“The illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, makes the point that clarity is bought at the price of limitation: ‘We never see anything clearly … What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; the point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes and kinds of things …’ He gives the example of an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn. Viewed from a distance of a quarter of a mile, they are indistinguishable; from closer, we can see which is which, but not read the book or trace the embroidery on the handkerchief; as we go nearer, we ‘can now read the text and trace the embroidery, but cannot see the fibres of the paper, nor the threads of the stuff’; closer still and we can see the watermark and the threads, ‘but not the hills and dales in the paper’s surface, nor the fine fibres which shoot off from every thread’; until we take a microscope to it, and so on, ad infinitum. At which point do we see it clearly? ‘When, therefore, we say, we see the book clearly’, Ruskin concludes, 'we mean only that we know it is a book.’ Clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.”
[I]n the face of such dire circumstances, it’s stunning that some of the most visible criticisms of these laws have reduced them to the realm of identity politics, as if the difference between pro- and anti- trans is whether or not you rhetorically bless trans people. Identity politics has become derogatory. At its best, supporting trans youth takes the form of a material politics focused on providing housing, redistributing resources, and removing the police from our communities. Rather than responding to the right’s endless litany of moral panics, which sap attention and energy from the central problems facing many trans people, we need affirmative visions of a better future.
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In our current moment, the two loudest speaking positions are egregious and excruciating, but they are complementary in their antagonism. One burns our homes down; the other tells us not to protest in front of the ruling class’s houses. “Political depression,” which is a term I’m happy to borrow from affect studies scholars and others, is the feeling of not knowing how to get in the middle of that screaming match when there’s so much actual destruction, loss of quality of life, and death hanging in the balance. There’s a pressure towards limiting our imagination and it reinforces a false division between so-called “cultural politics” and “material politics”—between identity and materiality.
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Once you realize that there are no limits on what we’re allowed to want, wanting is what we deserve to do. It is an active process without finality. What’s valuable about your life is your ability to desire beyond even your own wildest dreams. Otherwise life would be predestined and fossilized. Let me put it via my own biography. I grew up in a working class, immigrant suburb, and I was trained in the immigrant arts of stoicism, self-renunciation, and survival. It’s a very conservative worldview conditioned by scarcity: about setting aside what you want, and what you know to be true, in order to have just enough to get by. You hope the future will be better. One of the ways that I have found myself at odds with that sentiment is in my queerness and my transness.
In being queer and trans, the most powerful thing that I have learned is to think about the virtue of where desire unexpectedly leads in life. That desire can lead to building alternative kinship structures, or modes of care and solidarity, but it also builds the very materiality or flesh of my body. I don’t frame myself through a deep internal identity that must be satisfied, or some sort of moral dilemma. I don’t agree to say that I only deserve to transition because I have suffered. It’s far more wondrous and enjoyable—and actually far more effective—to think about it based in “want.” What kind of life do I want? And as a subsidiary of asking what kind of life do I want, “What kind of body do I want?” Not “What kind of body do I deserve?” I had to set aside that moral quandary so long ago to take myself seriously in a world that wasn’t taking my desire seriously.
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We like to think that if we assemble around the right people, or if we hold up the right sign, or say the right names, or if our politics are righteous, for the right reasons, then our perfection will secure our deservingness. But perhaps it’s more important to say that we’re all good enough.
As an historian, I’ve spent a lot of time studying the 1960s and 1970s. And I’ve thought a lot about, not just what was different in the political imaginary of people joining the counterculture, or women’s liberation, or gay liberation, or the Black Power movement, but also what was so different in the political mood of the time. In the emotional atmosphere that greeted people. I’ve read stories about young queer and trans people who heard a rumor, in the beginning of the 1970s, that something was happening in San Francisco. And so, they hitched a ride across the country on a whim and a desire. There was this kind of belief that, despite the chaos and the violence of the era, that something was about to happen. And that wasn’t necessarily a romantic experience. But there’s just something about that grammar, that mood, that sense of what is okay to feel in the face of a world that, you know in your bones, is deeply, deeply unjust, and inadequate. I’m not arguing for a kind of left nostalgia, where we need to reclaim that feeling from that era, but what is our feeling about what could happen? What is our “feeling” in this era?
Maybe it’s going to come in ways that are very of the moment. I hear whispers of it, I feel flashes of it in things as mundane as meme culture. In group text chains and in conversation with friends and comrades. I know we still have that energy, but it’s going to take a different form. I think we have to feel prepared to claim that. The goal of wanting things isn’t just getting them. It’s also teaching yourself that you’re deserving and teaching yourself that the people in your life are deserving. And therefore, thinking bigger and bigger about what you know, would allow you to have a life worth living, not just to be alive instead of to be dead, not just to save people whose lives are under attack, but then to turn around and say, enough is enough. Enough killing, enough letting die and here’s our counteroffer: lives worth living on our terms.
—You said in an interview several years ago that modern young people don’t have a sense that they’re living in history. Will they start feeling differently now, given current events?
— […] It’s clear that the type of postmodernism that prevailed for the second half of the 20th century is going away. When the very existence of truth and clear moral guidelines are denied, when everything is seen as a mental game and is subject to deconstruction, and an appeal to etiquette looks like an act of repression.
[…] It’s scary and tragic that Eastern Europe has once again turned out to be the place where these global transitions are happening.
— This question is probably naive, but I’ll ask nonetheless: Was all of this bound to happen? Or did someone’s personal idiosyncrasies bring us here?
— This is really a question for a philosopher, not for a historian. In my view, history always gives multiple possibilities and forks in the road. Events can’t happen if they don’t have deep foundations and reasons behind them. But there’s also no absolute predestination in history. It can take this or that path, and the choice depends on decisions made by individual people or groups of people.
You can’t say retrospectively that something was inevitable. Things could have gone differently. There were thirty years in which this development could have been prevented. But perhaps it was precisely because this seemed so unlikely that nothing was done to prevent it.
I’ve noted in retrospect that my evaluations of the situation as a person and as a professional were completely different. Everything I’d written suggested that this kind of war, while not inevitable, was quite likely. But at the same time, as a human being, I kept saying, “Oh, come on. What, are they going to bomb Kyiv? Please, that’s impossible.”
—People adopt their main ideas when they’re young. Both individuals and even whole societies or countries are capable of changing ideological benchmarks because they’re conscious and must be articulated. But that layer of semi-conscious ideas — cultural and political mythology — is very difficult to change. The transitions do happen — myths are not innate to any human society and are not passed down genetically; they arise, they’re maintained, and then they die. But in order for deep transformations to occur, you need either decades of cultural and social shifts or monumental catastrophes. That’s why, once a generation has spent its adolescence and youth in a certain era and then become the next generation’s political and cultural leader, it will reproduce in new conditions what it was once taught.
— So it’s not just Putin’s personal resentment after all?
— Ideology, official ideology, ideological struggle — these are all important things. But the most important thing about ideologies is how they are consumed. Why do some ideological constructions sell well while others remain mental exercises? One decisive factor is a person’s ideas about the world, which are often difficult for him to reflect on. That’s what I refer to as political and cultural mythology.
Resentment arises from disappointment. I often quote Yeltsin’s last speech, in which he bid farewell to the people and announced that he had chosen a successor. That’s one amazing paragraph: “We thought that in one tug, one swoop, we could jump out of the gray, stagnant, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, civilized future. I believed it myself. But one tug didn’t work. In some ways, I turned out to be too naive.”
Myths work especially well when they resonate with one another. The great transformation and the true czar — those are two important mythologems. But there’s also a third myth that’s no less important: the body of the people. The people, as a whole, make up an organic entity — a collective identity with one soul and one body. That idea is the basis for the idea that Russia’s historical defeat consisted of this body’s dismemberment.
If you read Russian folk tales, you’ll remember the bogatyr who was cut into pieces and doused with dead water to join the pieces back together. Then live water is poured on him — and he gets up. But he can’t get up if his hands and feet are cut off. First his body needs to be fused together again.
This is an idea that the official propaganda introduced to people’s consciousness over a long period of time, but nobody paid much attention. Why was the breakup of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe?” Because it was the dismemberment of the people’s body. And now we’re seeing war — the dead water. First, we have to collect it all, and then we’ll pour living water on it — and it will get up.
… Why the fragment? In part, it’s due to a necessary push against grand narratives or moral meanings—against totalizing, against seeing one’s self mirrored and being content with the surface, against learning about where Gunn came from and whom he desired as a key to unlock the work. Such methods only serve to comfort the viewer with a false sense of wisdom, appeasing her desire to use the artist to “solve” the work. By contrast, the fragmentary look—which we can also call a poetic turn—evades such bland approaches to the work. Gunn himself: “Even though [what I do] is political I would like for it to be looked at as a true poem about me.” I am guided by Alexander G. Weheliye’s Black feminist complication of our understanding of race’s central role in “bare life” through his idea of “habeas viscus,” which “insists on the importance of minuscule movements, glimmers of hope, scraps of food, the interrupted dreams of freedom found in those spaces deemed devoid of human life.” These scraps and shivers of life can, indeed must, be gleaned within such dehumanizing spaces as the plantation, the ghetto, the camp. The cancellations that take place in such spaces are extended, as Gunn soon understood in the 1950s, into the Hollywood movie industry, where images of a knotty Black subjectivity are policed, watered down, or outright denied.
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The loveliest touch in the scene, its button, is the length of a muscle spasm. It occurs when Waymon sustains the “me” in “down on me” for ages; all we see is Smart-Grosvenor’s face as she waits, along with us, for the natural end of the note. But it keeps going. And going. And still going. Once it does end, Waymon garnishes the note with a subtle melisma. At that, her eyebrow raises in surprise. In that one involuntary twitch, her body acts out the poetry she recited to Waymon a few scenes earlier: “They say if you are a true believer—that is, if the faith runs river deep in your heart—it’s possible, in the instant before the yucca-colored night gives way to dawn, to witness a cosmic freeze-frame.” In one twitch, Smart-Grosvenor avoids the “loss of the human” that occurs when somebody is “captured” by the too-perfect, too-neat image, instead existing in a choppy film flow. We can pause that twitch with a DVD player, rewind it and live it again and again, yet it will always escape the paltry explanations we fling at it.
It would be remiss to call what Gunn films “reality,” passive and generic. Reality in Gunn is not the mythic filming of life as capital-L “Life” lusted after by André Bazin—some kind of objective truth of cinema, the trace made into a monument of itself. Rather, the truth seen by Gunn and company appears to its audience in blips: precious as pearl daggers, or as the chipped ebony keys on which “sepia sambas” are composed. The fragments—the eyebrow twitch, a champagne glass at brunch lifted to underline a bit of gossip—cannot be assimilated into a straight plot, yet they are painstakingly toiled over. The fragments record skins and shades that weren’t envisioned as worth noticing with any delicacy by the makers of the Hollywood camera apparatus (Gunn: “We’re photographed like the side of a fence—we’re photographed so hard”). Twenty-nine-year-old white cinematographer Robert Polidori wields the camera with the intent of twisting the glamour apparatus against its racist origins. Polidori and Gunn reject a top-down approach to cinematic-image construction, following wherever the actors want to take the piece. As Polidori told Reed,
The way Hollywood works, they don’t like improvisations. They want the movie to follow a map. They get everything preplanned and precut so they can shoot with one kind of camera. You’re not jamming anymore. You’re playing the preset song, so the actors don’t get to take off. They have to mimic, so it’s robotic. But I was filming Personal Problems like improvisational jazz.
Such a highly unorthodox method of filming bolsters (what else?) poetry, that incommunicable domain of the quotidian that swerves to avoid crashing into institutions of power and fixed meaning. Recall the shot in Personal Problems when Gunn pans down to Waymon’s shiny black spats tapping out the pulse to his “One to One.” A crazy, inspired pan! All the singer’s sighs, all the love of the sight of blue lilies, all the lusciousness and the longing for Johnnie Mae that fills Raymon’s stage on this night (for only a night?), all the Black voices building toward the climax together: they all crystallize into this one shot, the feet that scaffold and feed a roomful of crying faces. The shot cuts to the heart of the film’s notion of a human as unrepresentable yet defiantly present; in a state of restless, blurry forming; engaged in a film act rather than ending as a filmed thing.
Such ontologies of process go beyond the concept of the totalized Man in art, that imaginary figure toward whom all creation tends, lazily, to be pitched. The struggle Gunn faced to communicate his Black aesthete’s vision of the world was one in which he tried neither to placate the white establishment’s notion of universality nor to buy into an African-American establishment notion of what Sylvia Wynter calls an “ethno-aesthetics,” a reinforcing of the cultural Imaginary (a white-inclined separatism, binary prone, and uninterested in mélange, the poetics of relation, or frisson and fracture). Where is the place of pleasure, of the unrationalizable punctums of life? Gunn had been intrigued by such excess since childhood. He loved Oscar Wilde, man of the epigram, and Alexander the Great spoke to him more than such staid historical figures as George Washington Carver: “Not only did they say that [what Alexander the Great did] was real, but it was fantastical too.” It’s not a big leap to connect Gunn’s acceptance of childhood phantasy to his adult hatred of an essentialized Man who denies that very same phantasy, the Black Man or Woman artist who must “speak to their race,” who must engage “the race question” and thus is refused the right to obfuscation. Gunn and company instead are invested in sonic textures, shattered scenes, errant colors, poetry, what the autonomist philosopher Franco Berardi calls “the excess of sensuousness exploding into the circuitry of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: desire.”
“In our small-town segregated world, we lived in communities of resistance, where even the small everyday gesture of porch sitting was linked to humanization. Racist white folks often felt extreme ire when observing a group of black folks gathered on a porch. They used derogatory phases like “porch monkey” both to express contempt and to once again conjure up racist iconography linking blackness to nature, to animals in the wild. As a revolutionary threshold between home and street, the porch as liminal space could also then be a place of antiracist resistance. While white folk could interpret at will the actions of a black person on the street, the black person or persons gathered on a porch defied such interpretation. The racist eye could only watch, yet never truly know, what was taking place on the porches among black folk.”
Hooks, Bell. (2009). A Place Where the Soul Can Rest . Belonging: A culture of place (p.149). essay, Routledge.
Jackson’s fiction is a sort of serial investigation of the malevolent, imprisoning power of her own fears. Her mother, in a letter, once reproached her for the excess of “demented girls” in her stories—which was both an excellent Geraldinism and a not entirely unjustified complaint. Eventually, Jackson herself came to lament the narrowness of her thematic range: “I wrote of neuroses and fear and I think all my books laid end to end would be one long documentation of anxiety.”
While her early stories are often about people being oppressed and persecuted by closed-minded communities, in her later work she focussed increasingly on the “demon of the mind”—the evil that afflicts its victims from within. In “The Lottery,” a woman is stoned to death by her neighbors and family; in “The Haunting of Hill House,” written eleven years later, the stones that rain down on the childhood home of the protagonist, Eleanor, have a more ambiguous source. Eleanor’s mother thinks vicious neighbors are responsible; Eleanor and her sister blame each other; but the strongest suggestion is that the stones are the work of Eleanor’s poltergeist, a paranormal manifestation of her rage and unhappiness. At Hill House, where the adult Eleanor has been invited to assist in an investigation of psychic phenomena, she imagines that she is being ganged up on by the other people at the house and that its spirits have singled her out as their target. But what tortures her and ultimately drives her to insanity is her own complex of childhood fear and guilt. The leader of the paranormal investigation assures his assistants that if they ever become too scared they can always run away from the house: “It can’t follow us, can it?” But the horror for Eleanor is that she can’t run away from what haunts her.
