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as freedom and generally the illusory freedom of choice between products or the freedom to run for political office or the freedom to fuck as one chooses many american reformulations of feminism sell it and sell is instructive as a lifestyle choice that will improve the rewards that you ll derive from your job and your love life that i think is inarguable but the problem with that rhetoric is that it is driven so exclusively towards the rewards for the individual that the wider structural implications of feminist critique which questions both the individual and reward as sound bases for an ideal state go unmentioned this shouldn t be news for queers one of the strengths of contemporary queer culture is the strong current of radical social thinking and work that runs through it which insists on seeing queer oppression as sitting at the centre of a nexus of wider global structural problems and that isn t surprising since to identify as queer presupposes radical thinking about what sexuality might mean a closer analogue would perhaps be the contemporary lgbt rights movement which seeks for accommodation and assimilation but to say that the queer movement is generally committed to political action would be mendacious if that s so then it s also committed to revolution under the banner of pleasure and a pleasure often referred to as authentic we also have to acknowledge that there s a nihilistic or at least apolitical component to a significant portion of current queer discourse which wants to dance in the wreckage and fuck in the ruins lee edelman s no future queer theory and the death drive is probably the strongest intrusion of the decidedly antipolitical formulation of queerness into academic literature and his argument conceives of politics as universally driven by reproductive futurism the spectre of the child for whom society must build a safe sustainable future and we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the child instead edelman argues that queerness is a negating troubling drive that must refuse these forms of political order and thus queerness in its strongest form demands a withdrawal from politics it is a strong and brilliant argument but for all its force and clarity it strikes me as reliant on a faith in his axiom that politics must have at its centre the image of the human child power s book is useful in pointing out that such a turn away from politics is both politically complicit and based on tendentious empirical grounds in large measure our dominant history is constructed as a tale of begetting and engendering reproductive futurity but this elides the alternative histories that one hears less about power s final pages touch on other modes of communal political organisation that operated on other principles the early radical kibbutzim are the chief example one might also touch on the writings of early 20th century queer fabians or reach back to the radical sectaries of early modern europe yet the dream of living an alternative is not dead as power notes but assimilated into the narrative of the liberal lifestyle as precisely that a dream squatting and sharing housing are almost exclusively the domain of the young and as such are linked into a process of maturing away from communal ideals and developing the sphere of the private as the unique preserve of maturity and especially as a domain outside the political power s message and it is a message we need to hear is that feminism establishes that the household is fully politicised and needs to remain visible part of that message for us might involve thinking how a nomadic anarchic sexual political identity is accommodated and neutralised by the institutions and structures is seeks to challenge the strongest chapters of the book to my mind are those dealing with the thorny question of pleasure either with the repressive desublimation of pleasure in the vibrator laden new feminism or with the history of the pornographic image or with the revolutionary potential of sex as taken up by 20th century radicals the examination of early pornography is a gem revealing the ways in which the pornographic image encodes and structures desire rendering sex a form of work the argument here is less about the commodification of the body and hence less to do with the plucked and enhanced bodies of porn workers and the fiscal compulsion towards a faked cold enjoyment and more concerned with the economy of the image itself that is to say reading the pornographic image is revealing because its dominant narrative vulcanised alienated shaven and labour intensive obsessed with private orgasmic teleology obscures the story of pornography before the rise of the sex toy and the porn industry which severs the link between the comical communal and imperfect body and sexuality itself contemporary porn is deeply worryingly serious in part a symptom of its alienation and this exploration shows that it needn t necessarily bear so pathological and taxonomic a relationship to actual human sexuality power uses this to tackle the rhetoric surrounding sexuality that permeates much radical thought sexoleftism as she calls it as such she echoes queer thinkers like jonathan dollimore and leo bersani in sex literature and censorship and homos respectively in calling to account the notion that sex must always be necessarily subversive liberating and radicalising this is i think where her debt to marcuse as a thinker is most apparent a recognition that apparently subversive events are rapidly accommodated by existing political structures and prone to retain an air of danger enough for political catharsis at least without having any significant impact either on subjective politics or structural political problems no revolution ever started in a fetish club the analysis of otto mühl s famous sexual communal experiment which banded together under the sign of absolute promiscuity thus severing the link between sex and the political structures of monogamy is telling in this regard political hierarchies translated into the workings of pleasure and desire rendered it a particularly noxious failure the attractiveness of social capital and position are part of the reason but part of it too is simply that desire doesn t arise equally towards all bodies all people one does wonder whether mühl s commune which was explicitly authoritarian in its structure is the best community to use as a paradigmatic example it strikes me that the resistance of desire to programmatic ideology is as strong even where that ideology is egalitarian and anti hierarchical this is where the parallel to dollimore is notable an explicit rejection of the idea that sex can ever be enough for a progressive politics that to represent it as the central tool of a radical feminist or queer politics misses the fact that as often as sex is subversive it is also abject or boring or diversionary it is also historically located what would have been subversively queer 30 years ago simply isn t now the strongest response to this is to recognise as power does through her invocation of shulamith firestone that feminism and for us the queer movement has a far wider remit than simply claiming a place at the capitalist gentlemens club instead it has arisen out of a utopian impulse which demands not simply equal rights in order to work merrily away but to reorder the sicknesses and inadequacies of the neoliberal capitalist model which give rise to the problem in the first place when we say that all politics is identity politics perhaps it s time to start remembering what that really means that we have a etiolated ineffectual and introverted politics of identity unless we recognise our sexuality and gender identity are the stage on which global and structural political problems are played out time to get three dimensional again james butler is a postgraduate student at oxford university a writer and an activist he may be reached at james butler ell ox ac uk posted by james at 09 29 1 comment tuesday 12 january 2010 poetry enlarges life in the preface to his excellent book on the poetry of wallace stevens simon critchley writes if i have a general cultural complaint it is that first and most importantly there are too few readers of poetry and second but relatedly too many of those readers are writers of poetry it is the general conviction of this book that poetry elevates liberates and ennobles human life and that the experience of poetry should be extended to as many people as possible poetry enlarges life with a range of observation a depth of sentiment a power of expression and an attention to language that simply eclipses any other medium as i say below poetry is life with the ray of imagination s power shot through it it is my belief that a life without poetry is a life diminished needlessly stunted little there to disagree with i think there s a comic apologetic dance that readers and writers of poetry alike go through when talking about poetry some kind of intuition that it s an antiquated or bourgeois pastime that it is inconsequential or a harmless eccentricity or that its sphere of effectiveness is diminished to a few thoughtful but impotent aesthetes this is partly so because one thinks of poetry as being either the rhythmic tapping out of the banal or inaccessible and recondite shards wrung out of infinite complexity and this is why john betjeman and geoffrey hill are the twin inspirational spirits of contemporary dullness one could be forgiven for navigating the poetry section at foyles and thinking that critchley s plea for poetry is the admirable formulation of an ideal cruelly flattened by reality most readers not instinctively given to the vice of poetry would accord with auden when he says famously poetry makes nothing happen but that stanza in a eulogy of w b yeats is as much a testament to auden s own struggle with yeats ineffable music and barbarism as a dictum on poetry in general what is not often recognised about that poem is simply how cruel it is in eulogising yeats even imitating his distinctive meter auden belittles and negates much that yeats believed about poetry its ability to engender and capture worlds it is a peculiarly english vice to be captured by the music but disown its sublimity one of my favourite of stevens poems to an old philosopher in rome posted by james at 14 59 3 comments sunday 9 august 2009 floodplain i ve been listening to the kronos quartet s latest album floodplain a great deal of late it s a nice concept music taken from the floodplains of the world because in the floodplains are the roots of civilisation and particularly interesting because it blends the music of various other cultures into the framework of western classical music the piece above oh mother the handsome man tortures me is one of my favourites unafraid to bring in electronic percussion to augment the performance no surprise from a quartet i know best for playing stockhausen similarly the collaboration with palestinian collective ramallah underground on tashweesh interference is a genuinely interesting collaboration by artists from profoundly different traditions but the quartet come into their own with the virtuoso playing on the raga and particularly the twenty minute hold me neighbor in this storm which conjures all the tension and catharsis and terror of the storm it s worth taking the time to genuinely listen to rather than letting it slip off as background music very highly recommended posted by james at 15 04 no comments sunday 2 august 2009 cases i was supposed to be at brighton pride this weekend instead i was kept at home stricken with a sinus infection i was sad to have missed the opportunity to see friends i haven t seen in a while but secretly relieved to avoid the ritual meeting dance of the homosexual the air kiss the hair flick the head tilt and the inevitable exchange of gossip it s not that i don t enjoy it a little hate is excellent refreshment on a hot day but i prefer it done with freshness and scandalous delight instead of the prurient laundry list of peccadilloes and profanations relayed with an outrage which would be more convincing had i not seen most of my friends livers crawl out their mouths for a rest from boozy embarrassment there s also the additional benefit of not having to step over the twitching drooling pile of jaw grinding teenagers on the beach this morning or trying to find a tolerable bloody mary in a town where there is neither any vodka left nor a single sober barman the small things i put up bookcases instead this would not normally be a cause for alarm but the history of diy in my family is far from illustrious my grandfather once constructed a shelf so uniquely non euclidean that objects placed on it gradually slid off either end the genius of this arrangement was precisely the slowness of its defeat by gravity or the whims of some darker tutelary spirit which attended all his attempts at architecture so one would be sitting reading quietly when suddenly a tasteless sub lalique figure would fling itself to its well deserved doom this too is the man who once managed to give five sides to a four walled greenhouse so genetically my construction of a straight shelfed bookcase is a cause for rejoicing at the marvel of the human animal overcoming its wonky eyed programming i had thought two cases would support all those books of mine hitherto unshelved and leave space for new acquisitions but no those books i had lying around in piles and hidden in cupboards have filled them til creaking i am not the strictest shelver in the world but i generally try to follow the system laid down by aby warburg in the construction of his library the law of the good neighbour that is the shelf exists as a continuum of conversation where a line of thought taken up in one book is continued deflected or refracted in its neighbours thus one section contains an italian edition of warburg s never completed mnemosyne project alongside mary carruthers work on the medieval memory frances yates on the same subject anne carson on simonides of keos and two of umberto eco s fictions the name of the rose and foucault s pendulum respectively for both deal with the laws of analogy and connection delirious or otherwise alongside some john crowley to the other side of warburg s book lie e h gombrich leonard barkan and ernst cassirer i might think then where did i put that other book of eco s baudolino alongside borges book of imaginary creatures pliny swedenborg de quincey unreliable narrators all this system like all other systems serves only to conceal that as the library becomes larger more connections uncover themselves that is why warburg never finished mnemosyne all arrangements are finite and conceal as much as they reveal i could draw a line of damned popes from dante boniface viii to aleister crowley a fascination with bor...