Both Bersanis: A Recent Gay Bashing, Homo-panic, Log Cabin Republicans, Repetition Compulsion as Model of Artmaking, and Passing

So I had to focus on the Bersani texts, as the they has a bunch of resonance with my swirling thoughts around a gay bashing assault that my friends were the victims of last week.

The Bashing, Briefly:

After an event at Heaven Gallery that we threw, a number of my friends and I left for another event, leaving a fashion designer friend and his models (who participated in the event) to keep dancing and lock up when they were done. They left around midnight, and were walking down Milwaukee, which was as crowded as its been on a weekend night since it was last warm. At Evergreen and Milwaukee (about a block from the 7-11/walgreens), five young men piled out of a car and beat them up, yelling "queer," "fag," and the like. My friends fought back, and got in a couple good punches, but were outnumbered and surprised. Dozens of people were on the street around them, and stopped and stared, but did nothing else. During the assault, no one intervened, spoke up, or called the police. After the assault was over, no one approached them to see if they were alright. The police, when contacted the next day, said that they would take no action unless further attacks occurred. We have been actively working to help our friends deal with this trauma, publicize the event and help to find the assailants. The CPD Hate Crimes Division yesterday assigned two detectives to the case, security camera footage is being reviewed and interviews conducted. This is a very truncated version of the story, but I just wanted to give a context for my reactions to the Bersani texts, as I couldn't help but read them in the light of this jarring and repulsive event.


--Repetition Compulsion

I have been experiencing strong vicarious repetition compulsion urges re: the bashing, and the victims and other friends have described these feelings as well. The urge to be present during the attack, to focus your emotional distress at the idea and remembrance of the attack at the instance of a new iteration of the same event, is highly appealing. I want to be there to try to enact a new outcome.

I have personally dealt for years with a similar repetition compulsion having to do with a less intense bashing I received while an undergrad. It's uncanny how clearly it plays out in my unconscious creation of similar situations, and I've done a bunch of thinking about it since first reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle way back when... Having only really read about it via Freud, who calls everything dysfunctional neurosis, it was refreshing to get Bersani's recovery of the term. In general, Bersani's rejection of Freud's simplistic and incomplete series of value judgements re: his whole psycho-sexual schema is really interesting, if a bit unproductive in it deconstruction without reconstruction. In fact, I was really soured when, by the end of the essay he writes:

Indeed, let us frankly express our relief at having found in Freud himself (and in spite of Freud himself) convincing
grounds for dismissing our own thoughts about sublimation as nothing more- and nothing less -than the play of a consciousness resolutely attached to the always ambiguous pleasures of its own vibrations.

I feel like being dismissive of the metanarrative that nourishes your entire poststructural critical career is a bit obnoxious, and we're hovering amongst a bunch of pomo canon that can't see the paradoxical irony in this tired play.. but i digress...

Anyway I really like the treatment of the repetition compulsion in Sex. and Aes. when it comes to actually getting (briefly) to the aesthetics part. His argument that art is the distancing, sublimating re-repetition of the repetition compulsion is fascinating, even if he jumps quickly over art in order to privilege criticism.. I find myself thinking of the repetition compulsion as art making practice, especially in light of Sedgwick transposing onto varying modes of critical and artistic production the Kleinian affects of paranoia and depression. If we are to be so bold as to naively map the repetition compulsion as productive practice onto Sedgwick's tautology, we can maybe come up with this simplification:

Depression: Modernism
Paranoia: Post-Modernism
Repetition Compulsion: Way Forward/Camp/???

Do you buy this? Do I have to sell it more?

I guess that the history of artmaking has been dependent on repetition, repetition of forms, repetition of technique, repetition of masters' technique, repetition of style throughout career. In very recent history, art-wise, I would argue, many of these tropes have fallen away. Take for example, the artist who produces the same sort of imagery, within the same medium, with the same style, for most of their adult career. Today, this seems repulsive to my generation and those on its periphery, but in, say, Jim Lutes' or Tony Fitzpatrick's generation, this was/is the status quo, as it was for time immemorial. Of course there are examples that don't follow this rule, but let's not get sidetracked and agree that this has for most of history been the general rule. OK, I've gotten sidetracked in anticipating objection... basically I'm trying to make it clear that repetition has fallen away as a trope in artmaking, and to assume that we're not alone among artistic disciplines in our condition as a hyper-differentiated/individuated collection of scattered dilettantes.

Now, in order to further de-pathologize repetition I'm going to argue that it's not some random urge that has evolved in us for no particular reason; I would like to remind us that repetition is the cornerstone of education, or, more accurately, of learning. We teach ourselves not only to draw and make good intuitive video edits by repetition, but also to shoot accurate hoops, to read, to run, to ride bikes, to have sex. Need I remind us: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. The "neurotic" patient's urge to re-create traumatic experiences is largely based in this productive habit... jump to: as an urge which might be stretched into a Kleinian affect, which might be stretched into a metaphor/method of artistic production, the repetition compulsion is interesting ground to set up new paradigm camp...

The repetition compulsion, in art, can sublimate and grant ironic distance to the rawer nerve of the repetition compulsion itself, as Bersani says, but as a practice it might look like a kind of camp, or it might look like a kind of insider art, or it might look like a dredging up of historical follies to try to recapitulate them and save them from doomedness.

Here: The dominant wisdom that provokes Freud to cast the R.C. in a negative light, and causes us to throw out our (fascist, communist, synth, beat, hippie, grunge, situationist, surrealist, modernist, idealist) babies with their bathwater, is perhaps not wise. If we were brave enough to restage the actions of the giants upon whose shoulders we stand as opposed to kicking at them with our heels because they didn't deliver the utopias they envisioned, perhaps we could recover some of the "progressive" trajectory we have so clearly lost in the past decades. We have the tools of genius at our disposal to pick up, modify, and use. Instead we thrash around with newness that uses as its referents the perverse inequity and decadence that we wallow in. I'm going to try and make old work new, which as a tactic is not new, and reeks of conservatism, but I am fed up with deconstruction and pastiche, and want to rebuild some of the structure that we're so post, and am tired of being embarrassed of putting these things so bluntly, knowing that they can be critiqued as naive by cynical folk who fancy themselves enlightened. I have intense feelings of saudade for an enlightenment that brings with it righteous positive rhetoric, and tire of generations of projects that though critique mill around in the graves of such thinkers, making sure their corpses are sufficiently scanned for faults and fractures.

But I digress again, and my critique is getting obnoxiously epistemological.

Basically, I'm above saying that I reject one method of utilizing historical art/critique tropes/themes, and I encourage another:

One: pomo deconstruction (against)
Another: Campy/critical recovery/restaging/repetition/re-representation (for)

Call me conservative.

Rectum=Grave?
CALL ME CONSERVATIVE:

OK, so there's much more to talk about with the Aesthetics/Sexuality piece, but I've probably lost all of you by now, so I thought I'd skip to the next reading and throw in some bold text to catch your interest. (<-unnecessary musing) I was struck by the passages that discuss the difference between a "gay" activist existence and a mere homosexual preference. Bersani eschews the notion that gay goes along with radically liberated activist lifestyle (some even suggest homosexuality=product of liberal mindset). Bersani, while he builds to a certain heroizing of gay male promiscuity/difference in sexual activity/non-combative monogamous relationship starting, is careful to anticipate some critiques, and rails against certain heroizations of homosexuality..

On the whole, gay men are no less socially ambitious, and, more often than
we like to think, no less reactionary and racist than heterosexuals. To want sex
with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism-a fact both
recognized and denied by the gay liberation movement of the late '60s and early
'70s. Recognized to the extent that gay liberation, as Jeffrey Weeks has put it,
proposed "a radical separation . . . between homosexuality, which was about
sexual preference, and 'gayness,' which was about a subversively political way of
life."' (205)

He goes on to talk of gay slumlords who feel no solidarity for other oppressed minorities, such as blacks. He makes the (I guess OK in the 80's?) weird move of equating all homosexuals with white privilege, but that's neither here nor there.

I'm reminded of this fascinating doc called flag wars about these horrible older white fags who aggressively colonize an historically black neighborhood. It's called Flag Wars:




http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0359281/



All of the talk of performing hyper-masculinity was also very interesting, especially as it was related to straight men, and in which ways they were and were not threatened by homosexual presence. My friends that were attacked were dressed in outfits that suggested the almost polar opposite of the will to "macho" representation. This is not to say that their outfits were hyper-feminine, though. They were clearly identifiable as fags without having to parrot gender stereotypes, in a third way that Bersani (unless I missed it) doesn't address. For B, it's leathermen with Jane Austin's oeuvre hidden in their lairs or queens who do work to demean women while highlighting (and therefor making vulnerable) their societally inflicted gender characteristics.

I feel guilty about performing . I've been weak for accepting that I "pass," and using this fact to my advantage. I feel that by making more audacious fashion choices, or even by adopting one of the various costumes of gender role-play that the queer wardrobe has acquired, I would be doing activist work in every environment I entered. Instead, for instance, I "labored under the assumption" of straightness at two of my previous workplaces, each of which was relatively queer-friendly, but housed some people who were explicitly homophobic. By "passing," as light-skinned black folk have historically done, I performed a shameful trick that was both cowardly and refused a number of opportunities to sway the minds of those who did not have direct contact with homosexual friends/coworkers/family members. I have done my share of activist work for various causes, including some queer-related ones, but I feel, especially in the recent light of my friends being gay bashed, that as a "gay," I have thus far been something of a failure. I'm confused by my options.. should I adopt a lisp, wear a pink triangle everywhere I go, or perhaps should I just join these folks:




So much more to write, but I have to finish the other readings... plus this post is way way too long already, sorry.