Pollen

Matt Valentine is a Ph.D. Candidate at Duquesne University.

“Queer Theorists” contend all identities, including gay and straight, are socially constructed. This challenges the essentialist positions of those who wish to say everyone is born with an innate gender and sexuality, usually argued as heterosexual. How would you describe the constructed identity that “Queer Theorists” believe exist. Do you agree with it?

I don’t think the question of identity has been adequately posed, but for the ‘right’ reasons. There are two ways of looking at identity, as an expression and as a reification. Both Deleuze and Foucault seem to believe the two are somewhat antithetical to one another but in different manners. Identity is either a short-circuiting of expression or a trap. Queer theorists seem at the very least to be sympathetic to this diagnosis.

I think the answer essentially lies in the distinction between Deleuze and Foucault. Sure, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus seems to have influenced some (proto) queer theorists like Guy Hocquenghem but in general Queer Theory seems an outgrowth of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. To upset the concept of identity, to show it as fluid, as historical, as socially constructed is to likewise conclude that attempts at solidity are a means of control. The imposition of power seems to come first and then we can resist it. Various acts are thus strung together to form a political subject vulnerable to a given regime of power. Attempts to reify identity are necessarily bound to power; they are politically strategic. It can thus become trendy to suggest that what is essential to queer struggle is not promoting homosexuality at all but merely non-normative practices that break the hold of subjecting power, that resist it and allow for new forms of pleasure. There is no “gay” or “lesbian,” or what-have-you, only those that resist or “queer” identity. Even heterosexuals will find that, according to the Queer theorists, their identity does not in fact exist as a stable essence. But rather than actually expressing what such a thing as sexual identity is, this merely obscures that the unseating of sexual identity as well as Queer Theory itself is a strategic deployment against homophobic strategies of power. If a homophobic strategy of power operates, as Halperin and Sedgwick claim by a principle of unfalsifiability then the only way to strike back is to upset the foundations of this principle, a strategy I call the strategy of negation. In this regard, this strategy seems very philosophical. Rather than play a fixed game by the rules, the strategy of negation merely throws them out the window.

Do you think there is something more happening within the creation of queer identity than just a “strategy of negation”?

What seems to have happened in Queer Theory is the following: the strategy is being conflated with the identity, which I think is a mistake, but not of strategy (it’s been very effective in that regard). Instead I want to invert this: a homosexual is one who employs a particular strategy in the face of power, but perhaps this needs clarification. The strategy comes first but this does not mean identity is strategy only that a strategy is a becoming that constitutes an identity, that is shorthand for its trajectory of becoming, its resonance. Thus, we have subjectivity derived from our strategic context within power. Identity has not been upset at all. Its constituting forces have merely been explained. Identity is the result of how a resistance is mounted. In this way it is expressive, not reifying or a form of subjection. This is how far Foucault can take us in a critique of Queer Theory. We would have to look to Deleuze to escape from a power/resistance paradigm. If this were otherwise, a gay or lesbian identity would be profoundly reactive when in fact Deleuze provides us with an active role for it insofar as he prioritizes deterritorialization over reterritorialization. I want to argue for a differential self, a self of process and becoming, but without losing the expressive potential in the concept of identity. Otherwise, the act of coming out, of identifying oneself as gay or a lesbian or bisexual would be meaningless, which we know is not the case.

Deleuze and Guattari differ from Marx in that Marx had a teological view of over-throwing capitalism. That is to say, for Marx there is a utopian climax whereas we don’t see this in Deleuze and Guattari’s creative-destruction. Lenin famously attempted to skip the Marxist / Hegalian teology and go all the way to the utopian climax. Does this type of “jumping the gun” appear in a strategy of negation, and if so to what consequence?

This is an interesting question for several reasons. For one thing, it is very easy to confuse the Deleuzian-Guattarian virtual with a teleological aim. The classic example is that the eye does not come before seeing but the problem of seeing prompts the production of the eye. This is what Deleuze would call reverse causality. They do not at first seem to help elucidate matters when they suggest that “primitive” and “nomadic” regime anticipate the State. In what way? Precisely because the State already exists virtually under all regimes, that it must be headed off from forming.

It is in a similar spirit that I charted the line of negation. It would be my contention that we take a cultural artifact such as Dante’s Inferno as a cultural phenomenon that composes the line of violence for a particular reason, a reason he may not in fact have understood, since he himself derived his hierarchy of sins from a rich Greek, Roman, and Christian tradition. Rather than judge whether Dante was wrong I instead wanted to examine the internal logic that led to the hierarchy in the first place, a task I find much more enjoyable and much more feasible than critique. Naturally, since I argue that Dante’s Seventh level in Hell is a particular line of deterritorialization penetrating into the ‘Body’ (Social Body -> Subjective Body -> Germ plasm (The Code of Life) -> Spirit), that it is an absolute penetration into interiority itself, it seems like an endpoint has be posited, that it is teleological. The point is merely exacerbated when I contend that the strategy of negation as opposed to fascism is a line of “fertilization,” that it makes positivity, or fertility out of negativity, whereas fascism fails to escape the line of abolition, deterritorializes too rapidly, and descends into absolute destruction. This led me to conjecture that at this point in history homosexuality itself is on the brink of bringing fertility from infertility through genetic advancements that will allow same-sex procreation. I get this idea of bringing positivity from negativity from Dante’s rationale of sins. Homosexuality (Dante’s relationship to homosexuality is complicated, as homosexuals seem to be the least sinful in Purgatory, as they are mentioned closest to the top of Mount Purgatory) is judged since it makes infertile what Nature has made fertile. Usury, the next in the sequence, is judged since it makes fertile what Nature has made infertile.

With usury at the end of the line of negation, what this seems to suggest is that capitalism itself seems to have reversed caused this sequence of events. Since reverse causality is not a determinism there is not necessarily a teleological direction, but I do think this is splitting hairs a bit. If the sequence is really a line of deterritorialization into the heart of interiority itself, how does capitalism comprise the ultimate deterritorialization of the most interior of Bodies? Of course we would be making a mistake here to limit the penetrating line to the various points on its line instead of seeing the action for itself. What capitalism does is in a sense unsettle reality. Marx’s observation of exchange value indicates a neutralization of essence. The digital nature of money of today, the emergence of a hyperreality, which I think are only the beginning, are only glimpses of what forces really are at play. Capitalism may be only a shadow of what is really at play. That is why I use such a vague term as “spirit” to denote what Body is finally breached. I’m not sure if a proper teleology would have such ambiguities. Instead, I think this is a virtual trend that could go many ways, a potential that’s always been latent that are starting to unfurl and encounter the various contours of a rough set table it is now covering. It’s like seeing a comet barreling towards the Earth and not knowing what variables may send it crashing into us. We can see the line of negation, we can tell in what rough direction it seems to be penetrating into, but what will happen is anyone’s guess.

It seems a quirky coincidence that in the account of Aliester Crowley I cite of his 1909 North African invoking of the Thirty Aethyrs with Victor Neuburg, he is commanded from on High to engage in an act of homosexual sex magick that obliterates his ego before he can be ready to enter the Abyss to confront Choronzon, when in Dante’s Inferno once Dante and Virigil past the realm of the Sodomites they had to get on Geryon’s back and climb down into the Abyss themselves (some translations, such as the source I used, actually call it ‘the Abyss’). I genuinely think there is an internal logic that compels such coincidences. If Crowley is any indication of what comes next, it seems utterly apocalyptic, an actual confrontation with the devil himself. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with this degree of eschatology but I do think the strategy of negation lends itself to eschatology in some way. The internal logic of an eschatology is an uprooting of reality itself, a deterritorialization of the world into something else. It’s quite tempting to make these connections and I cannot say I fully understand what it all means. I cannot even say I fully understand what I mean when I say ‘internal logic’ but I would prefer to take theories and traditions as cultural phenomena to be examined immanently rather than as corresponding properly or improperly to a ‘real’ world, and from this approach I am very tempted to make these connections, if for no other reason than I am inspired and intrigued by the conclusions.