Outside Belongings

Elspeth Probyn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317958796
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Outside Belongings argues against a psychological depth model of identity--one in which individuals possess an intrinsic quality that guarantees authentic belonging. Instead, Probyn proposes a model of identity that takes into account the desires of individuals, and groups of individuals, to belong. The main ideas she considers--"the outside", "the surface", and "belonging"--allow her to articulate, in concrete terms, her precise concerns about sexuality and nationality.

1

On the Surface

Start with a proposition: instead of inquiring into the depths of sociahty, let us consider the social world as surface. Follow with questions: What to do with all the various longings for belonging? What to do with the range of desiring identities that are displayed all around? Here I slide from “identity” to “belonging,” in part because I think that the latter term captures more accurately the desire for some sort of attachment, be it to other people, places, or modes of being, and the ways in which individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is fueled by yearning rather than the positing of identity as a stable state. This movement of desiring belonging is for me a defining feature of our postmodern, postcolonial times, part of the contemporary “perplexity of living,” to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase. Benjamin’s phrase is, in turn, taken up by Homi Bhabha in his argument about the conditions of “dissemination.” If the “perplexity of living” captures for Bhabha the complexity of the postcolonial situation, it also recalls for me something of the queerness of all forms of living, the very umheimlich-ness of social life. This is not to collapse the notions of queer and postcolonial but to consider belonging, at this historical conjuncture, as queer. Keeping these historical processes distinct, I want to learn from different manners of becoming and of belonging. Benjamin’s phrase inspires me to study the inbetweenness of belonging, of belonging not in some deep authentic way but belonging in constant movement, modes of belonging as surface shifts. In this chapter, I argue that it is necessary, at this time, to insist on the surface nature of belonging. I use Benjamin’s phrase as a way of immediately foregrounding some of the stakes in proposing this shift to the surface, of returning a sense of perplexity to the study of desiring identities and of longings to become. If I want to reinvigorate the idea that living is bewildering, strange, and sometimes wonderful, I also want to emphasize the magic of ordinary desires and return a feeling for that magic to cultural studies. This is a call neither for a naive attitude of celebration nor a stance of innocence before the brutalities of contemporary life. It does, however, depend on a sharpened acuity to the machinations and configurations of desires as they play out on the surface—a surface upon which all manner of desires to belong are conducted in relations of proximity to each other; a milieu in which different modes of belonging fold and twist the social fabric of life, so that we find ourselves in unexpected ways using desires for belonging as threads that lead us into unforeseen places and connections. In the course of these essays, I attempt to render somehow more evident, somehow more tangible, somehow more singular the very so-what expressions of cultural belonging in which I move. I start from my own experience of being caught up in movements of belonging, and like the scribe poring over texts she traces as she illuminates them, I wish to walk within what Edward Said calls “worldliness,” where “sensuous particularity as well as historical continency…exist at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself” (cited in Bhabha, 1994: 140).

Particularity and sensuality, surfaces and the outside, images that hit and move one to return to the minuteness of the social surface, the refusal to generalize—these are key themes, the theoretical underpinnings of which I will endeavor to explicate. They also direct me to thinking about ways of telling, modes of being in the world, and technologies of writing. Thus, before I turn to the theoretical problematics that move this book, I want to briefly cite a tale of magic, a story that catches at one way of seeing the interrelation of history, place, and sexuality, one mode of performing the translation of lesbian desires across continents, ages, and forms of knowledge.

In her novel, The Dyke and the Dybhuk (1993), Ellen Galford takes up the figure of the dybbuk. While the tale is firmly situated within the tenets of Jewish mythology that give rise to this spirit-figure, the mission of Galford’s dybbuk is to abet the vengeance against a certain Gittel by Anya, who is, in her own words, “neither one thing nor the other…. Not quite Jew…not quite Gentile.” Her fury at Gittel does not quite efface the memory of their times together: “Not quite a woman—because I wanted to do things with Gittel that only a man was supposed to do; not quite a man—because I wanted Gittel to do the same things back to me” (223). Kokos, the dybbuk, is materialized by a curse that Anya has put upon Gittel for having dropped her for a good Torah scholar. It is, says Kokos, a masterpiece of a curse, “a verbal edifice of Byzantine intricacy” with “passages burrowing into the distant future” (6). The gist of the curse is that Gittel “should disappoint her husband by bearing only daughters; and that the surviving first-borns of the female line should be similarly afflicted unto the thirty-third generation” (7). The line of the curse then stretches across centuries of migrating female first-borns, only to gather itself in London, where love and history play out in the final female first-born falling in love with the original curse-spinner (Anya, now translated into a savvy butch cab driver).

It is a splendid tale and one that through a singular dyke sensibility tells of the experience of being “between two lines.” While retaining its own singularity—among other things, written within the codes of lesbian romance—it nonetheless replays within the register of fiction what Bhabha calls

the experience of migration…[which] in the nation of others, becomes a time of gathering…gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centers; in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. (1994: 139)

While my project has different inflections from Bhabha’s, and certainly is of a different order than Galford’s, it endeavors to move in the same manner. Thus, while Bhabha’s attention is to “the supplementary narrative of nationness that ‘adds’ to without ‘adding up’” (1994: 160), in tracing out the surface of sexual/national/sexual belonging I seek to enumerate singularities in such a way that they may overpower any generalization, any simple adding up to a general statement of identity. As Bhabha states, the point of cultural criticism is to “keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of cultural knowledges that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative”: “The ‘difference’ of cultural knowledge that ‘adds to’ but does not ‘add up’ is the enemy of the implicit generalization of knowledge or the implicit homogenization of experience” (1994: 163).

In a quite different project, though one that is complementary to Bhabha’s, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben lays out very abstract and elegant terms for an alternative conception of relations of sociality, terms that refuse the doubled lines of essence or generality. Key to his conceptualization of “the coming community” is the notion of “la singularité quelconque” (1990). Michael Hardt translates quelconque as “whatever” and notes that, “as Agamben makes clear…‘whatever’ (qualunque or quelconque) refers to precisely that which is neither particular nor general, neither individual nor generic” (1993:1). Quelconque can also be translated as “so-what,” and I like both senses of the term. For if “whatever” fits easily within a queer lexicon, quelconque as “so-what” catches up with a dreaded question, that potential response to all cultural critique: “So what”

Against a certain line within cultural studies which aggrandizes the ordinary, romanticizes the banal, and turns us all into popular heros, the interjection of “so what?” is deeply humbling. At the same time, the phrase so what serves as an injunction to think belonging and relations of sociality in their very singularity—to think belonging in terms of manners of being, yet again a being that refers not to an ontological ordering of essences but to the very conjuncture that brings forth its manners. Or, as Agamben argues, “The Whatever here relates to singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is” (1993: 1). Being is thus divorced from an inscription of generic properties. Agamben charts a way of thinking belonging that insists on the ontological experience of being within relations of belonging even as it refuses an ontology of belonging based in the individual possession of an intrinsic quality.

To continue in the vein of initial clarifications, the relation of singularity to specificity needs to be posed. While singularity is not a new concept, Agamben makes it the central tenet of his book, all the while refusing to specify the distinction between specificity and singularity. Thus, left on my own to confuse matters, I understand “specificity” to refer to zones of possible forms of belonging: being lesbian, being Welsh, being woman, being red, etc. To use yet other terms, the movement from specificity to singularity can be understood as processes that render the virtual actual—the ways in which the general becomes realized by individuals as singular. Simply put, we do not live our lives as general categories: as a lesbian I should do this; as a feminist I ought to do that. While there have been times when the imperatives of the category meant that individuals became subsumed under the rules of the identity category to which they wished to belong, it seems now that the specificities of those identities may offer alternative modes of individuation that spill over the boundaries of the category.

Specificity can be understood as the necessary zones of difference, but these zones, be they of race, class, sexuality, or gender, are the points from where we depart in order to live out our singular lives. Of course, the specificities of difference are crucial, but they must not be allowed to translate into an ensemble of exhortations that constrict—for instance, when identity becomes a set of hard and fast rules that police comportment. Of course, I am saying nothing new, especially to those who have been the object of such scrutiny. For instance, my understanding of the world has benefited greatly from the courageous writing of lesbians of color whose work forms the ground of any current thinking about the strange and sometimes strained articulations one has to perform between and among categories of difference—women like Jewelle Gomez, who write of the processes by which they have arrived at forming “a tenuous yet definite community” with others; women who speak of their relation to femaleness, to community, of their attachment to other women, to families, of different “relationships to the ideas of maleness, femaleness, and Blackness” (Gomez, 1995: 135–136).

In a small way, I also hope to encourage the movement away from thinking and living difference and specificity as negative: to continue with others the task of conceiving specificity as the ground from where we move into the positivity of singularity. Working from desiring identities and belongings then foregrounds the way in which we are propelled into forms of living with ourselves and with others. This is to turn identity inside out so that instead of capturing us under its regime of difference as a negative measure, the desire of belonging becomes a force that proffers new modes of individuation and of being. Zones of specificity and difference, at different times and under certain circumstances, then may be yielded and lived out as singular.

To further muddy the theoretical waters, I understand singularity in much the same way that Foucault uses “necessity.” M. Hannah helpfully characterizes a major aspect of Foucault’s method—“his descriptive pursuit of the vanishing point where the very ‘surface’ of things (for example, discursive events), their otherwise mute, preinterpreted existence, bespeaks their necessity, where possibility imperceptibly disappears into actuality” (1993: 358). Singularity is thus rendered, not posited; it is to be produced in the processes of reducing possibility (as with a sauce or stock). In Hannah’s vivid image, “It is best to think of possibility as disappearing not through the amputation of large chunks accounted for by monolithic causal forces, but instead through a complex, uneven erosion, like the cleaning of skeletons by flesh beetles” (358). To be more prosaic, the process of singularizing forms of belonging passes through the minute description of the specificity of things, the “adding to” directed not at “adding up” to some totality but at a description of “exclusive actuality”: what emerges from what is said now, here, and nowhere else (Foucault, 1972:27–28).¹

It should be clear that singularity cannot be understood as a voluntary performance, an individualized state of affairs whereby we happily proclaim or exchange identities like changes of clothes. The movement between specificity and singularity is a process that is at times hard trodden, at others even impossible. Again, my use of belonging wishes precisely to capture the ways in which individuals may wish to belong, knowing full well that belonging is not an individual action, that it is always conducted within limits. Just as difference is more often than not first realized when it is described in a thrown epithet, we negotiate our desires for belonging as through a maze of club rules (including Marx’s rule about not wanting to belong to any club that would have him). What I want to get at are the ways in which the range of specificities that we may inhabit comes together in singularity.

As Agamben argues, singularity is rendered within and out of the material constraints and historical limits of “being-said,” the limits of difference as a personal possession:

In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed from its having this or that property, which identifies it as belonging to this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)—and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic absence of any belonging, but for its being-such, for belonging itself. (1993: 1–2)

Agamben posits that if belonging is not defined by any property, its possibility is always circumscribed by limits, the limits of “being-called”: “not being-red, but being-called-red” (1993: 10). Obviously, attention to the performative and the perlocutionary nature of language is now a common theme (for example, in the work of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick). And less recently, the role of language in the attribution of difference was one of the key points that Stuart Hall took from Althusser when, at the end of his essay “Signification, Representation, Ideology” (1985), he raised the example of teaching his son that he was black and not brown. If not a novel point, it bears repeating that the terrain of difference is deeply inscribed by the historical limits imposed by “being-called.” These limits then constitute a condition of possibility for belonging as well as the conditions for calling into question the inscription of difference: “Being-called—the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist)—is also what can bring them all back radically into question” (Agamben, 1993: 10).

I admit that when I first read Agamben’s book La communauté qui vient: Une théorie de la singularité quelconque, I was attracted by the spareness and the abstraction of his propositions. However, I will also avow that while I found him appealing, there was a certain crypticality and unintelligibility to his énoncés. Nonetheless, or maybe because of this, I was struck by his articulation of belonging as fundamentally impersonal but crucial. For, at the time, as now, I was trying to figure modalities which could radically depersonalize identity yet not do away with those desires for belonging, those desiring identities I saw all around me: on the street, at queer conferences, in feminist journals, etc. For those familiar with Agamben’s work, it will be clear that I deform him just as I am inspired by his work. I make no apology for this; in fact, it is inevitable that given the pressures that inform my own thinking (most notably of feminist and lesbian and gay critical theories and practices), I should do so. Most significantly, I inject desire, and moreover lesbian or queer desire, into considerations of belonging. While it is desire understood not as an individual possession but rather as a relational force among individuals, desire remains for me crucial in thinking about belonging. And, as will become evident, I read Agamben alongside Deleuze, whom in turn I read with Foucault.

All this said, it was reading Agamben, now a few years ago, that set me off, or rather accompanied me as I considered the weird and queer turns that belonging takes in Montréal. Because of its bilingual and many-cultured materiality, Montréal embodies a constant inbetweenness. This inbetweenness can be perceived in any number of ways: from the constant way that one is always in between two languages, cultures, and histories (even as it “officially” has only one language, and hence culture) to the ways in which Montréal is posed as apart from the rest of Québec (for instance, when it comes to “tolerance” toward gays, lesbians, feminists, immigrants, etc.) at the same time that it functions metonymically for the whole of Québec. It is a space that contains a multitude of “being-calleds”: a place of incessant attempts to linguistically name, a culture spun within the slippages of translation.

As I thought about the singularities of belonging within Montréal, it also happened to be winter, a season that in this climate always raises the question of why anyone in their right mind would want to be here, let alone profess belonging. But it was not quite by chance that the rigors of winter turned my mind to questioning forms of belonging, for if, as Bhabha says, to speak of the English weather is “to invoke, at once, the most changeable and immanent signs of national difference” (1994: 169), then to live the Montréal winter is to be faced with a welter of minute signs signifying the parameters of belonging. From remarks like “You must find it hard here in the winter,” spoken by those who have always lived here, who truly belong, to the sight of saris trailing in the snow, to brash young Québécois dudes wearing thin leather jackets open to the waist as they fight the winds howling down Rue Ste. Catherine, winter here is an ensemble of seemingly immanent signs of difference. But this is not to consider winter as having some deep meaning: it has little intrinsic quality, it is performed at a level of so-whatness. Winter is something that is difficult to conceive of as a desired property, although surviving it is necessary. It does, however, call forth manners of being-such that are performed in the hardness of a winter cityscape: a city in winter semiotically pitted against the pure whiteness of the country; a dirty, slutty, slushy city where the non-indigenous stand out; a place that we have nonetheless come to in the hopes of something or other—of happiness, of change, of merely getting by. A place of mixed longings, the mythic point of arrival for young gays and lesbians driven from the isolation of the outer regions, it is, as Bhabha puts it, “to the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation” (1994: 169–170). Drawn to the tolerance of specificities that supposedly thrives in the city, individuals then come to live it in singular ways.

But the singularity remains unpossessable. Weighed down by the innumerable layers of protection against the weather, silenced in the minus-40-something cold, there is utterly no reason why anyone should want at this moment to belong. This scene returns me to the way in which Agamben undercuts any transcendental quality that might rise above belonging, that might place belonging on a transcendental level. Explicating the Latin phrase for “whatever,” he notes that “quodlibet ens is not ‘being, it does not matter which’, but rather ‘being such that it always matters’. The Latin always already contains, that is, a reference to the will (libet). Whatever being has an original relation to desire” (1993: 1). Here the common sense of “whatever” as being anything and everything, as no matter which, as being inconsequential, on the sidelines, etc., is turned inside out. For me, if not for Agamben, it is the very forcefulness of desire, desire as force, that can turn the anything and everything into a question of the singularity of the desire to make the “no matter which” matter. Those placed on the sidelines, as inconsequential, then disrupt the sequencing of the dominant order, shift the view of the center by living the periphery in the metropole.

While Agamben does not name the “whatever” as such, the terms of his thinking closely describe the position, the manners, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• acknowledgments
• introduction
• 1 On the Surface
• 2 Becoming-Horse
• 3 “Love in a Cold Climate”
• 4 Suspend Beginnings
• 5 Disciplinary Desires
• postscript
• notes
• bibliography
• index