Problems with the politics of negativity

Jasbir K. Puar, in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), criticizes queer theory for being a particular product of a secular U.S. culture that is exclusive and does not relate to sexual minorities from other ethnic or religious backgrounds. She claims that queer theory and the concept of “queer”

often have no connection to the problems of immigrants and LGBT people from other ethnicities.

Moreover, she claims that “queer” is often a utopian concept with few links with the reality of radical politics. Here the meaning of utopia is not related to Munoz’s Cruising Utopia but is instead a specific understanding of political utopia. As Pulkkinen comments: “a utopian perspective is always a perspective of the final truth, the endpoint of and the state of affairs in which problems are solved” (Pulkkinen 2000, 21). This perspective is clear in the moralism of Edelman and Halberstam, whose standpoint offers little space for discussion or virtually no political action. The embracement of queer negativity is seen by them as a final political act.

Puar criticizes mainstream gay and lesbian organizations and their politics as well as particular currents in queer theory. Her critique is very explicit in relation to No Future but I think it can also be read as a general critique of a type of fetishization of negativity in relation to the concept of “queer”. She writes:

For queer politics, the challenge is not so much to refuse a future through the repudiation of reproductive futurity, (…) but to understand how the biopolitics of regenerative capacity already demarcate racialized and sexualized statistical population aggregates as those in decay, destined for no future, based not upon whether they can or cannot reproduce children but on what capacities they can and cannot regenerate and what kind of assemblages they compel, repel, spur, deflate. (Puar 2007, 211)

Puar does not refuse to use the concept of “queer” but she sees a place for it in sexual genealogies that would investigate identities with regard to the crossroads of sexuality, desire, religion, ethnicity and Western imperialism.

Another important author who discusses “queer” from the perspective of negativity is Elizabeth Freeman. In Time Binds (2010) she discusses “queer” as a political concept in relation to

different sexual practices and different kinds of sexual minority communities. Freeman does not embrace a narration of progress or emancipation; on the contrary, she is interested in alternative meaning production, and therefore does not embrace negativity. For her, temporality and therefore also the future, is at the core of her interest, but what she clearly shows is that there can be alternatives to dominant temporalities and alternative visions of future. She writes:

To me, “queer” cannot signal a purely deconstructive move or position of pure negativity.

In enjoying queers to operate as agents of dis- or de-figuration, critics like Lee Edelman (…) risk evacuating the messiest thing about being queer: the actual meeting of bodies with other bodies and with objects. (Freeman 2010, xxi)

The AIDS crisis and the activism that grew around it are for Freeman sources of the political potential of “queer” and subsequently she applies “queer” to the analysis of, for instance, different sexual practices such as S/M or the relationship between sexuality and class. For Freeman, “queer”

can function against late capitalism as a form or resistance or disruption when related to alternative forms of experiencing sexuality, but also alternative ways of experiencing bodies, time and alternative ways of relating to others. This is the political potential of “queer”, but this concept becomes purely theoretical when the future is foreclosed.

I find the theorization of “queer” as a negative concept theoretically and politically problematic. Particularly the authors that became most associated with this turn towards negativity, Lee Edelman and Judith Halberstam, propose specific ethical projects as a result of queer negativity, which seems to be somewhat contradictory. From another point of view, both of these authors give examples of “queer” as a negative concept and relate the concept to particular styles by analysing specific works of art. When reading their books, one can clearly see that they give positive value to Hitchcock movies or books by Jelinek, for instance. Therefore their negativity is self-contradictory as it is always represented by something that authors find valuable and they valorize this. This identification of “queer” with negativity can work well politically as a critique of current political discourse. What troubles me is that these projects seem to stop here.

Arguably, in the projects of Edelman, Halberstam and de Lauretis the negativity of “queer”

has the power to undo subjectivity. But is it really so simple to undo our subjectivity? Do we only need to identify with a negative fantasy about ourselves? Of course, it might not be so easy to identify with some degrading fantasies but, apart from that, is it enough to undo or get away from the subject. For Edelman, “queer” has access to jouissance; for Halberstam it offers some alternative forms of being, and for de Lauretis it is a form of undoing the psyche. The argument against these ideas is developed in Lynne Huffer’s Mad for Foucault (2010). She claims that such projects wish to negate the subject but they reproduce it on another level:

Precisely because queer performativity cannot let go of the “psyche” or “soul” which constitutes the rationalist modern subject, the moral violence of the swamp remains-even,

and especially, in morality’s dialectical negation as a resistance to sociality or a queer death drive. Indeed, from a Nietzschean perspective, the death drive of the queer antisocial thesis epitomizes the self-hating violence of the moral “I” (…). In dialectical terms, negation alone does not undo the “I” (Huffer 2010, 115-116).

Huffer finds particularly problematic the moralistic tone of the queer antisocial thesis. She postulates that “queer” should be used within the framework of Foucaultian ethics and be without morality. Of the authors I have analysed, the closest to this idea would be de Lauretis, for whom negativity cannot be a tool to valorize or create an axiology.

I claim that, historically, “queer” from the time of AIDS activism was not only a form of critique but also a concept that would enable different fantasies about the future, namely future forms of being, future forms of relating, and, finally, future politics. For me, the political potential of “queer” comes from its critical perspective because this concept refers to resistance to norms.

“Queer” also gets its political impetus from being used as a utopian concept that projects alternatives, opens up old meanings and designs new meanings. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote: “It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine an analytically usable language of habit, in a landscape so rubbed and defeatured by the twin hurricanes named Just Do It and Just Say No” (Sedgwick 1993, 140). I believe that the concept “queer” offers a possibility of a third way. It can serve as a tool of political critique and contestation but without foreclosing the future and, more importantly, it can enable different forms of political engagement with the present.

I suggest that narrations of “queer” as a negative concept understood as something anti-systemic have a certain degree of melancholia. Perhaps this idea of the radical “no” expressed powerfully by Edelman (2004), Halberstam (2005) and de Lauretis (2008) came from nostalgia for political engagement. In the beginning of the 1990s new queer theories were close to queer activism but more than a decade later queer activism almost did not exist and definitely did not have such a cultural and political impact as ACT UP or Queer Nation. I suggest that the nostalgic narration of radicalism expresses nostalgia for lost political engagement and looking for new ways of making politics after the era of queer activism.