on archives, paranoia, and the move away from trauma

“a final comment on the will ‘to connect what cannot be connected’ in archival art. again, this is not a will to totalize so much as a will to relate—to probe a misplaced past, to collate a misplaced past (sometimes pragmatically, sometimes parodistically), to ascertain what might remain for the present…it assumes anomic fragmentation as a condition not only to represent but to work through, and proposes new orders of affective association, however partial and provisional, to this end, even as it also registers the difficulty, at times the absurdity, of doing so.

this is why such work often appears tendentious, even preposterous. indeed, its will to connect can betray a hint of paranoia—for what is paranoia if not a practice of forced connections and bad combinations, of my own private archive, of my own notes from the underground, put on display. on the one hand, these private archives do question public ones: they can be seen as perverse orders that aim to disturb the symbolic order at large. on the other hand, they might point to a general crisis in this social law—or to an important change in its workings whereby the symbolic order no longer operates through apparent totalities. for freud the paranoiac projects meaning onto a world ominously drained of the same…might archival art emerge out of a similar sense of a failure in cultural memory, of a default in productive traditions? for why else connect so feverishly if things did not appear so frightfully disconnected in the first place?

perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition—its desire to turn belatedness into becomingness, to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy, and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations, to transform the no-place of the archive into the no-place of utopia…this move to turn ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites’ is welcome in another way too: it suggests a shift away from a melancholic culture that views the historical as little more than the traumatic.”  

—hal foster, “an archival impulse.” there has been a lot of work recuperating paranoia for feminism. philosopher sandra bartky has noted that paranoia is the essential feminist affect or mode: you are looking for sexism, racism, classism, etc. everywhere—and it IS everywhere! they really are out to get you or, at the very least, they don’t care that they are getting you, or they don’t care enough not to get you. but i think transforming paranoia and trauma—not doing away with them—is relevant for many reasons. 

"it is the very social and existential experience of loneliness that compels the lesbian body to extend into other kinds of space, where there are others who return one’s desire…lesbian desire moves us sideways."

sara ahmed, queer phenomenology 

redescribing, but it always feels new. 

"you want hysteria? i’ll give you hysteria."

karen finley, a certain level of denial

"a hysterical woman is a woman who has lost a sense of the boundaries between sign and signified—the supposedly arbitrary signifier and the supposedly distanced signified lose both their mark of randomness and their distance as they are collapsed onto the space of her body…in the logic of hysteria, all things mark."

rebecca schneider, the explicit body in performance 

"…that tantalizing combination of reasonable and outrageous that colors so much early second wave feminist writing…."

alix kates shulman, “a marriage disagreement, or marriage by other means,” in the feminist memoir project: voices from women’s liberation 

this is what feminist history feels like

“to say ‘memoir’…announces a goal—of describing events with their affects attached, of examining a complex of acts and feelings in social and personal space, of making an honest and ethical attempt to restore history’s specifics.” 

—rachel blau duplessis and ann snitow, “a feminist memoir project,” from the feminist memoir project: voices from women’s liberation. 

tumblr “confessions” and the frisson of doing feminist theory and history

“one of feminism’s structural inventions was the voluntary small group practice called ‘consciousness raising’ (CR) where women spoke about their histories and daily lives. they spoke personally and then generalized; they spoke privately in order to generate a changed public discourse; they confessed and told secrets in order to couple the private and public spheres. uncountable thousands of such small groups met across the country during these early years. through consciousness raising, women reinterpreted themselves and the institutions in which they lived.” 

—rachel blau duplessis and ann snitow, “a feminist memoir project,” from the feminist memoir project: voices from women’s liberation. 

"one can die from being unable to write in time the book one has in one’s body. this is the book that must be braved, it demands of me a courage i desperately seek to call up in myself."

helene cixous, first days of the year. has anyone written so well about tumblr feminism without writing about tumblr feminism? 

come to women & performance’s conference so we can talk about feminism and feelings.