I ate dinner at the library, rode home, tried to begin work again and realised I couldn’t concentrate until I made a cake. A semolina syrup cake with orange blossom water and coconut milk, to be exact. Rather an experiment, but we shall see. (The coconut milk is in the cake, not the syrup.)

I’m working on a draft of my final thesis chapter, which is also a book chapter due very soon, and have had my head in gendered and postcolonial theorisations of affective labour all day. I’m reading some fantastic books on migration and gendered labour, such as Rhacel Parreñas’ Servants of Globalization, an ethnography of Filipino/a migrant women, most of whom do domestic work. On the other hand, Parreñas focuses on the familial and resistant practices of her informants outside of the workplace, and what I need right now is writing on gendered and racialised subjective relationships within workplaces. Never mind, it’s a great book and well worth the read.

Today in the Reserve shelves I also randomly found a really awesome critique of the political economy of Thai sex work, Thanh-Dam Truong’s Sex, Money and Morality. Truong talks a lot about women’s ‘emotional labour’ in the context of tourism. I’m not writing about sexwork, but I do draw a parallel between sexwork and the new Thai health tourism economy — this latter is a less explicity sexual economy, to be sure, but it still draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity. Truong’s marxist politics are spot-on, and it’s from 1990, predating any post-autonomist writing on affective labor. This feels like hitting the jackpot, just a little, as if the library was in a good mood and decided to give me a present. I should hang out in the library Reserve section more often.

Where is the room to write thesis, when I’m so busy thinking about everything else? I’m replying on my ability to draw things together fast, because this week the deadline is Wednesday. 3000 words, assembled from notes. Whatever. At 4am, unable to sleep and now entirely nocturnal, I listen to The Pointer Sisters’ “Send Him Back”, Pilooski edit, courtesy of s0metim3s, and it mirrors a thrust into thought I’m enacting, arms windmilling in 60’s dance moves, or was that boxing…? And the new email list I’m moderating (which has a name I think, and maybe we’ll even get some institutional support at some point) is finally in flow. But all I can do is read people’s article recommendations and chew over stuff in my head.

Tonight I attended a HREOC sex and gender diversity project public meeting. I’m glad I went, although my horoscope for today said I’d be annoyed by a business outcome, and to “strategise, don’t nark off.” So right. Based on the initial submissions they received, HREOC has already decided that their project will focus on the question of identity documents: recommending federal legislation to make gender marker changes on birth certificates and passports consistent/coherent. So, defer thinking about affordable healthcare, Medicare subsidies, and forget removing gender from identity documents altogether. (S. suggested this latter solution at the meeting and a lot of people laughed, as if it was absurd.) So, the big question the HREOC people wanted to ask: “What line in the sand do we draw?” Because we have to draw a line somewhere, for people to change their document permanently from M to F or F to M. Surgery and hormones? Psychiatric or psychological assessment? Two years or one? Which legislation is better, Spain’s or the UK’s? Oh, so limited. So frustrating.

But the actual comments, the meeting itself, ran so far outside the bounds of this question that I started to feel better, optimistic. Trans legislative questions always run aground on these immense philosophical rocks that simultaneously connect very material every day existence with the whole epistemology of gender as a central category organising bodies violently, and why we find it so difficult to think without it. So, yes, why is it that someone’s gender is M at such and such an institution but F at another? Why is it that one can change one’s birth certificate, but when one gets pulled over by a motorcycle cop on a deserted country road, the cop can check one’s entire police record with previous names and genders and call one ‘Sir’, and throw in a few transphobic slurs as well? Why is it that in the Family Court, a transwoman suing for partial custody of her children could be denied it on the basis that she was upsetting her children by wearing women’s clothing around them? How do we think about these children’s desires to have a ‘normal family,’ and the violence that enacts against this woman, who has a life-threatening disease, and who just wants to be a ‘normal woman’? How do we think the crazily proliferating deployments of ‘normal’ in this context? How do you even think, when the story is so heart-breaking?

What really surprises me is the intensity of a lot of transfolks’ desires to gain recognition, preferably on an important looking piece of paper with a government seal. So much so that this validation forms a kind of fetish. If we have the piece of paper, everything will be okay. But what the meeting really demonstrated is that no, a piece of paper cannot make everything okay.

My favourite moment was when A. started talking about the costs of outing oneself as trans, and how much safer it is to be stealth. But staying stealth has to break whenever you witness violence erupt against another transperson. You have to stand up and tell people that’s not on, he said. “Do we stand up for each other? Can we have solidarity with each other, even if it means outing ourselves? This is the only line in the sand I want to draw.” What a beautiful intervention.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I’m working on right now. Comments please!

_________________________________________________

In this part of the chapter, I want to explore the logic behind posing, as I’ve done, a distinction between two subtly different ways of articulating resistance to gender variant patient subjectivation. On one hand, as we’ve seen, a sense of disempowerment frames the experiences of subjects who come into tension with modes of gender variant patient subjectivation in Australia, but have no other option to fall back on. On the other hand, the transwomen interviewees who obtained GRS with Thai surgeons enunciated their disposition to gender variant patient subjectivation in terms of dissatisfaction. Initially it seems obvious that of course, gender variant individuals who were able to do what they wanted were happier with the overall outcome. This is the case even given that many of the transwomen I interviewed in Thailand and Australia, intent on journeying to Thailand, were either midway through a number of surgeries and revision work, or had yet to undergo any procedures at all. (more…)

But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions — what a sociology that would be! — so a devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more I realise it’s not for me. Not for you either…. which leaves us in this silly and often desperate place wanting the impossible so badly that while we believe it’s our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent easing its way out of graspable sight.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Fangirl tagged me for this:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”.* Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

In the archive of LTTR (which is perfect for a Saturday afternoon web browse and inspirational for all sorts of reasons, those homos know how to make art and shit) I found this piece by Boots, about an extremely awesome Pudding Tits Project, illegibility and language. Here’s an extract:

Right after I got surgery, I felt strange. I felt strange that I spent so much money on something so self-indulgent. And I felt really strange about my place in the world. I called a friend who, like me, is not taking testosterone, gets read as female fairly frequently, and who had chest reconstruction surgery. I tried to articulate the fact that all of a sudden, it felt as if I didn’t exist in the world, save for in the presence of a few people that understood my wonderfully freakish, spectacularly monstrous gender. He both reassured and disappointed me with his reply: “We’re illegible. But everyone is, it’s just that most people are never confronted with the situation of really realizing it.”

I know this experience of feeling as if I don’t exist. I’d articulate a little differently, though — in the sense that since I’ve begun to be read as unproblematically male, everyday life is a little ‘easier’, but I lose the power of making my own freakishness visible.

For example, I don’t think many of this year’s crop of gender studies students know that I’m trans. A couple of them expressed fairly transphobic sentiments earlier in the semester, along the lines of, “If someone wants to be called a woman, fine. I’d use female pronouns to their face. But to me they were born men and they’ll always be men.” I encouraged other students to deconstruct or challenge those sentiments, and was impressed when the other students in the class rose effortlessly to the challenge. But somehow I could not say, “So I guess that to you I would count as a woman?” Partially this is because being an educator (at least in gender studies) is about dismantling the reliability of students’ individual experiences of their worlds, and offering them a toolbox with which to read the abstract, the invisible. But it was also about protecting myself from surveillance, and not allowing the class to become a space in which my gender performances were scrutinised. I wanted to retain a space in which my identity was unimportant, and where I remained effective as a conduit for learning. Also, I couldn’t think of how to describe my gender, how to account for it, to them. Remaining illegible has its uses.

Perhaps my students would learn just as much if I were ‘open’ about being trans as not. But since I don’t know how to ‘come out’ to them, I’ve tried to teach them that none of us has a stable gender (or sexuality or ethnicity or identity), and that we are all being misrecognised, all the time. If I am passionate about anything, this is it.

Anyhow, since I’ve been back from North America, I’ve been experimenting with style. Long ago, I decided that tight jeans and tight-fitting sweaters would probably make it more difficult for me to pass as a guy. No, worse — because let’s not diminish the homophobia implicit in this arithmetic around tightness and bagginess — it seemed easier to pass as a straighter-looking white boy than a queer. The excuse I gave myself was that my bum was too big for tight jeans. I’ve always felt uneasy about it, but at Transsomatechnics my whole structure of passing anxiety crumbled into dust. No-one cared. Or, people did care, but in an encouraging and nourishing way. So why is it different in Melbourne? We are still operating in reactionary response to a medicalised system in which anyone who wants to modify their bodies surgically or hormonally must engage with the ‘true transsexual’ narrative. The stakes of not passing as a true transsexual at the clinic are high — people self-harm, destroy their relationships, kill themselves. Even in the spaces made to resist this poison, we are still so psychically alert to the prevailing pressures of passing as ‘trans enough’ everywhere else that we cannot entirely innoculate ourselves against it. Lately I have been wearing flamboyantly skinny jeans, pink-streaked 80s ties and cornflower blue sweaters. Eyeliner, too. The world needs more boys with eyeliner. For now, this will be my innoculation.

Tag!: Ika, Jonathan, Craig, Wildly Parenthetical and Mattilda.

PS Today I had breakfast with a friend. After our Minor Place bagels turned out not to fill our stomachs, we went wandering through Brunswick on a mission to find baklava. On the way, we discussed what, if it were not for how the last month has been chock full of brain-shatteringly exciting things for me, would certainly be the most exciting project ever. It makes me shiver with barely repressed glee. Good things are going to happen, I just know it.

Back in Melbourne and the winter is setting in. It’s time to wrap a blanket over my knees and sit at the computer and write. Currently I’m expanding the paper I presented at Transsomatechnics into a chapter. Expanding conference papers this way really demonstrates how slack a scholar I am. And how ridiculous it is to have to make concrete definitions of terms, to begin with. For example, defining subjectivation. Despite having planned the chapter already, ’scheduling in’ the requisite glosses in the correct places, in the paper itself I wrote just whatever I thought subjectivation means. It’s difficult enough parsing the distinction between ’subjectivation’ and ’subjectification’, without realising that a) the Bifo essay I rely on to define Foucault’s development of subjectivation is referenceless, in that beautiful slack Continental fashion; b) Judith Butler talks about subjectivation in The Psychic Life of Power, but, in a move that must have caused who knows what domestic dispute, assigns an argument about identity politics, differentiation and rights to Foucault when her own partner Wendy Brown made it, neglecting to footnote Brown at all. Well done. Here is what I have so far on subjectivation. If anyone can offer insight, please do:

Subjectivation is the Foucauldian term I use to describe a technique of power which forms subjects who are able to think of themselves as autonomous individuals, but simultaneously produces subjection. This technique of power

“applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.” (”The Subject and Power”, 212)

Rather than, as with governmentality, dealing with the management of the population on a mass scale, this technique of power is intimately imbricated within the practices of everyday life. To call this form of power subjectivation is also to follow the anti-humanist claim that the ‘human’ does not pre-exist the practices that form subjects (of the law, of the state, of capital, of medicine and so on.) Franco Berardi writes,

“The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived.”

What Berardi refers to as subjectivation here are the multiple and performative points of contact whereby bodies become identifiable and categorisable. This could be thought of as a similar hermeneutic to the Althusserian concept of interpellation, whereby the state and/or capitalism bring subjects into being through hailing. But distinct from Althusser, Foucault maintains that subjectivation is not entirely oppressive, but that it also encompasses our own production of ourselves in relation to institutions. Thus, subjectivation might also be enabling of resistance to capital, or the state, in the same breath as we understand it to be a technique of either.

In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault implies that the newest modes of subjectivation as processes of individualization and differentiation. These contemporary modes of subjectivation are borne out of the political conditions of contemporary liberal democracies, in which formal rights and recognition are assumed to accrue only in relation to a specific (and wounded) category of identity. These multiple identity categories interface with biopolitical social apparatuses (or what Foucault calls dispositifs) in ways that are constantly mutating, along with the regulative regimes which recognise and manage them as categories of personhood. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, woman, migrant, refugee, indigenous or Aboriginal: these are some of the categories that could be cited in this context. ‘Transsexual’ or ‘transgender’ (with their different genealogies referencing relationships to medicine and politics) are two others.

Last week, Erin Kyan at Fat Sexy Gender posted a really anger-inducing account of his ‘treatment’ by Monash Gender Clinic. He is transitioning, and went on the clinic program to access testosterone and chest surgery. After having been on the program for some time, Erin has been told that he cannot access hormones or surgery until he recovers from CFS/fibromyalgia and loses weight:

I have been told (to my face) that I need to lose weight before I will be allowed to transition - and when I explained that I cannot exercise I was told that I can “take pills for it nowadays”. I have been told (to my face) that I should wait until my chronic illness that I have had for ten years gets better before I transition.

I’ve also been scowled at, looked down upon and scoffed at for being bisexual, polyamorous, and unemployed (even though, you know, I AM DISABLED.)

… So I go to the doctor. I tell him what the problem is. I tell him that I need to lose weight in order to receive medical treatment. I tell him why I cannot lose weight the “normal” way — I already eat well and I cannot exercise due to that whole disability thing.

He spends 20 minutes telling me that I am disgustingly overweight and it’s all my fault. Oh, and by the way, I’m not really disabled — I’m just fat. And that whole thing where I can’t walk? The cure for that is to walk, apparently!

Apart from how this is a really clear-cut case of discrimination, so clear-cut that it could easily be taken to the Equal Opportunity Commission, Erin’s story exemplifies the sheer incompetence of the Monash team. I was under the impression that taking amphetamines to lose weight went out of medical fashion some time in the 1980s.

It’s also just really infuriating and I am really pissed off that I don’t know what to do, at all, to make things better for Erin. Or for any number of people who call TMGP telling similar stories.

“I have the feeling of always wandering around, kind of alone, irresponsibly, while you’re sweating over capitalism. How could I possibly help you?”– Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus Papers

This weekend there’s a convergence in Melbourne to discuss the formation of an oceanic anarchist (+communist? +autonomist?) federation. Oceanic as in the region of Oceania, but there are likely to be some oceanic feelings involved as well, a la Freud. A bit of desire for transcendence, a bit of a lean towards hanging onto the skirts of Mother Anarcho with a capital A.

I do tend to wander alone, irresponsibly, while other people do the sweating bit (well, who’s to say wandering irresponsibly isn’t its own form of sweating over capitalism?) but I’m kind of in a mind to attend the convergence. And maybe put in a word for the impossibility of a ‘common politics’, and against the federation being made in the name of anarchism. And get shot down, obviously, but hey…

For a few moments on Wednesday, I thought maybe I was being a bit too cynical about the apology. I slept in on Wednesday morning, so missed an opportunity to engage in the national screen-mediated moment of apology. I didn’t miss everyone talking about the event, though. It seemed important on Wednesday, in social interactions, to say where you were at 9am, to voice your opinion about how great Rudd’s speech was, and to lambast Brendan Nelson for missing the point. (Awesome post on that note here.) And, yeah, if the apology makes some indigenous folks feel better about the conditions of dispossession, I’m glad. Because who wouldn’t want to to feel better?

But on the other hand, I’m wary of the mass sentiment this has provoked. It’s not new for non-indigenous people in Australia to express sorriness on Sorry Day. But it is new for this to be a government-mediated matter, where it becomes necessary to echo the terms of the Rudd apology in order to articulate one’s disgust at the past and present effects of the Stolen Generations. And the Rudd apology is still insufficient, even if it weren’t subject to the critique below. Nationalist calls to end one bad epoch and start a new good one always are. (more…)

Riki alerted me to to this excellent article by Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” in the Queer Futures edition of the Radical History Review. He quotes a line I’m proud of writing. But better, he takes a beautifully hard line about trans studies’ almost complete ignorance of gender variance as a form of consumption/production that is entirely very enmeshed within capitalist relations:

Scholars within trans studies rarely contextualize trans identities, subjectivities, and activism within historical and contemporary capitalist relations. Much scholarship seeks to save trans identities from invisibility, as well as to counter the ongoing reproduction of the heteronormative binary of sex/gender through detailed analyses of the vast array of existing trans identities. There is a tendency within this commentary to reify trans identities as solely matters of sex/gender and to challenge state and institutional dominance over trans people by emphasizing the necessity of self-determination of sex/gender. Such advocacy of self-determination is often coupled with arguments for human rights protections. Progressive scholars must question the theoretical and political implications of putting forward individualistic strategies of sex/gender self-determination, especially within the contemporary neoliberal context, where the minimalist state and a free-market economy demand individual self-sufficiency. While some texts address the impacts of capitalist socioeconomic relations on trans people’s lives, a critical analysis of the exploitative labor relations that comprise the logic of capital remains lacking.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is this Dan Irving, we must converse.

So there was this one moment at the Transdestinations “Trans Law” panel on Sunday when I seriously considered the tactical sense of walking offstage in a dramatic funk. I didn’t, because it would have looked like I was spitting the dummy. (I talked about this afterwards, I can’t remember who I was talking to, but I said this and they responded, “Yeah, Az, you would have been spitting the dummy AGAIN!” Oh.) But it would have short-circuited the falsely nice sense that all the panellists agreed on the definition of what was politically important. Plus it might have shut Jamie Gardiner up for more than a half-second. Three things about Jamie Gardiner: a) he was the only non-trans person on the panel; b) he wears knee socks; and c) he’s from the Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission and is now trying to sell the merits of the new Victorian Human Rights Charter. It’s sort of vague how transpeople can benefit from the charter, but as Jamie says, “change is incremental and we don’t want to try too hard, but just write lots of letters to your local member.” Since he spent 50% of the session talking, this dominated discussion totally. He seemed blithely ignorant of how bad this made him look.

The amazing thing is that people did, in fact, intervene on the great non-discussion of the Human Rights Charter. Crystal Johnson intervened. Crystal is a sistagirl from the Tiwi Islands. I guess one of the only great things about being nearly the only Indigenous person at a trans conference is that the facilitators’ white liberal guilt will make them give you the microphone (nearly) every time you want it. She said something brilliant, which was, “Where are our human rights? We don’t have any. We’re getting raped and beaten up and having stones thrown at our houses. What does this thing mean to us?”

At this point, Tracie O’Keefe, a hardnosed Sydney trans therapist, spoke — directly to Crystal. She said, pretty much, “It’s up to you to stop them. Wipe the blood from your face and keep getting up in the morning.” There was no sense of solidarity, it was basically, “You have to do it yourself.” It’s one of the most offensive things I’ve ever heard someone say at a conference.

It’s not really possible to communicate how fucking angry that panel made me, and how frustrating the entire conference was. Politically, it could have been much more powerful and useful. I don’t think these are teething problems; I think they have to do with what political concerns motivate conferences, and how the people organising them imagine and design the space allocated to talking about politics. Just getting a bunch of trans ‘public spokespeople’ in a room together does not result in anything worthwhile, necessarily. Good conference design is all about figuring out which conversations need to happen, and why, and how they might intervene in a broader framework where the most important conversations are hardly ever heard. Facilitators have to be on the same page about what’s important, so they can direct proceedings.

I feel bad making these criticisms, because most of the organisers are my friends, but it feels even more important to say, given this. Next year might be better. I hope so.

On the other hand, the arts and performance quotient of the weekend was terrific. Lots of great shows, especially Byrne and Erge doing a slapstick wrestlers’ bout depicting transmasculinity as scarcity, and Crystal’s performance/autobiographical rant. And while I’m linking to pics, you can also spy a picture of me doing my dirty Dr Seuss poem here.

Wednesday I’ll be back in Melbourne town. Probably I’ll already miss the hum of the air-conditioner and the goldish fug of Bangkok smog, even as I cough up the residues of said smog all next week. I’m certain to miss the smells and the tastes of this place, particularly som tum on demand, menthol inhalers, cooling powder and sweet-sweet-sweet iced coffee. Also, I will miss people. Especially B. — we’ve been working together a lot, but we’ve also become great friends. She says all her friends leave Bangkok, and I hate to reinforce a stereotype. But I guess, after all, that this means I’ll be back sooner rather than later.

Anyhow, I’m going home to a huge week. Even apart from how first of all there’s an airport reunion to be had with an enchanting giver of Wizz Fizz, who has been missed like crazy. This would be huge and exciting enough on its own. But wait, there’s (a lot) more. On Saturday, Midsumma fun begins with Transdestinations. Transdestinations is the first ever trans-dedicated symposium in Melbourne.

This is the rough schedule:

• Gendermash on Saturday night, including performances by… Actually, the website doesn’t say who’s performing, but I can tell you that I am! I’m planning to read some porno stuff I’ve been working on specially over the ‘holidays’. (Also, Gendermash is hosted by the great PJ Fotiades, which is reason enough to attend even if you don’t like the sound of porn.)
• There’s an all day talkfest on Sunday, with loads and loads of amazing people, including visitors from interstate like Norrie May-Welby, and Julie Peters, and other denizens of awesomeness.
• Upstart Alley on Sunday night — featuring my favourite Aotearoan boys Tom Erge and Jack Byrne, plus Husny from Australian Idol. No I’m not kidding, he’s really going to perform! It’s gonna rock.

But the fun doesn’t end on Sunday, because Monday is the Big Day Out, and we’re seeing Bjork AND Dizzee Rascal AND the Arcade Fire AND LCD Soundsystem and possibly Billy Bragg or Spoon and finally, most unexpectedly, DR OCTAGON…. I never dreamed I would see Kool Keith perform as Dr Octagon live, it’s making me wheezy with excitement as I type this. Then on Tuesday, if I’m still alive, the Arcade Fire solo show. And then Thursday there’s some other spoken word thing I’m reading at, also featuring Ed Burger who I remember from distant Fitzroy spoken word days. Hopefully I won’t be dead from thrill overdose by then.

‘9 in the afternoon’: a good way to talk about the odd machinations of my bodyclock. Last night I went to bed at 1am, woke up at 7am on the dot, read for an hour, went back to sleep, woke up again at 1.30pm. Morning in the (hot) mid-afternoon. Now it’s early morning and according to my bodyclock, well, just an hour or so after dinnertime. Weird.

Today I spent some time wrapping up loose ends for the Gender Centre project and TMGP. Over the last couple of weeks, people involved in the former project have been debating organising principles with some tension. Should we be a committee with a President and Secretary, or a working group with no defined roles? Do we need to be representative of the ‘trans community’, or can we try instead to be accountable to those people who might use the service we provide, without seeking to represent them? Do we need one media spokesperson and to broadcast a singular message, so that we gain credibility, or can we sustain difference of opinion transparently and non-representationally, even as we attempt to appropriate resources from bureaucratic state apparatuses of doom? Does it matter?

My answer is, yes, it does matter, but I had to scramble to articulate precisely why to people who felt confronted by the possibility that we might not care about our ‘public image’ or our credibility outside. This was an object lesson for me. I have spent years, now, working in a pretty intuitive autonomous/decentralised way on various projects. My intuitive explanations do sound vague, under-theorised and impractical. The upshot is, the working group is writing a document that says very clearly why it is important to organise autonomously, and how that will happen, and why we want it to happen. I feel reasonably optimistic. It feels good to be participating in the creation of a document that states our organising principles — autonomous, decentralised, non-hierarchical — and to already have found that writing this out clearly can result in a deeper understanding all round. (And to have won the battle against bureaucratic committee structures and community representation this time.)

Some more punning on this in the comments, please.

(via infinite thought, who got the punning off to a fine start with ‘dermatological materialism’)

At Recording Surface (back posting again!), Eric uses a Yo La Tengo lyric to prise apart the propertarian nature of intimate knowledge:

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable. Complete understanding is an attempt to possess, just as possession requires a high degree of understanding. Under the rule of capital, the axiom of interpersonal relationships demands that the flows between intimates represent the totality of possible flows. Nothing should escape and nothing should stay a mystery. If some bit of history or a feeling remains a secret, if it is not shared or revealed, that is an infidelity. It is in fact the definition of unfaithfulness. Secrets are always dirty little secrets. In the Yo La Tengo song, the feeling of not understanding the other is also the sense of losing possession of the other and the discovery of something new only induces crisis:

Sometimes I don’t know you, it’s like we never met
The way it seems to me is that you’re having regrets
Am I clinging to something that’s past?
That was never intended to last?

Lately, fiction-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin. I’ve been working back through the canon, from Voices and The Telling to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While the former feels as if it should resonate, in its experimentation with writing a differently gendered world through an interlocutor whose universe is distinctly binary gendered, The Dispossessed continues to fold me back into a consideration of its philosophical undertaking. It’s still the best fictional example I can remember of an attempt to think outside capital. But Le Guin attempts something more ambitious, as well: to critique the subjectivity of capital itself from a place entirely other. (more…)