The Queer Art of Failure
The Queer Art of Failure
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失败的酷儿艺术
DOI：
10.1080/13528165.2014.908091
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
0.1
通讯作者：
Judith ‘Jack
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Judith ‘Jack
朱迪思·哈伯斯坦的《失败的酷儿艺术》给自己设定了一个任务，那就是“拆解我们目前所生活的成功和失败的逻辑”(2011：2)。为了做到这一点，它建立了哈伯斯塔姆所说的“愚蠢的档案”，从动画片“海绵宝宝正方形”到小野洋子和玛丽娜·阿布拉莫维·ć的“S”行为艺术，再到埃尔弗里德·耶利内克的“钢琴老师”。对哈伯斯塔姆来说，失败是不可避免的，因为它提供了洞察力、存在方式、政治形式和抵抗当前霸权的范例。这本书在酷儿理论和文化研究领域内工作，奇怪地呼应了20世纪70年代拒绝朋克的情绪，以及全球同性恋解放者呼吁在家庭关系之外发明革命性行为。它对失败的拆解旨在表明，胜利目前是如何以输家为基础的。构成当今赢家和输家的不公平的新自由主义意识形态依赖于一个基本假设：那些输家不够努力，因此他们的命运是应得的。哈伯斯塔姆要求我们考虑在这样一个全球经济中获胜的正义性：赢家--1%的赢家--确实拿走了一切，留给我们其余人的东西很少，而那些处于经济等级最底层的人几乎什么都没有。根据斯图亚特·霍尔对安东尼奥·葛兰西的解读，哈伯斯塔姆运用了一种“低理论”的方法，汇集了一系列古怪的信息来源。对于Halberstam来说，Low理论着眼于广泛的目标，并着眼于达成广泛可用的反霸权选择。他将低理论定义为不那么受制于某个特定的目标，并再次引用霍尔的话，将其视为“不是自身的目的，而是通往其他东西的绕道”(Halberstam 2011：15)。在一本关于失败的书中，哈伯斯塔姆设想将低理论作为一种手段，以避免以目标为导向的政治和社会理论。它对“不可预测的结果”持“开放态度”，并且“具有适应性、变化性和灵活性”(2011：16)。哈伯斯塔姆把他的低级理论建立在霍尔所说的葛兰西的“开放的”马克思主义之上。霍尔认为，葛兰西的理论源于将马克思主义思想应用于他在生活中所面临的现实政治问题，而不是来自于为目的论政治计划服务的理论的决定论应用。哈伯斯塔姆通过设想一种同样可以接受质疑的“开放教学法”，从自下而上的视角，“脱离了规定的方法、固定的逻辑和认识论”，将自己插入到这一逻辑中；相反，它“引导我们走向解决问题的知识或激进正义的社会愿景”(2011：16-17)。哈伯斯塔姆愚蠢的档案中有很大一部分是过去十年的动画和定格电影，设计、制作和销售给大众观众，主要是儿童。哈伯斯塔姆称这些电影为《皮克斯伏特》，在皮克斯和梦工厂的作品中找到了集体反抗资本主义经济和权力的秘诀，简而言之，就是对新自由主义人文主义地位的反抗。哈伯斯塔姆认为，这些电影是为儿童制作的，他认为儿童是失败的主体，世界不是为他们设计的，他们对各种形式的权威笨拙和沮丧，准备并愿意以新的方式看待世界，对他们来说，革命是一个有希望的选择。在这些电影中，哈伯斯塔姆看到了“一个丰富的技术领域，用于重新思考集体性、转型、身份认同、动物性和死后的精神”(2011：174)。他指出，Pixarvolt的情节通常围绕着人类和非人类生物之间的斗争展开，这种关系“类似于过去被称为”阶级斗争“，它们提供了无数的反抗场景和替代严峻的、机械的、工业的生产和消费周期的方案”(Halberstam 2011：29)。皮克萨尔沃特的电影还专注于从囚禁中逃脱，最终达到乌托邦式的自由梦想，在这些元素中，他发现不是幼稚，也不是走向成人自由的轨迹，而是社会变革的梦想和手段。哈伯斯塔姆分析的关键是，他认为这些电影在社群主义反叛和怪异的化身形式之间创造了与直觉相反的联系。哈伯斯塔姆认为，皮克斯伏特的电影可以提供新的思维模式和家庭、育儿和社交的新模式。哈伯斯塔姆认为，尽管许多马克思主义学者将酷儿政治定性为‘身体政治’，并将其斥为‘身体政治’，但这些电影认识到，不同形式的化身和欲望是对抗企业统治的斗争的核心。哈伯斯塔姆承认，并不能保证动画
Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure sets itself the task of ‘dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (2011: 2). To do so it constructs what Halberstam calls a ‘silly archive’, which ranges from the animated cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović’s performance art to Elfride Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Failure, for Halberstam, is not to be avoided, as it offers insights, ways of being, forms of politics and paradigms of resistance to current hegemonies. Working within the realm of queer theory and cultural studies, the book strangely echoes the 1970s sentiments of punk refusal as well as the global gay liberationists’ call for the invention of revolutionary sexualities outside of familial relations. Its dismantling of failure aims to show how winning is currently predicated upon losers. The inequitable neo-liberal ideologies that constitute today’s winners and losers relies on a basic assumption: those who lose did not work hard enough and thus deserve their fate. Halberstam asks us to consider the justice in winning in a global economy whose winners – the 1 per cent – do take all, leave very little for the rest of us, and next to nothing for those at the bottom end of the economic hierarchy. With ‘low theory’, an approach adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Halberstam brings together an eccentric array of sources. Low theory, for Halberstam, aims broadly and looks to arrive at counter-hegemonic options that are widely accessible. He defines low theory as less beholden to a particular telos and, again citing Hall, sees it ‘not as an end onto itself but “a detour en route to something else”’ (Halberstam 2011: 15). In a book about failure, it follows that Halberstam envisions low theory as a means to eschew goal-oriented politics and social theories. It is ‘open’ to ‘unpredictable outcomes’ and is ‘adaptable, shifting, and flexible’ (2011: 16). Halberstam predicates his low theory on what Hall describes as Gramsci’s ‘open’ Marxism. According to Hall, Gramsci’s theories were derived from the application of Marxist ideas to the real political problems that he faced in life, not from a deterministic application of theory in service of a teleological political project. Halberstam inserts himself into this logic by envisioning an ‘open pedagogy’ that is similarly amenable to questioning, that is bottom-up in its perspective and that ‘detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes’; instead, it ‘orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice’ (2011: 16–17). A large part of Halberstam’s silly archive is animated and stopmotion movies of the past decade, designed, made and marketed for mass audiences, mainly comprising children. Halberstam calls these movies ‘Pixarvolt’, finding in the works of Pixar and DreamWorks recipes for collective rebellion against capitalist economies and power and, in short, a ‘revolt’ against the status quos of neo-liberal humanism. These films, Halberstam argues, are made for children, who he sees as kinds of failed subjects, people for whom the world is not designed, who are clumsy and frustrated with various forms of authority, who are ready and willing to view the world in new ways, and for whom a revolution is a promising option. In these films, Halberstam sees ‘a rich technological field for rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality, and posthumanity’ (2011: 174). He notes that Pixarvolt’s plots usually revolve around a struggle between human and non-human creatures in relationships that ‘resemble what used to be called “class struggle,” and they offer numerous scenarios of revolt and alternatives to grim, mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption’ (Halberstam 2011: 29). Pixarvolt films also focus on escapes from captivity that culminate in utopian dreams of freedom, elements in which he finds neither childishness nor a trajectory towards adult freedom but the dreams and means of social transformation. Key to Halberstam’s analysis is the counter-intuitive connections he argues the films create between communitarian revolt and queer forms of embodiment. Pixarvolt films, Halberstam argues, can provide new modes of thinking and new models of family, parenting and sociality. ‘While many Marxist scholars have characterized and dismissed queer politics as “body politics,”’ Halberstam argues, ‘these films recognize that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination’ (2011: 29). Halberstam concedes that there are no guarantees that animated