Fugitivity fails – inevitable structural violence

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277902726_Doing_Being_Deviant_Deviance_Studies_Description_and_the_Queer_Ordinary]//ETang

In their article “Social Deviance and Political Marginality,” Irving Louis Horowitz and Martin Liebowitz discuss the erosion of the distinction between “personal deviance and political dissent” in the campus protest movements of the 1960s (284). They note the affinities between the New Left and marginal social groups and the embrace of a politics of rebellion against norms of propriety and social participation. In contrast Doing Being Deviant to the Old Left, with its stance of working-class solidarity and its habits of respectability, the new social radicals take up a politics of everyday life that pushes them toward the fringes of society. Horowitz and Liebowitz write, If there is a hero, it is the alienated man who understands what is wrong and seeks escape. Often, escape takes the form of social deviance, which is considered no worse than the forms of behavior which are traditionally defined as normative. The traditional hero has been supplanted by the anti-hero who wins and attains heroic proportions by not getting involved in the political pro - cess. This anti-hero is defined by what he is against as much as by what he is for; he is for a world of his own, free from outside constraints, in which he is free to experiment and experience. (289) Horowitz and Liebowitz address the convergence between the culture of Left protest and the margins of society, considering the unlikely alliance between the antiwar movement and the Hells Angels, or the identification among student activists with forms of social marginality (homosexuality, mental illness, and addiction) in order to escape the draft. Horowitz and Liebowitz’s account of the student movement as “a celebration of deviance itself as the ultimate response to orthodox politics” (289) resonates with dismissals of both student protest and queer studies as engaging in a narcissistic and indulgent politics of personal liberation. Yet the importance of struggles over the definition of norms and deviance has been crucial in queer activism, since those subject to social stigma and inferiorization are drawn to contest, as Edwin M. Schur notes, the “oppressive conditions governing their everyday experience” (195). Horowitz and Liebowitz’s account of the New Left resonates with Herbert Marcuse’s account of Orpheus and Narcissus in Eros and Civilization and with a recently ascendant ethics of refusal, self-divestiture, and impossibility in queer studies. Marcuse contrasts the image of Prometheus, which he associates with the modern performance principle, with that of Orpheus and Narcissus, who are identified with the realm of the underworld, the aesthetic, and death. In contrast to the images of the Promethean culture-heroes, those of the Orphic and Narcissistic world are essentially unreal and unrealistic. They designate an “impossible” attitude and existence. The deeds of the culture-heroes also are “impossible,” in that they are miraculous, incredible, superhuman. However, differences 89 their objective and their “meaning” are not alien to the reality; on the contrary, they are useful. They promote and strengthen this reality; they do not explode it. But the Orphic-Narcissistic images do explode it; they do not convey a “mode of living”; they are committed to the underworld and to death. (165) Marcuse’s account of the Orphic-Narcissistic realm offers an image of what Horowitz and Liebowitz understand as the fusion of revolt and deviance. While Marcuse invokes the mythological realm of the underworld, his description of an impossible, death-bound existence that inverts moral hierarchies draws on the image-repertoire of a sociological underworld, the dwelling place of exiles and outcasts. Marcuse associates the Orphic-Narcissistic revolt with homosexuality and with a more general revolt against sexual norms: “The classical tradition associates Orpheus with the introduction of homosexuality. Like Narcissus, he rejects the normal Eros, not for an ascetic ideal, but for a fuller Eros. Like Narcissus, he protests against the repressive order of procreative sexuality. The Orphic and Narcissistic Eros is to the end the negation of this order—the Great Refusal” (171). The importance of homosexuality in Marcuse’s allegory of the New Left is crucial, for homosexuality seems to offer a fusion of protest and deviance, revolution and refusal. Queer studies took up this mantle of Orphic-Narcissistic revolt and remains invested in the idea of an impossible—because absolute—withdrawal from the social. Today, queer studies—prestigious but unevenly institutionalized—still signals absolute refusal or criticality—all anti- and no normativity. In their influential 2004 essay, “The University and the Undercommons” (and in the 2013 book that followed from it), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney rely on such an understanding of queer (as well as concepts borrowed from black studies, feminism, ethnic studies, and anticolonial thought). They call for betrayal, refusal, theft, and marronage as modes of resisting the iron grip of the academy, pointing to an uncharted, underground, and collective space they call the undercommons. “To enter this space,” they write, “is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons” (103). Moten and Harney speculate whether the “thought of the outside” (105) is possible inside the university and suggest that if there is an outside, it is along the margins and at the bottom. Yet their imagination of that outside is indebted to the inside, in particular to the conception of deviance produced within sociology. Their account of the undercommons reads like a rap sheet, a list of the traditional topics of deviance studies: theft, homosexuality, prostitu - tion, incarceration. Moten and Harney do not describe the undercommons, but rather ask their readers to join it, to participate in active revolt against profes - sional and disciplinary protocols. To offer an objective account of the social position of radical academics would be to further business as usual in the academy; dwelling in the undercommons requires giving up on the usual protocols of description. Moten and Harney argue against the traditional role of the “critical academic” (105), which they see as just another turn of the professional screw, since work that opposes the academy does not chal - lenge its basic structure or everyday operations. They argue that “to be a critical academic in the university is to be against the university, and to be against the university is always to recognize it and to be recognized by it, and to institute the negligence of the internal outside, that unassimilated underground, a negligence of it that is precisely, we must insist, the basis of the professions” (105). In contrast to the figure of the critical academic, they forward the image of the “subversive intellectual” who is “in but not of” the academy (101). Without dismissing the galvanizing effect of such a call to the undercommons, it is important to consider the limits of the refusal of objectification as a strategy. To be unlocatable, to be nowhere, to be in permanent revolt: Moten and Harney describe the path that queer inquiry laid out for itself. Objectification—recognition, description, critique—can be a way to reinforce the status quo, but it is also a way of acknowledging one’s institutional position and the real differences between inside and outside. Even the most subversive intellectuals in the academy are “on the stroll” in a metaphorical but not a material sense. The fate of those who came “under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love” (101), if they survive, is to become “superordinates” in Becker’s sense. Whose side are we on? Can we hold onto the critical and polemical energy of queer studies as well as its radical experiments in style and thought while acknowledging our implication in systems of power, management, and control? Will a more explicit avowal of disciplinary affiliations and methods snuff out the utopian energies of a field that sees itself as a radical outsider in the university? To date, both the political and the methodological antinormativity of queer studies have made it difficult to address our implication in the violence of knowledge production, pedagogy, and social inequality. Such violence is inevitable, and critical histories of the difference s 91 disciplines—and the production of knowledge about social deviance—are essential. Undertaking such work, however, will not allow escape into a radically different relation to our objects because we are (as Moten and Harney also argue) part of that history—we are its contemporary instantiation. To imagine a social world in which those relations are transformed—in what Moten and Harney refer to as the “prophetic organization” (102)—may be crucial for the achievement of social justice, but to deny our own implication in existing structures is also a form of violence.