Currently, a heated debate around questions of identity, race, and gender is raging in the club and music scene. To pick out just one prominent example: after the online streaming platform Boiler Room produced a documentary about the techno scene in Glasgow they were met with fierce criticism because they edited out parts of a statement of a woman of color. After a flood of criticism the organization—which promoted itself as being progressive and multicultural—saw the need to release a lengthy statement. The same organization was attacked about its involvement in live-streaming this year’s Notting Hill Carnival in London, after receiving a substantial grant from the British Arts Council. Graffiti in the area showed disdain for Boiler Room and an anonymous article accused the organization of exploiting artists and Caribbean culture in general. Again, Boiler Room offered a lengthy and detailed statement. There also seems to be a growing, apparently primarily white, heterosexual discourse of *finally* leaving politics behind (again) in dance music, as for example the dubious looking website changeunderground.com shows. Praising the inclusiveness of a profit-driven club music industry, an article against political correctness in the music scene concludes: “Dance music is for everyone. Let’s make it about fun and escapism again.”
At least since the events in Charlottesville, where a racist rally turned physically violent and one counter-protester was killed after being hit by a car, identity-related conflicts are now widely-discussed in the media. But the 2016 US presidential election already made clear that the now escalating culture war was imminent. A right-wing movement closely associated with people fueling the Trump campaign started to make headlines: the alt-right. Although not a coherent political group per se, people affiliated with it seem to be at least in part the offspring of a nihilistic, seemingly fringe online culture on image boards and sub-reddits, whose inside jokes and irony-driven memes connected with an opposition to political correctness, feminism, and multiculturalism. Above all, in the past few years the alt-right has given birth to a new kind of anti-establishment sensibility, expressing itself in the irony-driven, DIY internet culture and now in an offline political movement, as Angela Nagle points out in her book-length essay on the matter, Kill All Normies.
Nagle argues that not only the Right, but also the Left has become more radicalized and vulgar online. She identifies a “cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability”, that “has become central to contemporary liberal identity politics, as it is enacted in spaces like Tumblr.”[1] “And yet,” she continues, “amid all the vulnerability and self-humbling, members of these subcultures often behaved with extraordinary viciousness and aggression, like their anonymous […] counterparts, behind the safety of the keyboard.”[2] Recently deceased UK culture theorist Mark Fisher deemed this configuration in an essay from 2013 as the “Vampires’ Castle.” He wrote: “The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. […] This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way.”[3] The “embarrassing and toxic online politics” represented by this version of the left, has not only made the left “a laughing stock for a whole new generation” as Nagle writes—in her view its “years of online hate campaigns, purges and smear campaigns against others” were also responsible for the attraction and success of the anti-PC, nonconformist and dissident rhetoric on the (alt-)Right.[4]
To discuss those phenomena in depth and to locate them historically and socially, zweikommasieben editor Marc Schwegler has exchanged emails with Terre Thaemlitz. Thaemlitz is not only producing house music as DJ Sprinkles, but has been precisely analyzing issues around identity politics in her work as an award-winning artist and writer. Most recently, for instance, in her multimedia-album Deproduction (based on a performance premiered at Documenta 14), where she investigates the power dynamics of Western humanist notions of family values and their ties to global neoliberal capitalism.
Marc Schwegler You have been an activist for decades now—first in the US, in regards to women’s reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, and in the queer nightlife scene of New York, but also up until now in Japan, your country of residence. A lot of the battles I touched on above, you have experienced first-hand, and you’ve always been a critical voice against essentialist identity politics of all sorts. I wonder if this current escalation of identity politics on both sides is something you’d say is new or if it’s more or less just another instance of the same rhetoric all over again?
Terre Thaemlitz I can see what you mean by this “escalation of identity politics on both sides,” but I think we would also be in agreement that this is a kind of late-phase and co-opted form of identity politics. In a way, it is similar to the dynamics of co-optation discussed around the Boiler Room. So, to reminisce a bit, I would say it was towards the end of the ’80s that the Right first got clever enough to effectively co-opt certain language that Leftist activists and academics had been cultivating around identity politics. And in the US a large part of this was also the Right’s response to HIV/AIDS activism—particularly ACT UP—which was generating a lot of graphic design, media interventions and educational materials that cultivated the language of identity on a kind of pop-cultural level. As a direct action group they operated a bit differently from academia, albeit influenced by certain academics. So the Right—which controlled mainstream news coverage, TV networks, newspapers, etc.—gradually began mimicking these strategies. And as those signs and sounds became familiar to the public at large, they also became less effective as tools of resistance. Like with the mainstreaming of music genres, for most people who gained access to these signs through mainstream sources, they never really functioned as tools of struggle. But the language of struggle remained, in a kind of parodic manner. And it was eventually absorbed and regurgitated by the Right, as well as corporate advertising (this is very apparent in cell phone advertising, which uses pesudo-political slogans about freedom and liberation in almost every nation now). This was then in a way re-absorbed by the young Left from the ’90s onward, who was being exposed to these same terms via conservative academia, etc. And it strikes me that an important part of that re-educating or re-exposing of the Left comes with the impossibility of learning from the lessons of identity politics’ failures, because all that remains is a kind of positivist echo or “greatest hits.”
But failures teach us more than successes, I would say. In particular, the problems of falling into essentialisms. I mean, this is just how I tend to see it. So from my perspective, it does seem that both the Left and Right are both currently performing a rather similar dance, all of which is influenced by the mainstream media’s coverage/criticism/appropriation/reselling of those older and minor strategies of identity politics—many of which already had problems of essentialism to begin with. In musical terms, I guess it would be like a reggae band today claiming UB40 as their main influence. That’s the phase of identity politics that I think we live in now. So it is not only a question of the same rhetoric all over again, but perhaps even more importantly, how and why we still gain access to it? And how has it been filtered and purified over time (i.e. censored)? I think the only useful way to approach those questions is from an actively non-essentialist perspective, which in no way attempts to identify or resurrect an “authentic” identity politic, or “true” interpretation. It has to be about social contexts, and inquiries into when and where such language may still have use value. At the same time, what else have we been doing all these years? As you pointed out, there is criticism even from within the Left–I would say I am also doing this—and what are our methodologies that have been developing over the past 30 years or so in response to our witnessing and being conscious of that co-option of the language of identity politics?
What have we learned, and what are we doing differently, if anything?
For me, I focus on deliberately minor strategies that resist or delay co-option by being careful not to employ populist agendas, nor strategies for obtaining power. I personally tend to focus on inquiries into divestments of power, and the reduction of violence through conscious choices (as opposed to essentialist-based legislation of protections for specific, legally defined and accepted types of human bodies).
MS Has the left maybe not only not learned but rather even forgotten about certain issues? One crucial factor for the changing alliances in the current ideological struggle, the rise of the alt-right and the criticism of the Left (also by people on the Left, see Mark Fisher) seems to be the erasure of the category of class. Diversity in terms of race and gender has been a somewhat institutionalized category even in multinational corporations and there seems to be a strand of a neoliberal discourse that is based upon some twisted form of PC language—as in the example above, the website change-underground.com and its inclusionary vocabulary of profit. But questions of class (and maybe the aesthetics related to it—and even their appropriation, I guess…) are somewhat being faded out… This makes it all the easier to provide anti-elitist arguments for the new Right.
TT I think questions of class become more easily concealed or dismissed when people focus on essentialisms of the body, which lead to notions of universal experience, and ultimately presumptions around the politics held by certain bodies. For example, the idea that members of LGBT communities must be inherently anti-Right—something clearly disproven time and again, by groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans or Caitlyn Jenner. So when Jenner states she is fighting for the rights of all transgendered people, and that her method of doing so is by supporting the US Republican Party and Donald Trump, it is through essentialist readings of her transsexual body that people can overlook the blatant hypocrisy and absurdity of her politics. Even for those who may think she is not operating in her best interests, few actually step forward to identify her real interests and politics being rooted in issues of class and her own wealth. In reality, she is endorsing and proliferating politics that totally are in her favor economically, but as you mention, for most people this discussion of class seems to fade away in the face of essentialist discussions of the body.
So for a lot of people who look up to Jenner as a transgendered hero, they are more likely to follow her crazy Right-wing endorsements than they are to criticize her classism. Even if they choose not to personally follow her views, they may feel the dangers and risks of the Right or Trump are perhaps not as bad as they feared. After all, if Jenner thinks it’s okay as a trans-woman, it must not be that bad, right? It has a diffusing effect on the public. I also think there is a connection between the destruction of social services—which is about class warfare—and the re-inscription of “family values” into dominant LGBT agendas (same-sex marriage, monogamy, child rearing, military service, etc.). In my project Deproduction, which I premiered at Documenta 14, I talk about the link between this dominant Right-influenced moment of “traditional family values” and queer countercultures’ fascinations with tribalism. You know, mythologies of the respected trans-shaman living at the edge of the village (with no insights into the isolation or entrapment of being socially forced to exist as such figures), blurring the lines between body modifications (tribal tattoos, piercings, trendy surgical procedures, and hormone injections all become vaguely interchangeable trends), etc. Tribalism is, of course, more rooted in tradition and family than any democratic praxis. So I think it is more than coincidence that universities, art museums, and other cultural agencies—as endorsed sites of cultural production in a Right-dominated world—happen to find funding for these particular LGBT agendas at the precise moment when “family values” are increasingly mandated.
Despite our desire to see queer studies and things like that as alternatives to, or rejections of, dominant Western heteronormativity, they are in many ways a reflection of our internalization of that neoconservative “family values” agenda. And it comes with a lot of willing blindness to imperialism, orientalism and poverty—the fetishization and romanticization of third-world gender and sexual struggles, etc. If living in Japan has taught me one thing, with all of its mainstream transgendered celebrities, it is that trans-visibility does not inherently conflict with or challenge patriarchal interests. There are many forms of transgenderism that actually aid heteronormative and homophobic patriarchal structures. In the West, identity politics rely on a faith in the formula of visibility=power, and conversely silence=death. However, in terms of representing and activating the socially minor, that is very often not the case. In my own experiences, closets continue to perform important roles in my life, at the same time I have been publicly “out” as both queer and trans for several decades. I feel a lot of pain and suffering I felt in my youth could have been avoided if I had been taught how to accept and work with hypocrisies and simultaneity, and understand the functions of shame as something other than inherently traumatic and destructive. In retrospect, the pride of fag bashers having their way with me was just as traumatic and destructive to all involved. This is why I am also utterly uninterested in discourses of PrideTM. And by extension, “political correctness,” since I’ve spent shitloads of effort trying to live my life in ways that the majority of people would deem “incorrect.” When people accept you and consider you “correct,” you know you are in trouble. [Laughs.]
When you upset people, you know you have located and transgressed boundaries of power. Identifying and mapping them, knowing how to cross and retreat, and redraw them… that is never going to be a socially correct process.
So this is why I think it’s important to actively unpack our essentialist affinities for our own bodies and the bodies of others. It is why I think the humanist practice of legislating around bodies (ie, which bodies are legally acknowledged and protected as “human” under liberal democracies—typically those who fall under notions of being “born this way” or “couldn’t help it,” as opposed to states of being grounded in choices, willing perversity or nonconformity, etc.) has continually progressed Rightist agendas and led to this very state you are identifying and concerned about. It is apparently quite difficult for most people to unpack their essentialist preconceptions about the relationships between their own social experiences and the social codings around their own bodies. Impossible, it seems. Essentialism sells. It is way easier to convince people to endorse legal protections for people who “couldn’t help being born a certain way,” rather than convince them of what I consider to be a far more social and democratic practice of focussing on conscious choices to change social practices and reduce violence. The former focusses on protecting bodies, the latter on the actual issue at hand, the mechanisms through which violence and exploitation are enacted. So I see the entirety of liberal humanist legislation as a political misdirection. A parlor trick, really. This is how we’ve managed to continue to have hundreds of years of supposed democratic governing alongside chronic racial, gender, religious, sexual, and economic exploitation, slavery, etc. Our current woes are not a problem of humanism not having spread enough, as many might believe. All of this exploitation is actually part of how humanism spreads.
MS Amidst the hysteria around Trump, the alt-right, the general rise of right-wing populists I found myself to be somewhat yearning after a sober (liberal?) “Realpolitik” (Angel Merkel in a nutshell – not sure if there’s an adequate english term for this german notion)… The whole of France yearned for this I guess – and voted for Macron. You suggested earlier, that you personally “tend to focus on inquiries into divestments of power, and the reduction of violence through conscious choices (as opposed to essentialist-based legislation of protections to specific, legally accepted types of human bodies).” Can you explain how that’s a form of politics, how you’ve been doing this in practice?
TT Well, some of the ways I have been addressing these issues in my own daily actions have been about non-cooperation and self-sabotage as means of social interaction. Trying to minimize my participation in this shit world as a form of damage control, since I recognize that almost every aspect of the standard lifestyles we are led towards are teetering on exported slavery and domestic unsustainability. For example, in terms of employment, making decisions that would generally be considered counter-intuitive to capitalism in order to remain small. Not using regular distribution channels for projects, keeping projects “offline” and avoiding social media as much as possible, insisting upon payment and not volunteering free labor within creative industries, which also means not participating in a lot of typical forms of promotion, not buying advertising, etc. Remaining active in several economies as a freelancer (music, arts, academia), while refusing to isolate myself into one in particular. Basically, consistently and systematically doing everything backwards, as much as possible. And this, of course, affects one’s quality of life, and can also conflict with expectations of those around me, partners, etc.
Active non-identification with gender and sexual binaries can also create complications in personal relationships, obviously, since most people’s methods for determining their sexual object choices rely upon their ability to place a lover within a category of femaleness or maleness, heterosexuality or homosexuality, etc. I am also simultaneously “out” and “closeted” at every turn, which can be confusing enough for me, let alone for others. It means engaging in the labor of constructing social relations, instead of just mindlessly playing a predetermined role within conventional match-making. Many of these actions and strategies have been detailed elsewhere in my various writings and projects. Although I would never define these things as “activism,” I certainly see them as political in that they actively engage the boundaries of social relations in the private and public spheres, and have real repercussions that I accept will at times be quite negative or detrimental.
MS “Realpolitik” to me means on one hand an almost technocratic, very down-to-earth form of politics, a practical engagement and involvement in the processes of legislating. Deleuze once said, when asked about human rights (by Claire Parnet in that telemovie they made together), that all the outrage that is done to people is never a question of justice or abstract laws. Rather, it always is a question of “jurisprudence,” of jurisdiction. Being left, he added, is fighting for jurisdiction, is making law. This passage gets quoted—understandably—far less by Leftists than the one where he talks about being Left as a matter of perception…
I’ve started to think about a politics of hopelessness of some sorts that does not try to deny existing ambiguities, that does not fall to a growing ideology of ever-present safe spaces, that tries to find solutions in very difficult situations. Those are problems of Governmentality in the end.
That’s why I came up with Merkel and Macron—those are the (liberal) figures of our time who seemed to get lucky when Trump arrived, being the far lesser of two evils after all. But one can see their struggle and that of the European Union—while Brexit is still impending and the refugees are still coming—as another attempt to provide ontological moral fundaments to a liberal politics that needs to be grounded in moral neutrality and at the same time is not and can’t be. The whole ideological battle now taking place, that liberal democracies are not able tame anymore, is seemingly heading towards a civil war. And with it, exactly towards those horrors that, as Jean-Claude Michéa argues, lead to liberalism in the first place, after the religious wars in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.[5]
But if Realpolitik would be the way to go—when does one become merely an accomplice of (neo)liberalism? I guess you would argue rather soon—that’s why you not only suggest but actively follow a “strategy of self-sabotage,” as you called it. It’s a practice of deserting, one could say very deliberate but nonetheless also a forced exodus. But as Paolo Virno argued—deserting is or can be a political action…
TT To be clear, I do not see myself as deserting anything. I actually am quite opposed to that way of framing things, because it is so tied into legacies of transcendentalism, hermetics, etc. Even in desertion, there is no transcendence.
One does not desert into peacefulness. One does not ever escape. Every migrant is also simultaneously an immigrant.
Despite rhetoric of “welfare” and “assistance,” the culturally minor are always governed through processes of abandonment. This is why there is always an interaction between inadequate government and ground-zero struggles for survival and violence reduction. When making laws, it is imperative to remember that simply having laws on the books does not inherently alter a culture. The types of laws we are talking about emerge in response to material crisis—real suffering, not just academics or philosophers pondering how people might be suffering. Then, once a law is in place (often filled with concessions to the Right, rendering it rather useless) a very lengthy and expensive process of court cases around those laws are necessary to establish precedents of penalties toward violators, which in turn discourages future violations. That’s the shitty model we are stuck with at the moment. Without those years of trials, which only reflect a microcosm of actual ongoing violations and social abuses, there is no social change.
For example, here in Japan there have been laws against sexual discrimination in the workplace since the late nineties, yet there were no penalties associated with violating those laws. Gradually penalties were put in place, but not enforced. We are now at the stage of cases being brought against employers in the hopes of having those established penalties be enforced. However, the penalties are still not large enough to discourage abuse. And so systemic sexual discrimination in the workplace goes on, and on, and on… These processes take decades. Sometimes centuries. As a sobering example, the history of slavery in the US was happening in a country that boasted its roots in the principle that “all men are created equal” (note the gender imperative). And still, even today, the US is rampant with systemic discrimination.
Creating legislation is not an end point. Nor is it a start-point. It is a form of analytical response that must remain under constant revision and challenge.
Of course, it is something that people of Leftist inclination are constantly involved in. And rightfully so. But it would be a huge error to look to governance as the “true politic.” Particularly in relation to ongoing LGBT struggles for decriminalization, which is a project that is far from over. I see it as an error of the times that contemporary LGBT movements are more preoccupied with legalization and formal recognition (sanctioning of same-sex unions, changing binary genders, etc.), rather than what I would imagine to be a more promising movement towards non-documentation, the eradication of all legal recognition of marriages and partnerships, putting an end to legal gender identification requirements, etc. There are countless examples where the elimination of existing laws–and not replacing them with something else–would do far more good for far more people, and have have a deeper cultural impact. But many of these things will never happen, especially in relation to gender and sexuality under patriarchy. Sadly, we keep going deeper in the other direction, attempting to define and legislate ourselves into existence, filled with self-deluding hope and promise.
In Deproduction, I discuss the need for social services as means for those who have been “disowned” both literally by families in the private sphere, and more broadly ostracized in the public sphere. In particular, thinking about women, gender, and sexual others most adversely affected by patriarchal family systems. I think the mainstream tendency is for people to think about how to socially “re-integrate” people. Get us back into the mainstream. But I also recognize the need for certain people to live alone—and have that state of being alone be understood as about safety, rather than the more conventional tendency to insist it can only be about traumatic isolation. (Clearly, some personal baggage and needs guide my analysis.) As I said earlier, I think the globalizing West’s cultural switch away from democratic social services toward “traditional family values” is very much the ideological manifestation of real policies that have eroded social services. There are many feminists working on this theme of being alone. Here in Japan there was even a rather successful pop-feminist book called Ohitorisama no Rogo (roughly translated Aging Alone) by Chizuko Ueno, which was basically about how women can plan for a life outside of familial dependence, marriage, child bearing, etc.
MS Wouldn’t this provide an argument for the re-configuration of care work, an understanding beyond a simplistic and/or oppressive public/private divide—a care as letting-be (“Sein Lassen”—as Heidegger has put it, even if the guy has become a persona non grata around here now), as providing the space for those who are/want/have to be alone… Couldn’t that be a task for a governing of hopelessness? Wouldn’t that be a task for a new Left, one concerned with making (or also discarding, as you argued) law instead of policing discourse?
TT In practical terms, this involves responding to the brutality of social isolation by organizing spaces and services for safely living alone. But how one approaches these issues is problematized by the long-standing relationship between “independence” and social privilege. Being alone as a luxury.
The major difficulty is in finding ways to respond to individual needs with tools other than petit bourgeois individualism, or conversion-based community building.
Tools other than those designed for possessing a family,clan or tribe, or being possessed by one. It is about facilitating the ability to survive as disowned.To socially ground some of this stuff with a rather extreme example, think of how many queers in Iran are forced into gender reassignment surgeries in order to avoid a fatwah against homosexuality (the logic being that if men who have sex with men, or women who have sex with women, undergo gender reassignment they are no longer “homosexual” but “heterosexual” in their sexual activities). The result is Iran being the world’s second largest economy around gender transitioning, following Thailand. Many people in the West tend to think of those economies as being globally driven by the West, and primarily revolving around Western trans-issues, but no. Of course, Iran is a country that still relies heavily on families as the main site of social support and services. Yet, once people undergo their operations and are in need of recovery assistance and acceptance, they most often find themselves unable to return home to their villages or families. Many would face violence or even death at their own families’ hands. So this is a very real example of a situation in which there is a desperate need for social services to help those who are “disowned” survive safely. That is an extreme cultural example, but I bring it up in order to make clear that I am talking social services in response to systemic violence, and not simply some bourgeois strategy for individual retirement or whatever. Of course, there are more sublime forms of systemic violence, domestic violence, familial disownment and public abandonment that are constantly occurring everywhere—including here in Japan.
Ironically, the Iranian model of social services is for the government to financially subsidize those fatwah-mandated transitional surgeries. It’s interesting to note that this subsidization began in the ’70s, and was one of the first social programs initiated after the Shia Muslim revolt that ousted Shah Pahlavi. I find that amazing. Like, apparently the Shia’s felt faggotry was at a crisis level requiring immediate government intervention even way back then. Infuriatingly, over the years I have heard uninformed people in the West hold up Iran’s surgical subsidies as an example of a progressively pro-trans government, and reference it when arguing how far behind the West is in terms of providing trans-oriented social services, if you can believe it! So with regard to the types of services I am talking about, it is often not simply a matter of introducing social services to places that have none, but culturally redefining the very definitions of what it means to assist people. Clearly, many contemporary forms of social services are more about maintaining the status quo than actually aiding the ostracized. From a mainstream perspective, what culture wishes to invest against its own interests, right? This is the impossible situation we are up against.
The types of social service needs I am speaking about are largely unsellable on any mass scale, precisely because they are about services for the taboo and abandoned. In my experience, caring for the culturally minor often comes in the form of very small, direct, and personal assistance and intervention—which, by many social organizers’ standards, may not be recognized as “political practice,” since it is not populist in ambition. (And also, in rejection of alt-right strategies, not about acquiring political power. Isn’t it interesting that what most people accept as “political actions” are only about the acquisition of power?) The absence of language or frameworks for publicly thinking about some of these issues means things become reduced to “personal charity” or private-sphere bullshit that is also really imbued with notions of bourgeois patronage, etc. It’s all in the grey.
As someone who used to DJ in a transsexual sex worker bar years ago, I still often think about how “houses” used to function in the trans community–the House Mothers often being the only people helping homeless queer teens who were disowned by their families. City, state, and federal governments certainly weren’t helping. I always wondered what would happen if they divested of the familial constellation and metaphors. Is it even possible? Between the metaphors of family (houses) and nationalism (the “house nation,” etc.), it is clear that a lot of underground queer culture has been led by desires for overcoming the trauma of disownment by constructing new families and nationalisms. It’s simultaneously heartbreaking, disappointing, and utterly understandable. At times, a quite tragically campy politic. It really left me with an awareness of how trauma gives predictable form to our politics and practices, and inadvertently perpetuates the conservative.
[1] Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies. Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. London: Zero Books, p. 73.
[2] Nagle 2017, p. 74.
[3] Fisher, Mark (2013). “Exiting the Vampire Castle.” The North Star. http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299 . Visited last on Sept. 5th 2017.
[4] Nagle 2017, p. 113.
[5] See: Michéa, Jean-Claude (2007/2014). Das Reich des kleineren Übels. Über die liberale Gesellschaft. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.