What does it mean to say that queerness is ontological? In this episode, we’re joined by Billie Cashmore and Xenogothic (Mattie Colquhoun) to explore the philosophical foundations and political tensions surrounding queerness, normativity, and the symbolic order. Drawing on thinkers like Judith Butler, Heidegger, and Lacan, we examine queerness not simply as identity, but as a condition of social and ontological failure—and potential. What happens when queerness claims both radical subversion and historical universality?
Adam Jones recently invited me to have a conversation with Billie Cashmore on the Acid Horizon podcast, building on her recent essay for Splinter Mag, “On the Political Character of Queerness”, and my later discussion of it on the blog, “The Hauntology of Transness”. In a wonderful twist of fate, after many years of appearing infrequently on the Acid Horizon podcast whilst trapped in a quarantine world of Zoom, I happened to be in London on the date proposed, so Adam, Billie and I had our discussion in the living room of their flat. It was deeply enjoyable and I’m excited for others to hear what I think was a really productive chat.
This episode is also a nice corollary to the recently released conversation I had with Alex and Bella on the Ban Sex Now! podcast, which was recorded three years ago and will probably give you some sense of how much has changed for me over the years — not least my voice…
Also, if you want to make it a queer trifecta, I’d also recommend the previous episode of Acid Horizon as well, featuring Alexander Stoffel discussing his book Eros and Empire, “which traces the transnational roots of sexual freedom movements in the U.S. [to show] how desire has been both constrained by and mobilized against imperial and capitalist systems.”
Episode #2 of Ban Sex Now! is now online. Alex and Bella ask me about whether it is possible to have a non-fascist sex life and I pull on a bunch of things percolating for me at the time, which were to do with Deleuze, Foucault and D.H. Lawrence…
I say “at the time” because I believe this episode was recorded sometime in July or August 2022, not long after I first moved to Newcastle and before I finished my second book. It is hard to situate it now in my memory. I was in the midst of an earth-shattering mental breakdown at this point, although you can’t really tell… Things were really bad.
It is also recorded prior to my coming-out, and about a year before I started taking hormones, so watching it back now is like listening to a stranger. Admittedly, I think this stranger misunderstands a few things being wrestled with… Forgive me for that.
Nevertheless, it is a fun document of a really enjoyable chat, and actually a really interesting time capsule of someone thinking about their relationship to sex for the first time in a long time, right before they cracked the proverbial egg. I think there are a lot of seeds of ideas in this chat that have since fully blossomed since.
By forgetting its fundamental questioning of capitalist time, [hauntology] has become associated with what it first set out to oppose: a postmodernist understanding of presence and history.
I’ve written a short primer on “hauntology” for Red Pepper mag’s ‘Key Words’ series. You can read it here.
Thanks to all those who came to LCC’s BA Photography symposium yesterday, and congratulations to fellow presenters Suzi Teal, Lechen Zheng, Noam Dee, Ying ying Li, and Flora Liu on their degree show.
My presentation — a shortened version of which is below — was written with no idea about the work of the students I would be presenting alongside. When writing it, I was reflecting back on my own feelings as a then-recent photographic art graduate. What I remember most about that time is how I was so desperate to engage more heavily with theory. I’d read the canon of photographic theory — Barthes, Sontag, etc. — but philosophy as a whole was dark territory for me. I remember picking up Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus not long after graduating in 2013, and also making my first few purchases from Urbanomic, having no clue how to make sense of any of it. I brought that uncertainty to LCC yesterday, and was not only surprised but also hugely impressed by a graduating cohort putting “theory in action”, responding both theoretically and photographically to the work of Griselda Pollock, Immanuel Kant, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous and others. It was so exciting to meet a group of students engaging with theory at a level that was miles ahead of my own engagement when I was in their position twelve years ago.
I went to Offprint afterwards to find some of NERO’s English-language output in the wild. It was a good day.
The Problems with the Stories We Are Told
I began an undergraduate degree in Photographic Art at the University of Wales, Newport, in 2010. Having been obsessed with photography since I was a teenager, I had every intention of pursuing some sort of photographic career, and after I graduated, I stuck to my guns and went out into the world with hopes of acquiring one.
Much to my surprise, I had some success. I spent the next seven years working on and off as a curatorial assistant and exhibitions coordinator for galleries and festivals in England and Wales, which included working on the Welsh pavilion at the Venice biennale in 2015 and later curating exhibitions in the private members’ space at BAFTA. On paper, all this might look quite impressive. But if I’m completely honest with you, I wasn’t very good at holding down any of those jobs.
This is because my work ethic probably left something to be desired. I did really like certain parts of those jobs. I loved working with my hands, erecting installations in some strange places. I even enjoyed all the heavy lifting – and there was a lot of heavy lifting. But whenever I was at my desk, tasked with a load of admin as we tried to get various exhibitions off the ground, I was constantly misbehaving, mostly by posting on my blog and, later, writing my first book, when I really should have been doing other things. This did not go unnoticed, so it is not an approach to a creative practice that I can recommend in good conscience.
Already, I might suggest that this constitutes one sort of problem with the stories we tell ourselves. There was this sort of presumption I felt that, in working for a big gallery or institution, I should have felt like I was exactly where I wanted to be. I was getting the sort of jobs that lots of people wanted, but once I was there, I found that there were far more exciting things (to me at least) that kept diverting my attention – specifically, I found myself newly excited by writing.
This obsession I developed with writing was another surprise to me. Back when I was preparing for my own degree show, I positioned myself entirely against writing as the expected way of contextualising my own work. I was primarily interested in the shifting relationships between images. It was this interest that led me to believe I’d enjoy curating. I spent all my time messing around with sequences of images to make zines, looking at how different iterations of the same body of work could completely change its narrative. I enjoyed making mixtapes and CDs in my spare time for the same reason, and even ended up making an mix CD for my degree show, as an alternative to an artist statement, refusing the pressure to use a bunch of buzzwords that I didn’t even understand.
A few years later, I ran with this concept and starting making sound art. On an artist residency in 2015, for example, I made another mix CD, with other people’s songs interspersed with recorded interviews, bits of spoken word and field recordings, putting together a guided walk through a small village in Carmarthenshire.
At that point, the emphasis of my artistic practice was no longer about privileging my own experiences, but trying to instigate them for other people, finding other ways of sharing a certain perspective on the world. It was about emphasising the underside of the photographic work itself. I don’t know if many of you may feel similarly, but at a certain point, I started to feel like the photographs themselves were secondary. It was the experiences had whilst taking them that came to predominate, and of course, that can feel like an impossible thing to replicate and share when you’re tasked with actually showing the results of your adventures. The photographs started to only feel like traces of the real work itself, which was ostensibly an artistic practice that involved a lot of walking around and, in my case, as much listening as there was looking.
Photography, for me, then, was always a medium for documenting encounters – and I mean, of course that is what photography is on a quite fundamental level. But I was curious about the other sensory experiences that photography left behind. There was something about trying to do justice to multisensory experiences, albeit in an exploded and disjointed way, that really interested me, or maybe a kind of cross-cultural hybridity that defied easy categorisation – and categorisation is arguably all that language is good for. It registers difference. It makes a claim on the distinction between this and that. And that’s how my photographic education was also constructed, in terms of different kinds of photography as well.
To give you a little extra context, I should probably explain that there was an unfortunate if unintentional hierarchy in place between the photography courses at Newport when I was there. There may even be a similar hierarchy here. As I’ve already mentioned, I studied photographic art (which we abbreviated affectionately to ‘photo art’), but there were also courses in documentary photography (which we called ‘doc phot’) and photography for fashion and advertising (or PFA), and a sort of tension was always felt between them.
Doc phot saw itself as the most important, and it was the longest-running and most prestigious course, with very some famous alumni, like Martin Parr. PFA, by contrast, was the newest course. It was very commercial, and generally seen as unserious. Photo Art was stuck somewhere in middle, and what I noticed was that, although PFA were derided for its focus on the business of fashion photography, it was also the most openly experimental course, and I always found the work produced by its students, despite its commercial nature, to be the most visually exciting.
Absorbing as much as I could from these different courses, I think I wanted my own work to be a hybrid of everything that I was looking at. A kind of garish street photography, interested in moments where the commercial failed itself, or where a kind of capitalistic visual culture began to fall apart and reveal something strange and new underneath itself. So I set about documenting joyful visual experiences in daily life, which were nonetheless constructed out of what was essentially visual trash. And here I’m reminded of that line from the end of Philip K Dick’s novel VALIS, which I’ve always loved: “The symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum.” Here we can think of images of Jesus Christ that someone finds burnt into a piece of toast. But what I was interested in was a kind of understated sublime found on the visual trash heap of all that surrounds us.
What I was trying to make, then, was a sort of visual poetry that refused any relationship to the written word, and in interrogating this tension between art and commerce, I was drawn increasingly towards photography’s relationship with music in particular, or the music industry. This wasn’t simply through gig photography, but rather the visual culture that music exists alongside. I was an enthusiastic record collector back then, for example – and feel free to call me a hipster, but even now I don’t think there’s a comparable feeling to putting on a record and holding that big artwork in your hands, as its own kind of art object. I really liked the output of ECM Records in particular, which emphasised the improvisational relationship between photography and jazz.
The problem that I found, however, on graduating and making some preliminary steps into the art world, is that people still wanted you to talk about your work – which was something that, at that time, I just wasn’t very good at. And that’s not for lack of trying. I still had to defend my work in my final crit, and I think I did so successfully. And despite a refusal to write an artist statement at my own degree show, I had really enjoyed writing my dissertation, which again was about anxiety and photography, and overcoming a fear of failure – a failure to do justice to what was happening in front of me. So I wasn’t suffering from an anti-intellectualism, but was rather interested in the moments were forms of expression failed or couldn’t be so easily explained away. I wanted to rebel against the artist statement, then, as a prescribed format of summation, because I didn’t feel that whatever meaning I could contain within it was any more stable than any other form of meaningful expression. I wanted to summarise my own work in another, more open-ended way, with the making of mix CDs being as much an informed practice of borrowing from what already existed in the world as photography itself was.
I soon came to realise, then, that it wasn’t the written word as such that I had a problem with, but the pretentiousness of a kind of International Art English, which wasn’t really as intellectual as it professed itself to be and only seemed to try to plug the gaps in and explain away photography’s more poetic tendencies. I had read too many texts at exhibitions that felt like a sort of stolen valour in that regard, misusing concepts only to perform a kind of borrowed legitimacy, when I wasn’t personally bothered about whether someone else saw my own work as legitimate or not. I wanted to disrupt that habit you will see in art galleries the world over, where someone is confronted by something that challenges their preconceptions and values, and so they turn to a piece of wall text as if it would tell them how they were supposed to understand what they’re looking at. I didn’t want to rely on writing for that. I wanted to use something that was as fun to engage with as the work itself.
What I wanted, then, to highlight a disparity I felt between different modes of expression and disrupt a hierarchy of the senses. But I came to realise further still that this disparity wasn’t only applicable to art and writing, but other modes of expression as well. For example, as I tried to make moves into doing some sort of music photography of my own, I discovered that, despite working with bands that were proudly experimental, the ways they were written about or even photographed often made no attempt to reflect or enter into dialogue with the affects produced by the music itself. Photography and writing instead took on the task of a kind of sense-making and lazy contextualisation, rather than expanding on the elusiveness of meaning altogether and instead trying to engage on a more affective level.
Soon enough, I ended up being haunted by an anecdote that one of my lecturers told me about. Jason Evans is a photographer and artist best known for doing all the record covers for Caribou and Four Tet. Jason was the biggest influence on me whilst I was an undergraduate student, and they once told me about shooting for a cover story about the band Lightning Bolt for The Wire magazine, and being initially told by the editorial team that the images were too fuzzy – despite the fact that ‘fuzzy’ is a very apt description of how Lightning Bolt’s music already sounds. They clearly ended up making the case for their approach to the band, but the fact that such a case would even need to be argued for came as a shock to me.
It was an obstacle that I met myself repeatedly in working with various bands and magazines who were oddly alienated from any attempt to document culture in a way that directly responded to the sounds being made. The same was true when I started pitching my writing to music magazines, in fact. I was once invited to write for the Guardian’s music column, for instance, after one of the editors had enjoyed something I’d written on my blog. But despite liking what I did, they never liked any of the ideas I’d bring to them. I was always told that my writing or my ideas would alienate their intended audience, even when writing about music that they liked and which was itself aesthetically alienating. And so, more often than not, the bands or magazines I worked with just wanted photos of musicians looking handsome and cool, and the music press wanted some sort of journalistic puff piece. It bored the life out of me.
There were exceptions, it must be said. The last professional photographic project I ended up working on, before my life took a very different turn, was making the album art for William Doyle’s 2017 album Your Wilderness Revisited – an album of songs that sought to explore a kind of suburban psychedelia. I spent at least two years on that project, going for long walks with Will, making images as he came up with song ideas, and it was a really beautiful way of working with someone on the visual context for an album whilst the album itself was actively being made, rather than being brought on board when the music itself was already completed. We shared a really fruitful and exciting dialogue, and I’m still really proud of what we made.
We even had a exhibition in the bar of a music venue when Will was debuting the new material live for the first time. But for all the work that went into it, the project ran out of steam once the album had been released, with nothing much to show for those two years of work for myself. I ended up jaded, and I effectively gave up on any professional photographic practice soon afterwards. (Although, some eight years later, I’d really like to get back into it.)
Ultimately, all of these experiences only confirmed my suspicions that there were lingering problems within contemporary culture that some people had identified almost two decades earlier. There was a sense that certain modes of expression were subordinated to others. To be afforded the freedom to express yourself how you wish — responding to other forms of art directly rather than tethering yourself in advance to the expectations to a hypothetical audience — was a rare luxury. It is for that reason that I have primarily remained attached to blogging, where freedom of expression is total…
Shortly after finishing my undergraduate degree, I read Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 book, More Brilliant than the Sun – a book about black music, dance music, and music that looks to the future – in which he polemically jostles with a sort of music industry anti-intellectualism that I’d also begun to feel so sharply. Here’s what Kodwo had to say about music writing in the late Nineties:
All today’s journalism is nothing more than a giant inertia engine to put the brakes on breaks, a moronizer placing all thought on permanent pause, a futureshock absorber, forever shielding its readers from the future’s cuts, tracks, scratches. Behind the assumed virtue of keeping rhythm mute, there is a none-too-veiled hostility towards analyzing rhythm at all. Too many ideas spoil the party. Too much speculation kills ‘dance music’, by ‘intellectualizing’ it to death
The fuel this inertia engine runs on is fossil fuel: the live show, the proper album, the Real Song, the Real Voice, the mature, the musical, the pure, the true, the proper, the intelligent, breaking America: all notions that stink of the past, that maintain a hierarchy of the senses, that petrify music into a solid state in which everyone knows where they stand, and what real music really is.
And this is why nothing is more fun than spoiling this terminally stupid sublime, this insistence that Great Music speaks for itself.
It was Kodwo, then, that made me realise how writing could be as provocative and disruptive as music or visual art. His work had such an impact on me, as someone who had begun to feel this ‘hierarchy of the senses’ so deeply, that I went to Goldsmiths in 2016 to study on the postgraduate course he was then teaching on: the MA in Contemporary Art Theory. Although I was still hoping to keep working in the arts and as a photographer at the time, it was a course that only led me further astray, in part due to what ultimately transpired that year.
Kodwo wasn’t the only person at Goldsmiths I hoped to learn from – I was also excited to be taught by Mark Fisher, whose k-punk blog had been essential reading for me for about a decade. But when Mark passed away at the start of our second semester, in January 2017, the hierarchy I’d been wrestling against was suddenly razed to the ground. That is to say that, suddenly, writing, photography, art, music – all felt like inappropriate ways to mediate an experience of grief that was felt so profoundly.
But since I was still a student at the time of Mark’s death, who had a dissertation to write, I had a go at mediating it anyway. I kept writing and photographing to try and capture some sort of experience I ultimately knew I could not do justice to – some cascading melancholic present, defined by Mark’s death, but also the Grenfell Tower fire, Jeremy Corbyn’s first electoral defeat, and more. Over the next few years, that attempt grew from a 15,000-word dissertation into a book – my first book – which was published in March 2020 with the title, Egress: On Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, and which was followed soon afterwards by an editorial project, bringing together Mark’s final lectures at Goldsmiths before his death, published in January 2021 as Postcapitalist Desire.
I have primarily been recognised as a writer ever since then, but each book I’ve written has nonetheless been heavily concerned with the visual, with an attempt to flatten writing and photography as two complementary documentary impulses. It has still been difficult to situate these practices on an equal footing. These books, after all, are not photo books, even though they contain many images – including many of my own images. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to publish something more recognisable as a photobook that is accompanied by some sort of 90,000-word essay. It would undoubtedly be a ridiculous object, but all the more interesting for subverting what Kodwo calls the Trad Sublime, that is, the habitual ways through which we enjoy consuming culture.
I must confess that, at present, the book I’m working on isn’t visual at all. Right now, I’m wrestling with a PhD in Philosophy at Newcastle University. I’d originally considered doing English Literature instead, writing a thesis on the relationship between modernist photography and poetry, specifically imagism. I chose to write about the figure of the orphan in twentieth-century French philosophy instead, and anyway, whether I’d pursued English Literature or Philosophy, it has been fun to take on a very unorthodox academic route, trying to get a doctorate in something that you don’t actually have any prior formal training in. But my photographic education has still proven indispensable to me. In fact, I see this interdisciplinary approach to be an advantage that a lot of people don’t have, and I think everything that I learnt whilst studying photography has been invaluable in whatever else I’ve wanted to do. I think that’s because photography, first and foremost, helped me develop a sensitivity to representations of things.
This probably sounds vague, but stick with me.
Take my last book, Narcissus in Bloom, which was published in 2023 and which Paul tells me might already be familiar to some of you. It’s a book about narcissism, and even now I’m not entirely happy with the subtitle I ended up giving it. Originally, I didn’t want it to have a subtitle at all, but my publisher insisted. In hindsight, I wish I’d couched the end of that last word in some brackets – “An Alternative History of the Self(ie)”. Because the book is ostensibly about how we have come to understand the self – a story which I tell through art and photographic history, that is, by considering the ways in which we have become accustomed to representing ourselves. It was a book I wanted to write because, although no one knew me as a professional photographer by that point, I still had a lot of unfinished business with the medium and an understanding of it that I’d never seen written down by anyone else.
But the subtitle as it stands is still fitting, because I think if you were to judge this book by its cover, and you saw this flagged preoccupation with the selfie as that most ubiquitous and unserious thing, you’d probably think it was either an unserious book or maybe something a little too pretentious. To be honest, I think I’ve long run the risk of being seen as an unserious or pretentious person in general, ever since I decided to use a song by The Supremes to frame my final degree show work. But I remember, when talking to my editor about the subtitle, he said something that made me laugh. He acknowledged that it was a subtitle that might presuppose some level of unseriousness, and so it would – and I quote – “piss off those snobs at the Royal Academy”, but it might also draw in other people who aren’t looking for something so serious to begin with. I liked that, and I think I have long hoped to be a thorn in the side of culture in that same way. Not in terms of a kind of punk attitude, but at least a contrarian one. I have long hoped that, no matter what kind of preconceptions someone might bring to my work, they’d ultimately find themselves surprised by it. And I suppose that the whole idea of not judging a book by its cover is something that the book itself deals with implicitly.
In the book, I argue that narcissism has only very recently become a shorthand for arrogance and self-obsession. But really, to be a narcissist is to have a questioning relationship to the self. According to modern psychoanalysis, for example, everybody’s ego is an image, or an imago, that we construct for ourselves. It is an imaginary thing that allows us to understand the self, whilst ‘the subject’ – the person that we are on an unconscious level – is otherwise inaccessible to us. The subject of the unconscious is that base-level version of ourselves that sort of gets in way, that leads to slips of the tongue, that dreams, that makes errors, and it is this disconnection between the ego and the unconscious that means we have to constantly correct ourselves. The story of Narcissus, we must remember, is about one man’s encounter with this ego-image after having never acquired one previously. He falls in love with it, but is also horrified by it, and though the myth is often read superficially today, we should perhaps put ourselves in Narcissus’s position and consider the mental strain we would undergo if we suddenly saw our own reflection today, having had no sense whatsoever what we look like. Perhaps it is not really understanding what we look like that leads us to investigate ourselves so incessantly. And the problem is that, if we look a little too closely, I imagine we might all go a little mad, like Narcissus did.
But we don’t have that experience. Our self-image is something we begin to construct from a very young age, which is shaped from without by our cultural circumstances, and it is often the case that, when we consider how we understand ourselves and how we’re supposed to act, our relationship to ourselves can become unbalanced. We self-consciously notice some sort of error we’ve made, perhaps, or something we don’t like about how we look or behave or respond to things. Sometimes we overcorrect, sometimes we don’t do very well at correcting at all – but either way, this is a fundamentally creative and experimental process. And this is also the spectrum of narcissism, if I can put it that way. Donald Trump is often denigrated as a narcissist, for example, because we are very aware that he has tried to construct an overinflated image of himself as some sort of god-emperor, which is wholly disjointed from the bumbling idiot of a man that he actually is. But someone struggling with depression is no less narcissistic, as they might have a totally degraded sense of themselves that doesn’t align with how wonderful they are. So really, we’re all narcissists in one way or another, but most of us have a less disruptive relationship to this image we construct of ourselves than others.
As photographers, I think an acknowledgement of this is useful, and may even be more obvious to us than it is to other people. This symposium, after all, has been framed around “the problem with the stories we are told”. Narcissus in Bloom argues that the stories we’ve been told about narcissism are totally disconnected from what it initially symbolised. But the further point to be emphasised, in the context of the book, is that the stories we tell ourselves in general can also constitute a problem as well, which we can spend our whole lives working through.
This is something that is probably applicable to your own work. I remember my friend Amy Ireland, for example, co-author with Maya B. Kronic of Cute Accelerationism, once telling me about how we are all “fated to a problem”, which reminded me of something one of my lecturers at uni told us: that we will all probably have only one idea, which we will end up exploring in an infinite number of permutations. It shocked us then, but it’s something that has so far borne true for me. No matter what subject matter I end up taking photographs of or writing about, I have this fascination with trying to represent what otherwise feels unrepresentable, coming at things from disorienting perspectives, constructing this wild and living archive of all of my experiences online that, when taken together in its entirety, produces this sort of cubist perspective that would probably be impossible to make coherent sense of.
Take the relationship between Egress and Narcissus in Bloom. On the surface, they appear to be entirely different books. The first was a book about community, written in the first person; it was about my personal experience of things gone through collectively, thinking through the frictions produced by that collision of perspectives and the implications it has for our political imaginations. My second book was a book about the individual, written in the third person; it is about our collective understanding of what it means to have a self-image. As far as I’m concerned, these are two very different books that nonetheless orbit the same problematic, approaching it from opposing perspectives. All of my work as a whole is concerned with the same problem: how we are constructed by our experiences, and the difficulties we have in representing them, particularly experiences that contradict or challenge a prevailing understanding of how things should be for all of us.
In pursing this problem, my postgraduate life has taken many turns, and I’m left wondering what the value of this story is that I’m trying to tell you. On the one hand, I’m someone who has made a lot of stuff. I have contributed to the culture of my time, and it has taken about a decade for me to feel like that contribution has been recognised, at least in some ways. It is very nice to be told that my work has been taught on this course, for example. But I’m also someone who still lives in their overdraft, who works in a pub, and who still has no idea what the future holds for me. If the purpose of this sort of talk is to give you an example of how to approach postgraduate life and find some material comfort, I might not be the best choice of speaker. But that lack of material comfort is also a result of a life spent failing to do what I’m supposed to, or failing to think about the world in the way that my education has encouraged me to. This is to say that, whilst I think it is essential that we question the world in which we live and identify the problems with the stories we tell, it is also true that people don’t like being told that they’re wrong or that things aren’t how they appear to be.
But I think, as artists, that is precisely the load that we have to bear. To quote Mark Fisher: “has there ever been a time when finding gaps in the seamless surfaces of ‘reality’ has ever felt more pressing?” I think not. And whilst finding those gaps might not be the most financially lucrative way to spend a lifetime, some things are bigger than one’s own personal circumstances. If I can make any sort of claim to having found those gaps, and make some contribution to changing the culture in which we live by widening them, I’ll be happy. And if I can inspire you today to feel like that sort of life is one worth living – a life in which you question what is expected of you in the months and years ahead, even (or especially) in ways that run contrary to any sense of professionalism or cultural acceptability – I will be just as happy. It is difficult, for sure, but more affirming than I ever previously imagined it could be.
Anyway, that’s my story. And I invite you to question it as much as you like. But what I’d like to do now is hear some of yours.
I’ll be at Cafe OTO on Tuesday 24th June for the third in a series of events hosted by The Wire magazine looking at the impact of AI on contemporary music making.
I’ll be presenting on the implications of AI for blogospheric topics from the 2000s-2010s, regarding hauntology, salvagepunk and accelerationism as three different approaches to the cultural production of the new and how the recombinatory processes of AI sampling are changing our relationship to appropriation and sampling in music.
Generative music systems were around long before generative AI. This event looks at a previous history of music as a series of inputs, workflows, and rules-based processes, from Fluxus onward. What are the choices that inform generative music systems internally (in scores, programming, and technical possibilities) and externally (in power structures between performers, users, and corporations)?
Generative AI also generates its outputs from massive datasets, and can be ‘trained’ on the work of thousands of anonymised creative artists. Debates are heated about copyright, ownership and originality, and the consent of artists and creators to be used in these massive datasets. What does Generative AI say to the rules we have about what constitutes agency and identity, and the distinction between self and other in relation to information transmission and exchange? Looking into plunderphonics, folk, sampling and copy cultures, were or are other paths possible?
On the train down to London, I felt more eyes on me than usual. Standing to one side as I waited to take my seat, a man passed me by, then stopped in the gangway, turning to look at me directly. His face was like thunder, as if he wanted to say something, and then quickly thought better of it.
I could think of no other reason for this strange interaction than the fact that my queerness is increasingly visible. It’s certainly not the sort of interaction I ever experienced prior to beginning my transition. But it’s also whatever. I laughed it off to myself, taking some bittersweet solace in the fact that my hormone regime is clearly starting to scramble some codes, even when I am making very little effort to visibly present myself in that way. It is a complex pill to swallow when sexism and queerphobic start to feel gender-affirming… It’s depressing this sad silver lining is one you regularly hear from trans people just going about their lives. It is also, of course, a personal defiance that only partly covers over a fear that increasingly pervades our existence in public spaces.
As the train pulled out of the station, with no window to look out of, I resigned myself to spending the next hour or so scrolling through Instagram reels. I came across one from Shon Faye, in which she reckons with her own fear at present, finding herself speaking vaguely and defensively when meeting new people, doing whatever she can to not reveal her transness. This paranoia is heightened, Faye explains, because she fears that, if she were to be open with someone — perhaps an organiser of an event, someone doing their job, etc. — they may well feel more empowered to dictate to her where she can and can’t piss. Better to hide and pass as best as possible.
Without wanting to draw any sort of equivalence between our experiences — Faye passes; I am very much a bricky girl — as I sat on the train, having already been looked at in a threatening way, I began my own process of wondering who I could call on for help, if anything were to happen.
The food trolley was wheeled by, pushed and pulled by two members of staff wearing a casual polo-t-shirt uniform with lanyards hanging around their necks. The lanyards — now commonly seen in many work and/or institutional settings — were striped with all the colours of the ‘progress’ flag. A strange feeling took over once I noticed this. Despite this signalling of allyship, I didn’t hold out that much hope that, in the event of some hypothetical incident, they’d be all that helpful. I assumed, in their working role, they’d defer to the law. The people I was most wary of, in that moment, were the people wearing the colours signalling… support for my liberation? Maybe not even that.
I was left thankful that all train toilets are, for the time being, gender-neutral…
Two Sundays ago, I attended a demonstration around Grey’s Monument in Newcastle, where a range of speakers spoke out against the Supreme Court judgement over the course of two hours in front of an enormous crowd of supporters. The day itself was wonderful, with so many of Newcastle’s queers gathering in the otherwise more hostile centre of town, as the sun shone joyfully upon us.
I heard one old man, passing by, refer to us as a “gathering of freaks”, but no one would have been stupid enough to start something; there were hundreds of people in attendance. We moved onto The Old Coal Yard shortly afterwards for How Mountain Girls Can Love, a new monthly event showcasing queer country acts. It was wholesome and affirming and I went home that evening with my heart full.
But as the next few days went by, I came to reflect on how the speeches at the demo had ultimately left me cold, as although they were expressions of opposition to this growing reactionary current within British liberalism, they also felt oddly liberal themselves…
This was far from the intention, of course. The chants rehearsed and repeated between each speech were familiar — “No borders, no nations, trans liberation”; “When trans people are under attack, what do we do? Fight back!” But what does “fighting back” look like in the context of trans liberation specifically?
Expressions of Palestinian solidarity were steadfast at this protest, as they have been at all protests over the last eighteen months, no matter the overarching cause rallied behind. As it should be. But when the two opposition movements are brought together so explicitly, highlighting how both are resisting various kinds of state control and othering, it became clear that one side had clearer targets for direct action than the other…
Palestine Action, for example, are an undeniably courageous group, which has utilised direct action to disrupt Israel’s infrastructure of apartheid, its genocide, and the UK’s complicity in both. But if we are hoping to place the struggle for trans liberation alongside this sort of action, then what do our methods of disruption and resistance look like? What are we sabotaging? What are we tearing down?
It seems there is an unfortunate limit to trans dissent in this country. There’s also a vague feeling that, when claims of intersection with other causes are made, they start to feel like stolen valour, only highlighting the paltry forms of resistance that queer people and their allies have felt able to effectuate. This is perhaps because trans politics in this country has often been reduced — not necessarily through any fault of its own, but due to the sheer force of the reaction directed against us — to challenging a certain disregard for social etiquette, but not a whole lot more than that.
Consider how it is only the liberal position that understands the “kinder, gentler politics” of the Corbyn years as meaning “more social politeness” (read: not being mean to reactionaries on Twitter), rather than a programme that seeks to directly intervene in the causes of social murder. Given the moral panic surrounding people’s shifting use of pronouns, this is one area in particular where dissent takes on an unfortunately liberal character. Of course, the use of people’s preferred pronouns is good, but it is, at base, only the polite thing to do. And in what other political domain can politeness be framed as a vanguardist position? It is in this context that a trans politics is woefully circumscribed in a liberal context it otherwise opposes, and I fear that, unless more action is taken to truly elevate this struggle to the level of those it rightly stands in solidarity with, it is at risk of remaining there.
So, what is to be done? But also, what is already being done? There are many well-intentioned initiatives here and there, even if only at a local level.
Newcastle’s community has come together repeatedly over the last few years to throw fundraisers for different people’s gender-affirming healthcare, and has more recently crowdfunded legal support for a trans refugee seeking asylum in our city, who has since been given the right to remain. These initiatives have been run by trans people themselves, petitioning their cis allies for help and support. But this also further emphasises how the brunt of transitioning to a more equitable social reality is still loaded onto the back of trans people themselves, who are already engaged in their own forms of self-disruption.
This is arguably the entire reason why we are the subject of such cruelty at present. Talk to any trans person about their past lives — if they are even willing to divulge this information (many aren’t) — and you will find someone who was undergone a radical letting-go of the person they once were. This isn’t simply a position of transmedicalism (as some have claimed when I’ve argued this before); there are many ways in which we can materially change ourselves and how we relate to the world in which we live, and these are precisely the things we are being denied access to — economic stability, access to resources, housing, healthcare, general quality of life. We fall into the logic of our enemies when we make the ‘material’ synonymous with the ‘biological’, or even the ‘medical’ with the strictly ‘hormonal’ or ‘surgical’. It has always meant more than that. But this equivalence is one way in which the conversation lags behind where it should be, out of a fear of tripping over our inclusivity.
I think it is necessary, then, that we open out our understanding of what it means to be trans, beyond this simplistic inclusivity, whilst also not slipping into the sort of universalism that relativises the sorts of changes that trans people specifically undergo. This is tricky, but the point is essential because TERFs, to the contrary, are beholden to a ‘gender realism’ (as in ‘capitalist realism’) that tries to inscribe the mantra of ‘there is no alternative’ onto the level of biology and identity (with the two made somehow distinct, much like ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ themselves, such that only the latter is malleable, albeit it in an illusory way, when in fact they are both as real and mutable as each other). The only argument TERFs have, then, is that change — inscribed at any ‘level’ of our understanding of sex/gender — is impossible. This, however, is what makes the designation of ‘trans-exclusory radical feminism’ inapposite. Understood at its most reductive level, transness seeks a material change in one’s relationship to patriarchy — this is true for trans women, trans men and non-binary people. For any feminism to deny this surely disqualifies its claim to be a feminism.
It is for this reason that change cannot be cut off from our understanding of transness, especially right now. But does this also help illuminate what is required of our allies also, if they truly wish to align themselves with us? This is to ask whether it is not only imperative that our allies accept us and our choices, but that they also integrate a little transness into their own lives as well. Our allies must consider what they themselves are willing to let go of in order to liberate us. After all, do we not all desire some sort of transition — if not between (or out of) genders, then out of some sort of political / material reality? But does this also risk relativising transness as a process that only further elides the material differences between trans people and our allies?
Unfortunately, I fear that this conversation is not being had at the level it should be.
I want to keep emphasising the material changes in question here. Despite all claims to the contrary, transness is not simply an identity politics, that is, an ideology — and anyway, even if it is an ideological position in some form, every ideology is necessarily built on top of an understanding of our material conditions. A trans politics, then, is fundamentally rooted, as a process, in tampering with the material constitution of your own life and social relations. It is about mutating what too many see as immutable. Indeed, far from being an impossibility, transness reveals the extent to which change is possible in myriad ways — even if this sense of possibility is always an open question. Transness, furthermore, is inherently political because it demonstrates just how malleable things are, just how adaptable society itself is. This constitutes a threat to a neoliberal order. But there is a subtly worth investigating further here, which is the difference between a subject position being inherently political and a subject position containing an inherent politics.
Billie Cashmore, in a recent essay for Splinter, puts a much finer point on this, building on the work of Judith Butler to consider not only transness but a recent redefinition of queerness in general. It is a difficult but hugely rewarding essay, and so my intention in deferring to it here is also to help lubricate my own understanding of it.
Cashmore, having introduced the central conceit of Butler’s most famous works, argues that:
Queerness is … defined here in a way that makes its explicit politicisation possible. Of course, queer people have, as long as sexuality and gender has been the concern of the state, been necessarily involved in politics, but what Butler’s redefinition [of gender via the ‘performative’] accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state, but rather is related to its persistent destabilisation of patriarchal matrices of representation. We can now arrive at what feels like a slogan of queer politics of late, that queerness is “inherently” political. It is not just inherently political, it has an inherent politics, that is, its destabilising position is necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist. Hallelujah! Communism in the present.
I’m sure I don’t need to point out the sarcasm here. It is a definition of queerness that once again highlights just how disconnected trans political action can feel from the causes it otherwise aligns itself with — a disconnection, again, that is not the fault of trans people themselves, but a consequence of the bitter reaction against us, even in some feminist discourses. Nevertheless, for many of us, Cashmore’s conclusion (hopefully) bears true: we are conscious of the political character of our own queerness and affirm it as well as we can. But the trouble is that these pronouncements, this sloganeering, sometimes appears to be the limit of trans politics also. As Cashmore’s essay continues, this limit is felt ever more sharply.
For all the work done to correct a popular and reductive understanding of Butler’s work — the assertion that their conception of ‘performativity’ is itself material as a kind of inscribed doing; that is, all gender is an act, or constituted by a chain of signifying actions, which does not delegitimate its materiality or ‘realness’, but rather inscribes sex and gender in the overall insistence of a symbolic order, or what’s more, our sense of reality — the impacts of this conception do not necessarily, in and of themselves, disrupt the world in which we live. In fact, it is telling that an example frequently used to demonstrate Butler’s thesis is one that many people are culturally far more familiar with: marriage, as an example of cishetero-performativity.
The declaration “I now pronounce you man and wife” is performative in the sense that is constitutes a performative utterance, which doesn’t mean it is meaningless but rather meaningful; it does change the relationship enjoyed by a couple getting married, by structurally elevating the status of their relationship in numerous ways. Already the efficacy of this example is strained, of course, since the relationships between modern married couples may not actually change a great deal after a marriage ceremony — they may already live together, sleep together, have children together, etc.; acts that marriage was previously used to authorise — but the ritual itself nonetheless remains as a kind of social confirmation, an approving ritual, which means a couple may view each other differently after this act of commitment is affirmed by law, by ‘God, and/or by their community. Thus, society, in turn, will also view a married couple differently as well (legally and otherwise).
The problem that this thesis of performativity (as it relates to cisness) introduces into trans politics, however, is that we have often sought recognition from the state in terms that mirror cisheteronormativity, which can end up (re)producing the contradictions already active in cisheteronormativity itself. In the context of the recent Supreme Court judgement, this is readily apparent, but it also sets the stage for various ‘approving’ documents to be used to conflict with one another, and thus brings an institutional transphobia to the fore, as it has the potential to water down the significance of, for example, GRCs (gender recognition certificates). But it is notable that this diminishment, in terms of its legal standing, only travels in one direction, failing to understand how gender recognition certificates are no less performative than birth/marriage/death certificates themselves.
The consequences of this, again, become more obvious when we limit ourselves to a consideration of cis performativity, which highlights how so much of cisheteronormativity defers to an under-defined sense of what is ‘natural’. Take the example of ‘gender reveal parties’, which are a far more recent performative ritual used to approve the signifying regime one is to be coached in from birth onwards. They are performative because pronouncements like “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” are just as consequential as the declaration “I now pronounce you man and wife.” This observation unfolds in two directions: on the one hand, this sort of declaration is consequential because it will define your life in a meaningful and material way; on the other, if we were to declare that this declaration of gender is final and immutable, then we might as well regress to a time when divorce is no longer legal also… This, however, is seldom appreciated, heightening certain contradictions in our societal infrastructure.
This is a point that Butler (as quoted by Cashmore) frames as follows:
The resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation. The critical promise [of this rearticulation has] to do with … the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals.
GRCs precisely work on the weakness of a norm in this way, but we might argue that their efficacy becomes an issue for the interpretation of law only. The issue that Cashmore takes with this, which I think is vital, is that it is notenough. Indeed, again noting the occasional fear that arises when the ‘material’ is assumed to foreground an essentialism, we find ourselves in Marxist territory here: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” But what then becomes of a trans politics that fights for the autonomy to change on the basis of an interpretation of the law only?
Of course, this isn’t to say that Butler’s theses haven’t changed things; rather, the problem they too arrive at in their work is how to legitimate this rearticulation in terms that do not defer to the persistent quasi-solidity of cishetero-discourses themselves. In what sense, then, can a rearticulation of such actions highlight their performative nature whilst also, as is surely desired, escaping the ‘performative’ (in a pejorative sense) and actually having a lasting impact on the world in which we live?
Returning to Cashmore’s essay, it is here that we can understand how an inherent politics of queerness produces certain frictions, even amongst trans people themselves. Cashmore (again following Butler) highlights the example of drag, which likewise exists in a peculiar place in our social discourse, caught somewhere between a demonstration of the plasticity of gender and also a challenging (and ever-changing) monstration of it.
I’ve certainly heard people argue that drag is a kind of lampooning of women, for instance, but this presupposes that there are innate aspects of womanhood that are only being imitated (to the point of mockery) by people who do not ‘naturally‘ possess these characteristics. To the contrary, drag exaggerates the performance of gender to turn it into a performance-as-spectacle. Drag performances, then, “are radical (only) to the extent that they call the truth-regime of sex into question.” But if there is a discomfort produced among some viewers in this regard, it is because drag can also sometimes (re)produce the tensions of everyday gender performativity in negative. Cashmore continues, with this in mind: “Butler’s move, as we must always know, is to consider how resignification is possible in this performative mode, constantly implicated in that which it opposes.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, in the context of my pub job. Recently, my boss and I were puzzled as we considered how we might address a habit of some men on stag dos to wear dresses around town as an act of ritual humiliation. It is a ritual many men take on the chin, laughing it off and perhaps seeing it as a mark of courage, but which is changed when they end up ordering a drink from me at the bar — someone who may also be wearing women’s clothes, as a trans woman who does not yet pass. It is clear that we are wearing these clothes for very different reasons, but the problem then is how to go about voicing our opposition to their performances. Intentions, in this instance, are no doubt obvious, but it feels difficult to instigate a sort of soft ban on cross-dressing without making our otherwise openly queer-allied pub appear more hostile to trans people. Far from this being a major issue that warrants so much consternation, perhaps this also highlights the difficulty of making changes in this arena as it relates to Butlerian versus pejorative instances of the ‘performative’.
By way of another (more pressing) example, we can return again to birth/marriage certificates, and Cashmore’s observation that “what Butler’s redefinition accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state”. This redefinition, if it is even acknowledged at the level of popular discourse, has hardly been properly implemented, even within queer communities themselves. Indeed, queer activism all too easily shades into arguing for a far looser equality than we should be seeking: civil partnerships are as significant as marriage certificates; gender recognition certificates are as significant as birth certificates. Whilst this is true, it somewhat misses the overarching point at hand, because, in measuring these alternatives against a prevailing norm, we end up meeting cisheteronormativity on its own terms. Although the intention behind this sort of demand can be considered, in Cashmore’s terms, as “a kind of transfiguration of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, wherein the coherence of any system requires a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction”, are we not also left wondering just how deconstructive these breadcrumbs are in actuality?
This is the crux of Cashmore’s critique, and though I must confess to wrestling with it on publication, I have felt its power far more acutely in the aftermath of the Newcastle demo. The conflation of a trans ‘identity politics’ with expressions of solidarity with Palestine only heightened my own sense of their disconnection, in spite of proclamations to the contrary. It is this discrepancy that Cashmore skewers forcefully when she writes:
Intersectionality, rather than merely being read as a necessary identification of the ways individual subjects are constituted and dominated at the site of intersection between varying relations of domination, now reads each of these relations as reciprocally constitutive, such that there is no sense of what patriarchy is without white supremacy, no sense of queerness without a resistance to colonialism, and so on. As such, the interconnectedness of all struggles allows for some of the more politically questionable claims — for instance, that polyamory is necessarily connected with anti-colonial struggle — which thereby allows for a sense of activism through a set of choices one applies to one’s own life, by virtue of their apparent connection to all other modes of domination. No doubt there is not a struggle against oppression that we should not be committed to, and the interconnectedness of, for example, the genocide of Palestinians since 1948 by the settler colonial state of Israel is funded and technologically aided by the data-production of the tech industry which is now forming a new fascism in the United States. But claims to interconnectedness that imagine a total social space in which all relations can be said to depend on one another both misunderstands the radically disconnected quality of our lives under globalisation, but also allows for a form of political activism that functions as a resignation, a participation in only one’s own individual life, and which takes on the whole by its (often deeply tenuous) connection to all others.
Again, to reiterate the example above, I think this is demonstrated through the direct actions of those committed to the Palestinian cause — sabotaging weapons factories, most obviously — and the lack of any equivalent action (at present) in the context of trans liberation. At a certain point, we might even view these claims of intersectionality to be insulting to the particular experiences of domination being considered so holistically. And this is damning for a queer politics, as it risks evacuating queerness of any politics as such.
This is most apparent within the ‘radical inclusivity’ of queerness itself, where transness is relativised to the point that all emphasis is removed from its founding act of transition. This places a nefarious limit on trans people’s sense of self-authorising. The Palestinian people similarly self-authorise — they exist, and assert that fact against attempts to annihilate them — but then why does an assertion of the existence of trans people limit itself to the level of enunciation in our public sphere? Perhaps this is because the self-authorisation of trans people is paradoxically constituted through a self-questioning, which is not active in the Palestinian cause in the same way (they are questioned, but do not question themselves). As Cashmore writes: “Butler’s sense of an inhabitation of queerness might then, via this sense of being-at-home in queerness, offer us a surprising appearance of a well-known formulation, albeit in another form, that queer gender is that gender for whom its gender is in question” — a topic Butler discusses wonderfully in her underrated text Giving an Account of Oneself, which was integral for me in writing my last book on the equally knotted politics of narcissism, used to pathologize a self that calls itself into question.
The example of narcissism is useful here. In my book, I challenge the contradiction that narcissism-as-pathology is rooted in a certain self-assuredness, which is then moralised against for its apparent ‘arrogance’, when in fact narcissism has for much longer referred to a self-questioning. This is not to suggest that there is no sense of self-assuredness in contemporary narcissistic displays, but rather that these displays are defensive and only cover over an often existential predicament.
A similar contradiction is produced in trans politics. Trans people become trapped in a detrimental feedback loop between self-questioning and self-authorising — between renouncing an essentialist solidity and deferring to their own self-mastery. The latter mode soon tacks itself on the state’s ideological solidity, even as this solidity is itself in question. This, again, is not necessarily a problem that trans people produce for themselves; anyone who has been coached by another trans person as they seek access to medical transition (as I experienced last summer) will be aware that, in order to get what you want, you are encouraged to exaggerate your own certainty, even as you remain humble before all that you do not know about yourself in beginning this innately experimental process.
Although forced into such a position, it has nonetheless had an impact on how many trans people think about themselves, leading to the occasional voicing of suspicions in our own community, as some trans people are disparaged for not doing enough to pass. Again speaking personally, I am someone who feels increasingly assured in my own transness, as I have greatly enjoyed the significant (and still ongoing) changes that DIY HRT has made to my body. But at the same time, I feel indifferent towards my facial hair, which for many trans women is something they go to great financial lengths to have lasered off. When I look at myself in the mirror, I have come to see my five-o’clock shadow as a sort of readymade contouring that actually helps my face look more feminine, despite otherwise being a signal of masculinity. But as the complexity of this mixed semiotics of gender starts to scramble certain interpersonal codes, it nonetheless remains a point of anxiety as I wonder whether I too am really doing enough to let go off a past version of myself (since I’ve had a beard since I was 22 and, admittedly, still find its continuing if fading presence somewhat comforting).
This is to say that there is great difficulty involved as this rewriting of gendered codes leads to stereotypes and incredulity among cis and trans people together, and although a less regimented idea of queerness might afford some fluidity, it can nonetheless come back to bite us and undermine the greater freedoms desired by trans people collectively.
Cashmore lays out the stakes of this tension, with a ‘flat’ conception of queerness, as follows:
“Queerness” becomes accessible to everyone, as long as they are regarded as somewhat “calling into question” gendered norms. In a sense, this is what has allowed TERFs in the UK to refer to straight white women as “gender non-conforming” just because they have short hair: it’s essentially true! There seems to be little, then, that would separate queerness in this rather minimal sense from others in the queer community, who lie further outside the bounds of normative gender enactment for whatever reason. The attempt to articulate a notion of “queerness” that allows for radical inclusivity now flattens the varying and distinct representations of this “queerness”, reducing its political meaning to null, an empty signifier in which seemingly all can participate if they make the right choices about what shoes to buy, or what haircut to ask for. This is not an emptying of the political meaning of queerness by capitalist appropriation, but rather a process by which the establishment of queerness as ontological condition ensures that it loses all connection to its diffuse, particular discursive representations. […] This is a queerness whose politics has now ceased to exist entirely, since it bears no necessary relation to anything other than living truly with the always-extant deconstruction of norms that is already occurring: there is nothing, strictly, that must be changed, from the point of view of “queerness”. There is no politics of queerness.
I suspect that this is not a problem with Butler’s analysis, which to me seems absolutely correct from the point of view of drawing out what must surely be meant by “queerness” and its alleged politics. The problem is with this idea of “queerness” as something that exists at such a universal level. Helpful for a culture in which activism is demanded of all of us but the possibilities of radical change seem increasingly foreclosed, the inhabitation of queerness offers us all a radical politics that demands remarkably little of us.
What I find difficult to parse in this — and this difficulty is no doubt the issue at hand — is that, in reflecting on my own position in relation to this, I find myself falling into an impotent questioning that doesn’t really help me work my way out of the gender quagmire. Indeed, perhaps it is this emptying out of the political meaning of queerness that leads some trans people to take chunks out of each other. On the one hand, a trans person may look at me and see someone who isn’t really putting the effort in; on the other, I might defensively feel like binary transness delegitimates my capacity for self-expression and places a sense of authenticity above me that only exacerbates a gender dysphoria that has no end. There may be some truth to both positions, but neither feels entirely helpful. It leads to a sort of hand-wringing wherein politics suddenly appears absent. We remain tangled in the disastrous scaffolding of normative representation that helps nobody. It is actually a very depressing place to be.
In light of this, I think the point made about “the establishment of queerness as ontological condition” is integral here, as it appears that it is a process of ontologizing queerness that constitutes this very contradiction, which Cashmore frames as follows:
‘Queerness’, then, is always destabilising to gendered norms, and thus always political, though its entry into representation is only possible by a calling-into-question that involves an authentic inhabiting of the ontological structure of discourse, an authenticity always articulated as the impossibility of all performative authenticity. While Butler’s position may [very] well disallow any appeal to an authentic maleness or femaleness — even a sense of an authentic queerness itself — this sense of inhabiting queerness as critical instability calls into being the possibility of a queer person who is not inhabiting this queerness, where this queerness is constructed at such a general level so as to be a condition on all discourse. It is in this sense that Butler ontologises queerness: even if it is raised to the level of always destabilising the possibility of ontology, it takes this status only in being ontologised as the condition of impossibility of ontology.
At this juncture, what I find all the more interesting in Cashmore’s essay is its implicit (if forestalled) relationship to a kind of gender accelerationism — and she has referred to herself as a “recovering accelerationist” to me in private. This may no doubt make her chuckle, just as we laughed about this after the recent anti-launch for Mark Fisher’s Flatline Constructs at Housmans a few weeks ago.
In conversation with Adam Jones of Acid Horizon, a familiar situation arose where Adam defended an opposition to an accelerationist politics in the context of Fisher’s thought, whilst I defended its enduring relevance. This is always fun for me, as despite this disagreement, Adam and I remain well-equipped to have a generative conversation, as our goals are very similar, even if we are methods and frameworks differ in nuanced ways. After the event, Cashmore expressed a similar pleasure in remaining suspicious of an accelerationist politics whilst still finding its discussion invigorating — even if that is only because of the infectious passion it brings out of me when I talk about it in public.
I wonder if I might invoke accelerationism here again then, as the underside of Cashmore’s problematic. If the problems she is wrestling with are related to the consequences of substantialising, or ontologising, traces of gender-nonconforming experience that are common to many, resulting in a slide into apolitical universalism, which elides those experiences that are more particular for trans people, are we perhaps talking about a kind of hauntology of gender here?
To be clear, I am thinking of Jacques Derrida’s invocation of hauntology here, rather than its more Fisherian variant. Regardless, this suggestion might seem like a leap, considering all that we have discussed so far, and the introduction of another intersecting discourse might be made in error. But given the fact that Derrida looms large in the background of Butler’s work as a whole, let me take a moment to lay out the intersection between performativity and hauntology as I see it.
The specific tension Derrida wrestles with in Spectres of Marx is that which he finds in Marx’s work and its preoccupation with ghosts. Derrida’s work is immediately reflexive in this regard, with ‘pre-occupation’ functioning as a term for that which already (but perhaps only partially) resides in reality; for a being-already-haunted.
For Derrida, a haunting is thus “a habitation without proper inhabiting”; “it causes, it inhabits without residing, without ever confining itself”. He plays an etymological game here, noting how the word ‘haunt’ is derived from the Germanic haust (already close to the word haus), which means “dwells” or “resides”. This makes a haunting a kind of “dwelling again”, furthering the templexity of the revenant that both comes to reside and also returns to its non-place in a discourse.
This is how we are to understand Marx and Engels’ invocation of the spectre of communism: it is not the haunting of a past ideal (although it has its revolutionary antecedents), but is rather, as in Marcuse’s formulation, “the spectre of a world that could be free”. The spectre of communism is, then, the haunting of some future ghost / ghost of the future. Time is out of joint here. (Cue Mark Fisher’s paradoxical conception of “lost futures”, often shorn of its templexity and the tension held between the spectral and the psychedelic, where ghostly apparitions become hallucinations, blurring the line between speculating and remembering…)
Although this may seem completely irrelevant to a Butlerian discourse, I think we can turn to Derrida’s hauntologising of a certain politics in order to reframe the contractions at work in Butler’s notion of performativity. In fact, I’d like to wager that their thesis of “gender performativity” is precisely a transfiguration of Derridean hauntology, which discusses many of the same issues, regarding what it means to inhabit (if only partially) a notion like gender, thus ‘residing’ uncannily at the limits of ontologisation, that is, the ‘not-all’ residing of the unheimliche.
Consider, with Cashmore’s resistance to the ontologisation of gender in mind, how Derrida frames this notion of ‘haunting’ when he writes that a
logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the “to be,” assuming that it is a matter of Being in the “to be or not to be,” but nothing is less certain). It would harbor within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular effects, eschatology and teleology themselves. It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly.
This is perhaps what Cashmore also identifies in Butler’s (im)possibility of performance, and even shades into a more Derridean position as it relates to (what might be called) an eschatology of transness, which is feared by many as the supposed endpoint of a once-formidable truth-regime of sexual categorisation. But queerness itself is inevitably embroiled in this eschatological current also, with Cashmore imagining, somewhat despondently, towards the end of her essay, that a “time-limit on ‘queerness’ is approaching,” after which “we will have to look for new ways to articulate our place in this world, and our mode of opposition to patriarchy, in all its instantiations.”
Is this not where Derrida finds himself also, in thinking the absent-presence of communism within the (im)possibility of the so-called ‘end of history’, which similarly engendered new (or as-yet-undecided) ways of articulating a (post-Soviet) idea of communism?
Perhaps I am falling into a now-familiar trap here, returning to a notion of queerness as “destabilising position [which is] necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist.” Nevertheless, the question Cashmore arrives at is that of how we re-inhabit transness (as a haunting) at a precise moment when a liberal discourse has slipped into reaction against its own inapposite proposition of the ‘end of gender’ — in the sense that, for the liberal mind, the ‘transgender tipping point’ has brought about an era of ‘post-gender politics’ in the same terms that the Obama presidency brought about a ‘post-racial politics’.
We are not, of course, living in anything that might possibly resemble a post-racial, post-gender or post-historical society. Indeed, what is ‘post-‘ in this regard is clearly not the absence of any opposition, the settling of all sexed and gendered tensions (and here I am thinking of Fukuyama explicitly); it rather designates a revenant process that persists beyond the end, which, in Derridean terms, “consists in autonomizing a representation (Vorstellung) and in forgetting its genesis as well as its real grounding (reale Grundlage).”
To me, this seems like the crux of Cashmore’s argument. The tide of an autonomizing of trans representation returns us to the terminal beach of liberal anti-politics, but this autonomous spectre still haunts us all the same, and returns to us now again, as Cashmore writes, with an explicit nod to Derrida, like “a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction”.
The question of what is to be done resurfaces here, and it is in Spectres of Marx that we find some sort of outward path, or at least an emphasis on the ethical imperative required of us.
Consider how the status of included-exclusion is precisely that of the Derridean ghost, which we
welcome … but even while apprehending, with anxiety and the desire to exclude the stranger, to invite the stranger without accepting him or her, domestic hospitality that welcomes without welcoming the stranger, but a stranger who is already found within, more intimate with one than one is oneself, the absolute proximity of a stranger whose power is singular and anonymous, an unnameable and neutral power, that is, undecidable, neither active nor passive, an an-identity that, without doing anything, invisibly occupies places belonging finally neither to us nor to it.
How appropriate that one of the most memorable characters conjured by the arch-TERF J.K. Rowling, in her Harry Potter universe, is Moaning Myrtle — the wailing ghost who haunts a bathroom. Lest we forget, too, that Myrtle haunts the bathroom in which she was murdered because her killer has never been brought to justice, and justice is only finally secured when Potter, foregoing the ridicule and avoidance that characterises Myrtle’s posthumous experience, speaks to her, uncovering the final clue as to where her killer — a resurrected basilisk that has returned, after a long period of hibernation, to once again stalk the corridors of Hogwarts and kill its students — is located.
If you’ll excuse the grotesque Potterification of this position, it is nonetheless one akin to the one arrived at as Derrida’s text comes to its own end. He writes:
If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts … it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than the law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. No justice — let us not say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws — seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask the question “where?” “where tomorrow?” “whither?”
It is with this assertion (or thereabouts) that Spectres of Marx is ‘concluded’ (the door out is nonetheless left ajar). It is an assertion that once again brings to mind the disparity between the spectres of Palestinian and trans life — we seek justice for the former far more forcibly and directly than we seek justice for the other. And if we find ourselves feeling a kind of resignation here, it is no doubt because Derrida’s preoccupation with the ghost, with justice for the ghost, the ghost of justice, leaves us in a negative and even mournful position. Derrida’s text thus bequeaths a responsibility to us, but beyond that, it attempts to make something positive of our sense of an ending, which nonetheless arrives to us from both past and future in a time out of joint. It’s not a position inhabited all that easily — or, given the degradation of trans life at present, it horrifies us because we are already so mournful at the moment.
Enter accelerationism.
Hauntology and accelerationism are, of course, not diametrically opposed. Although accelerationism emerged as an argument against hauntology, it nonetheless constructs itself obliquely from the same materials that hauntology itself is preoccupied with. Recall Alex Williams’ 2008 blogpost “Against Hauntology (Giving Up The Ghost)”, which begins with a critique similar to that just made above, arguing that a hauntological cultural studies “is contended that such music comes to terms with the deadlock which we face, the inability to properly think the new as such, and makes of this condition something positive”.
An album like Burial’s Untrue, for example — its name already producing a kind of tension between an ‘ontology’ of rave’s ‘presence’ (its ‘truth’), coupled with a (pre)fixation of its degradation — contents itself with rave’s apparent death but makes something beautiful out of the wreckage. It is thus situated within a paradox that accepts rave’s death as ‘true’, but also produces something revenant that nonetheless ‘follows’ its ending.
Against this sort of paradox, Williams instead proposes that a more “nihilistic” position (perhaps instantiated through an indifference to ‘death’ as such) could “in some senses … operate in a similar manner,” whilst being “crucially bereft of the quality of mourning“, thus overcoming hauntology’s affective resonance with “a mood of melancholic defeatism in Western left wing politics.”
Williams nonetheless acknowledges that a more hauntological thesis has its merits. “Some of the stronger pro-hauntology arguments have run along neo-Benjaminian lines,” he argues, perhaps with a nod to Mark Fisher, who similarly (or at least later) held “that it is not merely an act of mourning for a non-reclaimable past, but rather a way of redeeming time, of reaching across possible universes towards parallel utopias, thereby showing us the possible, rather than just the dead-end intractability of our present socio-cultural situation.” But for Williams, this is only a concessionary positivity found in hauntology’s often smothered hope for the future. Indeed, even from this more positive perspective, hauntology, he argues, is still
a cowardly move, lusting after utopias that never were, or which are now unreachable, a retreat into childhood/youth, just as trapped in the endless re-iterative mechanistics of the postmodern as the lowest form of retroism, merely in a hyper-self-aware form.
Here I’m reminded of Cashmore’s confession, when we were speaking recently, that she had soured on philosophical notions of “hope”. And it is interesting to me that Williams’ 2008 blogpost sketches out a position that Cashmore herself may be flirting with in her essay for Splinter mag, when she notes how a Butlerian politics of queerness, when it breaches popular discourses, too easily shades into liberal universalism — that is, it too often comes to resemble the thing it is otherwise opposing. Williams concludes similarly:
In summary, hauntology cedes too much ground to what it attempts to oppose, because of an a priori assumption: that there is nothing else, (at this moment in time at least) that nothing else is possible, and as such we are to make the best of this (and that the best we can do is to hint at the possible which remains forever out of reach — with all the pseudo-messianic dimensions this involves).
In response, he offers two alternative positions that he and others in the blogosphere would spend the next decade+ exploring:
Firstly (if we believe the hauntologists discursive a priori), as I have hinted at above, we might think a more nihilist aesthetic which seeks not merely to foreground the processes of postmodern[ity], but rather to accelerate the system to its ultimate demise, to speed up the rate of fashion-flux to a point of irredeemable collapse. Rather than an act of reverence, of mourning, of touching at impossible universes from a distance, this would be a deliberate and gleeful affirmation.
Such is the classic (and cliched) accelerationist position, and it is notable that Williams contextualises this position in a hauntological negativity. A crude accelerationism only makes sense, then, if we believe that this is as good as it gets, if we believe that we have reached the end of capitalism’s sense of progress, and there is no longer any sort of progress to be made, only a violent dissolution, which is not a deconstruction but rather a “drastically advanced regression”. In Williams’ cultural context, this can be generously analogised to the no-futurism of punk, but is just as applicable to the violent pessimism of a far-right that has taken the accelerationist project in vain.
Then comes the far more interesting and nuanced position, arrived at along a more post-punk vector, which twists back on itself, into a sort of Derridean spectrality without mourning:
Alternatively, we might consider Badiou’s analysis of the emergence of the new, which would entail a more strategic examination of … those regions which appear, from the in-situational point of view, to be marginal, and properly undecideable.
There is arguably far less distance between this position and the hauntological position than is often supposed. Spectres, after all, are apparitions phasing in and out of ‘reality’ — like rave itself, in its ‘Golden Era’, which was often discussed as a heterotopia (as in Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash) — and are therefore innately undecidable themselves.
Having possibly reduced all of this to posturing and semantics, where exactly is the accelerationist heresy that we’re supposed to still be afraid of? It is to be found in how accelerationism understands capitalism’s role in the production of this marginality — a position that only Mark Fisher managed to make at all palatable when he wrote: “accelerationism maintains that there are desires and processes which capitalism gives rise to and feeds upon, but which it cannot contain; and it is the acceleration of these processes that will push capitalism beyond its limits.”
In a later post, this is also where Williams’ situates himself, albeit in more (intentionally) frightening terms: “To evade the dark/banal fall into mere neo-liberalism, we must maintain a firm belief in the horrifying and utterly negative nature of capital.” This is to acknowledge that it is primarily capitalism that deterritorializes all prior forms of stability. Just as Marx himself argued: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” In light of this, accelerationism notoriously affirms this meltdown, and in Williams’ formulation, comes to ask:
How might one ground a politics which aims towards an inhuman becoming (or perhaps we ought to say de-subjectivation) outside of a discourse of either alienation or alternately some kind of pseudo-biological vitalist ethology…? […] In other words[,] of how to apply a skilfully de-correlated philosophy to the always correlated domains of the subject (even if our intent is to ground a politics whose aim is towards the erasure of the very dimension of the subject itself).
What is notable about this, given Cashmore’s decisive move away from Deleuzianism, is that Williams too seeks to move beyond Deleuze’s “vitalist ethology”, and in so doing, strafes towards Badiou’s mathematization (as inhumanisation) of ontology, which is not without its problems — problems identified by Ray Brassier in his essay “Nihil Unbound”, which precedes the book of the same name, and contains an argument foreign to it; it is a tough essay to find, but if I can recall it correctly from memory, Brassier wonders how a mathematization of ontology might make human-being all the more susceptible to capitalism’s economic logics, since both work with numbers… (I’m being very reductive, and there is much more to be said on this by someone more familiar with Badiou’s theory of the subject — that is, by someone who isn’t me.)
It is in its attempts to later avoid this mathematized perspective that accelerationism comes to bear on transness. This is more often viewed in the aesthetic context of biohacking cyberpunk, which nonetheless helps explain the interest that many trans people end up taking in accelerationism as a whole. Transness again contains an inherent politics of subjective-material tinkering, as it expands beyond the limits of categories long applied to the human (if not exceeding the human as such), but Cashmore’s critique nonetheless remains valid here, as it is possible that this position ends up evacuated of a politics (and ‘unconditional accelerationism’, in particular, was open about its interest in an anti-politics, which many interpreted — wrongly, I’d argue — as being much the same thing as no politics).
The most difficult notion drawn out of an accelerationist politics in this regard is its focus on what Ed Berger refers to as “a sort of mutant subjectivity that begins (and ends) amidst the rubble of capitalism’s deterritorializing modernization processes.” Questions of agency are suspended here — usefully, I’d argue, as it is in deferring to a kind of agentic self-mastery that we risk falling back into neoliberal individualism — as the focus is placed instead on the affective conditions that produce trans people in modernity — that is, provocatively understanding trans people as a product of modernity itself, in a manner notably cleft from another questionable form of intersectionality, which is aligned with indigenous practices and belief systems where gender-nonconforming people are heralded as shamans, etc.
This is where the heresy of the accelerationist position is writ large: it is capitalism itself, as a deterritorialising process which scrambles all codes, that produces trans people themselves as subjectivised undecidables in its midst. Trans people may self-authorise, they may even self-question, but they are not self-produced. The world necessarily has a role in that, and we fail to acknowledge that to our detriment.
This is sticky territory, which may well lead us to psychoanalysis, for all its attempts to understand the interlinking of self and world. But the relationship between trans people and psychoanalysis is also fraught at present, since Preciado’s fall into popular reductions in “Can the Monster Speak?” There is a ‘positive’ conception of transness to be rescued from Lacan, for example, but it remains true that his language (and even his intent) are regrettable and outdated.
Borrowing from Lacan’s reading of James Joyce, trans people become untethered psychotics who are able to affirm their sinthome to align themselves with modernity’s scrambling of codes and find their own sense of agency in the chaos, as if to say, when faced with the tsunami of modernity, the psychotic hops on their board and yells “surf’s up!”, barrelling through the chaos that is otherwise covered over by reterritorialisations for more neurotic subjects. To be clear, this is a position that I think is problematic, but only because there is a familiar discomfort found here in being able to ‘explain away’ transness (even in the context of Lacan’s suspension of any sense of ‘normality’ and the fact that his passion and admiration for Joyce’s ‘psychosis’ is what led him to imitate his language so poorly at the end of his career).
The other side of this position also has its problems, however. The Deleuzian perspective on this process as vitalist, for example, can perhaps be understood in the same manner that J.G. Ballard ascribes to the mutant subjectivities of The Drowned World, wherein Kerans comes to wonder “what zone of transit he himself was entering, sure that his own withdrawal was symptomatic not of a dormant schizophrenia, but of a careful preparation for a radically new environment, with its own internal landscape and logic, where old categories of thought would merely be an encumbrance.” This is to say that, in The Drowned World, the humans who find themselves baking under the heat of a radioactive sun retreat into some psychic chrysalis wherein body and mind are ‘naturally’ rewired for a new environment. Hence, a ‘pseudo-biological’ process.
Accelerationist thought, to the contrary, acknowledges that what is rewiring us is not the ‘natural’ world but the inhuman mutations of capitalism itself, and so it on this basis that Williams continues:
Part of what I am looking for is a way to ground the Deleuzo-Guattarian model of capitalism (which even their harshest critics such as Peter Hallward and Ray Brassier hold is the finest conception of capital since Marx) outside of a faulty affirmative vitalism. That capital operates via a (largely state-mediated) axiomatic, controlling relative de/reterritorializations of flows seems too useful a model even for [Ray] Brassier himself to give up on… But even if such a regrounding were to be possible … the aim of the exercise, to re-introduce this into the social field in order to enable a radically new form of politics to become thinkable, the fundamental problematic remains. Outside either a vitalist ethology of ‘natural’ auto-self-maximisation, or some kind of Marxist-Hegelian dialectical drive towards the elimination of contradiction in the same, how might we be able to ground the very need for an inhumanising desubjectivation at all?
If trans people have long been drawn to these accelerationist theses — whether horrifically Landian, or something a lot cuter — it is perhaps because they occupy an errant mode of subjectivity that has continually failed to be reterritorialized under the auspices of a liberal ‘humanism’. This is how Amy Ireland frames accelerationism today, not according to some Landian noumena that is fundamentally unthinkable, but rather in the supernormal vectors of subjective delirium already borne of the Internet:
Accelerationism doesn’t just offer a theory of history that ends in Ray Kurzweil’s singularity or some shit like that. From a philosophical point of view, the idea is that something is changing human culture. It’s been doing this in concert with the historical emergence of capitalism, but it has this structure where what is happening can only be understood in posteriority. Human culture is being anastrophically guided toward assembling the future. It’s not about us humans imposing our will on history. The human subject has to be open to channeling the forces coming from this future that is assembling itself through human culture.
Against an “affirmative vitalism”, then, do we have here an “affirmative functionalism”? The problem with this assertion — which is nonetheless framed here as a virtue — is perhaps that the very “function” of subjective scrambling in the present remains undecided. Whereas psychoanalysis attempts to explain the emergence of certain psychic phenomena, opening itself up to appropriation by state apparatuses (not intentionally, but such is the Deleuzo-Guattarian critique), accelerationism attempts to stay with the trouble, even exacerbating it, resisting any reterritorialisation that allows for ‘the new’ to be given meaning in accordance with a pre-existing hegemony. (Capitalist society is, in this regard, a vast Ship of Theseus; we can sabotage its perpetual reconstruction?)
This is a crucial aspect of accelerationism in the present — one that was seen as entirely absent from Urbanomic’s #Accelerate reader, according to Simon O’Sullivan, who wrote in 2014 that
capitalism is not just an abstract inhuman agency ‘out there’, instantiated in forms of technology, and so forth (that is, as a supra-molar entity). It is also ‘in here’ – producing our very subjectivity on what we might call a molecular level. Capitalism goes all the way down, determining our affective states, as well as our very desires and the contours of our inner most worlds. Subjectivity, then, is not solely a rational business in this sense or, at least, those aspects not involved in the project of reason are also crucial to our sense of who and what we are – or, indeed, what we might become.
Whereas O’Sullivan is here critiquing the inhumanism of Reza Negarestani and others, the place of a “missing subject of accelerationism” has, over the decade since, been taken up by trans people most explicitly, particularly in Ireland’s work with Maya B. Kronic, and it is a similar point that Cashmore ends up at, quoting Butler once more before her essay is drawn to a close:
[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance — to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession.
Accelerationism reverses this formula: it is not “what forms us [that] diverges from what lies before us”, but rather what lies before us that differs from what forms us. The former is hauntological, the latter is accelerationist. Either way, I am reminded (as always) of my personal Deleuzean maxim: “not being unworthy of what happens to us”. For accelerationism, it is capitalism itself that is ‘happening’ to us; it is capitalism that produces — in spite of itself — the evental sites of mutation that it all too quickly papers over. Capitalism, as an ideological system, is incapable of making itself worthy of its own material processes; we, as capitalist subjects, needn’t follow suit.
In the context of the Supreme Court’s recent judgement, this is perhaps what we are witnessing acutely: the system’s reneging on a prior reterritorialization. The denigration of GRCs, in the context of other equally ‘performative’ documents, resituates trans people at the limit of neoliberal circumscription. The response cannot be a liberalised “I am what I am”, but rather a reassertion of transness as a transition to something else, which the law wants to (but cannot fully) deny. It is our undecidability that remains our strength in this regard, just as Cashmore asserts: “That we can — we must — be something else, is the shaking to the ground of all thusly constituted identity”; and what’s more: “Perhaps it is only here that we can feel the call of a liberated future.”
My conclusion here is perhaps not so different from Cashmore’s own, then, but what I think is notable, with regard to the sub-Derridean valences of her thesis, is that we can — we must — shake off the mournful quality that the present situation provokes within us. Perhaps what we have lost — or are in the process of losing right now — was not all it was cracked up to be in the first place. Perhaps this moment of reckoning will enforce a shift in our discourses that enables us to assert the fact that the scrambling of gender codes is not the responsibility of trans people themselves, but rather a consequence of capitalist chaos itself, which only highlights our particular preparedness for whatever is coming next, or what is struggling to be born.
If queerness has an inherent politics in this regard, perhaps we can shift the emphasis again to assert how it is our allies who lack a politics that truly intersects with our own. Trans people are doing enough, and it is a liberal hegemony that is struggling to keep pace with us. We cannot defer to those who would slam the brakes on our becoming. And what’s more, it is this braking that is grounded on an impossibility, because trans people not only have the potential to change, but are changing or havealready changed. Irrespective of whether these changes are acknowledged by the state, it is the anti-trans brigade who we can relegate to the mournful position here. They are figures of vain sovereignty, like Canute, making judgements to outlaw a tide that has already washed over everything. They herald their own decisional power over what remains fundamentally undecidable. In doing so, they humiliate themselves.
This sort of defiance is nonetheless hard to come by right now, but just as I have done (much to my own surprise) in writing this blogpost, we can talk ourselves out of it. We can talk to the ghosts that we are, and understand ourselves differently — because we already do understand ourselves differently. And I wonder if a similar break — contrary to the brake — is fast approaching on the horizon for many of us, perhaps even Cashmore too… Yes, perhaps Billie’s accelerationist “recovery” misunderstands the direct of travel. Perhaps it is this “recovery” that has allowed for the work of mourning to reassert itself, regrettably.
This is necessary today, as we seek justice for ghosts without assuming their death a priori. Our ghosts are very much alive. They are only out of phase with a persistent reality that they seek no solidity within. We can understand this as a virtue, we must understand this as a virtue. After all, is this not the very foundation of (a politics of) transness as such?
