I had a lovely discussion today with two fellow Michigan graduate students tonight. One is from Paris and in the French department, the other is British and in the Philosophy department. Our long, outrageous conversation fell back on three central questions which I think all of my work is concerned with:
1) What power do we have over our own desires? Can we change them if we want to?
2) Is organizing around marginalized identities reinscribing our own subordination? (this related to Wendy Brown's argument in "Wounded Attachments")
3) If identity is no longer useful as a rubric for gay and lesbian organizing, then what model should replace it?
Any ideas? :)
1) On “desire”: I am reminded of Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G) notion of desire as a productive force, a “body without organs” (ref. “Anti-Oedipus”): an abstract flow - lacking organization and constantly seeking new avenues/channels to realize itself; a flow therefore not limited to the affections of any one subject. From this perspective, desire assumes a kind of framework, facilitating new expressions and constantly challenging fascist ways of living. Do we then have the power to change them? Certainly, for desires do not come from lack. It is a “factory” as D&G would like us to believe.
2) On “organizing to re-inscribe our subordination”: I think not; for here I would like to reference Habermas, the public sphere and the notion of “Subaltern Counterpublics”. To put it simply, it means a. to begin with a basic premise that our societies are stratified b. within such societies, counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics and c. such counterpublics then function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment to generate and circulate counterdiscourses and through this recast their needs/desires/identities.
3) On “identities” – well this is tricky. I think the notion of “identity” is irreplaceable as long as our societies’ basic framework continues to generate unequal social groups. Is the Habermasian model then also the most workable model thus far? I don’t know.
What do you say?
1) Well I like the idea you've presented about D&G's formulation of desire -- but I'm not convinced that changing them is as easy as you would have it. I'm thinking here along a number of lines. The most salient in my work is around racialized desire in gay male culture -- either positively ("I'm really into Black guys") or negatively ("No Blacks"). If someone were unsatisfied with their particular desires around race, could they actively change them? How would they go about that? It's still not clear to me how much agency we have in this matter.
I also think about that in regards to desire production about bareback sex. Many gay men report fantasizing about it and wanting it badly, and yet they also report knowing full well that they "should" be using condoms -- and that they wish they could. Could they somehow actively on an individual level produce a desire for condoms in sex?
2) Secondly, I'm a bit ambivalent about the organizing stuff. Mostly, I think all the stuff written here has been from ivory-tower academics without a pinch of activist experience. In my mind, not much worthwhile will spill from their pens on this particular topic. This goes for Wendy Brown's "Wounded Attachments" as well, where she articulates this question much better than I have. I find her argument theoretically compelling, but practically useless.
3) I disagree. In New York, San Francisco, and other major metro areas, gay/lesbian is no longer getting people out in droves for grassroots political activism. We have won too many battles. The implosion of the movement is a product of our success. The same is true for Black civil rights groups and Womens groups. Identity -- in this way -- becomes a temporary mode of organizing, and cannot sustain itself after a certain threshold of success is reached. The problem here is that of course this may be true in NYC/SF/DC/etc, but not in South Carolina, Montana, and Mississippi -- where identity politics may still prove useful for that kind of work.