Introduction
Her main premise is to think about a relationship to the past that can fully account for negative affects without this attention somehow prohibiting politics in the present. Love argues that many contemporary critics neglect these negative affects through instead affirming a 'progress' narrative. 'Although many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress; despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people' (3). Love argues that this tension between wanting to explore the connection between queer existence and loss and arguing against it. However, she wants to argue that texts that evoke feelings of loss have an insistent hold on the contemporary queer imaginary. Love explains that she wants to look at these dark representations and avoid the impulse to turn them into 'good use' (4).
Love outlines the persistent connection between queerness and backwardness and argues that the texts she looks at 'turn their backs on the future' (8). Further, she wants to engage with the 'backward feelings' that the texts inspire in contemporary critics. 'In that these texts do not welcome contemporary critics - instead they turn away from us - they often have proved difficult to integrate into a queer literary genealogy' (8). Love points out the impetus to want to rescue queer figures from the past but is interested in her texts precisely because they seem to resist. 'Texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed disrupt not only the progress narrative of queer history but also our sense of queer identity in the present. We find ourselves unsettled by our identifications with/these figures: the history of queer damage retains its capacity to do harm in the present' (8-9). She points to the tension of being ruined by the past, in that being attached to these figures somehow means ruin in the present. She argues that this refusal to turn to the past 'has made it difficult to approach the past as something living - as something dissonant,/beyond our control, and capable of touching us in the present. Clearly annihilation is not a goal for the movement, but an absolute refusal to linger in the past may entail other kinds of losses' (9-10).
Primarily, Love suggests that disavowing histories of loss structures queer existence in the present. In other words, Love is concerned that queer theory, 'in its haste to refunction such experiences, may not be adequately reckoning with their powerful legacies' (19). Love is interested in the tension between looking back and moving on. She argues that the conflicting feelings of shame and pride, hope and despair, means that contemporary queers 'find ourselves in the odd situation of "looking forward" while we are "feeling backward"' (27). She wants to resist a complete turn to the future and instead wants to linger with the 'damage that we live in the present' (29). 'The politics of optimism diminishes the suffering of queer historical subjectsl at the same time, it blinds us to the continuities between past and present. As long as homophobia continues to centrally structure queer life, we cannot afford to turn away from the past; instead, we have to risk the turn backward, even if it means opening ourselves to social and psychic realities we would rather forget' (29).
Saturday 8 May 2010
Wednesday 5 May 2010
Brown, Resisting Left Melancholy (1999)
While most of this article is not terribly useful to me, it expresses similar sentiments to the previous one I read.
However, what it is useful for is the insistence again on thinking through how important it is to consider 'feelings and sentiments' in radical politics. Brown explains that the purpose of her thinking about left melancholy suggests 'that the feelings and sentiments - including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses - that sustain our attachments to left analyses and left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims' (27). In other words, I might gesture to this article and argument as yet more insistence that the emotions that come out of political work need to be part of our analysis.
However, what it is useful for is the insistence again on thinking through how important it is to consider 'feelings and sentiments' in radical politics. Brown explains that the purpose of her thinking about left melancholy suggests 'that the feelings and sentiments - including those of sorrow, rage, and anxiety about broken promises and lost compasses - that sustain our attachments to left analyses and left projects ought to be examined for what they create in the way of potentially conservative and even self-destructive undersides of putatively progressive political aims' (27). In other words, I might gesture to this article and argument as yet more insistence that the emotions that come out of political work need to be part of our analysis.
Brown, 'Women's Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics' (2003)
Brown highlights the question of how to live 'after' the promise of a revolutionary feminism. She argues that we are now urged 'to think feminism and women's studies in this condition of afterness, in this temporal condition of "knowing better" about our naive yet founding past, and thus also to grieve what we now know we never should have loved... a tortured and guilty grieving to be sure' (3). Brown wants to question what it might take to live in this temporality, having given up the hope for a radical overthrow of the social relations of the present. Further, she wants to delineate what indeed has been lost, what the loss of revolution is.
Indeed, she argues that what we mourn when we mourn revolution is not necessarily clear, or even necessary to delineate. Brown points to the lack of boundaries in mourning in a similar way to Butler. 'The condition of mourning is a stumbling and stuttering one, a condition of disturbed ground, of inarticulateness, of disorientation in and about time' (4). Brown also argues that a mourning being 'learns a new temporality' that punctures 'conceits of linearity with a different way of living time' (5).
Brown argues that a loss of revolution, or a fear that revolution equals totalitarian might seem to consign us to the present. 'It is this conviction about the inevitable triumph of the people over the illegitimate powers of wealth and rule that exploit, dominate or disenfranchise whose loss washes over us today' (6). Brown pushes to seeing this as melancholic instead of mourning precisely because there can be no closure in mourning a 'promise.' 'So we cannot even see or say what we mourn, gather at the site of its disappearance, weep over its remains, hold its lively embodiment in our memory as we must if the mourning is to come to an end' (7).
Brown declares that revolution is 'unquestionably finished' but then wonders why we should mourn it. For her, quite simply, it means letting go of dreams for something better. 'A severe critique that does not articulate with anticipation of a different future... an illness with no cure... how to proceed when this has become our condition?' (13) Indeed, she seems to be searching for an alternative way to live through this diagnosis. 'What as yet unpracticed political sensibility is required to dwell here?' (13)
Brown's solution seems to be to keep alive a utopian impulse while giving up indeed the blueprint of revolution. 'Above all, how to suspend this utopian impulse in a different temporality such that it could fuel rather than haunt or taunt left political life in our time?' (14) 'The task, then, would be to recuperate a utopian imaginary in the absence of a revolutionary mechanism for its realization such that this imaginary could have a political use, that is, participate in the making of social transformation and not only constitute an escape from the felt impossibility of such transformation' (14).
Brown concludes with suggesting that sitting in mourning might be productive. Through this 'dwelling,' it perhaps becomes possible to see how a 'seemingly unendurable loss is also the opening of possibility to live and think differently' (15). In other words, trying to let go of loss or disavow it or discredit it might also mean not using loss as a means to see differently. Indeed, that loss might be a pivotal place for learning to live and think differently.
Indeed, she argues that what we mourn when we mourn revolution is not necessarily clear, or even necessary to delineate. Brown points to the lack of boundaries in mourning in a similar way to Butler. 'The condition of mourning is a stumbling and stuttering one, a condition of disturbed ground, of inarticulateness, of disorientation in and about time' (4). Brown also argues that a mourning being 'learns a new temporality' that punctures 'conceits of linearity with a different way of living time' (5).
Brown argues that a loss of revolution, or a fear that revolution equals totalitarian might seem to consign us to the present. 'It is this conviction about the inevitable triumph of the people over the illegitimate powers of wealth and rule that exploit, dominate or disenfranchise whose loss washes over us today' (6). Brown pushes to seeing this as melancholic instead of mourning precisely because there can be no closure in mourning a 'promise.' 'So we cannot even see or say what we mourn, gather at the site of its disappearance, weep over its remains, hold its lively embodiment in our memory as we must if the mourning is to come to an end' (7).
Brown declares that revolution is 'unquestionably finished' but then wonders why we should mourn it. For her, quite simply, it means letting go of dreams for something better. 'A severe critique that does not articulate with anticipation of a different future... an illness with no cure... how to proceed when this has become our condition?' (13) Indeed, she seems to be searching for an alternative way to live through this diagnosis. 'What as yet unpracticed political sensibility is required to dwell here?' (13)
Brown's solution seems to be to keep alive a utopian impulse while giving up indeed the blueprint of revolution. 'Above all, how to suspend this utopian impulse in a different temporality such that it could fuel rather than haunt or taunt left political life in our time?' (14) 'The task, then, would be to recuperate a utopian imaginary in the absence of a revolutionary mechanism for its realization such that this imaginary could have a political use, that is, participate in the making of social transformation and not only constitute an escape from the felt impossibility of such transformation' (14).
Brown concludes with suggesting that sitting in mourning might be productive. Through this 'dwelling,' it perhaps becomes possible to see how a 'seemingly unendurable loss is also the opening of possibility to live and think differently' (15). In other words, trying to let go of loss or disavow it or discredit it might also mean not using loss as a means to see differently. Indeed, that loss might be a pivotal place for learning to live and think differently.
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