The queer art of failure

“This book uses “low theory” (a term I am adapting from Stuart Hall's work) and popular knowledge to explore alternatives and to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations. Low theory tries to locate all the inbetween spaces that save us from being snared by the hooks of hegemony and speared by the seductions of the gift shop. But it also makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal. And so the book darts back and forth between high and low culture, high and low theory, popular culture and esoteric knowledge, in order to push through the divisions between life and art, practice and theory, thinking and doing, and into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing” p.15

“Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon “trying and trying again.” In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards” p.16

“From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures. In many ways this has been the message of many renegade feminists in the past. Monique Wittig (1992) argued in the 1970s that if womanhood depends upon a heterosexual framework, then lesbians are not “women,” and if lesbians are not “women,” then they fall outside of patriarchal norms and can recreate some of the meaning of their genders”p.17

“Not an optimism that relies on positive thinking as an explanatory engine for social order, nor one that insists upon the bright side at all costs; rather this is a little ray of sunshine that produces shade and light in equal measure and knows that the meaning of one always depends upon the meaning of the other”p.18

“Any book that begins with a quote from SpongeBob SquarePants and is motored by wisdom gleaned from Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run, and Finding Nemo, among other animated guides to life, runs the risk of not being taken seriously. Yet this is my goal. Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words, in academia as well as other contexts, for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy” p19

“Similarly the computer scientists who pioneered new programs to produce computergenerated imagery (CGI), as many accounts of the rise of Pixar have chronicled, were academic rejects or dropouts who created independent institutes in order to explore their dreams of animated worlds.2 These alternative cultural and academic realms, the areas beside academia rather than within it, the intellectual worlds conjured by losers, failures, dropouts, and refuseniks, often serve as the launching pad for alternatives precisely when the university cannot”. p20

“Fred Moten and Stefano Harney in 2004 in Social Text titled “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” Their essay is a searing critique directed at the intellectual and the critical intellectual, the professional scholar and the “critical academic professionals.” For Moten and Harney, the critical academic is not the answer to encroaching professionalization but an extension of it, using the very same tools and legitimating strategies to become “an ally of professional education.” Moten and Harney prefer to pitch their tent with the “subversive intellectuals,” a maroon community of outcast thinkers who refuse, resist, and renege on the demands of “rigor,” “excellence,” and “productivity” p21

“In place of the “allencompassing and global theories” that the university encourages, Foucault exhorts his students to think about and turn to “subjugated knowledges,” namely those forms of knowledge production that have been “buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations” (2003: 7). These forms of knowledge have not simply been lost or forgotten; they have been disqualified, rendered nonsensical or nonconceptual or “insufficiently elaborated.” Foucault calls them “naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity” (7)—this is what we mean by knowledge from below” p24

“In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing” p25

“In fact, to speak personally for a moment, I am not sure that I myself am teachable! As someone who never aced an exam, who has tried and tried without much success to become fluent in another language, and who can read a book without retaining much at all, I realize that I can learn only what I can teach myself, and that much of what I was taught in school left very little impression upon me at all” p26

“The Class (Entre Les Murs, 2008, directed by Laurent Cantet). In the film a white schoolteacher, François Bégaudeau (who wrote the memoir upon which the film is based), tries to reach out to his disinterested and profoundly alienated, mostly African, Asian, and Arab immigrant students”p26

“For Gramsci and Hall, everyone participates in intellectual activity, just as they cook meals and mend clothes without necessarily being chefs or tailors. The split between the traditional and the organic intellectual is important because it recognizes the tension between intellectuals who participate in the construction of the hegemonic (as much through form as through content) and intellectuals who work with others, with a class of people in Marxist terms, to sort through the contradictions of capitalism and to illuminate the oppressive forms of governance that have infiltrated everyday life” p30

“Elizabeth Freeman (2005) has used the Pixar feature Monsters, Inc. to expose the exploitive reality of the neoliberal vision of education and the absence of gender and sexuality in the radical opposition to the neoliberal university. Describing Monsters, Inc. as a film about desire, class, and the classroom, Freeman joins forces with Bill Readings's (1997) scathing indictment of neoliberal university reform and argues that the film, an allegory of corporate extractions of labor, “illuminates the social relations of production” even as it mediates them (Freeman, 2005: 90). In the repeated staging of an encounter between the monster and the child in the bedroom—which in the film is designed to generate screams, which in turn are funneled into energy to power Monstropolis—Monsters, Inc. implies but does not address, according to Freeman, an erotic exchange. For Freeman, the queerness of this encounter must be acknowledged in order for the film to move beyond its own humanist solution of substituting one form of exploitation (the extraction of screams) for another (the extraction of children's laughter)” p33

“Pixar and DreamWorks films in particular have created an animated world rich in political allegory, stuffed to the gills with queerness and rife with analogies between humans and animals. While these films desperately try to package their messages in the usual clichéd forms (“Be yourself,” “Follow your dreams,” “Find your soul mate”), they also, as Freeman implies in her piece on Monsters, Inc., deliver queer and socialist messages often packaged in relation to one another: Work together, Revel in difference, Fight exploitation, Decode ideology, Invest in resistance” p34

“To that end I hope this book is readable by and accessible to a wider audience even if some nonacademic readers find my formulations too convoluted and some academics find my arguments too obvious. There is no happy medium between academic and popular audiences, but I hope my many examples of failure provide a map for the murky, dark, and dangerous terrains of failure we are about to explore” p37

“Stockton proposes that childhood is an essentially queer experience in a society that acknowledges through its extensive training programs for children that heterosexuality is not born but made. If we were all already normative and heterosexual to begin with in our desires, orientations, and modes of being, then presumably we would not need such strict parental guidance to deliver us all to our common destinies of marriage, child rearing, and heteroreproduction” p40

“Her account of pet love registers the need for new graphs and pyramids of sexual oppression and privilege, new models to replace the ones Gayle Rubin produced nearly two decades ago in “Thinking Sex” to complicate the relations between heterosexual privilege and gay oppression. In a postindustrial landscape where the size of white families has plummeted, where the nuclear family itself has become something of an anachronism, and where a majority of women live outside of conventional marriages, the elevation of pets to the status of love objects certainly demands attention” p50

“As we saw with Toy Story, the Pixarvolt films often proceed by way of fairly conventional narratives about individual struggle against the automated process of innovation, and they often pit an individual, independent, and original character against the conformist sensibilities of the masses” p56

“Dory represents a different, a queer and fluid form of knowing, that operates independently of coherence or linear narrative or progression. By some standards she might be read as stupid or unknowing, foolish or silly, but ultimately her silliness leads her to new and different forms of relation and action. In this chapter I discuss acts of loopy stupidity associated with forgetfulness and modes of active and passive forgetting often misread as stupidity. In each scenario a certain kind of absence—the absence of memory or the absence of wisdom—leads to a new form of knowing” p75

“Stupidity in men is represented as, well, disarming (Adam Sandler), charming (Jerry Lewis), comforting (George W.), or innocent (Will Farrell in Elf, Tom Hanks in everything). Male stupidity masks the will to power that lies just behind the goofy grin, and it masquerades as some kind of internalization of feminist critiques. The clueless male in movies usually requires a spunky and intelligent woman to pull him along, educate and civilize him, and this masks the gender inequality that structures their relationship” p78

“For women and queer people, forgetfulness can be a useful tool for jamming the smooth operations of the normal and the ordinary. These operations, generally speaking, take on an air of inevitability and naturalness simply by virtue of being passed on from one generation to another. Women are most often the repositories for generational logics of being and becoming, and then become the transmitters of that logic to the next generation. Aided by a few more plot summaries and some animated films, we will see how forgetfulness becomes a rupture with the eternally selfgenerating present, a break with a selfauthorizing past, and an opportunity for a nonheteroreproductive future. But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;3 we tend to organize the chaotic process of historical change by anchoring it to an idea of generational shifts (from father to son), and we obscure questions about the arbitrariness of memory and the necessity of forgetting by falling back on some notion of the inevitable force of progression and succession” p91

“Delinking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project: queer lives seek to uncouple change from the supposedly organic and immutable forms of family and inheritance; queer lives exploit some potential for a difference in form that lies dormant in queer collectivity not as an essential attribute of sexual otherness but as a possibility embedded in the break from heterosexual life narratives. We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new, but where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts” p91

“As a kind of false narrative of continuity, as a construction that makes connection and succession seem organic and natural, family also gets in the way of all sorts of other alliances and coalitions. An ideology of family pushes gays and lesbians toward marriage politics and erases other modes of kinship in the process. In an article in The Nation Lisa Duggan and Richard Kim argue that contemporary marriage politics manages to unite conservatives by consolidating support for the nuclear and conjugal family through marital support programs and a revival of covenant marriage while dividing progressive groups by creating anxiety and conflict about the status of samesex marriage rights. According to Duggan and Kim, the promarriage and profamily campaigns have had to counter rocketing divorce rates and the reality of diverse household forms in the U.S., and they have done so by anchoring the conventional family to financial security in the absence of a welfare state” p92

“Alternative kinship has long been a cause célèbre among gay and lesbian groups and queer scholars, and while anthropologists such as Kath Weston, Gayle Rubin, and Esther Newton have applauded the effort and creativity that go into making new kinship bonds in queer communities, other scholars, mostly psychoanalytic theorists such as Judith Butler and David Eng, have examined the family as a disciplinary matrix and have linked its particular forms of social control to colonialism and globalization.5 Why, many of these scholars have asked, does the nuclear family continue to dominate kinship relations when in reality people are enmeshed in multiple and complex systems of relation? In her work Kath Weston examines how kinship discourses invest in normative temporalities which privilege longevity over temporariness and permanence over contingency. These normative conceptions of time and relation give permanent (even if estranged) connections precedence over random (even if intense) associations. So an authenticating notion of longevity renders all other relations meaningless and superficial, and family ties, by virtue of being early bonds, seem more important than friendships” p93

“The contingency of queer relations, their uncertainty, irregularity, and even perversity, disregards the socalled natural bonds between memory and futurity, and in the process make an implicit argument for forgetfulness, albeit one that is rarely reflected in mainstream texts about memory and forgetting” p95

“Dory links this radical forgetting as a break with history to a notion of queer forgetting within which the forgetful subject, among other things, forgets family and tradition and lineage and biological relation and lives to create relationality anew in each moment and for each context and without a teleology and on behalf of the chaotic potentiality of the random action” p101

“Morrison's novel reminds us that forgetting can easily be used as a tool of dominant culture to push the past aside in order to maintain the fantasy and fiction of a just and tolerant present. While we live every day with the evidence of the damage done by forgetting—the desire in American society to “put slavery behind us,” for example—it is still worth assessing the power of forgetfulness in creating new futures not tied to old traditions. While they do not specifically mention forgetfulness both José Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman in books on queer temporality construct queer futurity as a break with heteronormative notions of time and history. For Muñoz, queer futurity is a “realm of potential that must be called upon” and that is “not quite here” (2010: 21), for Freeman, queer relations to time are accessed through new arrangements of bodies, pleasure, history, and time, arrangements that she names as “erotohistoriography” or “counterhistory of history itself,” one linked to queerness and accessed through pleasure (2010: 95)” p104

“In fact we can never really put the past back together again in the way that memory promises. In a haunting memoir that is in part a meditation on the impossibility of making the connections between past wrongs and present conditions, Saidiya Hartman asks, “What is it we choose to remember about the past and what is it we will to forget? Did my greatgreatgrandmother believe that forgetting provided the possibility of a new life?” (2007: 15)” p 106

“Failure, of course, goes hand in hand with capitalism. A market economy must have winners and losers, gamblers and risk takers, con men and dupes; capitalism, as Scott Sandage argues in his book Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2005), requires that everyone live in a system that equates success with profit and links failure to the inability to accumulate wealth even as profit for some means certain losses for others” p109

“Queer studies offer us one method for imagining, not some fantasy of an elsewhere, but existing alternatives to hegemonic systems. What Gramsci terms “common sense” depends heavily on the production of norms, and so the critique of dominant forms of common sense is also, in some sense, a critique of norms. Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope. Other subordinate, queer, or counterhegemonic modes of common sense lead to the association of failure with nonconformity, anticapitalist practices, nonreproductive life styles, negativity, and critique” p110