Oh, James… woman. Minima immoralia 2
This is just a blog entry… I wonder why on love again…
20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Block one can easily assume, that the Cold War was one of the most powerful romance stories ever. Written as a political project, permanently endangered by its own limitations and binarities, it provides an understanding of co-dependency for various forms of involvement, including the literary ones. As predictable, as the Ian Flemming’s „James Bond” series, as a clearly structured as the interpretation of Bond stories provided by Umberto Eco, the Cold War stands together with the greatest love stories written as proper literary fiction.
I do like romances and I would like a good lesbian romance to finally be produced in Poland. I would love to finally see it, and I do not join the elitary, castrating voice of the provileged symbolic capital holders within the feminist literary critique who, simply ignoring the class wars still at work in the postmodern era, simply smash mainstream readers with their elitist choices. I do like romances particularly in the moments of their collapse, in these thin spaces between structural parts, where we can see the stitch, where the desperate efforts of a rational being to bring some clarity and logic fall apart not because of some metaphysical destiny of any human effort to fall, but because of the – predictable, yet still surprising – incapacity of building a transhistorically coherent narrative. The materialist historicist does not neglect the human power of providing justifications to their temporary and precarious passions, she observes without producing another metaphysics – the one, which replaces critique with metaphysics of impossibility of theorizing.
A good lesbian romance does a set of things, it brings the lesbian desire to a mainstream position, but it can also provide a spectacular collapse of the „two halves” narrative – and therefore also a collapse of a romance. Where two women realize the heteronormative dream of unity, there is a great probability of subversion – and a subversive repetition of a romance brings new, not necessarily romantic, versions of desire, not only to visibility, but also to phantasmatic universum of indentitarian practices. There is nothing better for subject formation, than a good romance. And – there is no better and more powerful romance than the one which has the explosive power of transforming its own norm, its own foundations and its own rules. The process of unlearning heteronormative subjective formation can be considerably stronger in the process of reading a good lesbian novel, well – a good lesbian romance to be exact, than anything else.
But – we will deprive ourselves of the pleasure of experiencing this kind of explosive subject formation if we decide to exclude all forms of classical narrative in a colonial gesture of miming some Western rejections of the critical narrative. The omnipresent quote from Irit Rogoff on the notion of critique, ad nausea repeated by some of the art and literature critics here in Warsaw provides a nice example of spoiling a good bath and killing an infant while emptying the tube altogether. There is nothing wrong with a Western theorist experimenting with transformations of the critical narrative. But there is a big risk of quoting someone’s thought out of context, of appropriating it in order to solve one’s discursive trouble in one context without carefully rereading the other’s context and one’s context as an other too. Rogoff writes:
” ‘Criticality’ as I perceive it is precisely in the operations of recognising the limitations of one’s thought for one does not learn something new until one unlearns something old, otherwise one is simply adding information rather than rethinking a structure.” Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist
There is much in it to add and explain, but one thing remains important: limits of one’s thought. What kind of limits do we recognize while blatantly rejecting the romance narrative in front of a lesbian gathering in Warsaw 2010? What limitations do we try to map while reestablishing uncritical rejections of any modernist project? I have no idea, yet the question remains. And Irit Rogoff’s search for new ways of theorizing seems in itself much more interesting than the quote I hear repeated here and there… see yourselves: Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist ?
There is another risk I would like to mention while speaking about an international, yet inter-European cooperation within the feminist context – a risk of uncritically repeating a colonial perspective and practice of representation. Although it was a pleasure for me to see most of the works collected in the „Gender Check” exhibition recently presented in the Warsaw „Zachęta” Gallery, and previously – in one of the main Vienna museums, the project rises many questions concerning the contemporary politics of representation and possibilities of resistance without immediately rejecting the possible good intentions-based cooperation.
The „Gender Check” exhibit asks questions about gender, well – asks and answers at the same time, therefore the viewer’s activity is from the beginning reduced to silent contemplation. This cathedral of supposedly common sense recognition of some 70 years of art herstory of some 20+ countries is built of 10 or maybe less curatorial notes, where we can read, that for example none of the Eastern Block artists would call herself feminist before 1990. Interestingly, one of the exhibited artists is Ewa Partum, who did quite the opposite. Actually, the very use of the word „feminism” in a post-Soviet context is not discussed at all, so we have to believe, that it is perfectly applicable in any context. Some of us are brave, and we cannot do it.
The main problem of the „Gender Check” for me is the belief, that we can produce a representation of „Eastern” artists, that we can treat them with Western categories and present them in one of the Western capitals – in Vienna. I think this clearly reproduces a colonial optic, and I would like the cultural producers to see this as a controversy to analyze and possibly also oppose instead of hiding it under a carpet of a simplifying narrative. I would like to ask, why a project of an exhibit of Western artists based on Eastern categories cannot be produced for a Warsaw based gallery? Lets imagine an exhibit, where German, French, Austrian, British and other artists would be squeezed in small rooms and represented in a unifying narrative as „Western”… in Warsaw, Prague or Moscow. I want to stress: it is not only an impossible project, but I think it is an unimaginable one (our thoughts cant even face it). Asking this question does not equate to a desire of producing this kind of exhibit. It is an exercise for thought, not a political claim. My political claim is more complicated: lets rethink our location and the politics of representation which makes us unable to participate in an egalitarian, non-racist cooperation.
I would like the Polish or Croatian artists to be eligible for big exhibitions not only because they live in Eastern Europe, but because they are recognized as good artists. I would like Warsaw to stop hosting exhibits like „Black Art”, which brought African artists to Poland, and the only thing we now remember is that they were African and Black. I would like the busy contemporary curators to be more conscious of their own limitations. I would like myself to be courageous enough to scream when Western curators pay for my beer in my own city without saying „goodnight” to me or even clearly stating that I am an object of their hospitality in the beginning of the evening. I would like international solidarity, cooperation, sharing and enjoyment to still be possible after this… I would like to be able to befriend with people who do projects internationally and have the best intentions while doing it… I would like critique to again be a challenge, not a destructive practice.
The Cold War might be seen as an example of a bad romance (for a nice song on that topic, see Lady Gaga’s song ), with all the negative repercussions of such, as the colonial and racist outcomes of a bad reunion of „two halves” – in this case, East and West Europe. As Slavoj Zizek rightly puts it, the contemporary racism also exists within the generally white European context, where the Balkans can function as the simply rejected barbarians (traditional, exclusive racism), as strange mind set to be explained by a worried, reflexive yet external observer („reflexive” racism) and as a sort of „scansen” of a freak show of an other, who still belongs, although is clearly „different” („reversed” racism; for all three categories see: S. Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, Verso, 2000).
There is some sort of uneasiness while applying the notion of „racism” to a white, European context. But – other terms prove insufficient in this practice, postcolonialism and „othernisation” simply do not express the ethnic background and emotional input of the bad treatment… yet the simple, unproblematized application of a critique of racism in this context also fails. I think a critical application of the category of racism might be helpful, if by critical application one understands an application conscious of its limitations – in this case: of abuse due to a possible unification of various forms of racism. I would not like to do that. I would like to be conscious of the ambiguities of this use, yet – I would like to practice it, to provide an opportunity of hypothetically trying it… but that is for yet another story…
