As the title of this chapter makes clear, “queerness” and Theory will rub each other here and perhaps even in the right way.1
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 of pitch. Here, “queering” becomes the articulation of an alternative paradigm for reading and therefore constituting pitch.
It is this second connotation that I am interested in evoking through my chapter title, and it is this aspect of queer theory that, one might argue, has prompted the critical scrutiny it has sustained. Queer resistance is not exclusively or even primarily about the resistance carried out by subjects willing, under still unbearable circumstances, to bear the designation “queer.” It is not resisting queers. As the very structure of paronomasia would suggest, queer resistance resituates the queer subject within the articulation of an alternative paradigm of resistance. In other words, queers may well become where their resistance was (to misquote Freud). However, to avoid falling prey to the embarrassment of a circular argument (if queers do not precede queer resistance, then in what sense is their resistance queer), it is crucial that one delineate what is distinctive about the resistant practices that secure or enable queer identities. Historically, one might argue that this lesson was most emphatically relearned when it became possible for men to be feminists. Feminist resistance, in spite of the tenacious link between “females” and feminism (a link with an identitarian strategic value within the broadly professional sector), does not, in fact, presuppose a specific engendered identity as its agent. Moreover, the gains of feminism have often been embodied in alternative paradigms, for example, in the pedagogical field, where the otherwise attenuated paronomasiac aspect of “feminist resistance” clearly reasserts itself.
This said, it remains to specify what constitutes the distinctive tactical profile of queer resistance. It is what I will call inauthenticity. If queer theory has come to serve as the odd beacon of so many nomadic strains of poststructural, postmodern and even postcolonial analyses, it is because it has distilled the precipitate of the inauthentic from the politics of representation. In Adorno’s polemical assessment, authenticity, at least in its rigorously phenomenological sense (a sense, I would argue, which props up even the most quotidian of its recent applications, say, in debates about the difference between digital and analogue sound signals), rests on a misrecognized fusion of language and being (Adorno 1973, passim). By contrast, partisans of the inauthentic (and here I too am rehabilitating an epithet) insist upon the ontologically consequential antagonism between language and being, where identities become the unstable effect of the discourses that break up and socialize being. As the “feminist” scholar Judith Butler might say, performance precedes both existence and essence, where the point is not, as some have charged, to translate everything into language. Instead, the stress on the performative was designed to radicalize the philosophy of praxis by delimiting a problem (namely, if we are always already making sense and the world, then we ourselves are this interminable labor) whose subtleties require that it be explored outside the field dominated by the neat opposition between being and language. In Nick de Villiers’s provocative study of “opacity,” this point is given a formulation in which we recognize that the matter concerns not merely performance but the opaque performance of a Warhol or a certain “masked philosopher.”
Under the broad heading of the politics of representation, as is well known, literature and literary theory came to have a cortical status. The socio-genesis of this phenomenon is not what requires immediate attention especially since it has been discussed innumerable times before. Instead, what I want to draw attention to is the way inauthenticity and, what Nietzsche might call, the trans-valuation of all literary values figure within the same genealogical constellation. Let us just say, for the sake of provocation, that literature was decisive here because of the way its study prompted many to rethink the relation between language and being, especially once language had been reconceptualized within the purview of structural linguistics where literature was stripped of its elevated status. Foucault, who along with Deleuze and Klossowski participated centrally in the Nietzsche revival of the 1960s, was among the first (one would, as Badiou might insist, also have to include Lacan here) to begin subjecting this relation to sustained historical and philosophical scrutiny. Though initially, at least in The Order of Things, this took the form of an archaeological, that is, spatiotemporalized, reconstruction of the “being of language,” after 1970 these archaeological preoccupations gave way to a radicalized concept of discourse and the distinctly genealogical hybrid of power/knowledge. What deserves special emphasis here is the fact that though literature (roughly, the Eurocentric tradition of letters that extended from the picaresque to the “new novel,” with special emphasis on the masculinist pantheon of Sade, Hölderlin, Artaud, Bataille and Roussel) played a decisive role in Foucault’s early analyses, it becomes all but entirely absent in the later work where, through the treatment of disciplinary power and the apparatus of sexuality, he lays out the theoretical principles that really underpin the concept of inauthenticity as it figures in the debates in and around queer theory.2
This overstates the case to some degree (there is, after all, a brilliant micro-genealogy of crime fiction in Part One of Discipline and Punish), but it enables me to pinpoint the problem whose exploration will help us come to terms with what is at stake in the concept of queer resistance. Though Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (in English, The Will to Know) are separated only by a year, one cannot help but be struck by Foucault’s extravagant insistence upon the possibility of resistance in the second book. This was prompted by the fact that the concept of power mapped out in Discipline and Punish seemed to have thrown the baby of resistance out with the bathwater of truth. If revolt, which grounded itself in truth, justice and the rational law of history, could not reliably be separated from the field of power/knowledge in which it made sense, then perhaps it was groundless or, worse, nonexistent. As Foucault himself once provocatively put it, “is it useless to revolt?” To counter the obviously unacceptable political implications of this, he moved quickly to reinstate the possibility of resistance, an activity with which he was well acquainted in a variety of practical contexts. Unfortunately, this was not enough. For, to reinstate the possibility of resistance is not yet to establish either its necessity or its efficacy, and Foucault’s critics, particularly those within the legions of scholars influenced, directly or indirectly, by Jürgen Habermas, have not hesitated to point this out.
My
