"Oh, Lol0": Heavily-favored Lolo Jones doesn't live up to expectations in Atlanta.Hope is fried. Change is burned out. Sentimental, noncommittal, notional: Messieurs Hope and Change have proven to be as disappointing as their historic standard-bearer, the current President of the United States. As we speak, they are likely pacing shabby cages—gaunt shadows of their former, meaningful selves—sideshow creatures of Third Way politics.
What are the alternatives to what we thought were the alternatives? The Occupy Movement sparked something that should not end with this recent spate of evictions. Intrinsic to its function is an avoidance of objectives or demands or goals — a position which, much like the unmarketable, uncommodifiable butch lesbian referenced by Jack Halberstam — resists and blocks advances by the capitalist system. What the Occupy movement created was a failure, in short, to communicate; a refusal to interface, or engage, on power’s terms. Occupy went into public space to be nothing less than an expression of failure. By resisting the market-driven hope prescribed by institutional power, Occupy opened the door for other alternatives to take root (see Robin Hood).
For philosophy that informs this strategy, Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure may be considered a key, if not seminal, text. A Professor of English, Gender Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity at USC, Halberstam’s crash course on failure follows three easy steps, which she kindly submits below.
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People have sometimes misunderstood me to be saying that we need to learn how to fail, when in fact we know how to fail quite well. What I am really recommending is that we rethink the logic of success and failure to find better and more expansive ways of incorporating failure into our understandings of life, love, death and politics. Otherwise, success/failure is a zero sum game, with increasingly fewer (but bigger) winners, exponentially more losers, and very little in between. The 1% and the 99%, in other words.
As it turns out, when I recommend failure, people seem to want tips. So consider this a crash course in failure, a self-help guide to failing well and failing better. And why should we learn how to fail? Because winning has become the byword for greed, arrogance, profiting from others, conformity; winning means gloating, hoarding, condescending. What’s great about losing? Failing? Failure can become a potent form of critique, a repudiation of capitalism and profit margins, a refusal of the norm, an indifference to assimilation and a route to other ways of being in the world.
1) Follow the loser.
In a photography project associated with the 2000 Sydney Olympic games, aboriginal and queer artist Tracy Moffat takes profoundly moving pictures of the participants. As she tells it, Moffat was told in the months leading up to the Olympic games that she was being considered as an official photographer for the Games. She replied that she was willing but never heard back from the committee. This implicit rejection only motivated her further to document the parts of the games that “official” photographers ignore — namely the spectacle of losing. From second to third place, from silver to bronze medals, she became increasingly aware of the hierarchy of losing.
As Moffat puts it here: “So, at home, alone, in September 2000, there was just me and the television coverage of the Games. It was then that I narrowed my interest down to the position of Fourth. What could be more tragic than coming Fourth in the final of an Olympic games race? It’s sadder than coming last because when you come Fourth you have just missed out on a medal. You almost made it, but you just missed out. Fourth means that you are almost good. Not the worst (which has it’s own perverted glamour) but almost. Almost a star!”
Moffat's photographs capture the outside of success: the runner ignored by the camera; the exhausted swimmer excluded from the celebration party of the medalists; the athlete who trains for years only to lose in the moment by a fraction of a second, a centimeter, an ounce, and who tomorrow is lost to anonymity. These images remind us that winning is a multivalenced event: in order for someone to win, someone must fail to win and so this act of losing has its own logic, its own complexity, its own aesthetic, its own beauty. Moffat tries to capture the texture of the experience of failure. “Fourth” for Moffat also refers to the “Fourth” world of Aboriginal culture, and so it references the erased and lost art of a people destroyed by the successful colonizers.
Fail?The unrelentingly patriotic coverage of the games in many countries — particularly in North America — offers pristine images of winning, underscored by the desire to flex muscle and pose as the under-dog all at the same time. While individual North American athletes practice plenty of failure at the games, American audiences are generally not permitted to witness those failures; we are instead given wall-to-wall coverage of triumphant Yanks in the pool, in the gym and on the track. We are given the histories, strategies and work ethics of winners all day, every day and so we miss the larger drama of the games, emerging as it does from unpredictability, tragedy, close defeat, and yes, messy and undignified failure.
2) Be a lesbian.
Losing takes us on to other L words: Lesbian is irrevocably and happily tied to failure in all kinds of ways. Indeed, according to Heather Love: “Same-sex desire is marked by a long history of association with failure, impossibility and loss” and she continues: “homosexuality and homosexuals serve as scapegoats for the failures and impossibilities of desire itself.”
It is this “backward” history that a show like The L Word wants to overcome and replace with a sunny and optimistic version of queerness. The makers of the obnoxious and infectious Showtime soap The L Word would love, in other words, to redefine lesbian by associating it with “life, love, leisure, liberty, luck, lovelies, longevity, Los Angeles,” but we know that L can also stand for “loser, labor, lust, lack, loss, lemon, Lesbian.” “Same sex, different city,” the ads for the show declare cheerily. And it is that “same sex” assurance that represents the heart of The L Word’s success; for the loser in the glossy and femme-centric series is of course the butch who can only appear as a ghostly presence in the fluffy androgenous character of Shane.
What the L Word must repudiate in order to represent “lesbian” as “successful” is the butch. The butch therefore gets cast as anachronistic, as the failure of femininity, as an earlier, melancholic model of queerness that has now been updated and transformed into “desirable” womanhood. The butch lesbian indeed is not only a failure within contemporary queer renderings of desire, she stands in for a failure within consumer culture writ large because her masculinity becomes a block to male desire while feminine lesbians, of the variety imagined within a hetero-pornographic imagination, sell everything from beer to bathing suits. Somehow, the masculine lesbian proves to be a kind of kryptonite for capitalism.
And so, in an example like The L Word, we see that in order to make “lesbian” appealing to men and straight women, the specific features which have stereotypically connoted lesbian in the past — masculine appearance and interests and jobs — must be blotted out to provide a free channel for commodification. While even feminine gay men can function within this framework (because they still model a desire for hetero-masculinity) the butch lesbian cannot: she threatens the male viewer with the horrifying spectacle of the uncastrated woman, and she challenges the straight female viewer because she refuses to masquerade as castrated.
The L Word lesbians “succeed” within the secular economy of televisual pleasure precisely by catering to conventional notions of visual pleasure. Shane, with her romantic prowess, her emotional detachment, her boyish demeanor reminds the viewer of what has been sacrificed in order to bring the lesbian into the realm of commodification. In the lingering reminder of the mark of failure that usually signifies as lesbian, we find the persistence of politics at the heart of the lesbian project.
3) Don’t be successful, be fantastic.
Animated films offer an incredible archive for failure: geared towards children they recognize that childhood, despite the myriad ways that we sentimentalize it, is one long drawn out experience of failure and frustrations, misunderstandings and unknowing. Because the child must be allowed to fail in order to learn, the films that address them have very supple and creative models of community, progress and success most of which involve flawed creatures who rebel against their society’s standards of success and failure and invent their own. Finding Nemo, for example, is about a little fish with a disabled fin who ventures out into the open ocean against his father’s advice and learns that what is important is working with multiple others for freedom, rather than burying oneself in the family and the neighborhood and preserving the status quo. Chicken Run is essentially a film about organizing and freeing oneself by rising up together as a multitude and flying the coop.
Much of the Occupy Movement represents a generation raised on Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. and Chicken Run, people who have taken to the streets to make protest through sheer numbers, collectivity, multiplicity: fish versus fishermen, chickens versus farmers, monsters versus corporation, woodland creatures versus suburbs!
And let’s not forget Fantastic Mr. Fox — a masterpiece of stop animation that tells the quaint story of a fox who cannot settle into a life of domesticity but wants to go wild and so returns to his old ways of stealing chickens from the farmers. He has a sissy son, a yoga practicing nephew, a patient wife and a pack of wild animal friends who support him when the farmers track him down and, yes, cut off his tail. In the film’s finale, Mr. Fox gets his tail back in an improved, detachable form. Detachable being better than organic because it relives him of the phallic burden of always having to be “quote unquote fantastic.” Being fantastic then means:
1. Turning the mundane and the ordinary into the odd and the eclectic;
2. Finding kinship in all kinds of odd relations (the sissy son and his macho father); and
3. Knowing that power or the phallus is not organic but can be put on and taken off.
In my work I have turned repeatedly to the “silly” archives of animated film. While many readers may object to the idea that we can locate alternatives in a genre engineered by huge corporations for massive profits and with multiple product tie-ins, I have claimed that new forms of animation, computer generated imagery (CGI) in particular, have opened up new narrative opportunities and have led to unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer.
There is a “dark side” of animation, and stop-motion animation in particular, which takes us not simply through the looking glass but into some negative spaces of representation, dark places where animals return to the wild, humans flirt with their own extinction, and worlds end. Of course, in animation for children, they never do quite end and there is usually a happy conclusion even to the most crooked of animated narratives. In Coraline, for example, the young girl who has escaped through the walls of her apartment to a bizarre universe with an “Other Mother” and “Other Father,” returns home and is happy finally to be back. And in Fantastic Mr. Fox, the hunted and haunted animals that have been driven from their homes by the farmers, rejoice in their sheer survival. In Where The Wild Things Are — part animation, part magical puppetry — Max leaves the sad, haunted beasts with whom he has built and destroyed habitats and submits to the strong pull of the oedipal home. But along the way to these “happy” endings, bad things happen to good animals/monsters/children and failure nestles in every dusty corner reminding the child viewer that this too is what it means to live in a world created by mean, petty, greedy and violent adults.
To live is to fail, to bungle, to disappoint and ultimately to die; and rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace of the absurd, the silly and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.
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