Results tagged “temporality”

Though I've been tracking temporailty for a whole semester now, I don't know that I have a comprehensive knowledge of temporality theory, or theory that is concerned with time. Is that my own fault? Have I personally failed to understand or work through and alongside temporality? I don't think so. My experience in tracking this term, though far different from my experience with tracking terms in the past, has certainly been informing my experiences with queer theory and queering desire. The avenues through which I chose to approach the term could have been more direct, but I tend to think of and engage with various texts beside one another, which is why tracking terms through vastly differing, perhaps even contradictory, texts has been so beneficial.

I divided my three annotated bibliographies into three categories/themes: images, bodies, and failures -- which was pretty contrived, but my intention was to think through and alongside temporality not according to various theoretical approaches, but according to three indirectly connected problems of time -- problems that theory must, and has, inevitably, encountered and struggled with.

The question that presents itself to me now is, how can I (or we) understand temporality beside or through queering desire? I've been thinking of this question in terms of what they each do (and undo) when positioned beside one another: we've read and discussed a few pertinent texts in this class that point to a number of ways we can understand this relationship, namely, Lee Edelman's No Future, Muñoz's Cruising Utopia, and I would suggest even Kincaid and Stockton as staging problems in theorizing temporality alongside queerness and desire. Although I have certainly not exhausted my queering of temporality, I would suggest at this moment in my relationship to queer temporalities that queer temporality not only problematizes linear conceptions and applications of time, but undoes and rewrites inscriptions of life time -- such as "reproductive futurity" -- that serve to demarcate what it means for a life to have value, for a life to be livable.

Confession: I love Twitter. I've blogged before, but until this semester I had never tweeted, and I definitely see its appeal. Both the blog cluster and diablog assignments really allowed me to see twitter's productive potential -- for the former, I tweeted as I read through the various blogs and it helped me catalog my readings of the cluster, which was helpful in keeping track of where I was reading and where I had followed a link and so forth. My diablog tweeting with Remy was a really great way for me to think through the reading and begin an initial conversation from which to organize my thoughts and our presentation. In general, though, Tweeting was also a really easy and casual way to share information and links with classmates or pose questions about the readings, etc., and to engage with what other people shared. I also follow a lot of newspaper/art forum/cinema publications as well as various celebrity figures, and I find Twitter to be a very convenient way to access information.

From what I've observed from many of our tweets, blog posts, and blogging dialogues, our class as a whole has been productively engaged in various queering practices, not least of which is the queering of academic engagement -- for instance, this (accidental?) conversation about Ahmed (did you guys plan this?):

In academic settings, we, as classmates, do not utilize one another as resources nearly as often as we should, which is one reason why teaching and learning with blogs has proved itself rather subversive. I was definitely most engaged in the class and the theory at hand when I had also been actively engaged on twitter and on the blog -- and I felt most affected by the readings when I was paying attention to others' dialogue blogs and live tweets. If I were to give any advice to future blogging students, I would suggest to really experiment with how the blog allows us to engage theory with and beside one another.

Undoing "linear historicism."

She picks up the notebook that lies on the small table beside his bed. It is the book he brought with him through the fire -- a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has added to, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations -- so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus. (16)

I am a person who if left alone in someone's home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. (18)

"Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion." GLQ 13:2-3 (2007): 177-195. Print.

(Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, Nguyen Tan Hoang)

Opening this conversation with a series of questions presupposing a "turn toward time" already establishes as our central concern not the movement toward time but of it: the motionless "movement" of historical procession obedient to origins, intention, and ends whose authority rules over all. And so we have the familiar demand for narrative accountings of "how and why," for self-conscious avowals of motivation, for strategic weighings of what's opened up in relation to what's shut down. Implicit throughout are two assumptions: time is historical by "nature" and history demands to be understood in historicizing terms. But what if time's collapse into history is symptomatic, not historical? What if framing this conversation in terms of a "turn toward time" preemptively reinforces the consensus that bathes the petrified river of history in the illusion of constant fluency?

Summarizing roundtable discussions is always a bit tricky, since there may not be a central thesis, but multiple theses and points of disagreement. At times, the participants in this discussion offer very differing ideas and understandings of the meaning of "temporality," and the importance of the "rubric of temporality" (177). I found the beginning of this discussion most interesting, wherein the participants address concerns over "history," primarily "linear historicism" (Dinshaw, 178), which are not merely concerns with time "heteronormatively" conceived, but also History as a telling of linear progressions of time -- histories and historicism as a cataloging of events, etc., which follow a specific, necessarily, and somewhat strategically, exclusionary narrative.
For the most part, however, this roundtable discussion was less than impressive. Maybe I'm just misreading many of the participants, but a few of them seem a bit too eager to advertise themselves and their theoretical accomplishments, which gets very distracting at times since they're really just supposed to be engaging in direct conversation with one another. I don't have a problem with the discussion being too theoretical, they are, after all, having a theoretical discussion, but the discussion starts on the ground and ends up somewhere else entirely; and I'm not really sure where that place is -- sometimes it's better not to know just how hard a writer is working.

I've been interested in reading No Future for a while now, and so it's probably about time I finally got around to doing that, since I generally appreciate his position on temporality and conceptions of time -- and even though I do not always necessarily agree with him, his negativity and cynicism are very attractive. Walter Benjamin's essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History," came up in the roundtable discussion a couple of times, and I think that reading that piece would be beneficial to my tracking of temporality as well.

I came across this discussion in searching (via the UMN library page) for a concise collection of queer theories on temporality, since I was only familiar with a few theorists' engagements with the topic. I also was hoping to find some kind of encounter between Edelman, Halberstam, and Muñoz, and this seemed about close enough.

Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, vol. 1: Women, floods, bodies, history. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

As Theweleit says, the point of understanding fascism is not only "because it might 'return again'," but because it is already implicit in the daily relationships of men and women. Theweleit refuses to draw a line between the fantasies of the Freikorpsmen and the psychic ramblings of the "normal" man: and I think here of the man who feels a "normal" level of violence toward women (as in, "I'd like to fuck her to death") . . . the man who has a "normal" distaste for sticky, unseen "feminine functions" . . . the man who loves women, as "normal" men do, but sees a castrating horror in every expression of female anger . . . or that entirely normal, middle-class citizen who simply prefers that women be absent from the public life of work, decisions, war. Here Theweleit does not push, but he certainly leaves open the path from the "inhuman impulse" of fascism to the most banal sexism.

I have been kind of loving this book. First of all, the reactions that I get from people when carrying this around is very interesting, as the cover is somewhat provocatively designed, but just the title, "Male Fantasies," is powerfully seductive -- more people have casually asked about this book than have ever asked about any other book I've carried around before. A professor was recently commenting that if you bring Karl Marx's Capital onto an airplane, no one will bat an eye, but if you're planning to read Male Fantasies during your air travels, prepare to immediately become a "person of interest" -- and not in a fun way. One of the primary purposes of this is book is to refute all former theorizings of fascism -- Klaus Theweleit does not believe that fascism was "about" something, that there is some psychoanalytic explanation (Wilhelm Reich, anyone?), but that fascism was a result of men carrying out their fantasies, and fascists were simply doing whatever they wanted. Central to these fantasies is a deep-rooted hatred for and fear of women -- the first half of the book focuses on several Freikorps officers and their relationships to women, and the second half analyzes and builds a number of unusual arguments towards a theory of these men's fear of women's bodies and sexualities. What I really love about this book, though, is Theweleit's use of images -- illustrations, cartoons, advertisements, engravings, posters -- which create a very unorthodox commentary on the text, extending its temporal and spacial meaning and significance.

For further reading pertaining to this book, I'd be really interested in reading some feminist and queer readings of it -- Ehrenreich wrote the forward to the first volume, in which she provides a warning to feminist readers not to read it the way they may be tempted to read it: "Neither feminism nor antifascism will be well served by confounding fascist genocide with the daily injuries inflicted by men on women [which the above quoted excerpt may seem to imply] -- and I urge the feminist reader to resist the temptation to do so" (xv). I'm curious about how philosophers and historians deal with this book as well. Theweleit is often referred to as a "theorist," but if he is one, he's certainly a devious one. Jessica Benjamin co-writes the forward to the second volume, which I haven't gotten to yet, but hope to do so shortly.

I first heard of this book about a year ago when I was taking a Fascism and Film course. We read an excerpt of the second chapter of this volume, and I enjoyed it but had no idea what the hell I was reading. I don't think I really know of anything else like this, it's quite spectacular.

Brakhage, Stan, dir. "Eye Myth." By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume One. The Criterion Collection, 1967. DVD.

The first time I was shown this movie, I actually missed it. I turned away for a second -- well, 9 seconds at least -- and missed the whole thing. My bibliographies almost always include some type of engagement with a film, and so I was thinking about what film would properly fit the "theme" I had wanted to focus on for this series of sources and after considering (and then reconsidering) a number of other movies, Brakhage seemed the most suitable. Engaging with movies has become really important to me, since I'm so often frustrated with feminist and queer readings of movies -- I find many of them inappropriate and beside the point. Worst of all, they're far too irreverent, both to the film medium and, in few instances, to great filmmakers, taking liberties in manipulating film content to fit their narrative (like Halberstam's evaluation of Almodóvar's Talk to Her). Well, such unnecessary criticisms of most of Stan Brakhage's films would actually be impossible. There are no story-lines, no characters, no narratives, and no conceivable avenue through which to insert a theory. Most of Brakhage's movies are like the film above, a crude array of colors, shapes, brush strokes, and movement. I chose this particular film for its brevity. If you blink, you will miss it. The YouTube download of it that I found claims that it's 13 seconds long, but it's officially marked, by the Criterion Collection, as 9 seconds -- I'm not sure where those extra 4 seconds came from, but there they are (this clip also claims the film was made in 1972, but that's wrong as well)-- but, no matter, my inclusion of Brakhage in this series is simply because he provides no easy paths for interpretation or story-making, his stories either aren't there, or aren't interpretable, they're not even comprehensible. I can't find the source for this statement, but in an essay I read of his a long time ago he claims that his painted films (like the one above -- yeah, he actually painted directly onto the film, sometimes over images he shot with a camera (I think this is an instance of that) or pre-exposed) are experiments of sight, he wanted to capture what it was like to learn to see -- before any thing or any body had a connotation, or a meaning, or a history.

In relation to Brakhage's explanation of his more abstract movies, I recommend Marius von Senden's accounts of congenitally blind patients before and after corrective operations, Space and Sight. I also recommend every single film that Stan Brakhage ever made, especially Dog Star Man, Window Water Baby Moving (which I've seen about 10 times), The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, and Black Ice.

My first introduction to Stan Brakhage was through his movie, Window Water Baby Moving, a record of his wife giving birth to their first child, which contains a linear plot -- that was about five years ago, and I watched all of the short films featured on the first volume of the criterion anthology, but haven't seen any of the films on the second volume, which I think came out just last year. I've only seen these movies on DVD (and now on YouTube), which is incredibly unsuitable to their form, but I take whatever I can get. Whenever I think of Brakhage I'll probably always think of having this DVD out my entire second semester in art school, where they charged me overdue fees per disc, rather than per item -- absolutely worth it, though.

I am interested in further engagement with Judith Jack Halberstam's "What's That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives". In this essay, Halberstam discusses temporalities of people, particularly the differences in those temporalities experienced between queer communities and their heterosexual counterparts. In this way, Halberstam is referring to heterosexual temporalities as those developed to institutions of family, heterosexuality, reproduction, and kinship. Queer subcultures and "epistemology of youth" "disrupts conventional accounts of subculture, youth culture, adulthood, race, class, and maturity" (Halberstam). To live queerly can be to imagine futures "according to logics that lie outside of the conventional forward-moving narratives of birth, marriage, reproduction, and death". Halberstam sees this concept of queer also as detached from sexual identity exclusively, where by it can be defined "as an outcome of temporality, life scheduling, and eccentric economic practices" (Halberstam).

Because of my sexual orientation, the life I live is considered outside the heteronormal (though well within the homonormal). My life narrative and future does not (necessarily) depend or relate to institutions of the "traditional" family, which reinscribe patriarchy and capitalism through marriage and childbirth. Does this mean that I have more free time then "straight" people? Am I stuck in "youth"? Halberstam suggests that queer communities have exploded in presence over the last few decades, which forces us to redefine the binary of adolescence and adulthood, further problematizing the heteronormative. What would happen if we acknowledge "non-heterosexual, non-exclusively male, non-white and non-adolescent subcultural production in all its specificity"?

Existing in bodies existing in time.

"We are born in a physiological time, after a certain number of mitoses and at the closure of a genetic figure; but we are born, after 270 days, into an astronomical time of days and years. Thus begin our astronomical birthdays; but these again are not the time in which we mature and die. They would seem to be irrelevant, 'a man is as old as he feels.' 'But how old do you feel then?' 'Ach! 43 years!' The conditions of society go by astronomical time and they have done me in." --Paul Goodman, 'Five Years'

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Print.

"I contend that if queerness is to have any value whatsoever, it must be viewed as being visible only in the horizon." (11)

"Utopia can never be prescriptive and is always destined to fail." (173)

José Esteban Muñoz opens his book with the postulation that "queerness is not yet here," and thus, "we are not yet queer." The purpose of such an outré assertion being to skirt pragmatic gay and lesbian political devotions to the immediate present -- as "heterosexual time" has been conceived and propagated as prioritizing reproduction and capitalist conceptions of work time -- and instead to cruise ahead, as it were, towards a queerness that is "not-yet-here," but on the horizon. The idea of queer failure becomes somewhat central to Muñoz's argument -- for any outlook in which utopia is anticipated as a conceivable end is, simply speaking, naïve. This failure is not embarked upon as a goal, however, but is rather an inevitability of queer futurity. Muñoz conceives of this far off queerness by relying on images from the past -- specifically those of the Stonewall period -- in order to track not the possibilities of a queer utopian future, but the potentialities for one: "We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness's domain" (1).

It always was a shock entering the straight world of a car full of grim people sitting dumbly with suffering on their faces and in their bodies, and their minds in their prisons.

-- You Got to Burn to Shine; John Giorno (qtd. in Muñoz, 14)

The logic of my opening a series of sources concerned with bodies in time with Cruising Utopia may not be readily apparent. However, Muñoz's interest in and investigation of performance art, performativity and performed radical sex acts of the past, present, and towards the future support my decision to include the book under this heading. Further engagement with the text and the implications of these embodied acts and experiences of temporality and futurity may further inform the decision. The key point of conflict with this book, for me, was my limited knowledge of the social theory of Ernst Bloch -- although my scattered familiarity with the Frankfort school was vaguely helpful, familiarizing myself more thoroughly with Bloch's work, especially that concerning utopia, may provide me with a more satisfactory understanding of Muñoz's intentions. Lee Edelman's No Future would be another good text to become more familiar with for further engagement with Cruising Utopia.

This is a relatively new book from Muñoz, whose previous book, Disidentifications, I was only first introduced to last year in Queering Theory. I've been slowly reading through this book since September, developing mixed and alternating thoughts and relations to it. There were a couple of chapters that grabbed my attention immediately, namely "Ghosts of Public Sex," and "After Jack," the latter of which probably being my favorite chapter in the book, but there were a few chapters that left me a bit underwhelmed. I hope to continue spending time with the book as I have not completed it yet, and would probably better serve myself (and Muñoz) if I read it straight through, from cover to cover, rather than skipping around it as suits my own time and will.

Childs, Lucinda. Dance.1979. Music by Phillip Glass, lighting by Beverly Emmons, and a film by Sol LeWitt of portions of three of the five sections ("Dance #1," "Dance #3," and "Dance #4").

Dance demands a degree of service greater than any other permorming art, or sport. while the daily life of every dancer is a full-time struggle against fatigue, strain, natural physical limitations and those due to injuries (which are inevitable), dance itself is the enactment of an energy which must seem, in all respects, untrammeled, effortless, at every moment fully mastered. The dancer's performance smile is not so much a smile as a categorical denial of what he or she is actually experiencing -- for there is some discomfort, and often pain, in every major stint of performing.

-- Susan Sontag, "Dancer and the Dance"

I do not intend to apply critical or social theory to a work as pure as Dance, but merely to comment on its magnificence in rendering and defying conventions of time. Classical dance is controlled and propelled by precision -- the dancer's body is bound by time, every movement, every pain. Lucinda Childs' Dance, in its hypnotizing transposition of bodies from the past to the present, demonstrates a profoundly righteous use of the film medium. Master conceptual artist, Sol LeWitt, filmed Childs' dance in 1979, the film was then used as a projection onto a transparent scrim at the front of the stage during performances -- providing not merely a setting, but a literal transfiguration of the dance -- to create an alternate reality, a double-space, which, juxtaposed with live performance, establishes an intimate ambiance. Appearing as a shadow mimicking and following its three-dimensional counterpart, the projection over and above the performers makes the live dance alternately appear as a disembodied effect of the image: an illusion that there are no bodies, only ghosts. Ballet so often creates an illusive spiritual fluidity of movement seemingly incorporeal, but here the film projection amplifies the bodies' ethereal phantasm by posing the live dancer against a discarnate mirage of a past self reborn on film -- a temporally defiant spectacle.
(Sontag regards the film as "finally subordinate to the dance," a notion reinforced by Childs' recent re-production of Dance with a new company of dancers to perform beneath the 1979 film recording.)

I am anything but an authority on ballet or any other form of dance. A more thorough knowledge not only of Lucinda Childs and balletic minimalism, but of minimal art of the 70s in general may prove essential for further investigation into the temporal significance of the above discussed piece. I know Sol LeWitt primarily as a minimalist sculptor, and was, until quite recently, unaware of his other cinematic endeavors. Familiarity with LeWitt's other film projects would be beneficial as well. However, much further investigation in and/or engagement with the piece may risk vulgarity without my experiencing the performance first hand. Someday, I can only hope.

I first saw LeWitt's film of Dance about five years ago in art school when a friend who was studying dance and performance art showed it to me. I had not seen it projected above a live performance until just last week when I was looking for the LeWitt film on the web, and this discovery -- as well as that of the recent performances accompanied by the film -- led me to begin thinking of it in relation to Muñoz. This piece compliments his book quite well, I think, despite its distance from anything decidedly queer. The dance and its players may not hold any relation to the term or its ideas and movements, but in placing it adjacent to Muñoz in this way, I think that we can momentarily look at each in more nuanced ways. Besides, minimalism plainly effuses certain utopian rays, does it not?

Greenaway, Peter, dir. A Zed & Two Noughts. Fox Lorber World Classic Cinema Collection, 1985. Film.

Oswald Deuce: How fast does a woman decompose?
Oliver Deuce: Six months, maybe a year? Depends on the conditions.
Oswald Deuce: Does being pregnant make any difference?
Oliver Deuce: No.
Oswald Deuce: And the baby?
Oliver Deuce: How far gone was she?
Oswald Deuce: Perhaps ten weeks.
Oliver Deuce: Then you'd never know.
Oswald Deuce: [long pause] I cannot stand the idea of her rotting away.
[short pause]
Oswald Deuce: What is the first thing that happens?
Oliver Deuce: The first thing that happens is bacteria set to work in the intestine.
Oswald Deuce: What sort of bacteria?
Oliver Deuce: [matter-of-factly] Bicosis populi. There are supposed to be 130,000 bicoses in each lick of a human tongue; 250,000 in a french kiss. First exchanged at the very beginning of creation when Adam kissed Eve.
Oswald Deuce: Suppose Eve kissed Adam.
Oliver Deuce: Unlikely. She used her first 100,000 on the apple.
-- from A Zed & Two Noughts

The wives of two zoologists die in a car driven by a woman called Bewick who's attacked by a swan on Swan's Way. This is the event upon which A Zed & Two Noughts (Z.O.O.) builds its drama. In preparation for making the film, Peter Greenaway (the writer and director) visited zoos throughout Europe, America and Australia -- in an interview conducted just after the film's production, Greenaway remarks of the zoo in Berlin, unique in that it exists within the city, "You could see a hippopotamus standing in front of a tramway. It was this relationship between man, animal and object that appealed to me. In this respect, Berlin is an especially powerful symbol, because one might consider the city itself a zoo." The movie revolves around the tortured grief of the two zoologists, twin brothers, whose wives were suddenly killed at the zoo -- Oliver and Oswald begin to embark on a research project with an impossible goal: to uncover and demystify the truth of death and mortality. Their research, experiments and affairs only serve to further upset and disparage physical, scientific truths as their obsession with decay and the indistinguishable facts coalescing human and animal corporealities leads to their final experiment: the death and decay of their own bodies.

The work of Darwin casts an overwhelmingly present shadow over the film, and it is for this reason that Darwin's theories may be interesting to revisit for further discussion of bodies and temporality. Greenaway is a marvelously intriguing figure, and his work consistently makes itself relevant as I think through questions of queer theory and queer materiality. A Greenaway film is never free from the aesthetic and spoken references to Vermeer, a painter who I've come to slowly find more interesting and vanguard than he at first appears -- Vermeer somehow could make for an interesting subject through which to link Images of time, the subject of my last annotated bibliography, to Bodies of time.

The first Greenaway movie I ever saw was The Pillow Book when I was in high school. I first saw A Zed & Two Noughts with a friend in New York a few years ago, and like I already mentioned, Greenaway and his various artistic endeavors have since been an ever present source of interest and inspiration. Unlike the first two sources in this series, which show bodies moving through time, this showcases the inescapability of bodily existence. In this way, as Paul Goodman suggests above, I have begun this project in contemplation of how astronomical, as well as physiological, time has done us in.

Additional sources pertaining to Bodies of Time not included in this entry:

• Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, by Rosi Braidotti

• Sally Mann's photographs from the book What Remains


• "How Bodies Come to Matter: an interview with Judith Butler," conducted by Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins


• The work of Leonora Carrington


• The photography of Jock Sturges

"The dog shitting a hot turd is mildly interesting to me, but the cold turd on the street is disgusting to me. Yet on a rural road the turd is not offensive because it will decompose into living soil." (Paul Goodman;Five Years, p.1) (Natural vs. Unnatural?)

(Last week, Sara asked us to share how we read -- the above image is a virtual representation of how I took notes and began to organize my thoughts around these texts.)

"Images exist; things themselves are images... Images constantly act on and react to one another, produce and consume. There is no difference between images, things and movement..." Gilles Deleuze

Thinking about temporality -- time -- and the pertinence of images. The image -- photography -- allows time to collapse in on itself and cease (fail) to adhere to its own directives: I look at a photograph of my grandmother on the porch of her first house in America, 1945, and access a moment that no longer exists, before I ever existed, experienced by someone who has ceased to exist. In approaching time -- temporality -- my first confrontation is, quite naturally, with the image. It and I have come to a standstill.

Prosser, Jay. "The Art of Ph/Autography: Del LaGrace Volano." Sublime Mutations. By Del LaGrace Volcano.

"Photography like autobiography is a paradox of time [ . . . ] The dilemma of the 'transsexual real' is also a paradox of time: how to reconcile an unlivable past with a fantasized idealized - but possibly unrealizable - future?" (Prosser, 6)

"It is the 'play of looks' that I want to explore, within the framework of desire and its visual representations. By unearthing some of psychical, social and sexual processes involved in representations of desire we can begin hopefully to examine the dynamics of desire present in the relationship between the photographer, the photographed and you." (Del LaGrace Volcano, "Dynamics of Desire")

Although this essay is certainly concerned with time and its indispensable relation to the image -- as well as to bodies, to gender, to sex -- Prosser's primary fixation is realness: "[LaGrace Volcano] makes real what would otherwise not be seen as such." Attempts to locate realness, however, inevitably miss the mark: there is no real -- the real is artificial, and, furthermore, "it is dangerous for any of us to believe we can achieve 'the real.'" The photographs do not seek to validate their subjects' realness, but to displace realness and render its in/validation irrelevant. Photographs contradict time, which ceases to make sense in the presence of the image: by capturing/freezing the transient and disallowing passing moments to pass.
Prosser draws connections between the passing of time and the passing of gender -- as well as other senses of passing, such as the aesthetic. LaGrace Volcano's aesthetic sensibilities make sharp, unexpected, shifts and transitions throughout the book, and even within a focused series. The relationship between bodily transitions, bodily mutations and time -- becoming precarious, transmutation, transmogrification -- and Prosser's interpretation of the photography of Del LaGrace Volcano rests on the comfort of uncertainty, wherein we may be assured that "The only certainty is change."

Sublime Mutations showcases a mere modicum of LaGrace Volcano's transgressive spirit. Love Bites, another collection of photographs highlighting the photographer's most controversial and heavily censored work; Sex Work, which chronicles a history of queer sex in pictures; and Pleasure Principles - Politics, Sexuality and Ethics, a book which seems to be largely about photography and desire, are points of interest for further investigation not only into the work of LaGrace Volcano, but also photography, gender, temporality, desire and their convergences.

I'm at somewhat of a loss as I try to recall the exact source which lead to my discovering the work of Del LaGrace Volcano. Something I read quite recently mentioned the name, I performed a search on the UMN library homepage, and one result presented itself: The Drag King Book-- a collaboration between the photographer and J. Jack Halberstam (located in the Annex, that dark hole in the basement of Wilson Library where deviant books collect dust)-- a book that slightly interested me, but not enough to make the trek to the lower depths. I found out about Sublime Mutations via LaGrace Volcano's website, and requested it through inter library loan, with no intentions of using it for this project -- the Prosser essay helped make its relevancy apparent.

Puar, Jasbir. "Abu Ghraib and U.S. Sexual Exceptionalism." Terrorist Assemblages. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. 79-113. Print.

"The pictures will not go away. That is the nature of the digital world in which we live [ . . . ] it was the photographs that made all this ''real'' to Bush and his associates. Up to then, there had been only words, which are easier to cover up in our age of infinite digital self-reproduction and self-dissemination, and so much easier to forget."
(Susan Sontag, "Regarding the Torture of Others")

Where do I begin to summarize this chapter -- or even simply summarize its relevance to my discussion of time and the image? This chapter, and this book in general, is something that I must come back to, and have been coming back to, over and over again. Before I encountered this book, but after it was written, Errol Morris made a documentary about these images -- not so much about the torture, the scandal, or even the politics, but the images themselves. Opening the film is a series of photographs unrelated to those that comprise the heart of the movie's content: pictures of sunrises and sunsets. As the credits begin to scroll across the screen, the sunset photographs recede into the distance and are soon surrounded by numerous other photographs, floating in a virtual void. The infamous images in question begin to take their place alongside the first. These pictures exist within the same context at the same moment: sunrise, sunset, sexual torture. Directly after this opening sequence, we see photographs of then Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, visiting the notorious prison, and we're told that he cut his tour short -- he did not want an image of the prison or the goings-on within its walls. It doesn't exist if the images don't exist: that which can't be proven never happened. (And, as Lynndie England comments later in the film, some of the photographed horrors would not have taken place had the camera not been present.) Now that Rumsfeld, the rest of the United States, and the world have been confronted by these pictures, they "will not go away," as Susan Sontag notably stated.

Jasbir Puar claims that Sontag "got it wrong," that the pictures have gone away, but really it's Puar who's gotten Sontag wrong, whose statement, "the pictures will not go away," is meant concretely -- she's referring to the photographs themselves, their digital immortality. They cannot be burned or discarded: they are all right here, and here they will be, regardless of whether or not they are ignored.

I have not summarized the chapter, I don't yet know how to approach the task. But I promise to return to it shortly. The reason I was compelled in the first place to include this chapter specifically in this series concerning time and image is because of my intellectual relationship to these photographs and to photography in general. Sontag has long informed my thoughts and opinions of the photographic medium, of digital media and the like. Abu Ghraib has never gone away in my own mind, in my memories of the Bush years and my thoughts about this war and the U.S. military. Puar and the arguments she raises have only recently entered the equation I've been struggling to sort out -- to solve, as it were. The above discussion of uncertainty and images of time may eventually become necessary in informing my thinking about these photographs -- may allow me to depart from this standstill without solving anything, without proving any thesis. For now, I'll continue to sit with this.

Jarman, Derek, dir. Blue. Zeitgeist Films, 1993. Film.

"The image is a prison of the soul, your heredity,
your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities,
your psychological world.

I have walked behind the sky.
For what are you seeking?
The fathomless blue of Bliss.

To be an astronaut of the void,
leave the comfortable house that imprisons
you with reassurance.

Remember,
To be going and to have are not eternal -
fight the fear that engenders the beginning, the middle and the end.

For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions."

I conclude this series about images with the absence of image. Derek Jarman's last film demands its viewer to look fixedly at a blue screen whilst its narrator, Jarman himself, speaks of his blindness, his pain, his loss, his disease and his pending death. He speaks of cafes, Bosnian refugees, the drip of DHPG, the death of his friends. His musings range from philosophical questions: "If I lose my sight will my vision be halved?" to angry commentaries on the evils of political indifference: "Charity has allowed the uncaring to appear to care and is terrible for those dependent on it. It has become big business as the government shirks its responsibilities in these uncaring times. We go along with this, so the rich and powerful who fucked us over once fuck us over again and get it both ways. We have always been mistreated, so if anyone gives us the slightest sympathy we overreact with our thanks." The common thread of all that is contained within this film poem is Blue -- all are inhearsed in Blue. Blue represents many things throughout Jarman's film -- time being one, loss perhaps another; wretchedness, death, joy, desire.

As somewhat of a supplement to thinking about and engaging with the film, I read through Sontag's Illness as Metaphor and AIDS & its Metaphors and have since been concerned with the disease metaphor, and metaphors in general. Jarman, of course, is not speaking metaphorically -- his reflections are profoundly concrete, his anger and disappointments soundly evinced. Sontag remarks in the latter work that "AIDS is a disease of time" -- an inescapable truth that Jarman finds himself consumed by, as time slowly and brutally escorts him out of this life.

I first heard of this film nearly five years ago while having coffee with a friend -- I finally got around to locating it and watching it nearly three years ago, and have since been somewhat obsessed by it. It fits well here, in this discussion of images: images of desire, images of horror, and this, an image of non-image, all contradictions -- paradoxes -- of time.

While some of the work involved in processing a response to this query has already been done for me, I do have a few thoughts/questions of my own to add to the discussion. Firstly, I'm very interested in/troubled by the notion of an online identity/self that "lasts 'forever'" as formulated in the afore-linked engagement: my main question being-- what is meant by forever as it pertains to online identity, or online texts, etc.? and why the quotation marks around the word? And I do agree that these quotation marks are properly in their place within this context, which may be my main point of contestation, as this is precisely the trouble I'm having with the concept of online time and its queer/ing temporality. Does online presence allow one to develop a virtual self outside the confines of time linearly conceived? What is the opposition between a virtual self and a real self? or, perhaps, where does a distinction take place? Is the primary opposition that one (real life self) is limited by linear time and geographical space and the other (virtual self) not? How might a virtual self also be limited by these conceptions of time and space?

I'm supposed to be answering the questions, not asking them, right? As that doesn't seem very likely at this point, I'll move on to the next part of the question -- namely, that which concerns the transgression of physicality, for which I turn to Julie Rak for assistance in an attempt to formulate some semblance of an answer. In "The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity," Rak begins her discussion by calling attention to one of the originations of weblogs as somewhat of a transgression (my word, not hers) of diary keeping -- diaries being, by definition and relevant association, private: unread by anybody except its author. Weblogs, unlike paper diaries, have audience members and are, as an effect, an evolution (one might argue an aggressive flouting) of the private diary and interpersonal -- as well as personal -- communication. The inevitable result of which being what have come to be perceived as the development of online communities -- people with a common interest/goal/what-have-you engaging in conversation, arguments (both productive and unproductive), or even activism through online networks. Perhaps Rak's most important discussion of online blogging communities takes place on page 172, under the heading "Blog Ideology," where she addresses blogging rhetoric and its "[adherence] in some form to a version of liberalism which was part of early internet culture. In this form of liberalism, freedom of expression is important, particularly when it occurs outside of institutional attempts to control the flow of information." In this sense, blogging communities may be formed through a sharing network of otherwise inaccessible, previously privatized, information. But, there remains the lingering question of censorship -- internet censorship exists, right? And this is something I know next to nothing about, but am curious about what types of information are accessible online and to whom? (I'm thinking of this question primarily in terms of government media censorship and language -- but I'm sure there are other types of internet censorship/varying degrees of inaccessibility to information depending on one's physical locality/reality, etc.)