(Break) meme

I begin to contemplate completing a meme only to recoil in frustration. Unaccustomed to such exercises, I cannot envision any way to get the required questions apart from copying and pasting already answered questions (assimilating them, as it were), erasing the answers (ejecta), and putting in my own. Not quite a palimpsest, but it feels like it should be.

These technical issues remind me that the meme is build on a sort of mimic ritual, monkey see, monkey do, albeit with some differences. While the answers are supposed to reveal aspects of individuality, perhaps even create intimacy, they emanate from a similar (normalizing structure): a set number of questions, a limited number of responses determined by the questions, an imperative to spread (like a rash, ringworm, or venereal disease) the joy, pain, but perhaps the most appropriate word is exercise.

So, I sigh and look at the first question, which asks where I keep my cell. Immediately, I feel a tinge of frustration. “Don’t have one.” I look down to question 2 on relationship. “Don’t have one.” Proceed to number 3, hair. “Ditto.” Number 4, work. “Ditto.” I give up. And decide to write against the evil of the meme.

It seems to me there’s something, if not violent, then profoundly discomfiting about a set of questions that produce an individual as absence or lack within the social codes of the document. At the same time, it reveals the false intimacy we have come to associate with information.

So, (in a break from working on my dissertation, perhaps I do “work,” after all, but academic labor is often dismissed as unreal by people who shuffle papers in real offices and talk on the phone a lot), as I was saying, I want to think, briefly, about the production of intimacy as aspiration within memes.

At the core of the meme’s standardized questions (and, seriously, when the government asks us to fill in such forms, don’t we complain?) lies what I think of as a misrecognition of information as intimacy. The more I know about you (and let’s not forget the intimacy of a document that asks for “your mood,” as though moods can be frozen in time in any meaningful way), the more I know about you, the closer we might become. As though knowing that I believe cells (phones not bio-units) are the devil’s instrument says anything meaningful about me (it might! Bible school lingers).

How are we to think about instruments whose said name (meem) is a giveaway to the act of social recognition they perform. Me looks for Me, images of ourselves, confirmations that, like us, other people have dreams, goals, pasts, quirks, rituals, habits. As though to ameliorate our unease in living amidst stranger sociality, where we come in contact with more strangers every day than we do intimates. There is to the meme a mode of making strangeness less so—you carry your cell (the devil’s instrument) in your bag, SO DO I!

Indeed, it often seems to me that the promise of a meme is to have more SO DO I moments than not. And when these are not present, we are thrilled to discover that other people have quirky habits, strange little tics, that is, that we are not alone in our strangeness, albeit a strangeness denuded of any social critique of ideological challenge to how we imagine ourselves (remember, we look for me-me).

This is not to say, however, that memes are not useful for thinking about the forms of intimacy we inhabit and seem to treasure and privilege. Indeed, what seems striking about them is precisely the extent to which they mimic personal ads, which, in the “new era” demand more and more information, insist that intimacy (as the e-harmony ads say) is a function of information. (For this reason, I actually prefer the stripped down ads on Craigs list, which can be just as violent, but reduce intimacy to its essentials.) Of course, “likes and dislikes,” the preferred language of ads, or even “values,” seem more “personal” than “information” might suggest. But the same logic of know yourself (you know, the idiot who actually popularized this injunction in the self-loving midst of late capitalism . . .) inheres to both personal ads and memes.

Yet, what attracts us to people and maintains intimacy is often much more idiosyncratic than memes will allow. Many of the people I have met on kbw and continue to think of as friends, if not intimates, have appealed to me for a range of reasons: a certain generosity of spirit (mshairi, guess); certain ways of engaging with the world with grace, humor, care (mutumia, KM, rombo); modes of cultural critique that wed ideological and formal concerns (potash, mmk). Often it was not a body of work, but a response, a comment, even a sentence. There was, in a moment of reading, a sense of recognition, a feeling, an intuition.

Of course, some memes might lead to such forms of recognition. And, to be fair, they are often shared among and between intimates (mutumia got me into this mess). Yet, their formal determination that certain kinds of information produce knowledge, friendship, even intimacy defers, I think, the long, hard, and wonderful labor of reading through a fellow blogger’s entire archive, struggling with unfamiliar language and concepts (potash, jke at his most technical, myself sometimes); being willing to follow bloggers across borders (kipepeo, where are you now?); waiting, against the logic of the blog, for posters to return from various absences; or, moving beyond the time-lag of the blog into intimate, personal communication.

Perhaps, finally, I am not interested in solicited information, no matter how “intimate” it may seem. I prefer the embedded narratives we tell about ourselves and the world, the way, that is, we participate in living and world-making.

(Break) Diaspora and Frottage

Imagine for a moment that black diasporic encounters can be conceptualized as forms of volitional and inadvertent frottage. Imagine, too, that histories of sexuality emerge from contact and proximity, encounters of carnality. Finally, imagine the range of emotional and ideological reactions that emerge from such rubbings, disgust and pleasure, sanction and approbation, abrupt interruptions and pleas for more. To these reactions may be added the surreptitious pleasures we term being on the “DL,” the ambivalent pleasures mediated by the demands of social position, the pleasures of antinomian intimacies, even the pleasures of normative strictures. Frottage may be a strategy for reading the histories of the black diaspora alongside and against histories of sexuality.

Yet, in terming frottage a reading strategy I have withdrawn, perhaps coyly, from the intimate implications of frottage, the space of unruly affect, for it connotes, more than anything else, the bodily experience of proximity, the place that is indifferent to personal space, the bus-ride of a been-to, where one remembers being home means pressing strange flesh. It also means experiencing the strangeness of one’s body: in close spaces bodies disobey, run away from us, forget the social rules that govern legibility. At such moments, we may wish to get away from our bodies, to disappear from our ever-present fleshliness. We can’t.

I must withdraw again from this scene of rubbing, but only briefly, to emphasize I am interested less in the moments of dispersal that give rise to diaspora and much more in the uneven, intimate moments of coming together. Thinkers on the black diaspora use the term “diaspora” to mark cultural multiplicity, to say not all blacks are the same. (As much as possible, I avoid the somewhat fashionable term “difference,” for it seems to mean too much and not enough, perhaps the condition of all language.) Within my conceptual histories, I might be describing the encounter following displacement in which traditional ethnic rivals find themselves recoded as color or labor or object. We know such histories, yet not as intimately as we might. Beyond that recoding is not simply the re-establishment of pre-encounter kinship patterns, as some thinkers have it, but the innovative establishment of a range of intimate lives. But this seems too structured for what I’m after.

It is the accidental moments that intrigue me, not because they may lead elsewhere, but because we have few ways of archiving such moments (with the possible exception of fiction) even though, taken cumulatively, such moments probably capture the rich quotidian of the diaspora. Take, for instance, antinomian McKay seated on a dais with middle-class Harlem elites, uncomfortable in his performing suit, abraded by the experience. It might be possible to recode, or recognize, this moment as an instance of frottage, to recognize in his purple blushes and chafed neck the marks of diasporic encounter.

One might write about the modes of affective response experienced when encountering an individual similarly recoded: two Africans on a zebra crossing (as it must be named), my excitement on joining kbw, the first time I read Teju. Two Africans on a zebra crossing (if this is not the title of a book, story, or blog post, it should be. Potash?).

Also, irritation. For the mediated moment of frottage, through layers of clothing, layers of culture, layers of history, layers of language, this mediated moment makes known its mediating character. Irritation, we might remember, describes a feeling on the surface of the skin and an affective state akin to that skin-feeling. Unlike other cathartic emotions, joy or anger, it persists, indifferent even to cause. One might spend the day irritated unable to explain the cause. Once irritated, it seems a cascade effect begins, the slightest encounter or event, Sianne Ngai points out, extends the temporality of a heightened sensitivity. One feels air.

I have wandered off again. Perhaps my sense that unless one is engaged in it, frottage might be one of the most boring acts to envision, despite its metaphorical richness.

Frottage flirts with the suture of re-connection, to be sure, but insists on sloughed skin cells, exchanged scents, flows and fluids (thanks WM). Despite its arrested temporality, that is, “something” remains, a feeling, a smell, a sensation. To understand the accretion of such moments is to trace what I consider diasporic intimacy.

I end this post, which forms part of a larger ongoing project, with the image of two Africans at a zebra crossing who bump into each other, accidentally.

Break (Part One)

What would it mean to subject the notion of dating, of being dateable (as Gay Prof writes), to serious scrutiny? I ask this as one who has derided, scorned, abandoned, and, for good measure, cremated the idea and practice of dating (especially around February 14). I am not concerned with the quality of one’s dates, those abstract and material measures of worth and attractiveness that seem to add social significance. Instead, I am interested in the indifferent—if normalizing—project of dating.

Perhaps its best to begin from the negative: what does it mean to be (un)dateable? Once we move past the cosmetic and cultural fixes (a little Shaw channeled through Rex Harrison), and once we bracket the performance of gendered excess and cultural insensitivity, once, that is, we get to the (fictional) ordinary of undateability, then I think, the question becomes more interesting. Here, I shall avoid the inevitable comparisons to markets that surround the stranger sociality of public intimacy. Even though such a comparison is contiguous to this particular set of concerns

To consider the quotidian of being (un)dateable means thinking about time and space (fortuitously captured in the term “date”), about an unspecified temporality awaiting enfleshment in the form of bodies, time awaiting further elaboration (first date, second date) and arrest (no more dating, marriage at times), about the way dating (being dateable) interpellates and enfleshes (here, it’s necessary to think about ideology, per Althusser and Butler, and embodiment). To be (un)dateable, that is, or, more precisely, to think through what it means confronts us with an idea of how bodies occupy, stretch, and interrupt time.

Dating, at least as constructed in contemporary media, internationally at this point, is viewed as part of a narrative with definite ending(s); some continually frustrated, others realized only to be repeated. Here, I find I must amend myself, for dating seems more synchronic than diachronic, more bound to arrest and repetition than intimate (fore)closure. Dating, that is, offers a way of occupying—and manipulating—time. (I’m circling). Insofar as it is also considered an achievement—one can date at a certain age; we count certain forms of intimate success in dates per year (dpy); we consider it a marker of maturity, social worth, and mental health—dating also has the potential to function as a normative regime(n). But this is easy enough to say.

What continues to fascinate me is how we might talk about being (un)dateable away from rhetorics of socio- and psycho-pathology. Of course, I have (artificially) removed one key player in this particular scenario: the anonymous and synecdochic dater who judges whether one is dateable or not. At best, I am limping like a kiguru (puns abound).

It is as kiguru, then, that I ask what particular form of failure inheres in being (un)dateable? This is related to but not quite the same as being “unmarriageable.” It is not a diagnostic question. In other words, it’s less a matter for the numerous solutions and remedies too readily available, and more an opportunity to think through and with the banal ways we inhabit intimacy, even, and especially, when marked by apathy, indifference, and failure.

On Forgetting

I have a leaky memory, perforated in such a way that I remember idiosyncratic details and forget important ones. For instance, when it comes to Kenyatta’s biography, I remember he was circumcised by missionaries. I could not tell you when he joined KCA or the name of his lawyer during his trial. In Foucault’s History of Sexuality, I remember an anecdote about an “idiot” who engaged in “milking” games with young girls. To remember Foucault’s notion of biopower, I need to return to the text. In some ways, this is unremarkable. I learned to read at a time when “margins” and “idiosyncratic” details had a certain life to them, though it had waned considerably. And my favorite thinkers have an eccentric edge to them—Freud and Lacan are nothing if not attentive to the “edges,” at times frustratingly so.

Biography runs away with me.

I have been thinking about what it means to remember and to forget in an era when the promise “never to forget” seemingly punctuates every event. I think here of the Embassy bombing in Nairobi, the more recent plane accidents being memorialized on kbw, and, of course, on this infamous anniversary, 9/11. With the exception of 9/11, in which memory is engraved on the date, perhaps the most ingenious way to ensure remembering, I cannot tell you when the other events I have mentioned occurred. Not without some judicious online searching.

Does my forgetting exact dates matter? To veer into biography again, I ask this as one who has no clue when his father died. I consider the date meaningless and choose to remember him on his birthday, because it is conveniently a few days before mine, and even then I forget.

Is forgetting an intellectual or emotional process? If not dates, do we mean we will never forget how we felt during a certain moment? If so, isn’t that a little wishful? We begin to forget how we feel about events moments after they happen—feelings are nothing if not temporal. And the persistence of certain feelings, Freud tells us, should be understood as pathological. For that matter, scientists have begun to map the temporality of “falling in love,” attributing feeling to chemicals.

Within political discussions, memory is often invoked in a prophylactic way—we remember so we won’t repeat—and, more recently, as justification for war. Memory takes on a moral imperative and a retaliatory edge. Yet, even my use of memory here is imprecise, and our injunctions “never to forget” often acquire a coherence that bears no relation to the emotions we experienced.

Indeed, if we take the injunction “never to forget” seriously, we invite not order, coherence, or purpose, not recriminations or justifications, but the gamut of reactions that range from the most extreme forms of trauma to apathy and indifference. We come up against the meaningfulness of remembering, in which some of us believe certain historical events still live on in the present while other believe we have moved on.

In the past (a few blog posts ago, that is), I have challenged those who choose not to remember or, more precisely, refuse the imperative to remember events they may not have experienced. But I am nothing if not a learner (typical pattern: refuse, fight, think, attempt some form of compromise). What might be the value of indifference? Or, since I actually do believe indifference is violent, what might be the value of blankness? (Anyone who has tried to explain math to “people like me” understands the term blankness.)

Is there something to learn from forgetting? Perhaps a form of grace, a way of being and continuing in the world, perhaps the value of cultural amnesia.

I have no answers. But in a world where the injunction “do not forget” has become an obligatory way to think about the after-life of events, I am compelled to ask why.

Queer: Again (Notes)

As a young(er) queer, I was strangely comforted when I first read Fanon’s comments on homosexuality. In addition to his well-known denial that it exists in the Antilles, he writes, “I have never been able, without revulsion, to hear a man say of another man: ‘he is so sensual.’ I do not know what the sensuality of a man is” (Black Skin, White Masks 201). To put the statement in context, Fanon is describing a non-homosexual, albeit racist, description of “the Negro” offered by Michel Salomon, a French scholar. In what might be termed a queer reading, he “unveils” the pornographic imagination of racism. This is not my concern here.

It is, rather, the movement from feeling to knowledge, the irrational way Fanon wrestles with the question of desire. While Fanon is often credited with “race-ing” psychoanalysis, his re-working of psychoanalytic desire is equally important (I crib here from others). Now, to be sure, Black Skins is nothing if not full of logical leaps, jumps, and dances. It is brilliantly unsystematic (this, of course, may be why it plays so much better to a younger generation of scholars; I must confess, I find attempts to wrest a system from this particular text rather futile; I much prefer the “stuff” aspect of an over-full mind).

So, why should this particular articulation of “homophobia” (not quite the right word, but it is a remarkably imprecise term and may suffice here) be so comforting?

It is the way Fanon tunnels around, backward and forward. When he claims, for instance, “I do not know what the sensuality of a man is,” is he suggesting that desire and its presumed opposite, revulsion (revulsion may also be constitutive of desire, but that’s another point), may be based on accumulated experience? What does it mean to “know” desire, a phrase to be understood in all its biblical connotations? Put another way, to experience desire, must we first “know” what desire is? If so, how do we “learn” about desire? And, more interesting to me, what are the limits of a rational and experiential-sympathetic model of desire? What responsibility might we bear to that which we don’t know, understand, or experience?

As queer scholars have noted, Fanon seems willing to extend inscrutability to race and gender—in his claim that neither the negro nor the white man “is.” Indeed, despite his attempts to normalize race and gender, in tension and contradiction with his attempts to deconstruct both (this is the dizzying fort-da of the text), he needs a fairly stable notion of desire, even as he wants the very existence of desire to be the grounds of empathy and ethics more broadly. Put another way, Fanon wants the existence of desire to be grounds for politics, at the same time that he wants to control the terms of this desire.

I am less interested in resolving the problem of material desire in his text (material, to the extent that he writes about a form of “recognition” that Hegel “never” envisioned—the relationship between recognition and desire is fundamental in Hegel—that between a black man and a white woman—here is the importance of psychoanalysis, that, when set in the West, its terms only make sense within an interracial matrix) than in understanding why the nature of desire becomes so important to him. What is it about the nature of desire that demands it be managed in the service of politics?

The question is not new within the U.S. context. I think it becomes especially pressing for 20th century diasporic blacks, and that it finds its most complex, if incoherent, articulation in Fanon. Now, one easy answer is that managing desire is one way to manage race. Although I like this answer, it seems a little too easy because it ignores the way other social and historical categories also depend on managing desire.

But, again, that is not my concern.

What I find particularly comforting, finally, is Fanon’s inability to rationalize “homophobia”—no appeals to religion, or family, or tradition, though he does cite geography and history; rather, the more honest, “I do not know what the sensuality of a man is,” the (mis)recognition, that is, of emotion (revulsion) as intellect.

Having spent the past many hours reading rants against “academic prose,” and quite frustrated with my own attempts to think through Fanon, a final note. There is a certain pleasure-specialized, perhaps-in submitting to the style and manner of a text, one that, quite often, does not depend on being able to reduce it or even elaborate it. Mess offers its own rewards, though they might lie in irrational and bodily responses—the passage that always causes shivers, for instance. Sometimes, and its wonderful when it happens, we meet others who share our particular idiosyncratic pleasures in sound and sense, in a mostly non-systematic knowledge. Those times can be wonderful. But, and this is the lesson of queer desire, I make no claims for the universality of my tastes and pleasures.