In the preceding line of thought, I argued that it is not just amicable proximity which makes some appearances more palatable than others. But, at the same time, there is a phenomenon which must be noted, that of the hometown hero. Why is it that celebrity is a more astonishing event when one is able to establish a connecting line from that celebrity to oneself? One answer would counter my previous hypothesis: people enjoy what is familiar to them more deeply than that which is not. I cannot accept this argument, by virtue of the fact that people continue to seek surprise, even as they want stability.

No, I think that what is at play in the joy of another’s appearance is a kind of pride, a narcissism. In cases where one has surrendered one’s time to the other, one identifies oneself in that other. Any acclaim that one’s students receive is due, at least in part, to one’s own teaching. The condition of the hometown hero is that of achieving vicarious praise. It’s not simply that familiarity makes us enjoy our familiars more than strangers. With the hometown hero, there is the factor of other people’s wanting to look at, to enjoy, to receive, the presence of those with whom we are familiar. The effect is similar to that of when our favorite piece of art receives an award, or is approved of by others. We recommend works of art for confirmation of our tastes. We enjoy knowing that we are capable of identifying the beautiful. This assures us that, perhaps, we, too, are beautiful.

The matter at hand is a desire not merely to identify whether that which is present is beautiful, nor is it even a desire to identify which of several options is most beautiful. The anxiety which presses on our consciousness is the desire to assure that we will retain proximity to the beautiful, that the objects to which we choose to attach ourselves will remain beautiful. To recycle the analogy of the beauty pageant, our present selves are tasked with the role of judge, meant to represent the desires of the audience who comprise all our later selves. We therefore risk numbness, the greater we apply the pressures of prediction upon ourselves.

To truly understand how pervasive, how potent this need to predict is, one must understand that “The Princess and the Frog” is a parable for Christian charity. That is not to say that the transformational, moral tale towards hospitality is exclusive to Christianity nor to the princess’s frog. In Greek myths (cf. Baucis & Philemon) the gods have a pernicious and inexplicable habit of appearing in frail forms to unsuspecting hosts. Those who accept the elderly, disguised gods past their threshold receive divine gifts innumerable; those less trusting, who deny access to these visitors, are quick to find themselves the victims of obscene punishments. “Be careful what you wish for” becomes “be careful what you welcome.” Similarly, it is a common adage meant to critique frat-boy misogyny that the contemporary princess must “kiss a few frogs before finding her prince.” In equal terms, the tale is indicative of a social compulsion to reject or repress feminine desire (one must love the man to whom one has been married off), and is indicative also of the belief that any good lover will bloom with love and time; plants need water to grow.

Don’t judge a book by its cover, because covers are apparently flimsy things not worth the time for contemplation or appreciation. The thing that lasts is always, according to our anxiety’s pleas for self-denial, most important; and, so our anxiety claims, it almost never coincides with what we see. Be kind to those ugly, broken, smelly or silly–share your toys with everyone. One day you will want them as your friends. Socialization requires self-subjugation; good classroom behavior necessitates, inculcates ignorance of our own anger, disappointment and severity. And so the critic’s acuity is dulled by culture, not enhanced by it.

Even as the idea of the hometown hero is exemplary of the continuity of desire, this continuity cannot be understood without a thorough analysis of that event which we call “jealousy.” Both Gods and lovers are prone to jealousy, those on Mts. Olympus and Sinai alike. Although, the jealousy at hand is not of any deity, but rather of the jealous worshipper, who would rather have a single divine name to remember than twenty or more. The beautiful bird is quick to alight before our footsteps, so we settle for a single, dropped feather.

Encouraging loyalty risks permitting the neurotic vice of anxiety to mask itself as a virtue of consistency. Our own fidelity preempts and precedes the greater fear that lovers who cheat will disappear. I am loyal to you, so you ought to be loyal to me. We’ll both blind ourselves to any others. It’s an easy bargain for me to make, but I’ll make it appear magnanimous, because I don’t want you to realize that you are worse off for the deal. No man is an island, but each is a storm, and we fear lest wandering eyes be caught in the currents of more powerful waters. Our relative inadequacy frightens us because it renders us powerless to ensure the presence of our desired object. But why is it that an object is desired?

To say that one desires a single object is ultimately to argue that one’s desires are uniform across time. The case for continuity finds its most pertinent and persuasive argument with regards to the task of child-rearing. Indeed, the transformational tale of hospitality (attach yourself to your guests, be kind, and they will pay you handsomely) makes little sense with regard to any object except for children (or the young of all species), who are prone to the most radical changes over time. But to read love as a transformational tale risks allowing love to become an economic exchange, in which the present pains of parenting are redeemed when one’s children become one’s caretakers. Continuity is therefore demanded not because desire is singular or consistent through time, but because parents must retain control over their children as a means to quell their own fears of senescence. Hence the status quo of parenting. If parenting is the originary force behind continuity, then monogamy is a result of parenting preferences, not the other way ’round. The partner is the route to the child.

But the problem with beauty is that it very rarely follows rules, nor can we exchange our pains and labors for its currency at anything resembling a constant rate. We too often make the assumption that beauty and desire are merely the results of evolutionary habits, as if continuity were the desire of every being. One would like to explicate desire as a merely evolutionary event, because this helps to delimit what would otherwise be the chaotic realm of aesthetics. All living beings want to survive, and to pass on their genes–that’s all folks. So seductive is this evolutionary narrative that the biologist Robert Sapolsky has been willing to gloss the entire history of literature as the result of human genetics: the genes derived from species with both tournament and monogamous species. The tournament-style lions compete for mates; some birds protect the same nest for life. Chimps, like us, do both. It’s just genes.

That being said, before attempting to corrode this continuity/evolution narrative, it is worth acknowledging, for a moment, that the function of the counselor-client/analyst-analysand dyad, according to many theories of practice, is precisely to maintain a consistent and long-term relationship. According to the major theories, clients are those who are faced with problems unknown to them, or whose solutions elude them, such that they lack consistent and successful relationships. The counselor/client dyad must therefore provide the model that the client ought to follow elsewhere in life. In this case, the counselor is serving as the externalized host of memory. Our own memories fail us, and so we demand that they be doubled in storytelling, whether in the journals of our own private archive, or the more public realm of our peers. Loyalty may therefore be a useful lever towards the aim of achieving self-control. But, while there may surely be a diagnostic practicality to consistency or continuity, it remains to be seen who or what ought to fulfill the function of this diagnostic system–are we to spend our lives searching for a singular partner to take the job? Still, neither loyalty nor continuity explicates the event of beauty.

Additionally, one might want to argue that the event of beauty is an event of legibility, thereby requiring a level of continuity insofar as images must remain relatively stable in order for them to be read. However, the extent to which such images require stability for successful reading has yet to be determined. Ought we all to engage with a Talmudic analysis of the same few passages, such that our experiences are continuously expanding due to some ineffable exegetical power of the Book? I hardly think so. After a melancholic retreat to the dismal doldrums of my apartment, I fled its stale air–only to be seduced by the flattery of a cool breeze, thousands of indecipherable praises etched into my skin, whispered by the wind. Even the distended streaks of color seen when driving are, to me, pleasurably non-figurative, though they are occasionally interrupted by crimson, octagonal signifiers: S T O P. Desire can be stream-like or static.

In recent years, the work of queer intellectuals and the prevalence of queer artists in popular culture have indicated that traditional models and strategies for acquiring beauty have lost their hegemonic relevance. While some queer commentators still seek to attach themselves to what is considered natural, by showing alternative forms of community and queer sexual acts in the animal kingdom, the very existence of queer attraction has the potentiality to challenge the “natural” definition of attraction as the extension of the evolutionary process. To rescue literature from Sapolsky’s definition, art itself may be considered queer, insofar as it has very little obvious connection with the task of reproduction. In other words, queer theory has the potentiality to attach itself to everything in one’s life which is not continuous or reproductive–those events which thereby exceed our (at least current) explanations, including and especially the experience of the beautiful. The queer attachment may therefore be short-lived or unexpected; in either case, the queer event of beauty is repressed precisely because it induces abject anxiety: it rejects our capacity to control or predict our own happiness.

Gender, Fascism & Presence: Patterns in the Discourse of Beauty

Earlier, I stated that the initial impetus for this line of thought was the fact that ugliness and disability are both taboo, as forms of human limitation–not to say that disability is an inherent form of ugliness, but to say that both disability and ugliness are silenced as rude topics of conversation. That would only be a half-truth. Equally if not more important was my reading of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s Productions of Presence, a strange and intensely personal book, a book that in many ways reveals the nudity of our emperors, leaving no Oz-like screen onto which we may project our visions of great wizards. For his capacity to be vulnerable, to risk shame, to be so publicly personal, Gumbrecht deserves a great deal of credit. In particular, I was struck by the following passage, which I have re-produced in its near entirety:

“My first more personal concern for this class was to be a good enough teacher to evoke for my students and to make them feel specific moments of intensity that I remember with fondness and mostly with nostalgia–even if, in some cases, this intensity was painful when it actually happened. I wanted my students to know, for example, the almost excessive, exuberant sweetness that sometimes overcomes me when a Mozart aria grows into polyphonic complexity and when I indeed believe that I can hear the tones of the oboe on my skin. I want my students to live or at least to imagine that moment of admiration (and perhaps also of the despair of an aging man) that gets a hold of me when I see the beautiful body of a young woman standing next to me in front of one of the computers that give access to our library catalogue–a moment, by the way, that is not all that different from the joy that I feel when the quarterback of my favorite college team in American football (Stanford Cardinal of course) stretches out his perfectly sculpted arms to celebrate a touchdown down pass. Quite naturally, I also want all of my students to feel the elation, the suddenly very deep breathing and the embarrassingly wet eyes with which I must have reacted to that very beautifully executed pass and to the swift movement of the wide receiver who caught it. I hope that some of my students will suffer through that sentiment of intense depression and perhaps even of humiliation that I know from reading ‘Pequeno vals vienes,’ my favorite poem in Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York, a text that makes the reader intuit how the life of a homosexual man was emotionally and even physically amputated in Western societies around 1930. My students should get at least a glimpse of that illusion of lethal empowerment and violence, as if I (of all people!) were an ancient god, which permeates my body at the moment of the estocada final in a Spanish bullfight, when the bullfighter’s sword silently cuts through the body of the bull, and the bull’s muscles seem to stiffen for a moment-before before its massive body breaks down like a house shaken by an earthquake.”

Gumbrecht is a Professor Emeritus of Stanford University, widely regarded as one of the premier institutions of our time, where he held a position as a named chair of comparative literature. Let us assume therefore that Gumbrecht’s work is exemplary of that protean entity which not infrequently is called “genius,” i.e. that it is among the best offerings that his generation was able to bestow upon the next. In equal measures, Gumbrecht’s prose sustains and eradicates this mirage, this cult of genius. He is able to alternate fluently between languages, periods and cultures. He has a rich vocabulary, and a seemingly vast store of cultural referents, both of which have come to be regarded as requisite qualities for one’s being professorial or intelligent. These referents become meaningful (and we must hear in that word “meaning” all the potency with which Gumbrecht imbues it) to the extent that their descriptive potency alludes also to a prescriptive power. Through what the historian and theorist Hayden White has termed the “practical past,” we should be able to use our readings, our experiences, our sagacious sources of advice, to figure out what precisely ‘I ought to do now.’ (This practical question of course links to the other relevant demand: “How am I to find beauty?”)

In defining this quality of professorial intelligence I am reminded of an anecdote: I once shared a historical project I had been working on with a family member, curious as to how or whether she might find my work meaningful, elucidating. Her response almost entirely ignored the content of the piece; instead, she complimented me by saying: “I had no idea you had such a big vocabulary.” The event made me question the extent to which any historical investigations I conducted were indeed insightful, the extent to which I could teach anything (or had anything to teach) to my elders who were less fortunate in their access to educational resources than I, other than a new list of words and names. Similarly, does Gumbrecht’s advice allow us to learn something, or is he merely surprising us with new references (assuming that Garcia Lorca’s poetry is not widely known)? Is he therefore reproducing in us precisely what exists in him, as a schoolteacher might inculcate the young with rote memorization?

Gumbrecht himself does not seem to subscribe to this notion of genius; he points out in this passage that he is totally powerless in the face of actually doing something, because he cannot make his students feel those desired moments of intensity. One wonders whether the effete intellectual (this one or any other) were to have better served his time if he were to have trained as an athlete, or as a proficient oboe player, or even if he were to have maintained/developed/performed an appearance as does the beautiful woman. He seems disappointed with the power of words to do anything, even as he realizes (or perhaps we realize through our reading of him) that he has devoted such great periods of his life to reading, to the mastery of words.

The title of this short book, Productions of Presence, refers to the etymological roots of the two words: producere is to produce or bring forth; prae + essere is to be at the forefront. In Gumbrecht’s formulation, words and digital technologies collapse together into a intertextual panorama of hyperlinks and preternatural wizardry: words call forth effects on our minds and bodies, just as the camera, the website, the screen–all those whirring actors of the digital age–suddenly make new imagery accessible to us. The world is divided, as Gumbrecht tells us, into “presence effects” and “meaning effects,” where presence effects make something spatially accessible (in range of, and unobscured from, our senses), while meaning effects attune our senses to those things which are already accessible.

Gumbrecht’s philosophy owes to Heidegger’s reading of the Greek term a-lethia as knowledge, but more literally as “de-concealment” or “un-forgetting.” Many, if not most, of Heidegger’s readers (one has in mind such figures as Derrida, Vattimo, Marion and Caputo) have taken the effects of a-letheia to be like that of flipping a coin, where the de-concealment of one thing requires, and is simultaneous to, the re-concealment of another. But Gumbrecht has greater faith in the capacity of human sense perception to be expanded, and the digital humanities are particularly exemplary for this. If presence is literally translated as “being before,” then latency is translated as “being besides;” that so many things can be called forth–microscopic imagery, photographic portraits of dead relatives, telescopic presentations of the cosmos–has made our daily experience become saturated with latency and ambiance: with a feeling that there is more to one’s surroundings than what meets the eye. Ambiance is a bi-lateral latency, flanked on both sides, lurking in the periphery. Latency is an anxiety: Heidegger formulated anxiety as the awareness of one’s back–it’s the feeling that you’re being watched, which makes you turn around. It seems that in many ways Gumbrecht’s approach to get over this anxiety is to just make all those “maybe”s into certainties, to bring the possibles into actuals, the latent into the present.

Gumbrecht himself refers to the approach of those like Vattimo and Derrida as “left-leaning,” which is to say that there are those who prefer accepting uncertainty, and others who want to eradicate it. The fear is that any unkept desire for certainty will lead to fascism and totalitarianism: one must always be open to the possibility of one’s own misunderstandings, one’s own anxieties, and this is what allows for peace and democracy. Gumbrecht, like other investigators into the phenomenon of presence (one thinks of Runia and Ankersmit most immediately) seems unconvinced by this. The leftists privilege meaning effects, which is to say that they question whether they are sufficiently aware or understanding of what is already there. They are dominated by the polite question: “Am I understanding you correctly?”; while, on the other hand, more conservative thinkers, because they accept the extent to which they already understand what’s going on, are willing to acknowledge the cold, hard truth of the matter–the presence effects.

Notable in Gumbrecht’s self-presentation is the great extent to which intellectuals–or at least, contemporary American/European intellectuals in the humanities–desire to distance themselves from conservatism. At the same time, intellectuals seem to have severe anxieties as to whether they can successfully achieve this distancing; these anxieties find their outlet in the public denunciation of “identity politics.” Those who decry “identity politics” fear first that the identity politicians may call them fascist or totalitarian, and so preempt these criticisms by labelling “political correctness” as a polite, or at least more silent and less visible, form of totalitarianism–for his part, Gumbrecht calls identity politics a “soft terrorism.”

Exemplary of such an anxiety is Gumbrecht’s early declaration that: “Finally, while the author admits that it has become difficult for him to imagine his own work without the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the last thing that he would be willing to accept is the label ‘Heideggerean.’ His reasons for this refusal are not philosophical reasons.” Reading between the lines, this diplomatic and somewhat enigmatic confession indicates two of Gumbrecht’s opinions: (1) contemporary criticism is too quick to equate ideas or intellectual patterns with specific behaviors of its proponents, in this case ‘Heideggerean’ thought with Heidegger’s own Nazism; (2) Gumbrecht is cautious that any form of mentioning Nazism and his political disagreements with Heidegger will lead to his very undoing, because people will see G=H, and H=N, thereby making the transitive leap, the faulty syllogism that G=N. Perhaps Gumbrecht also is affected by this syllogism, and must therefore hide it from even himself.

Another example of Gumbrecht’s desire to distance himself from conservatism is his citation of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter. To some extent, this citation reads to me as an attempt to raise his hands and show his palms: “See, even she, this powerful purveyor of queer and feminist theory, agrees with me. So how could I be the enemy? How could I be sexist, homophobic or transphobic?” Importantly, he cites the following excerpt: “What I would propose in place of these conceptions of construction is a return to the notion of matter, not as a site or surface, but as a process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter.” One sees in this citation the triumph of matter (a presence effect) over construction (a meaning effect). Yet, Butler does not fully distance herself from social construction; Gumbrecht neglects to include the clarification offered by Butler slightly after his citation: “In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect.” [One ought to note the auspicious use of power as a productive effect.]

The excision of this passage cannot be deemed accidental or extraneous, given that Gumbrecht glosses power as the “meaning effect” version of violence:

“Now if space is the dominant dimension through which, in a presence culture, the relationship between humans, that is, between human man bodies, is constituted, then this relationship [risks turning] into violence–that is, into occupying and blocking spaces with bodies–against other bodies. For meaning cultures, in contrast, it is typical (and perhaps even obligatory) to infinitely defer the moment of actual violence and to thus transform violence into power, which we can define as the potential of occupying or blocking spaces with bodies. The more the self-image of a certain culture corresponds to the typology of a meaning culture, the more it will try to hide and even to exclude violence as the ultimate potential of power. This is how we can explain the fact that, in recent decades, historians and philosophers of our culture have confused power relations with relations defined by the distribution of knowledge.”

With that last remark, we must hear the quip against power-knowledge as a quibble with the Foucault of History of Sexuality, Vol. I, the same Foucault that inspired Butler’s own use of the term power. Gumbrecht’s anti-Foucauldian framing of power neglects the question of how it is that bodies coming into contact with bodies will be harmful, and how name-calling may induce a form of harm quite separate from the threat of bodies hitting bodies. I think that the queer imaginary has been reluctant to accept this framing of violence wherein harm and pleasure are obviously differentiated, at least partially because the queer imaginary is more accepting of BDSM culture (Foucault is important in this respect), where the borders between harm and pleasure–between play/pretend/signifier and rules/reality/signified–become blurred. Enough, Gumbrecht says, of interpretation and its meaning effects.

In citing Bodies that Matter, Gumbrecht’s philosophy of presence touches on a contemporary political crisis: that of the transgender man or woman. In many ways, the constructionist view of Gender Trouble attempts to reduce the frequency with which we force each other to define our gender performances. In public lectures, Butler has remarked on more than one occasion how tiring it is that waitstaff at restaurants in Berkeley have to inaugurate her meals by asking: “what can I get for you ladies?” (Many of these anecdotes strike me as exemplary of privilege even as they decry so-called “banal” mistreatment.) Gender Trouble also questions the extent to which “he” and “she” are fixed terms that can be universally correlated to the supposedly discrete and concrete forms of penises and vaginas. The goal is perhaps to point out how arbitrary and exogenous these definitions of gender are, in order to lessen our attachments to them. Again, in public lectures, Butler notes the strange pattern where the entity known as Butler could care less whether one refers to this entity as a she/he/they, even as Butler respects the pleas of many transgender feminists who say that one pronoun is much more livable for them than another.

There is a tension between the extent to which these beliefs about gender are nonsense, and the extent to which these attitudes are respectably human; at some point, gendering outpaces its respectability, just as religiosity may breed mysticism and mutual respect, or it may reach theocratic extremes of tyrannical, puritanical control. The common, unspoken belief undergirding these events is that straight men who need always to be perceived as straight men are to some extent tiring and/or loathsome: self-repressed, repressing, and often reprehensible in their treatment of others. Whereas, FTM transgender men, those who desire to be perceived as “authentic,” whatever that may be in this case, purveyors of the pronoun “he,” are much more likely to be the persecuted than the persecutor. Thus, transgender people who declare that there is a significant divide between masculinity and femininity, one that is inescapably important for them, become a point of access for the straight cisgendered male who does not want to labelled as repressed or repressive for his affect and affections.

To some extent, Bodies That Matter acknowledges that those who transition their gender, or those who pursue gender-affirming surgeries, do so according to legitimate concerns, even as one does not want to say that all penis-carriers are men, and all those with vaginas are women. (There is an attempt to disorient what are supposedly commonsense definitions, in order to demonstrate that the categories of the masculine and feminine should not or do not have consistent definitions, even as agents make claim to their belonging to one category or another.) But there is also a political reading for the very title Bodies That Matter, a title which demands that we ask ourselves whose bodies matter to us, and how it is that these bodies come to matter to us. It would be relatively facile to read about what bodies matter in Gumbrecht’s very personal passage above, in order to find suppressed or repressed therein homoeroticism and misogyny, as well as a violent disregard for animal life; but, it would be too facile to derive from this the claim that any philosophy of presence will therefore become masculinist and/or fascist.

Relatedly, in his review of Runia’s philosophy of presence, Hayden White bluntly calls it a return to fascist rhetoric, and asks us to question whether this enigmatic “presence” has a gender. The line between presence and fascism tends not to be too tenuous, nor hard to draw. As Gumbrecht himself mentions in public lectures, his son is a fighter pilot, and much of his thought on the production of presence has to do with his awe of standing before the immense power of a jet engine. Similarly, the desire behind Production of Presence, the desire to make things concrete or producible, such that they could appear as soon as one wants them, becomes an aesthetics of speed. There is a palpable parallel between this desire for speed and the rise of futurism at the beginning of the past century, an aesthetic movement which bled rather quickly into the first form of fascism: Mussolini’s Italy. If we are to again promote presence effects, then does Gumbrecht’s advice risk a correlation with Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, who thought that all life was defined by political tension between friends and enemies, from which he drew the conclusion that life was better lived when such tension was acknowledged and acted upon–better to have outright violence than the many looming threats of contemporary power?

If Gumbrecht’s philosophy risks being read as a masculinist form of futurism, then Butler, too, may be read as a futurist who favors expansions in power and speed, albeit a multi-gendered, fast-moving stream of desire. Again, we might read: “In this sense, what constitutes the fixity of the body, its contours, its movements, will be fully material, but materiality will be rethought as the effect of power, as power’s most productive effect.”  Perhaps then we ought to dive fully into trans-humanism, ought to develop those bio-, medico-, and digital technologies which most readily reduce the “fixity” of the body?

I think any reading of Gumbrecht or Butler which demands accelerating the rate at which our desires are met risks misunderstanding the difference between desire and satisfaction, as well as the great harms that occur when even our most destructive desires are unimpeded.

In my understanding of speed and fixity, I think a similar matter is at hand in Catherine Malabou’s coupling of materialist philosophy with deconstruction, where she argues that languages and behaviors–indeed, the very structure(s) of being–are all defined by plasticity. In other words, all things have attachment(s) to other things. The masculinist’s ideal Man desires strength so that he may never lose his attachments, may preserve and protect them. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the pacifist’s ideal Zen master is forever at rest, because he lacks attachment. Matter fixates; meaning separates.

The virtue of plasticity, to some extent, desires detachment. Nietzsche calls plastic power the capacity to forget, and compares forgetting to the act of taking a knife to one’s roots. The image of plasticity is like that of a body whose sinews, when stretched, are able to snap their taut strings. But, one must realize, plasticity is impossible without attachment; the flexible object is always able to retain or return to its earlier shape. In his glossing of deconstruction, John Caputo says that there are “relatively stable effects,” that there is such a thing as an “optimal disequilibrium,” and that one must resist both ossification as well as dissipation. Specifically, to define this “optimal disequilibrium,” Caputo uses the term “chaosmos” from Finnegan’s Wake. But Finnegan’s Wake is itself dominated by a binary between a masculine, geographic principle and a feminine, fluid principle. The earthy phallus creates structures and civilizations, spaces, which are washed over by the feminine river, time, causing them to erode, to decay, to heal, to transform. Again, we find ourselves reduced to two essential genders.

One travels so far, and yet no end comes in sight; moreover, one might add, all this because a Stanford professor found a young woman beautiful and decided, against contemporary norms, to write about it. It’s infuriating enough to make one want to scrap the whole thing altogether, and just return to something simple–like presence effects. But that is precisely why this enigmatic event of beauty remains so poorly known, so little discussed. No sooner does one hear the word “beauty” than the contemporary English ear completes the sentence: “is in the eye of the beholder.” Yet the qualitative dimensions of our existence far exceed in number the mere occasions of beauty, and yet we express such little skepticism for other qualities. Strangely, successfully, many of us manage to negotiate our tracks through space and time–which may be similarly bending and flexible as the ineffable mellifluence called beauty–with minimal interference between our and others’ movements. The puzzle is not why nothing works; rather, we must ask why even our catastrophes are so successfully performed.

Along with Gumbrecht, we might lament how powerless he is over the feelings of his students, even as we realize that he himself has been able to read widely of the thoughts and feelings of others, has been able to retain and represent those thoughts. The event of attraction is not some mere superficiality; furthermore, it cannot be measured finally and ultimately with any neurological or physiological equipment, any more than an ant could successfully read such charts to predict human behavior. But this difficulty does not suffice to say that we can ignore the phenomenon and let it be reduced to mere meaning effects, because then we lose our capacity to see the emperor’s nudity, to declare what’s out there.

To continue the preceding discussion, it may just be that queer studies/arguments are no more than the documentation of the fact that beauty comes often from unexpected places, in unexpected times. It is worth noting that Gumbrecht’s appeal to queer affection does not, according to the above definition queer (v.) desire, but instead argues that the sources of beauty are loved objects, which remain fixed, permanent; in Gumbrecht’s reading of Lorca’s poetry, he declares that the man who is not free to pursue other men is wholly alienated from an essential, authentic component of his being, i.e. is “emotionally amputated.”

But what if one were to say that the queer instinct is simply the desire to say that something is over- or under-rated? This argument will appear sacrilegious, harmful and indeed negligent. But what if we could just say that no desires are particularly important or universal, that some people’s desires just differ from others? Obviously, the realm of sex is, has been, so politically and religiously charged that one cannot simply say that one chooses one gender over another. Why is it that the tragedy of the closeted, repressed queer person is so liberating for the contemporary subject–why are we so tightly attached to this pathos? It makes sense that the narrative wherein millions of LGBTQ+ people have been persecuted and continue to risk persecution would be a political expedient (all persecutory fantasies for Lebensraum will lead to nationalism, which contemporary critics of “homonationalism” are quick to point out). But, it remains to be seen why this narrative is a personal expedient, why the presence of others’ suffering allows one to decide that one is gay. (Butler herself asks whether homosexuality is an attribute, or whether she is being lesbian, is doing lesbianism.)

The fact of the matter is that the discourse of repression has been linked to religious doctrine. The Westboro bigots argue that to choose homosexuality is to choose sin. More level-headed progressives dodge this line of thinking by stating that one does not choose homosexuality. But, really, in saying that a desire is not chosen, one declares that it is a divine vocation, an innate essence. So in truth one denies the homophobic argument on premises which are entirely alien to it, while claiming to have disproved it. If people have not suffered, and suffered severely, throughout history–then somehow my present confusion and suffering becomes de-legitimized. The progressive Christian assumes a benevolent God would not instill such desires in us, if we were not to be allowed to act on them. The strict conservative has a fanatical faith which is able to exceed this reasoning, which dictates that God is perfectly willing to condone and create human suffering, such that he would instill these desires with his left hand, only to be forgotten by his right, which forbids them.

But what if one were to escape from this logic altogether, to state simply that a set of myths were established to perpetuate procreative behaviors, and that sexual activity–whether it is procreative or not–lacks the emotive or “essential” power which our procreative myths have given it. The reproductive myths attach deep significance to those organs with reproductive potential, such that–even as we escape from the procreative myths of homophobia–our use and abuse of these organs is considered central to our desires. The myth of the partner therefore survives its queer critique, even as many queer activists wonder why same-sex marriage is the token of equality for which many LGBTQ+ activists have fought.

I am curious, also, of the extent to which these myths and their modern interpretations perpetuate biphobia. Does bisexuality counter both old and contemporary narratives, insofar as it provides an example wherein sexuality is a choice? What does it mean for me to say that I am bisexual, even as I affirm that I would not have been willing to die to date (or, more vulgarly, to fuck) a member of the same sex? Does this mean that I am an inauthentic coward, unwilling to pursue my desire at the risk of persecution? Or is it that the myth of true-love, of the perfect partner, does not hold for me? Does my courage and authenticity equate to my desire to admit that I have not felt, nor do I imagine I shall feel, such desire as moved Tristan and Isolde? To say that one is bi- or pan-sexual is to pose a problem to others, who find comfort in the idea that desires are constant and predictable–it is to queer beauty.

By ogling the young student in the library, does Professor Gumbrecht adhere to the long-standing tradition which upholds the ineffable beauty of love, as Dante ogled Beatrice before him–or is he simply tasting a pleasure which we silently experience in our daily lives? It’s enough to make one plead: enough questions of meaning, let us get back to the concrete effects of our desire. Let’s get married. Maybe have a few kids. Surrogacy if we can, adoption if we must.

An Otherworldly Hunger, Hungry in Othered Worlds

When Emily Brothers, a blind politician in Britain’s Labor Party, came out as a MTF trans woman in 2014, The Sun asked the obvious and impertinent question: “how did she know she was the wrong sex [sic]?” Though politically incorrect, this is a question that all people, trans- and cis-gendered alike, ask of themselves: how does one know one’s gender? The Sun’s posing of the question was obviously derogatory, missing the relevant pathos of the self-questioning trans-person. But if we are to affirm trans-lives, then we must ask ourselves: what would it be for me to know that I was born “the wrong sex?” To affirm the Other is to affirm the possibility of the Other ‘s existence in oneself. What if these are your desires–what if you are repressed? The anxiety of this demande has provoked many of the thoughts that follow. Intolerance likely has much to do with an inability to face these anxieties.

To the naive eye, sex and gender are taken to be salient features, hence why the existence of the blind trans-person is so dubious to today’s highly visual society. The obvious fact that one could be trans- without experiencing the visual medium, as well as the historical event where this fact was so obliviously ignored, indicates the great extent to which our perceptions of our bodies are limited–by our social spaces–to a visual domain. Consciously, we consider ourselves observers, even as our unconscious selves work to control how we perform as the observed. In interviews, Emily offers an anecdote of what her experience as a transgender woman has been: she was quite pleased when a train conductor referred to her as a “lady.” The event of gender is not merely seeing oneself in a mirror. It is being seen.

Moreover, to ask how it is possible that a blind person could be trans-, is about as ignorant (and nonsensical) as assuming that all blind people must speak in low voices. (Sense reception is as distinct from performance as one form of sense reception is from another.) Gender is embodied, and this embodiment includes voice, touch, smell and movement. The question posed by The Sun may more widely be expressed: How is it that people whose mobility has been limited perform their genders? Is it that disabled bodies become anonymous conglomerates of flesh, neutral in their reading? What gender are my prosthetic limbs? Moreover, is gender a matter of performing specific forms of beauty? Is it that to perform my gender successfully is to be a beautiful version of myself? Is it that I am more proximate to certain forms of beauty–and therefore certain forms of gender–than others? (Is it therefore a matter of the fixity of matter coupled with social forms of power?) Moreover, what does it mean if I am a beautiful man who would rather be an ugly woman?

In order to achieve her desired goal of being perceived as feminine, Emily must perform in a world which she cannot see. While Emily has received help from her friends, who arranged outfits and put on her makeup, I cannot but find her struggle as exemplary of the hunger for the invisible which is intrinsic to one’s being human. Like Kafka, Emily becomes to me an Every(wo)man. In Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” the titular artist fasts not because he is a Stoic hero, but because he cannot find food that will please him. Kafka’s oeuvre is haunted by similar stories, populated with such unlikely protagonists as moles who dig in the dirt without seeing, defendants who do not know their alleged crimes, and mapless travelers stuck at the gate. Like Emily, Kafka’s characters are often alienated from their bodies: they remain unknown to themselves, cannot navigate course to their desires. It is as if our actions, performed and understood in this world, were tethered to alternate versions of ourselves in entirely other worlds–with our choices and actions having unforeseen consequences on our happiness, as we drag around the voodoo dolls of ourselves in this unknown dimension.

We can create our own versions of Emily’s and Kafka’s story. Imagine you are a seeing person born into a blind world, which works at 22-hour schedules. Could you explain to your sightless peers what comprises a “day,” in order to limit your schedule to the visible hours? Imagine you are a herbivorous person born into a photosynthetic world, one which lacks not only the presence of food, but also the language to describe it. Could such melancholics name their remedies, or will one always fail–as much as Kafka’s hunger artist struggles to find an appropriate meal?

Rather than a sexual orientation–a matter of a straight horizon, caught in the visible world between the rising and falling of our sun–queerness may be the night of our reason, the very disorientation of desire.

So much questioning and still–ah, I just can’t see the end of this.