Queer Ontology and Relational Aesthetics in

Three (un)Related Visual Productions

“The possibilities are numerous once “(…) there was never any moment when
we decide to act and not react” we were not already in relation”
(Gloria Anzaldúa) (Leo Bersani)

Many years ago it was said that “(…)’queer’ is to be a site of collective contestation (…)

never fully owned, but always and only deployed, twisted” (Butler 1993: 228). This

statement still seems to circulate in a now more defined territory of queer studies where new

terrain is won all the time. I would like to take the risk to deploy its meaning into new

horizons, but it will take an unusual and less travelled direction in the periphery of queer

theory practise dominated by deconstruction and psychoanalysis.

In my essay I want to look into the processes of relating to others and by that go into a

“reconfiguration or reorientation of queer thinking” (Tuhkanen 2009: 114) where

oppositional thinking is challenged and sexual identity can be rethought in the boundary of

new ethical considerations in visual aesthetics. My inquiry regards first of all encounters
between visual representations and its spectators. In those I want to investigate in new

relational modes where notions of (sexual) difference are kept along an inescapable ontology

of sameness that I would like to think differently from common terms of identification

between persons. What is at stake here reaches Leo Bersani’s intention to “hypothesize a

genealogy of the relational, more specifically, a certain threshold of entry into the relational”

(Bersani 2000: 642). In his books he uses phrases like “correspondence of forms”,

“inaccurate replications” or “homo-ness” when he refers to a virtuality, I would even say

monism, that make us head towards “a revolutionary reversal of the relational mode

dominant in our culture, one that nourishes the powers of evil that govern us and with which,

as long as we remain in this relational field, we are all complicit” (Bersani and Phillips, 2008:

87). He builds up a metaphysical ontology where, quoting his admirer Tim Dean, we can

view “sexuality outside the realm of individuals – indeed, outside the realm of

persons“(Dean, 2000: 17). This mode of impersonal relation tends to take flights into the

mystic when he admits an “essentially mysterious connectedness in the universe” (Bersani

and Dutoit 1985: 46). It resembles thoughts of the famous feminist and queer/postcolonial

theorist Gloria Anzaldúa of whom I got inspired to write this essay.

Similarities between these two thinkers have only vaguely been covered1. My aim is

not to mystify Bersani’s thinking, but rather to find a common ground to discover and work in

“ontological laborator[ies] of literature, art and (in this case) film” (Bersani and Dutoit 1998:

63) and by that find new relational modes between subject/spectator and other/screen in the

realm of film aesthetics. Bersani’s investment in this field is taken into visual culture in his

work with Adam Phillips Intimacies. He registers a shift in our understanding of intimacy

where he claims that we move: “from our heterosexual culture’s reserving the highest

relational value for the couple to a communal model of impersonal intimacy” (Bersani &

Phillips 2008: 42). This questioning about the privileged status of the intimate and personal
related couple as such is interesting, but my focus will be on the “communal model of

impersonal intimacy” he wants to replace or set up as an alternative.

Working with a few of the visual narratives from our syllabus I would like to look

into epistemological ways of rethinking subject and other in respect to queer theory. The

inseparability of subject and other has been issued several times and in various contexts

throughout history. There is an endless list of previous investigations from Plato in classical

philosophy, Lacan in psychoanalysis, monistic thought in religion and now this new wave of

transcendental approaches in my references Bersani and Anzaldúa. In this context I would

also like to meditate on the concept of becoming by Gilles Deleuze. In his philosophy we can

find a dismissal of rigid dualisms in favour of a new strategy that somehow refuses

metaphysics and transcendental thinking.

To make sure that my reader does not box me in a category of metaphysical minded

spiritualists with no touch of reality I will paraphrase my thoughts on Todd Haynes [Safe]2. It

is a feature film movie that on a hyper-satirical platform e.g. examines the hypocritical New

Age escapism and rich people’s privileged boredom in suburban surroundings. In [Safe]

Carol ends up in a distant and quite sketchy place called Wrenwood for people with the so-

called “environmental illness”. Extreme awareness of being clean and in sync with

everything and everyone is an example of how an obsession with ‘sameness’ and ‘oneness”

can disconnect itself totally from any recognition of differences and turn into a fascistic

imperative of utopian definitions of health and happiness. It is a world where any

inappropriate acts, noises and sicknesses are sinful, where the human being is left no

freedom to suffer or feel pain.

With its shift from Carol’s trivial life in a white bourgeois culture and to what is

supposed to be a remote place of peace and harmony for everyone, we see the cinematic

strategies changing radically. The camera registers a clear and natural light in the second part,

but the communication and relation between people remain disturbingly superficial and
weak. Wrenwood’s spiritual and HIV-deceased guru Peter is describing his ambitions in a

quite unconscious, I think, ironic phrase “(…) what I would like to give you, is an image of a

world outside, as positive, as free, as the world we created here”. Tragic in this situation is

that Wrenwood is more a place of anti-relational and restricted commitments. The idea that

“we are one with the power that created us, we are safe and all is well in out world” has lost

its roots in reality and “their insistence on an impossible ideal of safety” (Stuber 2008: 83) is

so immanent with the introducing remark in Peter’s ritual speech “I have a confession – I

stopped reading the papers”. They simply try to escape from the world as it is.

Haynes’s big achievement in this movie is the mystery he builds up around Carol. All

the symbolic values in the milk, the black couch, Carol’s lack of sweat etc. are tricky objects

we should react to, analyze and make conclusions on. He wants us to be judgemental and

decide what is wrong with her. The movie, so to say, performs a proposal for the audience to

make a diagnosis on the behalf of Carol and her family. The aesthetic vision is to create

pictures of grotesque but somehow authentic value. We can even see her illness as “that thing

which only ever confirms identity (as patient, or victim, or sufferer)” and that not accepting

being ill or “to be ‘not one’ with disease is not to identify with it, that is, it is to put oneself in

a relation of non-relation to it” (Stuber 2008: 87). Either we want it or not, we try as much as

possible to put an identity – or illness – on Carol’s shoulders. But she refuses any other label

than “environmental illness” which is itself an ambiguous construction, because it first of all

refers to a puritan society of middle-aged women and their disturbed minds, but actually have

nothing to do with pollution in the air.

Another relevant video is Mirror, Mirror. It is not an artwork in conventional sense,

but more the result of academic education and research turned into a video production with

certain aesthetic approaches. It has its technical limits and may lack a bit of editing, but all in

all its vision is clear and successful. The ethnographic methods of Mirror, Mirror plays with

the documentary as genre and representation, it invites the spectator to participate in

contemplations on being and becoming these queer characters and performers, it incorporates

a methodological questioning of the whole process of shooting and editing and it generally

establish itself as a work in progress performing its own creation.

While cleaning the beard off her face after one of the first nights of queer clubbing,

the director, who is also the narrator of the film, gives a crucial monologue – her attention

actually turns directly to the spectator in the end of the clip - where she considers the relation

to the people around her in Club Wotever. She focuses on how the environment and inviting

gesture of the crowd creates a special interrelatedness between her and the people around:

“being in the club allowed me to explore my own performance and desires” “we all

met in the club and by the time I realised that these characters (…) were all aspect of

my desire and were becoming aspects of myself”. (Mirror, Mirror)

This way of feeling transformed by affirmative desires towards a crowd turns my attention to

“an account of desire as coming into being as the consequence less of subjective identity –

my own or the other’s – than of an impersonal object.” (Dean 2000: 17) This meta-reflection

resembles figures of what Zemirah Moffat feels when other people become “aspects of

[her]self” and what elsewhere is called “the ontological interconnectedness of bodies, the fact

that bodies resonate with others, find themselves partially replicated in other bodies”

(Tuhkanen 2009: 94).

The reoccurrence of the mirror in this scene and the following is part of a number of

scenes, where each character reflects on its role in the visual narrative. Club Wotever creates

an affirmative and utopian community where people seem to relate to each other across

restrictive borders and normative values ruling the world outside its doors. Club Wotever

definitely has an exemplary status as project and it has even travelled the world with events

popping up in other cities, but it potentially risks falling into an opposing territory closing in
on itself with an identity politics for “a club that was not gender or sexuality specific (…)

where every person was a type (…) attract[ing] the varied and diverse” (Mirror, Mirror).

Such a trademark has somehow also exclusionary vibes, calling attention to people who

identify themselves as diverse or different from the average citizen. But generally the project

succeeds as social experiment and aesthetic production. It brings up tons of questions about

how we construct identities in today’s society. It relates in a playful way to the spectator and

invites him/her to wrap up the content from within. It is a method which throughout the

movie is mentioned as “screening back” or “talking back” to the camera. The continuous

deconstructive method in the film making speaks for the script’s questioning attitude to

norm-based understandings of sexualities and the same goes vice versa.

Mirror, Mirror has a variety of voices and stories. It leads to a kind of qualitative

multiplicity where the one speaks for the many and by that strengthens the narrative

(Nigianni 2009: 8). In the case of Maria we hear talking about editing elements of her speech

out of the final product and we hear how she feels odd talking as herself and not acting as she

usually does in front of the same camera. It again has a self-reflective and interdisciplinary

twist calling attention to its performative qualities. Maria is of course placed half-naked in

her bed to underline the privacy and intimacy of the footage. Paradoxically we have a strong

spotlight headed directly into the camera. Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza and Tuhkanen’s

clarification of this as a “queer hybridity” becomes highly relevant in relation to Maria’s

situation in Mirror/Mirror. At one point she says, still in her bed: “I identify as queer,

because I see it as an anti-label (…) you can’t be defined and (…) to say that I am black or I

am white is to deny either one of my parent and also my own existence. So I will say that I

am mixed race.” Furthermore she tells us that she dates both men and women. She cannot

reach a proper definition of what she is except for being queer, but the crucial line comes

when she says: “(…) there is no way you can define yourself. As soon as you stop the

movement you become still and as soon as you are still you’re dead”. Even though it is said
in a quite rigid way it is corresponding Deleuze’s and Anzaldua’s “theory of being and

becoming” (Tuhkanen 2009: 92). Pleased with the so-called anti-label queer and less satisfied

with the bad connotation of “mixed race” Maria Mojo would be surprised by the suiting

concept of mestiza by Anzaldúa. Identity politics in this field is often described as a queer

pool where an endless line of sexual identities swim as what “constitute instabilities in such

constructions, as that which escapes or exceeds the norm, as that which cannot be wholly

defined or fixed by the repetitive labor of that norm.” (Butler 1993: 10). Using the term

mestiza from the chapter “Towards a New Consciousness” in the book Borderlands/La

Frontera we grasp and maybe even solve out two issues of identity making in the case of

Maria. The core meaning of Anzaldúa’s mestiza is captured here:

“The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that

keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how

duality is transcended. The answer to the problem between the white race and the

colored, between males and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very

foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts.” (Anzaldua 1987:

80)

It takes the filming of Maria in her bed to another level when this quotation refers to her as a

“prisoner”, who shows her personal struggle “in the flesh and through the images”. I can not

in any way believe that Maria Mojo would disagree on that one.

Taking Bersani’s impersonal narcissism into account we have endless possibilities

looking into a short movie like Looking for Langston. First of all it is important to note that

Langston Hughes and his father figure Walt Whitman both are uncompromising literary

promoters of their own body and mind. Whitman starts out in Leaves of Grass by declaring “I

celebrate Myself” and decades later comrade Hughes shouts “They’ll see how beautiful I
am/And be ashamed” having one of the strongest voices in the Harlem Renaissance. Both

voices can be identified with Lacan’s when he says: “I love only my body, even when I

transfer this love onto the body of the other”3. The Harlem Renaissance had this communal

love exploring “new ways of being together” into a certain “homosexual mode of life” related

to the point that “"homosexuality is a privileged vehicle for homo-ness, the latter designates a

mode of connectedness with the world that it would be absurd to reduce to sexual preference"

(Bersani 1995: 10). The Harlem Renaissance was an artistic movement who’s members felt

that they were "being loved” and who “were linked by [their] homosexual desires"4. It was a

collective of artists who wanted to "emasculate and impound their society as a whole” and a

project that “erases the image of the two-coloured sissies kissing and producing pines and

paintings for and about each other and finally it undermines, as so much of Americas history

does whenever it attempts to reconcile itself to that enigma known as the Negro, the dismissal

of nearly everything that does not make it white". It was an important political action using

art, affirmative values and dynamic approaches to race difference.

Looking for Langston is loosely based on Hughes’ life and its main setting is a

communal environment of homosexual people (men and women) enjoying themselves in a

decadent and esoteric party. Using a Lacanian “notion of sexual desire as indifferent to

personal identity” Bersani’s thoughts could be communicating with the motions we see in the

dream-like event of Looking for Langston, especially when Bersani announces that “Tireless

sexual promiscuity makes for a connectedness based on unlimited bodily intimacies”

(Bersani & Phillips 2008: 37). This idea is in opposition to the idea of personal intimacies –

we have to remember that the highest valued relation is said to be “a couple” - which has

more to do with “prideful masochism” according to Bersani. This is another discussion I will

not take here, but his idealising take on homosexuality as a “historic occasion to reopen

affective and relational virtualities” (Bersani 2000: 642) is highly relevant in the case of

Looking for Langston. The homosexual clientele of the party seems to have a flat hierarchy
structure where people almost wear identity-free masks in their flirting approaches around the

hall. It is coming close to a mode of being and becoming together where there is no national,

ethnic, racial, or gendered borders. This atmosphere is kept while a singer sings: “Beautiful

black man, I’m just like you, you know I face discrimination too”, but soon it changes into a

satirical power relationship between a black and a white man in a small narrative: “his name

isn’t important, it would be coincidence if he had a name, a face, a mind (…) his seed dilutes

in your blood (…) to you he is only visible in the dark” and we – the spectators - stroll

through images of hypersexual black bodies without identities, glorified in smoke and

spotlight and finally end up with a scene where money are given to the used body of a black

man. The (per)formative force of the visuals is shown in a rather poetic and visually blurred

scene, where the narrator in jazz rhythms reads aloud: “while the silent colour movie grinds

around and around (…) I moan as the mouth swallows me, this is the first sound in the silent

movie, then he moans, giving the movie its dialogue”. Starting from behind the screen, seeing

the neck of the cinema’s solitary spectator, we move with the camera around him until we

reach a frontal perspective, a close-up on a pair of blinking eyes, where the “dialogue” with

the pornographic material is screened in front of him. This narrative creates with its visual

impulses an imperative to join the scenario or at least to relate through some of the most vital

spoken poetry I have seen together with motion pictures: “(…) and now we think as we fuck

(…) this kiss could turn to stone”. The textual symbolism speaks for itself and the same goes

for the history of male homosexuality and the occurrence of AIDS, but in combination with

the imagery of this scene it has an important and strong relational value for the spectator.

Tragically we have to face – while the threatening policemen come to end the party in its

peaking moments - the fact that there was and probably still is many places where there is a

long way to reach this freedom and communal space. The end-scene has an optimistic vitality

– a will to be5 - when the speaker says in front of a black orchestra playing blues: “Suns are
rising/this is gonna be my song/the suns are rising” and leave the spectator with a feeling of

hope and new horizons for “the homosexual mode of life”.

My main argument comes down to a very simplified conclusion, which I have been

meditating on for already many words now, but of course it has – now when I have gone

through a few visual and textual examples - to be bound in empirical material or various

forms of representation, to make us conscious about it. I want to return to Mirror/Miror to

make a few final points. Jacq Tamlyn, the notorious performer and celebrator of love, says in

one of the panel discussions: “If I was just a straight person watching this, then in a way, I

would have a slightly deeper understanding that ultimately people are all the same and have

similar points of conflicts and being uncomfortable.” I remember encountering this comment

and letting it converge with other ontological and epistemological ideas I have paid attention

to in my research. Though I normally cheer for different and diverse sexualities, I sense an

importance for sameness if new relational paradigms should be established in a globalised

society. I am not proposing for an exclusive and misunderstood Oneness like the one we see

in Wrenwood’s New Age paradise, but it would be a pleasant development if “ineffective

pleas for the respect of difference and diversity” (Bersani 2000: 642) got less attention than

e.g. a “tolerance for ambiguity” (Anzaldúa) or “awareness of sameness” in the sense of an

impersonal relation we know from Bersani. Instead of opposing a diverging society or

sexuality we should rather incorporate them in ourselves. We have to remember that “The

possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react” (Anzaldúa, 1987:78).

Ingo, the eventmaker of Club Wotever, is in a short clip presenting a political speech

talking about the club as a communal space of total inclusion. S/he6 describes it as follows:

“All and everyone are welcome. It is fucking historical (…) we take everything back to the

ground level of understanding between human beings” S/he is very right here and the

Swedish shyness (sometimes identities are there for the good) awakes my sympathy, but I

think the idea is established on a different relational valuation. Instead of the common cliché
of praising mutual respect for differences I would suggest ‘a welcoming’ based on an

ontological relation of sameness as mentioned throughout many philosophies in the past.

For the recent decades my suggestions would point towards Anzaldúa and Deleuze

where “each individual is an infinite multiplicity” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 254) and this

“multiplicity (…) is partially shared with other bodies” (Tuhkanen 2009: 96). It makes a

paradoxical phenomenon Deleuze explains by saying: “[i]nseperable does not mean

identical” (Tuhkanen 2009: 96). The video examples used in this essay give their voices and

investment in the struggle to make relations between spectator and object, subject and video,

happen in multiple and inventive ways. The time is already in a new relational aesthetic

movement and the visual arts are in the lead of this. Hopefully art in this field will establish a

growing optimism and affirmative injections into the future of queer borderlands.

ID: 2009690096
1
This link is made in a footnote where a third relation with deleuzian thought is suggested: ”what joins Bersani’s
project to Anzaldúa’s and Deleuze’s is his insistence on thinking about becoming” (Tuhkanen, 2009: 94)
2
I love this feature of putting the title in a box, as if safety is found within protecting walls, within the claustrophobic
cabin Carol moves into in Wrenwood.
3
Citation taken from Bersani & Phillips, 2008: 76
4
Quotes without references are cited from the movies I look into in the specific paragraph.
5
Bersani uses this expression in relation to a Nietzschean vitalism in the article “Sociality and Sexuality”
6
Ingo questions at one point the narrator’s use of she whenever referring to Ingo. In respect to that, I have chosen to use
s/he as a common expression for what is either one sex or just in between the sexes.