Queer futures interrupts the aff – no perms

**there’s probably some good stuff on how this intersects w/ salt fish girl and it’s dual narrative of nu wa and miranda

Queer Futures While the operative term used most often in the text to describe, characterize, or evoke temporal asynchrony is “queer,” I’m relatively certain that the term is not used self-reflexively, ironically, or in parody.13 Indeed, the seemingly explosive proliferation of the word suggests to me that, like “time,” it’s a productively overdetermined term in the text. Note, for instance, how, in the following example, it connects the North American landscape to Asia: “They’re a queer folk, the Yanks,” Mallory said. . . . “Never saw Americans, just Indians.” And the less said about that the better, Mallory thought. “What did you think of India, by the way?” “It’s a dreadful place, India,” Brian said readily, “brim-full of queer marvels, but dreadful. There’s only one folk in Asia with any sense, and that’s the Japanese.” . . . “Oh,” said Brian, “when you see some Hindu fakir a-sitting in a temple niche, filthy naked with a flower on his hair, who’s to say what goes on in that queer headpiece of his?” (269–270)14 Let me suggest at least one central meaning of queer, as the passage above implies: the term signifies the irruption of inappropriate time lines (nonwhite, non-Western) that threaten Western modernity, precisely because it is those inappropriate time lines that Western modernity relies upon, but must disavow, to establish its own exceptional (white, male, heterosexual) universality. It is not the irruption of the primitive itself that disorders time, since the modern necessarily depends upon this evocation (indeed, without the primitive, modernity wouldn’t be modern). Instead, it’s the way the primitive or primordial past skews the future, as a potent threat to modernity’s present: the queer future, it turns out, is that which potentially counterfeits the “natural” inevitability of the present, thereby exposing it as the future’s asynchronous past. It’s worth noting here, however, that the term “queer” is not the only connective thread between these two narratives: by proving the link between Sybil’s meditation on the “Underground” and Mallory’s archeological digs, excavation becomes the associative metaphor intertwining the text’s anxious evocation of disordered temporalities and queer time lines. Here, again, is Sybil Gerard thinking about the London subway: “It was a queer business, the underground . . . where the navvies had come upon lead waterpipe of the Romans, and coins, and mosaics, and archways, elephant’s teeth a thousand years old. . . . And the digging went on . . . they worked unceasingly, the excavators, boring newer, deeper lines now . . . and soon Lord Babbage’s smokeless trains would slide through them silent as eels, though she found the thought of it somehow unclean” (49). As this passage illustrates, when The Difference Engine says “excavation,” what it means, in fact, is time travel: digging into the earth to assemble “newer, deeper lines” connecting and disconnecting nature (“elephant’s teeth a thousand years old”) to culture (“lead waterpipe . . . and coins, and mosaics, and archways”). Sybil’s sense of the uncannily “unclean” thus dovetails with Mallory’s fear of de-evolutionary regress. More importantly, in both cases, the ostensible icons representing the triumphant progress of Western technology (the clock, the subway) become, at the same time, sources of deep anxiety over what the archeology of such progress might unearth. The London Underground, in this sense, is much like Madeline’s clock: its symbolism registers a double articulation, on the one hand pointing to the way that technologies of time not only support, but render visible, the ideology of “natural” evolutionary progress, even while expressing, on the other, an aporetic uncertainty about the very constitution of the “natural.” If Madeline’s clock is a metonym for the excavated earth, then excavation itself becomes the novel’s larger central metaphor for a type of temporal ordering at which Mallory so excels: a spatial (geologic and geographic) ordering that temporalizes race. Mallory, let us recall, not only sees and understands the “hidden gear-work” of Madeline’s clock, but, as an archeologist, literally pierces through and pieces together the jumbled-up, hidden layers of the earth, thereby reconstructing (by reordering) the geologic truth underwriting the triumphal narrative of (white) “man’s progress.” Here, it is the earth itself that becomes the most “natural” clock of all, measuring not only the spatial distance between races (North America, Asia, India), but also their relative positions in a temporal order (North American and Asian “Indians” as simultaneous in time—both irrationally “queer”—compared to the Japanese). It’s here that the novel’s semiself-reflexive, subtextual Orientalist tropes most revealingly adhere to its representations of technologies of time: the physical, geographic displacement of Asia into North America (and vice versa) suggests a queer, temporal disordering that anxiously rehearses (even as it textually reproduces) nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses positing Asians as developmentally “in-between” the primitive (Africa, North America) and the modern (Europe). Let me return, by way of conclusion, to one final example of the text’s prolific (or profligate) utilization of the term “queer” to better illustrate—if not neatly, then hopefully provocatively—the multifarious points of contact between that term, temporality, technology, and race. Upon meeting, for the first time, a group of Japanese diplomats associated with Laurence Oliphant, Mallory thinks to himself, “the queer little foreigners seemed so young, so idealistic—intelligent, and above all sincere” (170). What is so “queer” about them, in fact, is not only the uniformity and incongruity of their appearance (“Five Asian men sat about [a table], in cross-legged alien dignity: five sober men in their stocking feet, wearing tailored evening-suits from Savile row” [166]), but their unreasonable expectation of an asynchronous leap into modernity. Thus, despite Oliphant’s assertion that “Japan is the Britain of Asia,” Mallory remains skeptical that the Japanese can rightfully claim such equivalent status: “It’s a bit of a hard slog, though, civilization, building an empire. Takes several centuries, you know. . . . For you, in a few short years, to achieve what we have done” (169). Worth highlighting, however, is that Mallory’s skepticism is not directed at the possibility that Japanese could, eventually, attain an equal footing with British modernity, but at their desire to do so out of (temporal) order: “But what you propose is simply impossible!” (170). Most disturbing to Mallory—making the diplomat’s sincerity so queer—is his proclamation that Japan will grasp modernity at any cost: “We will make whatever sacrifice necessary” (170, emphasis in original). If Mallory fails to grasp the veiled threat behind the diplomat’s claim (“perhaps the faint chill in the air was only Mallory’s imagination” [170]), he also misunderstands the similarity between their respective positions. Indeed, this similarity is underscored by the presence of another technological object—a whiskey-pouring automaton, in the form of woman with “a look of mask-like composure and a silky black wealth of hair” (166)—that inspired the fraught exchange in the first place. Unlike Mallory’s initial encounter with Madeline’s clock, however, his encounter with the wooden automaton befuddles his sense of technical mastery. Whereas earlier that clock’s representation of an originary feminine life force seems to affirm Mallory’s (masculine) rational mastery of time, here that force returns as the troublesome sign of a queer, racial-temporal threat, aligning Mallory with what he earlier imaged to be Madeline’s position, unable to piece the deceptively “natural” surface/skin of the “Japanese” automaton: “the woman had not moved so much as an inch. . . . She made no response. Mallory began to wonder if she were ill, or paralyzed. . . . ‘She’s a dummy!’ Mallory blurted” (168). One could argue, at this point, that the text here grants the Japanese characters a certain counterdiscursive tinge. After all, Mallory’s inability to recognize the automaton for what it is directly supports the diplomat’s claim that Japan, like Britain, can achieve prodigious feats of technological superiority. But this claim is immediately checked, I suggest, by the novel’s problematic reproduction of the hoary techno-Orientalist trope of Asians as at once inhumanly premodern and über-modern. And it is, of course, the automaton that yields this truth: for, if Mallory is not given to see that his misrecognition of “her” humanity places him in a queer temporality, then The Difference Engine is likewise not given to acknowledging how its brief evocation of Japan as an implacably threatening, alternate modernity depends upon its representation of the Japanese, with their “alien dignity,” as automatons—mechanistic, reproducible, technological, inhuman. What unites the Japanese automaton with Madeline’s clock is the way each technological object evokes and elides a problematic “origin,” at once past and future, lodged at the heart of any “scientific” technological-temporal ordering. It’s not simply that the Japanese are represented as both “later” (already themselves automatons) and “earlier” (inappropriately premodern) on the developmental time line that evokes a technoOrientalist discourse. Rather, it’s the way this threatening asynchronicity represents, in the larger text, a technicity originating in a sui generis racial homogeneity, a (past-primordial) homogeneity uncannily mirrored in (and foundational to) Mallory’s “scientific” belief in the (future-modern) homogeneity of the perfectly rational “universal” subject. Indeed, what Mallory cannot recognize here is also what most troubles and haunts The Difference Engine’s larger representational matrix: the possibility that race is not discovered by, but in fact constituted through, the “natural” technologies of time—including, of course, clocks, the earth, and other automata.