Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
The Apostate
by Sharon P. Holland | ns 71-72
Somebody who renounces belief.
A person who forsakes his religion, cause, party, etc.
—Webster's Online Dictionary
"There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how."
—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (1974)
"Getting there is half the fun, being there is all of it."
—One of several taglines for Hal Ashby's Being There (1979)
PREQUEL
Six of us were sitting in the living room of our Chicago loft talking politics, brassieres (our loft used to be a bra factory in the 1880s), war, ethics, and plastic surgery. It was one of those random and disorganized conversations that you grow to adore—no theme, but lots of rhythm and raucous laughter. As the Gamay gave way to whiskey neat, we began to rail against the push to normal in everything around us and our petit protest soon turned into an often maudlin, but desperately sincere lament for another time. It then dawned on us that carpe diem wasn't just for Hollywood & company; that we could stem the tide of belonging, of being for another (to embrace Merleau-Ponty's conceptualization of the phenomenological conundrum). It was then that we hatched a plan to embrace the following creed: nowhere, never, nothing in all things. This little speculative essay is an "anti-credo"—an attempt to think through our apostasy. My title and its definitions circle round the verbs "renounce" and "forsake." I cannot think of a more troubling betwixt and between since to renounce something is not necessarily to forsake something. When we renounce something we can reject belief or simply stop doing something; when we forsake something or someone, abandonment steps into the picture and the act of dissent becomes more personal. My title points to the work of criticism—its extreme poles of impersonal "objective" observation and pointed, strategic strike. The peculiar quest here might be to get around the necessity of having to do either. Here, I want to grapple with Malcolm McLaren's oft-sampled lyric, turning a directive into a query: do "buffalo gals" really "go 'round the outside, 'round the outside?"1 Or in the tradition of Bob Kaufman's Beat Abomunist Manifesto (1959) what would that circumlocution look like? This is just an exercise in free association.2
NOWHERE (or, Being There)
Even as I write this, the word "nowhere" looks bizarre on the page, evacuating space/time with an arrangement of letters that appear more haphazard than intelligible. Is it possible to be "nowhere"? On the road with a friend trying to get from one place to another, one could arrive "in the middle of nowhere"—which holds open the possibility of arrest, of status, of an in-between. If one were no-where, where would you have to go to be somewhere? I am reminded here of Pamela Lu's novel, Pamela3 and one character's attempt to disrupt the time/space continuum with the black hole of her own experience. Having voiced a vote of no confidence in the "map" ("Where does the map get off, telling you where you are or aren't at the moment?" [22]), the characters in Lu's novel conclude "[s]o if there was no 'there' for us to travel to, then there was also, in a sense, no 'here' for us to be. Or, whatever 'here' we constructed for ourselves was always in danger of being shown up and shown to be an imaginary location. Contemporary utopias existed not as places of real estate but as fragile extensions of being which we carried around with us the way we carried street maps for affirmation" (29-30).
Lu's characters are the opposing thumbs of Peter Sellers' character in Being There (1979), if her characters can be said to have too much going on and his character to be devoid of such substance. Nevertheless, we are somewhere in the after-life of that famous queer pronouncement: there is no there there. If that sentiment can be made to apply not only to California, but to the rest of the country, finding no there here can be even more distressing. Being nowhere could constitute being without anchor and therefore be liberating. It could also catapult a being into a place or thing where objects disappear. But even that tight rendering of "nowhere" always proposes the outside chance of being somewhere—even if that somewhere is forever collapsing upon itself—even if its very definition is some kind of interminable repudiation. Often what we imagine as the place outside time/space is peopled by, organized by our idea of it—even if that idea is only a reaction formation. In many ways, our naysaying and nerdish attempt at being trendy only collapses into a pithy and selfish desire to be somewhere, which reads as: anywhere but HERE. We become a mockery of the endeavor as our bourgeois and neoliberal training shows itself and we become Frankensteins for a new millennium. But I believe that the striving for a "nowhere" is a fruitful endeavor because of the possibilities for creative work that it might engender. Thinking of the not-HERE loosens one's hold on the center and turns place into a possibility, rather than an occupation. To say, with clarity and in a loud voice, "I am here" is to declare, as Lu so astutely reminds us, that I am occupying this place; I am "taking up space." Feminist pedagogy demonstrated to us that "taking up space" was patriarchal at worst, and impolite at best. "I am here" is an obvious rearrangement of Althusser's famous "Here I am"—a moment that fixes one's subjection and literally incorporates being—turning this statement around does little to correct the problem. Now that we are not-HERE, now that we have some level of comfort with being nowhere, we might enjoy the trip. Like a 42-footer off its mooring, no-where could be a journey out of the harbor into the open sea, although in most cases it is a trip to the harbor master's office and a fine. This latter possibility locates the error in identifying with the no-where position: the putative rewards are several and the danger is serious. What I am proposing here is that we make an effort to take the trip.
NEVER (or, Letting Be)
In 2004 Agamben's The Open: Man and Animal became available in English translation. A tiny little book, The Open is ostensibly about the (hu)man/animal divide, but geared toward two particularly Heideggerian moments: the difference between animal and human being and the post-history mantra of overcoming. In this work, Agamben's prose, enabled by a brilliant translation from Kevin Attell, is eviscerating and epic. As he moves from Linnaeus to Foucault through Bataille and Benjamin he focuses upon twentieth-century philosophers like Heidegger in order to ask in his penultimate chapter, "In what way can man let the animal...be" (91)? Early in the text, Agamben observes, "If animal life and human life could be superimposed perfectly, then neither man nor animal—and, perhaps, not even the divine—would any longer be thinkable" (21). This is a pivotal and explosive moment in a book that I have grown to admire for its bravery and beauty. Think about it for a minute: what if we just let the animal be? What if our being weren't always already articulated through the gross vicissitudes of overcoming something? Of course, I am immediately drawn to that famous Civil Rights lyric, "We shall overcome." And especially in this inaugural moment of what Judith Butler has criticized as "Uncritical Exuberance?" Butler's piece cautions left-leaning people to think through the blinding and often uncritical optimism proposed by Obama's presidency. She reminds us that we are still, especially as queer people, under siege in this nation and that the very idea of "justice" itself is a goal whose future awaits us. While the spirit of the piece is very much appreciated, I am wondering why it is necessary to produce "caution" in a public (narrowly conceived of as academic from my vantage point) already on pins and needles about the wave of impending disillusionment that will more than likely follow the January inauguration. If we take a moment to reflect upon the historical weight of the word "overcome" in that Civil Rights lyric, then we might remember that that famous line—"we shall overcome"—also has its limit: a limit posited as generational and later devised ab extra as statutory. "Overcome" in the original is followed by "someday." Now you are thinking Judy Garland, right? Someday, somewhere over the rainbow...how ironic.
Given the critique of the no-where offered in my first foray into micro-political exchange, I want to spend a little bit of time here on the "someday," a word often understood in the African-American lexicon as a day that would never come. Being here is punctuated now by the gentle hope of replacing "never" with "mission accomplished." Never beckons as the afterthought of a Critical Race Theory, whose own limit has been stretched, altered. Our overcoming has seen its limit, at least figuratively, at least for the time being. Somewhere among Tindley's revised gospel lyrics,4 Obama's ascent, and Agamben's query is a meditation on that limit called "never." If the very notion of a future is punctuated by the limit proposed by the possibility of the unattainable, then what kind of future is that? In addition, if the "joy" of the moment—Obama's ascension to the throne of late(nt) capital(ism)—cannot be harnessed by well-meaning intelligent people, if our exuberance is somewhat farcical, then where do we go from here? What if we just let the animal be? What would it mean to embrace the possibility of the "never" moment and realize that over-coming has be-come human being? In this post-election 2008 moment, many pundits have weighed in on the myriad possibilities that accrue. In particular, thought-pieces like "Uncritical Exuberance?" encourage us to overcome our moment of pleasure, to exchange the quiet turning-over-in-the-grave sounds of our ancestors who are at rest, finally for some other more dreaded human future. What if human futurity and all that attends it—property, inheritance, reproduction, waste—were not our goal? Butler understands that the present political moment is NOT an overcoming. She writes, "[t]he election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times." This quasi-redemptive moment comes neatly packaged in the human march of time—we lift as we climb.
At another moment, Butler reveals what she means by "overcoming"—that "[t]he indisputable significance of his election has everything to do with overcoming the limits implicitly imposed on African-American achievement; it has and will inspire and overwhelm young African Americans; it will, at the same time, precipitate a change in the self-definition of the United States" (emphasis mine). Overcoming here is understood in racial terms, whereas exuberance belongs to someone else. Our journey along the march of time does have a specificity, even a hierarchy where African Americans are happy to just be overcoming, and "we" are cautioned about our "exuberance." What kind of creative turn do we miss when we reign in our joy? Why does there have to be a trade-off here? Now that we have approached the moment of our overcoming, what kind of recasting of "never" will have to happen? After reading the rather sobering account from Judith Butler and the radical turn away from the status quo offered by Dylan Rodriguez,5 the refuge is immediate and the times are still imperfect. As we hover somewhere between redemption and overcoming—very heartily "American" themes to say the least—I am stuck by how these two words also functioned to anchor early Faulkner criticism, as he is often the go-to person for the (southern) racial shibboleth of the US. In truth, the question mark at the end of Butler's pithy title stands there like the question/not question in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!: "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest that you can't stand." It is a period that begs for a question mark; hers (Uncritical Exuberance?) is a question mark that begs for a period. Each example straddles that fine line between some kind of racial redemption and growing ambivalence. In sum, black doesn't cover up the nasty overcoming sought by white supremacy. But a century of "black" politicians have proven this to "us"—whoever "we" are. In lieu of these singular and several calls to vigilance, toward sanity and away from sentiment, I offer this: If we think about the "never" as a different place—as stillness, not progress, as letting be and letting go, then we might be able to theorize our way out of our constriction. Never is perhaps, a still life awaiting its animation.
NOTHING (or, Asking "Why?")
How many times have we heard ourselves or others intone: "I don't like the argument of this book" or "I don't understand the argument of that essay?" As readers of texts, we are often called upon to distill an argument, to massage it a bit so that we can hopefully engage in new understandings—understandings which bring us to a future otherwise known as brighter, more interesting, and oftentimes enlightened. In this process, the rush to "understand"—to think of our labor as a form of knowledge production or formation—we often leave behind the affective labor of the text, the associative and therefore metaphorical work that a text performs in order to get us to the right place. A "place" sometimes called "the argument." In my graduate school years, the "metaphorical work" was often described as "good writing"—and since we all knew what that was, we didn't question what it could be. But we cannot find an argument without having one to bring to this place. And this is the sticky part: often our quest for the argument is really about our own argument. This has been a speculative exercise about what it would be to not have an argument, to think of a text in that very conservative and literary way—as a mass of contradictions supported by a clash of elements: the reader's own produced/(in)formed narrative and the story proffered by the object, by the BOOK.
In my CRT (Critical Race Theory) classes I often tell my students to begin to unmake themselves—to take their narratives of their own identities less seriously. As an exercise, I ask them to think about letting go of what they think they know about someone and let the people they encounter identify themselves. In the course of reserving judgment about another, my students begin to see that even some of the most benign information about another often comes from the see-er, not the seen. This works especially well with gender, as I encourage my students to ask why they need to know whether the people they encounter are male or female. What do they gain by guessing? What do they gain by not-knowing or un-knowing the other? Anti-racist action has as its hallmark a struggle to unlearn racism as we unmake our faulty knowledge about another person. Is it possible to know nothing about a thing? Is it actually fruitful to resist having an argument (for or against)?
The initial epigraph to this essay is from the first pages of Morrison's The Bluest Eye, as the first person narrator ends her opening and devastating remarks about telling Pecola's story. Taking refuge in "how" is certainly more scholarly because, for that endeavor at least, you have content: archives, diaries, journals, newspapers, forums, videos, etc. You have the beginnings of an argument for something, and the water appears to be less murky. I believe that the time has come for the "why" work. When we look back upon our failed overcoming at this historic event (and surely we will, that's what critics like Butler are here to remind us of), we will have to ask more "why" than "how" questions. But the "why" is certainly more necessary in the coming future, though nonetheless important because its emotion (and we have certainly understood "why" in terms of negative emotion) gives us back a missed opportunity for creativity. By settling for the negative emotion, by pulling up to the bumper of the affective life of knowing, we could be countering a fervent desire to confuse fact with fiction. Like Agamben I am for the open.
Notes
1. The original phrasing is: "buffalo gals go round the outside, round the outside," from Malcolm McLaren, "Buffalo Gals," Duck Rock (Island Records, 1983). From the man who brought us the Sex Pistols in the mid seventies, McLaren's Duck Rock is considered a hip-hop classic, The "Buffalo Gals go round the outside" line was reworked by Eminem as "two trailer park girls go round the outside" in "Without Me" from the album The Eminem Show released in 2002. "Buffalo Girl" brings to mind a certain "American" identity—an amalgam of Western folk history, quasi-Native nomenclature, and musical tagline/sample.
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2. I am grateful to Kevin Bell for bringing my attention some years ago to Kaufman's work. I am also indebted to Jennifer Brody, Johari Jobir, Margo Crawford, Sarah Shelton, Kevin Bell, Dana Gingell, and John Keene for sharing the couch with me. Their inspiration is key to this particularly effusive and necessarily direction-less venture.
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3. Please see a larger treatment of this text in my essay, "When Characters Lack Character: A Reading of Pamela Lu's Pamela," PMLA 123.5 (Oct. 2008): 1494-1502.
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4. "We Shall Overcome" is adopted from Charles Tindley's 1900 gospel, "I'll Overcome Some Day." It was first sung in its present form during a strike by the Negro Food and Tobacco Union in Charlestown, SC, in 1945. In the 1960s it became synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement.
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5. See Dylan Rodriguez, "Inaugurating Multiculturalist White Supremacy," from RaceWire: The Colorlines Blog. 10 Nov. 2008. Rodriguez argues against any moment here—at least any affective moment—that approaches joy. In his opening salvo, he offers: "At the risk of being scolded for offending the optimistic spirit of this historical moment, I offer these thoughts with a different kind of hope: that the spectacle and animus of the Obama campaign, election, and presidency fail, and fail decisively, to domesticate, discipline, and contain a politics of radical opposition to a U.S. nation-building project that now insists on the diversity of the American 'we,' while leaving so many for dead." The rest of the article outlines in devastating detail all of the ways in which we should refrain from lifting every voice and singing. The postings about Rodriguez's piece are equally illuminating.
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Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Butler, Judith. "Uncritical Exuberance?" Indybay 5 Nov. 2008.
Lu, Pamela. Pamela. San Francisco: Atelos 4, 1998.
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