Offering Theory. John Mowitt

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Название Offering Theory
Автор произведения John Mowitt
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия
Издательство Учебная литература
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781785274084



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in being resisted by Theory, effects the event of the encounter where Philosophy and identity fear to tread.

       Chapter 1

       QUEER RESISTANCE: FOUCAULT AND THE UNNAMABLE

      A crucial aspect of the thinking of context bears on the when–where–who of that which is to be contextualized. As I have suggested, the “who” of this series, as the index and avatar of identity, has come illegitimately to operate as a metonymy for the whole. It has done so at the expense of Theory, or so I contend. To develop this argument one might pose a rather direct “methodological” question, namely, where is it that Theory takes place, or, when does it happen? While this might appear to submit to a preemptive gesture of contextualization, consider that the bizarreness of the question, particularly as it avoids the standard attributive maneuver—who wrote it?—indicates that there is more here than meets the ear. Matters become even more challenging when we consider that Theory’s uncanny status as the “chronic” implies that wherever and whenever it takes place, it isn’t quite. Instead, however, of sitting stunned before this aporia, let me propose that it is precisely under such circumstances that the attractions of reading assert themselves. This never-quite-happening or always-having-happened quality of Theory calls out for attention. Not an interpretation. Not a production of the sense of Theory’s situation, its identity under these circumstances, but a reading of the potential ensnarled in the chronic condition of Theory. As this clearly implies, reading is more than literacy, or if it is literacy, then literacy is more than the exercise of a narrowly defined linguistic competence. Put differently, and to use an expression whose evocativeness we have grown deaf to, what must reading be if one can “read a or the situation”? Is it a “decoding” as Stuart Hall once famously argued? If so, what is the code of the situation, or the encounter, that is deployed in the act of decoding? To be clear, the drift of such questions derives not from the now compulsory impatience with “language” that one hears everywhere and every time we speak of affect, body, technology, objects, matter and so on, but with the distinctive pressure put on the work of reading Theory when its character as reading is taken seriously.

      What’s in an acronym or, as some prefer, initialism? As I write we have just marked the 50th-year commemoration of the so-called Stonewall Riots, that is, the uprising that developed in response to vice squad raids that took place at and around the Stonewall Inn in New York City during June of 1969. I trust then I will be forgiven for having the acronym LGBTQ in mind. Initially, the acronym took form as both a protest against inaccurate labeling and the assertion of a certain coalitional consciousness. It included only three letters: LGB. Over the course of the ensuing decades it became alphabetically enhanced assuming its current form, and the matter is in dispute, in the late 1990s. A politics of coalition among communities has gradually given way to a metaphysics of intersectionality, with each letter a “proxy” (Gayatri Spivak might insist) for an identity, so, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-gendered (as opposed to cis-gendered). The odd letter out is Q. It is the one letter that has consistently denoted two separate things: a community (Queers) and a practice (questioning). At the very least, Q is a proxy for a split identity, and this is part of what makes “queer” into a concept whose power is far from exhausted even if it is stopping more frequently at march oases.

      The title of the path-breaking volume, Queering the Pitch, is an expedient way to elaborate the point I am concerned to make here, which is embedded, as it were, in the titular pun (Brett, Wood and Thomas, 1994). Queering a pitch invites immediate comparison with the musical practice of “bending a note,” in effect, with the means by which a “blue” or slurred note is produced. Queering thus becomes a technique, a practice that makes a virtue of tonal intemperance. By the same token, queering the pitch (especially in a musicological context where the study of pitch-class sets has set the standard for a certain type of disciplinary knowledge) means altering, or problematizing, the very concept