Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Introduction to Transformation: Literature (Pt 1)


"I don't want the world to see me, because I don't think that they'd understand.
When everything is made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am"

The Goo Goo Dolls, Iris

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To be continued...
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In this post I continue my investigation of thought and thinkers that may contribute to a Queer Materialism. As in the previous post, these items will be revisited and elaborated upon more extensively in subsequent work. Here I aim to servery literary thinkers that can offer useful insights into the discussion of the Holey Paradox of Transforming Things. For ease of reading / writing in dealing with an extensive number of thinkers, this post has been split into "Verso" and "Recto" sides. 

“The book touched me.”
" 'Show me where?’ inquired the attorney, turning aggression into empathy.”

According to the same simplistic dualism of subject and object, this is metaphorical in a derogatory and not tangible, paradoxical sense. The image of a hand reaching out and rubbing against your arm may be summoned up, or any number of similar scenes. But skin to skin is just one set of things that can touch. Mouths and air and ear-drums touch. Hands and type-writers and paper and light and eyes touch. Perhaps one day brains and electro-transmitters and brains may touch. In any case, even if we are speaking of "touching" the mind, we are talking about the brain/body which is a very complex sensory organ; a community of actors/sensors so complex things live in there: memories, stories, dreams, heroes, lovers, hormones, neurons, words, us.

"Is this real, or has this been happening inside my head?"
"Of course it is happening inside your head...should that mean that it is not real?"
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

At this juncture I would add to the Holey Paradox of Transforming Things that... the holes in language which admit the impotence of our powers to  become-language, become-read, is a saving realization which in some ways is based on the impotence of being to be colonized by any single motion. There is simply too much going on for our experiences, our rational structures, our words to capture, even within the play of language as a material thing itself. The word (logos) is not a totality but a thing becoming it-self as it becomes an-other. In that way, the hole is more like the window into which we glimpse the Other-world at play within / across the familiar. There is a tradition of viewing things being "taken" away into this world, often never to return, leading onward to an unattainable desire and lack. Alongside this reading we find that things go into the holes of our structured world, often return (if we can recognize them) but transformed. In fact, it is transformation that is a source of this "differance," this "dis-appearing" & this un-readability. 

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I. Transforming Word-robes: 
Why Changing Makes the Differance

Jacques Derrida and Sir Orfeo: Key Concepts

  • Differance: and Metonymy
  • Transformation:  and Metaphor

If structuralism sought to build a discernible frame-work for language, post-structuralism/deconstruction developed from the realization that this structure was built not only on a shifting beach but with pillars of sand. Every-thing is language according to Jacques Derrida and language itself is a (w)hole. Specifically "all there is is differance," the absence of things, which are ever-"deferred" by the constant re-placement of signs/things for one another, a game of signification that gestures to every-thing else so that any positive existence of things is either ineffable or non-existent. There is no-thing at the beginning, the present, or the end, on the play of differance that enacts the thing, the question, the questioner and time it-self. 

We see this game of re-placement going on in Sir Orfeo, as in the Seafarer and a number of other Medieval poems, in which things are listed as present, only to then admit that they have been replaced by an-other thing. In Orfeo's case he exchanged his kingdom for the forest and then the reverse upon his return. This in fact appears as one of the lessons the queen learns about the other-world into which she is called. If she resists being dis-appeared, re-placed, differed, then she will experience great suffering but because she submits to the seeming inevitability of the game, she is able to ride through the re-placements unharmed. Likewise, Sir Orfeo's pursuit of her performs the desire for an end of differance in which the thing in itself can be held and kept (an act which would ultimately end the life / transformation of the thing desired).

The contest with Derrida comes if we do not accept that (1) things that appear in the place of other things cannot co-exist but rather that multiplicities co-inside one another instead of re-placing, i.e. they trans--across/between/with--forms and (2) that given this positive existence of things that they may be differed elsewhere but trans--change/become--forms. By affirming this positive presence / coexistence / coincidence, then "differance" is not ONLY metonymic but ALSO metaphoric. That is to say that queer materialism affirms that with the performative play of metonymic re-placement of haecceities, there is in addition the quality that "this thing is this AND this" and adds that "this becomes that," via metaphor and trans-formation.

While the Queen appears carried away in the metonymy of re-placement, Sir Orfeo trans-forms performatively/materially when he moves from kingdom to forest and back again. Witnesses note how he has become-like his environment, to the point that he is no longer recognizable as him-self. It appears to others that a re-placement has occurred when in fact we see as much of a trans-formation. Likewise there is much in his experience that is not put into words, either during his ten-year stay in the forest (outside the realm of human writing) and the ineffable glance exchanged between him and his Queen when they meet again. We must also acknowledge our impotence, or rather, the impotence of language to colonize and trans-scribe all things; that it is this impotence of language that may be its saving grace as it allows for things to continue to queerly slip, change, hold fast, swerve, play and live; and ultimately, to speak—from this position as hole.

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II. Holes in the Fabric of Narrative: 
And the Narrator

Arthur Frank and Margery Kempe: Key Concepts
  • Inarticulate Bodies
  • Chaos/Quest Narratives: Immediacy and Mediation

While Derrida begins with language abstractly and then meditates on materiality, only to discern from his dialectic tendencies a kind of post-structuralist nihilism on holes (still distinct from Lacan's/Zizek's), Arthur Frank approaches speech from the perspective of "the holes" in material experience. Frank argues that \ “the body [as object] is not mute, but it is inarticulate; it does not use speech but it begets it...the challenge is to hear. Hearing is difficult not only because listeners have trouble facing what is being said as a possibility or a reality in their own lives. Hearing is also difficult because… they are also told on the edge of speech. Ultimately…it is told in the silences that speech cannot penetrate or illuminate.”

From this theory, Frank develops the concept of "Chaos Narratives" which he uses to investigate illness but could equally apply to the disorientation of queerness and other bodily experiences. Frank writes that “Events are told as the storyteller experiences life: without sequence and discernible [straight / metonymic] causality... they lack any of coherence sequence is an initial reasons why chaos stories are hard to hear; the teller is not understood as telling a ‘proper’ story...more significantly the teller is not understood as living a ‘proper’ life.”

For those who have read the Booke of Margery Kempe, this very well appears to be an apt description of not only her narrative but her life; certainly she records that was told so by many of her contemporaries. Whether we accept the hypothesis I offered earlier that Kempe suffered from Manic Depression or Schizophrenia, or that she had some other (possible mystic) condition, her writing certainly reflects a mind that cannot articulate or perform herself according to convention. At times she seems to follow norms, other times she takes them to extremes or chooses ones deemed inappropriate for her, while many times she performs multiple things that appear to enact many contradictory things at once and many that cannot be put into words; in part an explanation for her repetition of events. It is often said that trauma simultaneously disturbs the organization of memory thus drawing the person to repeat the act of their traumatization in various ways, so too Kempe repeatedly enacts and records her own queer disorientation.

As queerness cannot define an identity, queer things can never exist fully in language and this refusal to be read that preserves the queer "life" of things, that which trans-forms it. It is this chaos / disorientation which is an act of becoming intimate that language as differance would act to separate. It is practically impossible for someone to speech from the position of Chaos for as Frank writes “consciousness has given up its struggle for sovereignty over its own experience. When such a struggle can be told, then there is some distance from the chaos; some part of the teller has emerged…a true chaos story cannot be told. The voice that might express the deepest chaos is subsumed in interruptions, interrupting itself as it seeks to tell.” This too holds for Kempe who not only falls into repeated inarticulate/ineffable fits but throughout the narrative requires the hand of a clergyman to write her story for her (in part because despite certain capabilities, and perhaps because of others, she never learned to read and write).

Frank then proposes “the Quest narrative” in which the person “meets illness head on; they accept the illness and they use it.” This model of living provides her with not only a sense of meaning but a reason for continuing to live, or even to die; she has reason to desire being herself; what Frank calls the “boon” of illness and narrative. “This boon” he writes “is the body’s ability to understand itself reflectively as a communicative body: to be associated with itself, open to contingency, didactic towards other, and desiring for itself in relation to others.” That is to say, the writer/performer admits, like the reader that they do not control/know/make the story themselves but are with them in the ecology of performing and becoming. Ultimately this may be a triumph of Kempe's life, that is was recorded and that despite her frustrations and violent opposition, she continually performed her-self publicly, even if and when she could not be understood. Kempe exemplifies that the queer story is in part the admission that one cannot be fully expressed.

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III. Disorienting Dance-Shoes : 
When You Go from Here to Queer

Sara Ahmed and Thomas Coryate: Key Concepts:
  • Queer Objects of Orientations
  • Becoming-Lost/Disoriented

As in the Chaos narrative, it is often difficult for Queer/Transforming Things to tell their story because it-they are constantly changing/on the move. While modern technology makes this feat easier, it is still very difficult for those on the go to stop and record the events of their lives. None the less, for the Queer Traveler, such as Thomas Coryate, the performance of their lives nonetheless is what sustains it. His travels/narrative letters are as much a result of as the generator of his becoming-queer/disorientation. 

Trekking somewhat inexplicably from Jerusalem to India, Coryate attests that his long journey afoot was motivated out of a desire (1) to see the Great Mugal, (2) to Ride and Elephant and (3) to see/touch the Grave of the King of Corners. Despite these particulars however, Coryate is addicted to detours (if in fact his whole trip could not be characterized as such) and his (objects of) orientations swerve as much as he does. 

Sara Ahmed, in Queer Phenomenology, argues that queer and queering bodies  may manifest out of “an orientation toward what slips" and that some bodies become “directed by losing our sense of this direction.” Effectively  a certain rhythm of non-residence, of motion, can feel like a home, so that “being lost can in its turns become a familiar feeling.” The way in which this becomes maintained as the status of "non-residence", by undermining this familiarity and, as Ahmed writes, to “overcome the disorientation of the queer moment but instead inhabit the intensity of its moment." Among Coryate's letters, it is evident that he rejoices in taking things as they come, being unsure about his present, his future, who he is and when he might return. He records with pleasure the multiplicity of professions/titles he can add to his name and that when faced with officials from his home in England, that he appeared both a sort of disgrace from home and foreigner abroad to them; and who he likewise is able to maneuver around through his flexibility with language and his health among diverse diets.

Coryate celebrates throughout his writing that he was born in "Oddecome" and that as a result he was an "Odde" man. Thus as Ahmed writes “Disorientation might begin with the strangeness of familiar objects.” Feeling that he is as much at home abroad, in his performing the queer / wandering / transforming qualities of his home, he demonstrates how one can identify as self and as other simultaneously. His letters speak to multiple audience, as he does through his theatrics public addresses, his clothing and his very presence abroad as he bumps (literally) into diverse things.

Certainly his book he rejoices in as part of himself and is elated to find that just as he traveled bodily to India, so too did a copy of his writing. He requests a drawing be made of him on the elephant which he rides, in a way demonstrating how he becomes-familiar with the animal as he performs their mutual strangeness. In this way “bodies acquire the very shape of such direction” and changes also what we/he defines as the perimeters of that body. In that way, desire, disorientation and non-residence lead to dancing onward between boundaries, insides and outsides, as well as bodies can create something like a queer identity. Likewise, it is through this constant exchange the queer body serves a kind of moving home. “Becoming part of a space where one has expanded one’s body saturating the space with bodily matter” Ahmed adds, defining “home as overflowing and flowing over.”

The performativity of matter, the incorporation of transformation, the dance of queerness all serve to tell a material story of identity which is as "sticky," as Ahmed writes, as it is in the motion of disorientation. Thus while readable in some dimensions, the queer body-as-story is ever living up to Deleuze and Guattari's imperative: "Run lines, never plot a point! Speed turns a point into a line!"

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IV. Clashing : the Paradox of Orthodox Attire

William Blake and GK Chesterton: Key Concepts
  • The Marriage of Heaven and Hell : The Tearful Revolution of Paradoxes
  • The Ethics of Elfland : The Playful Adventure of Paradoxes

Arising out of the dynamics of queer and trans "identities" is a strong anxiety of performing even these identities, these forms, because the acknowledged impossibility of fully becoming-language. In a sense, to assert a self is to deny an-other-self. Thus to approach language / literature / performance with a sense of sincerity is to hold the position that what will be an enacted will be a fiction. It has been said of literature that in this way it is the most sincere, insofar as it recognizes in its metaphor, it screams "YES" and whispers "no." This performing-self then becomes a game which one cannot help but play but which we cannot possibly take too seriously. As readers of performance, we must also acknowledge the contradictions and the unreadable queerness that brings the texts into existence as well as the light touch of mind to allow it to trans-form again and vanish beyond the haecceity we had loved.

"Without Contraries is no progression" writes William Blake in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, articulating this queer anxiety. "Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence." As in our theological discussion in the last entry, Blake recognizes that "Eternity is in love with the productions of time" Blake continues in his Proverbs of Hell. "Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. But the Prolific would cease to be Prolific unless the Devourer as a sea recieved the excess of his delights." All things in one and one thing in all for Blake is then sustained through existence based on this anxious queerness.

In that sense we cannot escape this tension and neither should we concern ourselves too much with it as it works through us without a need for our constant active participation. In fact, this playful adventure of identity within the constant confines of momentary singularity of form / language / material existence as such is the position of GK Chesterton in Orthodoxy, or perhaps more accurately titled by one of the books chapters "the Romance of Orthodoxy."

Chesterton, in Orthodoxy, for the most part is not concerned with debating specific "laws" or forms as such but rather the required game and even ironic joke of "Law." In comparison to "natural law" which is a series of doctrines which takes a brief description of what appears normative for what then must  be  prescriptively adhered to, the "Law" of nature is the very fact of  things  existence as such. A thing can trans-form it, but cannot undo it. Forms can be queered, but not annihilated. That in one way and one instance a thing must exist in one haecceity and not another is the required status for that thing to exist at all, but need not be regarded as the "En Sum" of its existence.

While a stalwart rationalist, Chesterton argues that it is the joy of wonder, of not knowing the totality of things, or rather knowing that at some point / way the "Law"  cannot be justified by even its own sense of "Law" that it exists out of a unlawful proposal, or a playful self-reference (as there is no law without it). Out of this "Ethic of Elfland" by which we admit the rational need for the irrational order, and the surprise that what exists as such exists at all as such, we will find all our rational deductions and  poetic revolutions ironically affirmed. We play in Elfland out of the rule that somethings must be, for the moment tentatively allowed to become set, if only for the time of game before they are transformed: "To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax."

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[Warnings on Transforming as Change: from 'the Suicide of Thought']

"It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote -

“Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.”

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into. The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought about the past or future simply impossible.

Every act of will is an act of self limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act. Every act is an irrevocable selection exclusion.

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Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Introduction to Transformation: Theology


“Now, ‘I am’ become …” 
J Robert Oppenheim, 
Paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita

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A man holds up his hands to form a circle. Inside it a wafer of unleavened bread occupies the hole. But is it empty? It depends on how we view it. The Parallax View shows two different registers: being and non-being, a sign and a dead object. Dialectics tells us that at the heart of this there is nothing. Dualism tells us that at the heart of this there is something we do not see and what we see is a lie, or worse. But the Trinitarian View of Incarnation shows one thing, and everything: being and becoming, living objects; a Queer Thing; a quasi-object; an ecological body. It is present and with us. in fact, we are all present with each thing: one in substance but ever transforming... ever transfigured.

In this post I continue my investigation of thought and thinkers that may contribute to a Queer Materialism. As in the previous post, these items will be revisited and elaborated upon more extensively in subsequent work. Here I aim to servey theological thinkers that can offer useful insights into the discussion of the Holy Paradox of Transforming Things. 

I have focused primarily on Catholic theologians in part because of that traditions extensive body of potential queer-materialists, but also out the accident of my familiarity. As in the prior post I focused mainly on Philosophers from Europe, the concentration on a primarily Catholic theology is not at this point intended to either characterize a body or group of thinkers as a whole or to make an inter-faith argument. The comparison here is primarily between dialectic/dualism conceptions of materiality and the Trinitarian /paradoxical view.

At this juncture I would add to the Holey Paradox of Transforming Things that... the Hole which is found at the juncture of extremes, into which hybrids appear to coexist and trans-form as paradox, is from the Trinitarian perspective the Incarnate All-in-One and One-in-All Divine Person/Thing (Panentheism). Catholicism (and its kin) in fact holds in its version of Monotheism that articulates a God which is both Queer and, in a sense, Material. 

In its status as "the Creative" first principle (articulated traditionally as "the Father") it is the singular source OF which all material eternally comes into being (that is, from the position of eternity there cannot be a before and an after so it must be a singular, constant action of the present).

In its status as "the Sanctifying" second principle (articulated as "the Son" or "our Brother") it is that which BECOMES material eternally (as the ACTIVE mode of being which articulate the ACTUALITY and HACCEITY of things), but through a TRANS-FORMATION which exists through, across, between finite moments (it is eternally born, killed and reborn from the perspective "in the middle" of the material universe). 

In its status as "the Mediating" principle (articulate as "the Spirit") it is that which serves as the ACT of STATUS which paradoxically relates/trans-forms the first and second principle together and with the second principle all things to these principles and to each other. 

It is the Dualistic perspective that in some senses the Trinity is either not-distinct (it/all are one, even it appears distinct), all are three fully alienated beings (thus the role of mediator is complicated), or that they are three sequential forms of being which never existed at once (as is the case with Zizek). Likewise these divided/ sequential statuses hold true within materiality, which is itself often regarded as relatively illusory or inconsequential to non-material dimension of the divided status of being. These positions however not only halt discourse but essentially dismiss the universe (at least in the large part) if not condemns it. If we ARE to pursue materialism in any form, we require then to acknowledge a paradox. 

If we are in fact to TOUCH any-thing, we require a sense of mediation that we are always -already touching. In the "Parralax View", intercourse is impossible and ever desired. In the "Trinitarian View," we participate in an orgy which has been going on for eternity.

If the Eucharist is a thing and a sign, then God is seperate, as we are from everything else. If the Eucharist is a paradoxic all-in-one (instantaneously and over-time through the ecology of digestion), then we not only touch the face of God, but it becomes us as we become it as we become together. It is an intercourse of multiplicities, a thousand tiny phalluses and a thousand tiny vaginas.



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Taking the Father and Son At One Time:
When Monotheism Becomes Polyamorous

Paul of Tarsus and Thomas Aquinas: Key Concepts
·         The Trinitarian-View: Coincidence of Substance, Transformation  & Mediation
·         “This is my body”: Re-presentation versus Sign-ification
·         Performative Spirit: Prayer as the Act of Overcoming Ontology


Paul said that he is “all things to all people” which is both a performative and a central meta-physical statement of queer materialism.This can be approached from the perspective that Paul had his moments speaking in conflicting mind-sets and thus enacting the performative spirit he preached, and as an act of overthrowing certain identity/ ontological categories as such.

“There is no Jew or Greek, there is neither bond not free, there is neither male nor female. All are one in [the trans-cendent ecological body].”

The Trinitarian view, the panentheistic view defines “the self” as essentially a "community” and a community is only possibly through internal self-difference. Rather than a sort of vitalism or pantheism which would lump all things together into one, for saying a = b and c = b is then to say that "a" and "c" do not actually exist distinctly. Pan (all) en (in) theism (god) or the Trinitarian view however stations the multiple as together and inseparable, but also distinct in hacceity and their motions. They are “in” each other, identified to one another by its own act of mediation, but not identical.

This is the sense of “this is my body” in the Pauline and subsequently Thomistic understanding of the Eucharist. From the meta-physical to the empirically physical, things trans-form across all other things to form a perpetual becoming throughout time, space and other bodies. This is likewise the sense of why food is a logical means of, not "expressing" so much as "highlighting," the perpetual status of things. That which was is and will be, between bodies (either through digestion or other ecological methods of assemblage). “This is my body” is a re-presentation of this ecological self which is new with every momentary trans-formation into diversity. It is performative, but it is not a sign-ification, because the expression is not differentiated from the material status. If it is a language (logos) it is a material one.

“Wherefore henceforth, we know no man according to the flesh. And if we have known Christ according to the flesh: but now we know him so no longer. If then any be in [the ecological body] a new creature, the old things are passed away. Behold all things are made new” ~ Paul of Tarsus

Being, is queerly material, as it cannot sit still but constantly over-throws the attempts to vacuum seal it shut or hold it down. That which ceases to change is dead and thus apparent secret of “the living bread” even from an empirically material level, nothing dies. At the same time, every-thing constantly dies to itself as it becomes itself/other. Thus the Trinitarian view is one of re-birth and re-presentation. Resurrection, but one that admits that yes… you die, constantly in big and little ways.

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Quivering Bodies: 
"When He Dwelt in Her, in his Manhood"

Margery Kempe: Key Concepts:
·         Queering Incarnate Visions: Schizophrenia and  “Her Bodily Wits”
·         Queer Visions of Incarnation: Converted Beyond Language
·         Performative Spirit:  Prayer as the Act of Overcoming Ontology

As the incarnation and utmost presence of the first principles of the Trinitarian view are paradoxically fully present as they are distinct with matter, then bodily experience is not low or secondary, but the only means of experiencing these motions/persons. All things exist and exist to one another through and as mediation.

Taking one such person who performs this Trinitarian view, Margery Kempe, we see that in her account of her life’s experiences she accounts of touching, intimately, visions of Jesus of Nazareth, the “risen” or “trans-figured” form of this body, as well as numerous other saints or figures from biblical stories. She writes that they were present in her body, tested her bodily wits and brought about intense feelings of both joy and pain (jouissance) which debilitated her at times. Were these experiences in her head? Yes, but her “head” is in her body and this certainly appears to be a network physical experience.

Due to the specific and sudden contrasting emotional extremes, the difficulty with linear self-narration or thought, the presence and blurring together of sensory experiences and personalities which Kempe writes as her daily, and particularly spiritual, life it is likely that she may have had the biological condition now clinicalized as “manic depression” or “schizophrenia.” This however does not preclude her from “true” experiences of reality but qualifies it and trans-lates it across certain expressively queer, qualities of experience and materiality.

Kempe’s shifting visions of empirically present material things and things which were present in a less generally observable manner demonstrate how things trans-form across places/times/things. In this way, Kempe experiences the queerness, the disorientation, the mediation and the trans-formation of things more acutely then the normative Christian (she would then, in fact, be in some senses more the ideal “norm” than the "normative.”)

Likewise, Kempe’s lived performance of this queer spiritual life leads her to trans-cend the identities of virgin-mother-nun-priest and female-male through the clothing and other things she made a part of the performance of her body. It is this which often lands her in trouble and gets her out of it again. She is not moving from one identity into another, but not identifying or limiting any single performance of identity to one. She becomes all the more disoriented/queer as she performs the spirit of materiality in a way which overthrows ontology, at the call of the queer theological motions/persons she orients herself towards.



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Getting Dirty with Things: In Diverse Forms

Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul: Key Concepts:
·         Vincent: The Dignity of People As Things
·         Francis: The Dignity of Things As People
·         Performative Spirit:
       o   Prayer as the Act of Overcoming Ontology AND Liberating the Ecology


Considering the implications of this Trinitarian-view of queer materiality, there arises various ethical compulsions which Francis of Assisi and Vincent de Paul both articulate/perform through their spiritual lives.

“It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them." ~ Vincent de Paul

For Vincent, while he recognized the particular sacrament of his faith tradition, he recognized the sacramentality of every person who participates and is an enactment of the creative-sanctifying-mediating ecology of an all-in-one/one-in-all body. But this means more than service with the marginalized but a re-identification and solidarity with them. We are together with them as part of this body/ecology and what we have is there’s and vice-versa. The dignity we ascribe to them, or lack of it, we likewise ascribe to our-selves. To recognize that others have been marginalized and oppressed by actions (collective and individual) must also mean recognizing our own imprisonment. To give to others is to recognize that we have held onto and halted the ecology of things in a damaging/violent manner, by no recognizing the co-self of other-things/persons and thus co-ownership. A gift is as much a gift, as an apology/thanks for taking.

“To 
take away
 the
 goods of 
another is
 nothing, 
in
 comparison
 to 
taking away
 their
 dignity
 and 
honor.

In 
taking 
away 
our
 neighbors 
dignity 
and 
honor, they 
lose 
all.” ~ Vincent de Paul


Taken to its logical conclusion, it is not that people become recognized as “things” and "objectified" in a derogatory sense, but that their dignity, as material things is better recognized with our own. This is why Vincent focuses on material needs of those he serves. A person is a material thing, and that is imperative to serve and dignify.

“If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.” ~Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi approaches this issue from the other way around and focuses on the dignity of persons in things, things as persons. He recognizes the co-status of things as part of an all-in-one, one-in-all by which material things exist paradoxically as one co-incidental body and as ecology. Francis translates this insight into referring to things as “brother” or “sister” sun, moon, earth, air, fire, death etc.

“Above all the grace and the gifts that Christ gives to his beloved is that of overcoming self.” ~Francis of Assisi

The Franciscan method of performing the spirit is then is to regard the quasi-object and ecological status of things with the imperative metaphysical value that the first principles are present in them through the creative (constantly bringing into existence), the sanctifying (constantly transforming/becoming self) and the mediating (constantly transforming/becoming other). As a result, while the performance of the self becomes a contingent part of our queer materiality, like Judith Butler’s conception of drag, it constantly queers, undermines and overthrows this identity into not only new forms but with a co-existence/co-incidence with other-selves.



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Sex with Chains: 
To Let You Know You Are Alive


Karl Marx and Leonardo Boff: Key Concepts
·         Labor: The Moving Spirit of Living Things
·         Liberation: The Moving Ecology of Living Things
·         Performative Spirit:
       o   Prayer as the Act of Overcoming Ontology AND Liberating the Ecology


In Karl Marx's statement that “Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand” we see an affirmation of the Trinitarian View of self as relationship.

“Men's ideas are the most direct emanations of their material state” writes Karl Marx, attempting to establish a sense of the immediate mediation inherent in materialism. Likewise when Marx writes that “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” and that “Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself,” we see how he abhorred the idea that ideas/language/psyche would or could take prominence over the materiality that not only bring them into being, but are in fact that which is the language through cerebral performance.

If we view objects as dead, or people as dead, that is to see we fail to see how as objects they are also subjects. Our quasi-objects, living bread and incarnation returns. In an ecology where existential nullity is impossible, death is the enemy to life in perspective primarily, along with the stagnation, violence and imprisonment it forms for the things it captures in its gaze.

“For the bureaucrat, the world is a mere object to be manipulated by him” writes Marx. “In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.” Thus in order to live, we must ascribe life to the world. To be person we must allow for our own contingency of the rest of the persons that participate in us and which we participate in.

Leonardo Boff and other Liberation Theologians certainly affirm the place of Marx’s thoughts within the performance and perspective of spiritual life. Anecdotally it is said that when asked to stop calling the Vatican “bourgeois”, Rev. Leonardo Boff, responded “you cannot possibly make that request from St. Peter’s while I am here living in the ghettos of Central America.”

In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, Boff urges the need for ecological changes of perspective and action to find the locations in which we misunderstand or underestimate our own materiality. Boff combines elements of actor-network theory, eco-feminism, the quantum-physics and counter-psychoanalytic understandings of the mind simular to that which Deleuze and Guattari utilize, as well as Marxism, biology, a multitude of scriptures and Catholic theology to demonstrate that within one substance there are multiplicities of trans-formings and that it is through understanding this all-in-one/ one-in-all status that the ecology can be brought into more life-giving forms (that which is pit against stagnation and violence) and that it is not the body that is the opposite of the spirit (which he coincides) but the spirit and death. That is to say, the attempt for positivist stasis or for nihilistic violence/despair. For him Liberation comes through both celebrating/affirming and overcoming the "hacceity" of the self/selves. By affirming transformation.

Leonardo Boff also explores beyond the Sacrament of the Eucharist into the sacramentality of all things, the queer, life of all things. Each chapter begins with a meditation ranging from “My Father’s Cigarette Butt as Sacrament” to Tin Cans. Materiality is then performative, as it is relational, as it is sacramental, as it is transformative and as it is queer. Since the ecology is constant shifting, transforming and overthrowing attempts to ontologize it or pin it down, likewise social identities form another constraint to be liberated.

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Transforming Intercourse: 
When One Thing Just Leads to An-other-Self

Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank: Key Concepts:
·         The Trinity: Sequence or Coincidence
·         The Living Bread : Dialectic or Paradox
·         Performative Spirit:
      o   Prayer as the Act of Overcoming Ontology AND Liberating the Ecology


Slavoj Zizek, via Hegel and Lacan, proposes an original nothingness that bursts into being, like consciousnesses from unconsciousness, ultimately to return into nothingness (creating one model of becoming from nothing to being to nothing and onward.) This model however keeps consciousness and being forever sealed off and alienated from not only others but itself (object v. subject).

Milbank however reads dialectics as the extreme extension of the traditional of dualism which arouse out of the mutual development of thought in the "enlightenment" and "reformation" which he, like Bruno Latour, view as the mislead division of hybrid substances into separate qualities that are then read as impossibly coincident, and thus bringing about nihilist conclusions on the impossibility of being.

Milbank's alternative proposes an essential "paradox" as the constitutive essence-form of being and not-being, finite-infinite, and other impossible coincidences that non the less exist, and proposing a positivist "between" that grounds finite together with the infinite, that all is mediated/mediation. All is still "becoming" but in a mode in which "being" itself perpetually "becomes" both in creating "more" from and of itself, which is a single eternal motion, that in-time occurs through what I call "trans-formation".

It is according to this model that Milbank reads the story of genesis as a theoretical (although not literal) treatise on being/life:

"Eve from Adam's side was not a sign of secondary inequality but, rather, mirrored the equal birth of the Son from the Father in the Trinity" ~ John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ

We need to better understand the words "Adam" and "Eve" to make sense of this:

"Man and woman are both under label Adam, and their drive to group up lodge in Eve. The name Eve denotes the collectivity that is so common to the behavior of living things. We should never forget that multicellular creatures, even humans, are in fact a highly efficient colony of single cellular creatures." (via: http://www.abarim-publications.com/Meaning/Eve.html)

Milbank was elaborating on his Trinitarian/paradoxical understanding of a reality which is based on a singular ESSENCE which as being itself inherently is draw to create, which means it is inherently drawn to manifest DIFFERENCE (if only between the numerical status of 1st and the 2nd, but more than only this) by continually adding "more" of itself to itself from itself.

This is what he means by the Father, or that which is the object which is being itself without deriving being from some other substance, is himself (or itself) BEING and as such BECOMES more/difference out of the inherent character of his/its existence. The Son is the (theologically perfect and manifestly historical) articulation of that God-becoming more-God. They are then one in substance, different in form.

Thus, "Adam" which is the mythical stand in for the human, is drawn inherently to produce "Eve" which is community; a mutually constitutive network/life-form which is also UNIFIED IN SUBSTANCE but UTTERLY DIFFERENT IN FORM.

We can then see a Trinitarian theological basis for the proliferation of difference between things through as the engines of "being" continued to sort through a multiplicity of "becomings". There is an underlying productive queerness which drives towards "more" and "different." The queer which always undermines totality is a fundamental element of being insofar as to suppose being/form to reach a final total of existence and a final form is to understand contrary to the inherent qualities of being.