Interlude: “You’d have to be an insipid, wretched creature not to enjoy the buzz…”
3.10 A concluding note
smelly mosh of human fleshiness and desire and pleasure and hate. And queer people. We watch as citizens who have smelled violence on our skin, in the pinpricks of fear and
exhilaration and anger of raised hairs at the nape of our backs. Our skin ripples at the memory, hot flushes in electric waves bristle up and down our exposed flanks, blood rushing to my dick carries the memories of past bashings, of corrective rape (such a cowardly phrase); my cheeks burn in unrighteous anger, inflamed skin, corrective fucking, short-circuiting fleshy layers.
Lovers can feel the heat of indignation on my burning cheeks, the hairs in the small of my back bristle with aroused anger – my citizenry bursts forth in zealous shouts: What makes a people abject? Or: What makes an abject people? How can queer theory, and a queer approach to text, help us understand the way we’ve been regulated into citizenry? These films show us how (sexual) self is constituted as relational citizen, it opens open spaces for a re-awareness, and then a potentiality for a re-negotiation, of citizenship. Space for potentially seeing ourselves as filmic desire-citizens.
is (should be) that uninhibited person who shows his behind to the Political Father.
Above all, bliss has to do with the subversion of identity itself. As with the uncontrollable force of laughter or the moment of orgasm, the extreme pleasure of bliss involves a collapse of self, a (momentary) dissolution of identity. The subject is thus ‘never anything but a “living contradiction”: a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall. (Barthes, 1973:21).
Through an identification with the bodies on screen, the opened viewer accepts their
fragmentation and finds in it bliss (in the intertwinement of repulsion and arousal) - are maybe even politicized toward, or the body galvanised into, (some kind of) action. They embody Barthes’ split subject, oscillating between being fictionalised and scandalised by (our identification with) the text, repulsed by an attraction, attracted by a repulsion. Abject desire approximates a new type of spectator complicity wherein looking anew/askew, in a blissful manner – being affected and affecting in turn – offers queer potential for decolonialising
intimacy, by actualising us out of the viewing position’s complacency, and spurring us to action in the extra-diegetic world outside the textual.
New ways of seeing, new dispositional orientations towards texts are surfacing. If we critically return to Barthes’s “delineation of the paradoxes of pleasure” (Bennet & Royle, 2004:264) into texts of pleasure and texts of bliss, we see that he states that “[n]o doubt all literary and other cultural texts are susceptible to being read in both of these ways” (ibid.). In Otto; or, Up with dead people, the two types of text coexist (as the two approaches do in Deleuze and Guattari).
Where nested (filial, arborous, conforming) and frame (opening up zones of potential alliance, rhizomatic, confronting) narratives mesh, bleed into one another, against even the logic of the script. This is overly simplified, but Otto; or, Up with dead people is (can be) a text of pleasure, LAZombie is (can be) a text of bliss, because of the sense of loss it trades on. Even though
time-image and movement-image are present in – and at work in – both, the difference is, crucially, how we navigate our immersion, how we open ourselves to affective potentiation.
The participatory viewing of queer film offers the potential to, in a revoltingly revolutionary manner, plug the viewer into larger contours of affect, which destabilise, discomforts, and ultimately offers the potentiality of “a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse’” (Barthes, 1973:21). Such a (queer) disposition is not ever negative, rather it is productive, and shows how, as we are reminded by Deleuze and Guattari, desire is productive: Here it produces in us a sense of desire-citizenry, of relating to/through the text to others, to ourselves. It is a particularly queer way of seeing our relation to the text. Weiner and Young (2011) write that queer theory’s main focus has, perhaps all along, been on queer bonds, not queer agents. So the potentiality towards destabilising lies in the engagement with the text, in the realisation that the abject and desire are intimate bedfellows, not in the viewer/spectator/text itself. A destabilising effect that needs to lead, through affective plugging into larger contours of affect, and by seeing affective/identificationary/participatory relationality’s potential to create a more equitable being-in-the-world – of queer film.
Such revolutionary potential to recode/potentiate relationality is already inherent in exclusionary abjection, immanent to it: The credit sequence posits a world that has been overcome by fear and horror at the “purple peril”, a kind of fear based on difference and exclusion. In Hook’s parlance, it is also an incoherent fear based on traumatised corporeality and a relegation of
‘others’ to the margins of society. He (2004:687) rightly states that the abject is “a force-field of identity, one in which two particularly potent sets of affect – hate and fear – exist in
combination”. These negative affects – hate and fear – are visible in both nested and frame narratives. In the first, Otto finds temporary solace with the film crew, his “band of outsiders”. In the secondary narrative, exclusion and fearmongering are so prevalent that only an uprising –
through desire/pleasure/fucking – is left possible. It is into this already-abject environment that Fritz and his band of necromantic zombies start their uprising. It is no surprise that cast
members are doubly credited as “Orgy Zombie/Revolutionary Zombie”: In LaBruce’s universe, you cannot be a desiring zombie without being revolutionary at the same time.
Within the threat of being excluded lies the subversive potential to recognise our similarities, not only our differences. Herbst (1999:115-116) states that, although abjection works on excluding that which is different, “[y]ou can exclude it, but you cannot erase it [...] This means that
prohibited things, abject things, have a certain revolutionary power, whether real or imagined, and as such they challenge the ordering formation”. Abject queer bonds can be activated, and when a text is approached in read-for queer bonds that lie outside of patriarchal structurings, we are also busy surfacing decolonial intimacy. This is not only in/through visuality, but other
modalities of the bodily is activated, such as the olfactory. Perhaps we should thus start emphasising how the body engages with the text in a blissful manner instead of simply saying
‘texts of bliss’. This type of intentional interaction – a reworking of the ways we think about our working relationships with texts – with a text is inherently political in nature. For Barthes, “[b]liss has to do with a deconstruction of the political” (ibid.:265) in as far as it is “de-politicizing what is apparently political, and in politicizing what apparently is not” (ibid.). On an even more
subjective and personal level, such a blissful approach has to do with a renegotiation of the idea of self, of a “subversion of identity itself. As with the uncontrollable force of laughter or the moment of orgasm, the extreme pleasure of bliss involves a collapse of self, a (momentary) dissolution of identity. The subject is thus [...] a split subject, who simultaneously enjoys, through the text, the consistency of his selfhood and its collapse, its fall” (ibid.).
In the end, we are busy re-seeing the unsettling, politicising, bodily engagement of queer film.
The bodily responses LaBruce’s films elicit in us – the erection, the goose bumps, the burst of
laughter, the redolent proxy – all point to a collapse of viewer-self as discrete unit, allowing us to (temporarily) lose ourselves in identification and so inhabit a fragment of “that uninhibited
person who shows his behind to the Political Father” (Barthes, 1973:21) and then taking the father from behind (to borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guattari) in a convulsing and
compulsing conjugal recoding. The very nature of cinema (in queer film, particularly) itself allows for this enjoyment of the consistency – and potential collapse – of the self’s reliance on
territorialised patterns of behaviour in/and codified praxis. Keep in mind Neale’s (1983:9) axiom that “[c]inema draws on and involves many desires, many forms of desire. And desire itself is mobile, fluid, constantly transgressing identities, positions, and roles”; by embracing such an articulation of desire and pleasure in/for film by intentionally seeing, unseeing and re-seeing the abject, we seem to be halfway closer to answering Mulvey’s clarion call.
Jy flikker uit die niet Aan die kringe om my oë As jy aan my koek
Om die donker se oor Het [..] ons gehoor?
Jy kom van [in] my sy Uit die vonk van die pyn As die heelal wil skiet Is ons al gebind [...]