon, we would find it there as well.”De Sade’s universalism is not what I intend here. I suggest rather that as long as we remain under the sway of Hegel’s dialectic...the moment of imperial crisis necessarily entails a recurrent if not constant crisis of corporal definition between the body of the master and that of the slave. More precisely still, if, as Hardt and Negri put it, it is not reality that is dialectical but colonialism, then the recurrence of corporal crisis is one index that empire in their sense remains entangled with colonialism.

When life is but disappointment, and nothing seems amusing...

...we struggle to find the joy that life is haunted by/but what ends when the symbols shatter? What happens to hearts?

I'm aware how there is a very real fear in our culture of how the social death can precede the physical death. Loss of employment or retirement loom large for many men, and suicide or the development of addictive behavioural patterns can be reactions to the loss of public recognition, and hence personal identity. There are other management techniques of course: how else to explain the seeking of refuge in spaces that are deliberately furnished to appear as non-domestic (i.e. non feminine) as possible? Think of the strictly utilitarian, as opposed to decorative, stools etc in your typical pub or workshed, for example. Many rural communities in Australia have taken this onboard to the point of establishing The Men's Shed on a permanent basis, as a place where some men, who would otherwise be at a loose end, can gather free of charge to use hardware on assorted building projects, thereby circumventing any excessive need to carouse, gamble, fuck or fight...each of which may be symptomatic of boredom and depression. It goes without saying that some effort is also expended to promote suicide prevention initiatives.

It's like my mother has always told me: "many women get used to invisibility fairly early in their lives, while more than a few men struggle to accept not always getting a parade". I hope this is changing over time. I'm able to recognise this palpable sense of dread from the perspective of the female character in the opening sequence of Safe that I've posted here: the mobile privatisation of the car winding its way through the dark labyrinth of suburbia to the accompaniment of an eerie synth score. Julianne Moore's character is basically swallowed by space. But I also get what my mum was trying to tell me: Age eventually unmaketh the man too. To drive the point home further, just look at how no one has yet written the white male middleclass equivalent of Betty Friedan's pioneering feminist work, The Feminine Mystique.

Other than Douglas P, whose lyrics I've quoted, perhaps it is not surprising how more forthcoming the New Queer Cinema has been about some of these dilemmas. I've decided to put up here some of my favourite scenes from movies by Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant that capture entrapment, abjection and invisibility particularly well. John Hurt's character in Love and Death in Long Island is a case in point of someone who is reawakened by finding something beautiful where he least expected to find it. Many people can relate to this as this is surely part of the appeal of falling in love: a form of contingency that reminds you how life still has hitherto unknown possibilities, sometimes even for the most lowly, unappreciated self, who otherwise holds out few prospects for redemption. This brings my mind back to lyrics. Sadly, either possibility was ultimately too overwhelming for poor old Ian Curtis to handle, and he detailed this struggle in almost every song he ever wrote. For example, who can forget that Joy Division's debut album was called Unknown Pleasures, and what about this line too from the song "Twenty Four Hours" featured on Closer, "I never realised the lengths I'd have to go/all the darkest corners of a sense I didn't know/just for one moment I heard somebody call/look beyond the day at hand/there's nothing there at all".

You know it's strange, I started thinking about this stuff last night as I was watching the new series of Doctor Who. I'm sure many people dream of having the Doctor's lifestyle: just like a cowboy, he is a free agent who can travel but still periodically enter communities to perform good works, before departing again. Nirgal was similar in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars series: he was a loner, but he wasn't a hermit. I find much to agree with too in Houellebecq's observation (in his Lovecraft book) that people who like to read and write are generally not that enthused about life in other respects.

These proclivities can be distinguished from the extremes I've posted here. I'm someone who likes pathos, and there is plenty to be found in the clips which follow. But I'll also never forget the guy at university who could only [read: exclusively] listen to Closer, who worked as a toolmaker. His other obsession was the tragic life of Jean Seberg. What I look back on most of all though is the stories he used to tell about growing up and the people he had encountered at work. So I'll recount my personal favourite about his working life: he had a workmate who used to get up early every morning to read Proust ("struggling to find the joy" perhaps). Anyway, one morning the workmate was talking continuously about the dilemmas faced by Raskolnikov (i.e. the anti-hero of Dostoyevsky's novel, Crime and Punishment). He disappeared into the bathroom at lunchtime, eventually re-emerging with a shaved head. His scalp was bleeding profusely as he'd used a very crude razor. Everyone just stood there in silence, uncertain how to react. What would be his next move? The man placed one of the workstools on the bench and sat himself down: "Now that I've got your attention, let me ask again: does anyone remember Raskolnikov?" Why be so demonstrative to try to get across a point? I won't pretend to understand, and suspect I'm not alone in that respect. So you might reasonably expect that psychiatric treatment would follow and this man would be certified as unfit for work, but according to my friend, that is not what happened. Perhaps these struggles are more common afterall than many of us realise, and people are sometimes able to find ways to manage their suffering more effectively than they're usually given credit for by so-called "experts" in mental health?

That's a pretty important point, so permit me to say something more about it. I don't claim any sort of superiority here because I've always preferred to think in terms of an anecdote Lacan related. A specialist in "ego psychology" informed him that she felt she was a good therapist thanks to her "strong personality". Lacan confessed that he felt the exact opposite: it was because he could empathise so closely with his patients' distress that he was able to treat them. In a manner of speaking, "there but for the grace of God go I".

Seeing I've posted the opening of Last Days here, it is fitting to close this post with lyrics by a band from the days of Seattle's grunge scene: the song is called "The Birds", and the band is Skin Yard. It's such a great summation that there is little I can add. It's worth watching the rest of the film too as there is another great scene of a door to door salesman meeting Blake at his isolated mansion. Blake is preoccupied by his own problems to the point he can barely communicate. To his credit, the salesman is not fazed by Blake's demeanor, or his disheveled appearance (Blake is also wearing women's clothing at the time).

I'm sitting in a rather small room
My walls have nothing to say
I memorize every hole
Squinting eyes all day

Fold me up and bring me home
With the night I cannot stay!

Violence surrounds my house
I'm a loco loser
Springing the noose, stay rather far

I rest from the fact
The birds cover trees on my side
Violence surrounds my house
So I sit on the side
These birds are mine, together
The friends of your blood
I smile, then divide
The birds all take mine

Fold me up and bring me home
No I will not stay
These birds surround my house
I cannot stay

I'm sitting in a rather small room
My walls have nothing to say
I memorize every hole
Squinting eyes all day

Resting from the fact the birds
The birds cover the trees, my side
Violence surrounds my house
So I sit on the side

These birds
My mind
Together
They fly

On the side I hide my eyes
Stole my mind
I feel my flight

The milkman passes through today, on his way
He's bringing home the noose of mine
The birds are his tree
I'm sitting in a rather small room
My eyes of nothing left to say
I can remember a time I was
As pretty as the day!

From subterranean to suburban....

Recently I've come across Dennis Cooper's blog, and found myself so overwhelmed on many levels that it's taken me a while to begin to formulate any kind of a response. While certainly I was impressed by Cooper's habit of amassing obscure material, such as Marc Almond's paean to Bataille's Solar Anus (not that I've even yet heard his other piece Martin, concerning the eponymous character of George A. Romero's film), along with rare interview footage of Bataille himself, doubts started to set in about the overarching motivation. Afterall, wasn't this just another avant garde formalism, with transgression somehow typifying the seeking by a narcissistic ego of increasingly rarefied thresholds of difference, to escape a "mass" [sic] ? In other words, a phenomenon that Raymond Williams, in The Politics of Modernism, noted as an urban narrative trope?: ..."extreme and precarious forms of consciousness...a paradoxical self-realisation in isolation."

After seeing Cooper's posted profiles of self-proclaimed young male "slaves", and the recurring theme in his fiction of such characters being sadistically eviscerated by serial killers and the like, I also wondered if Cooper was mapping similar territory to nutcases such as Peter Sotos in words, if not in deeds (say Randy Kraft). I'd say "no" after reading interviews to the effect explaining how much he imbues his young victims with character, so the reader really cares about their fate. The major problem has to do with how, despite his qualifications, Cooper remains open to recuperation by those less inclined to read, or even care about, the author's explanations. For once you emphasise how in principle you don't want your work to coalesce into a convention, you leave yourself open to misappropriation by in effect not standing behind your words. This dilemma may simply be a direct consequence of the all too familiar "death of the author" syndrome.

By extension, any attempt to pin down Cooper's characteristic themes as the epiphenomenon of sociological variables becomes inherently problematic. What I find intriguing then (in a suitably ambiguous kind of way) are attempts to portray his work as in some sense the byproduct, if not always a direct commentary, on the epidemiology of AIDS, wherein a queer identity relocates to non-spaces such as the Internet and the suburbs. For Cooper, the blandness of suburbia makes them "perfect hiding places from oppressively conformist narratives of selfhood...suburbs constitute a deterritorialization, an attempt to create a non-defining space free from mainstream, or indeed gay, hegemonic identities". In other words, it is the same tactic described by the emigres in Williams, who were fleeing the upheaval of another form of mass destruction, except here the setting is not an urban centre. Indeed, such a distinction may become meaningless when describing a city such as Los Angeles, given how it derives its distinctiveness as largely a suburban geography where "social structures are at their loosest and least defining" (obviously the more relevant distinction would remain Williams's typology of The Country and the City, as I am unaware of any queer claiming of small towns as the new frontier). The same relativisation might apply to the more traditional "urban" focus of Henning Bech's renowned study, When Men Meet. Notwithstanding any reservations about vulgar sociologism in relation to aesthetics, there may be some value in remembering that Cooper is an LA based writer, when it comes to evaluating his fiction (as even he acknowledges in the link in this post).

I raise these issues here then because they may be a different facet of the question of "other spaces" that have featured in previous posts on this blog, particularly in relation to thana and sex tourism. I can only hazard a guess at the reasons why Cooper does not feature in more "straight" online forums devoted to the likes of J.G. Ballard, who likewise adopts a suburban focus in his work, and whom Cooper has acknowledged in interviews. I particularly enjoyed Betsky's quote about suburbia's moral "boundlessness" [below], which appears applicable to Cooper and Ballard. But there may be more varied lines of flight hinted at in the former than the latter (i.e. not merely a conflation of sex and violence):

Betsky is at least aware that other gay writers have reckoned with and created visions of suburban environments. But his synopsis that “to queer authors like Dennis Cooper [the desire for underage boys] laid bare the rootlessness and moral boundlessness of suburbia in an extremely violent and spatial manner”29 is only partially correct. As we shall see, Cooper amply demonstrates the “boundlessness,” moral and otherwise, of suburbia, yet there is a misplaced negativity in Betsky’s assertion, which no doubt derives from the emphasis on the borderline paedophilia of Cooper’s novels. Betsky describes the emergence of a new kind of non-physical space, imposed on queers after the mass-destruction inflicted by AIDS: “the void,” an emptiness characterised by “that absence, that loss” (182). Through a collective experience of this absence, the void has become “the queerest space of all;” subsequently, queers have learnt how to “build an identity that would then be separate from real spaces of connection and community.”

From Subterranean to Suburban: The Landscapes of Gay Outlaw Writing

http://asjournal.zusas.uni-halle.de/archive/50/98.html

However provocative this strategy may appear, unanswered questions remain: at stake is the "when" and the "how" by which these identities could demonstrate any kind of recognisable political efficacy (including the kind that might extend to coalition building). If such networking took place, would it be restricted to cyber interaction, making this non/identity politics comparable to the "hyper realist" position of writers such as Mark Poster, or even (shock! horror!), the "virtual republic" of Ken Wark.......? (both previously critiqued on this blog)

If the answer is "yes", well here is a vision of "progressive" politics I find almost as disturbing as any of the graphic scenes of carnage depicted in either Cooper's "outlaw fiction" or on his blog......

http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/

Voices of hope

Still recovering from Andrew Denton's gushing interview with the distinguished naturalist David Attenborough. I certainly bear no real personal animosity, but what saddened me was confirmation of the critiques I'd heard about over the years, that Attenborough constructs his films so that there is little sense of how the status of Nature has altered under conditions of reflexive modernization, so that it too is a subject of human calculation and control, even, or especially when, it appears to be a pristine, untouched environment (this is attributable to decisions about risk management etc). What surprised me more then was his claim that what is most depressing is the encroachment of humans into the wild, and his portrayal of this in Malthusian terms i.e. "there are simply too many people". Good Lord! What about the distribution of wealth and the ideology of consumption as relevant factors?; coming from Attenborough's relatively privileged position, a failure to mention them sounds very much like a lack of understanding of extended families as the only alternative in the absence, or relativisation, of a welfare state.

As much as I admire Stephen Fry for his deconstruction of hegemonic masculinity, I thought again of his shared background with Attenborough while watching the documentary on Fry's experiences of living with bipolar disorder. Since first going AWOL from his public school, up until more recent reporting of his disappearance from a theatrical production, one can, and should, have considerable sympathy for him and others living with the condition. What was strange though in watching the program was how Fry would talk about going on shopping sprees to help alleviate his depression, without once considering how having this option would be unavailable to many fellow sufferers. Fry must have assumed that for "good television" he would need "articulate" [sic] subjects, so all the other interviewees were, like him, members of "the creative classes"; to use an admittedly crude example, the kind of person who, in an American context, would be attending a New England university and daydreaming they were Sylvia Plath because they had read The Belljar, which had confirmed their sense that no one really understands them. To be sure, a comparable aspiring writer was featured, among others, all of whom shared the characteristic that their illness could have been examined in different terms: a more sociological approach would have considered how the condition could be exacerbated by the hyper reflexive involution associated with late modernity. To repeat, the point is not trivialisation by me of mental illness, but rather that the interviewees may not have been so unanimous in their decision to "walk with the angels" by choosing to keep their illness if given the choice. I doubt that many homeless persons with the same condition, who have to live with the consequences of neoliberal deinstitutionalisation, would have supported Fry's view. If anything, the program was closer to psychologism, mixed with a dash of bioliberalism, as Fry showed greater interest in a possible genetic causal link for his bipolar disorder.

Likewise, Attenborough ends up targeting society without realising the terms he uses are themselves byproducts of a reflexive risk consciousness.

These personal testimonies hardly qualify as "voices of hope" then, but fortunately derridata passed along the following more compelling piece on Antony Hegarty. Very interesting, especially the references to the "difference in repetition" as a defining characteristic of the voicing of queer subjectivities (complicating my own previous musings on seriality and pathology, which I have elsewhere, i.e. not in this blog, acknowledged with reference to another piece on "queer sameness"). I don't pretend to have anything more than a passing knowledge about queer theory though, so I won't undetake anything like a detailed comparison here:

http://www.trikster.net/1/steinskog/1.html