THE RESISTANT OBJECT Homepage

“Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant”
― Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Dear viewer,

What lies before you are the ruins of a website, named in an attempt at tickling the special place where poignant literality caps the glittering pinnacles of dry humour: website about my research. This name remains in place as a monument to my failure, which akin to fat on broth has risen to the surface of my labour as an assertive asset of questionable value. What follows is an affectionate account of how I stopped worrying and learned to love the failure – my highly saturated friend.

(If you please, do imagine the iconic shot of cowboy-hat-toting Slim Pickens riding the bomb in Dr. Strangelove and place the word failure upon the heroically straddled piece of nuclear weaponry in your favourite silly font. If you do not feel sufficiently challenged by this proposal, do not imagine a still shot, but make it a nifty gif. That should do.)

An affectionate account of how I stopped worrying and learned to love the failure

1.

“The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

As all fabulous anecdotes tend to do, it all began with a series of bad decisions. At the time I was making them, however, I was thoroughly oblivious to the fact of their horrendous nature, which often makes for even saucier pieces of narrative magic. What I chose for was in essence: being to the point. In my last exploit in pursuit of a master’s degree I have largely utilised excess and effectively exhausted myself through the ecstatic use of abundant imagery in a brave attempt at disorienting object orientation. Following this expansive effort, I thought I might gift myself with a moment or repose and turn the eye of my mind to the homely medium of text and classic lightweight web design. Where is the problem with that, you might ask? Alas, the plot thickens.

(If you please, do start counting soup metaphors.)

The blessed and highly flavoured (or so I thought) battle plan I landed on was to create a menu serving up in black-on-white fashion a number of texts that buttressed and mullioned, arched over and abetted my research. The idea was to follow the form in which a restaurant would present a menu and consolidate my items under entities such as: Surprise menu, 3 course menu, 5 course menu, 7 course menu, Starters, Mains, To Finish, Specialities, All you can eat, To go, etc. and to compose the texts within these menus and lists of other independent consumables as a chef would; taking into consideration such qualities as taste, texture, origin, seasonality et al.. This was meant to reference and unfold the act of eating / consuming present in my ongoing research in iterations such as: the feeding / eating of corpses, food and beverages in traditional Slavic mortuary ritual, the feast as a model for dramatic composition, the expanded capacities and capabilities of the mouth, anthropophagy as a metaphor for the interaction with an audience etc.. This was the patient zero of my mistakes.

The first step in my journey was to gather my ingredients, so I burst through the door of my archive brimming with vim and vigour and started sorting through all manner of text that has been accumulated in the process of conducting my research. I have rather quickly decided to limit myself only to that portion of my research and its textual spawn, which was conducted in bluntly direct relation to acquiring my masters degree, otherwise, following my allegiance to leakage and simultaneity as the rulers of all, would lead me to including into my preselection all texts that I have ever generated or that have ever been generated around me as valid components of my research process. This decision can be accurately labelled as mistake number one.

The second step in my endeavour was to prepare my workspace, so with a steady hand and the code for the correct shade of hyperlink blue (#0000EE) I sculpted a prototype of my text-only webpage. The angel guiding my hand left me with a cute old school design a font from the Courier family and the word “reasonable” ringing in my ears. This state of mind will from now on be dubbed mistake number two.

The third step in my undertakings required the preparation of my ingredients. At this point a degree of doubt started to set in, but I pressed on and employed a method useful in times, when awe of all creation starts turning into fear; I decided to divide and conquer. What I opted for as a general technique was to go into each text and screenshot and crop out what looks good and deal with the aftermath later. Dutifully I peeled, sliced, hollowed out, diced and minced my words until I had before me a bunch of smaller text objects. Then, in order to comprehend my precipitous selection process, I placed them into categories that each covered a certain aspect or inclination of my research, such as: audience, body, chaos, communication, image, invisible, love, etc. You can probably already sense a pattern here, but just to confirm: This was a mistake. Third time truly is the charm.

The fourth step that I managed to enact, before I came to a screeching halt was an attempt at turning my ingredients into something „edible“. At first, I tried to exploit the categories I have created and assemble my menus based on the established familial relations within these categories. Soon enough the categories started to leak, and each menu and each list seem to say the same thing from a slightly different angle: I am not here. The more I tried to conjure up presence and a straightforward “telling” quality in my texts, the more they resisted. Neither simplicity nor elegance answered my call, what stared back at me was jagged, frizzy and frankly quite bitchy. And as I was left sitting in a puddle of disillusionment observing the tattered scraps of my glorious plans going up in flames all around me, I thought to myself: This is fantastic, I’m in heaven.

2.

Patient zero

I have utilised food metaphors before. When constructing my performative experiment in the first year I have even explicitly thought through a soup metaphor. The blog that I used to communicate with my tutor was called Affective Soup after a label given to one of my submissions. Soup has always been a friend. Because a soup is a multiplicity. A multiplicity, which hints at singular components, however not all of them are fully recognisable by the time the soup is sufficiently soupy and all of them significantly transform I order to become soup. A soup is also something that is enjoyed sensually and thus communicative by default, has a homey quality and provides comfort. It is warm and consistent and at the same time complex and daring. An edible exploration of metamorphosis. Food metaphors also organically invite questions about interaction, such as: Who gets to eat it? With what instruments? At what time? To what end? In whose company? Etc. Questions markedly reminiscent of questions present in staging. The direct connection to mortuary rituals and ideas of passing and delegating the notions of corporeality is just a fancy bonus. In this assignment however I have misguidedly equated a food metaphor with consolidation and organisation. Mistaking composition for order I purified and purified my substances util there was near to nothing left and I was left hungry. What would have worked is reduction or distillation; operations leading to enriching or concentrating my material, which would nevertheless have transformed. But I stood in the way of this inherent process of transformation in “food preparation” and strived to keep the singularities of my ingredients intact and privy to recognition, inhibiting any type of movement.

Mistake No. 1

When I decided to use only the material directly related to the portion of my research that is provenly a part of attaining my master’s degree, I did something unprecedented. In all of my previous tasks and submissions I have taken an opposite stance; asserting that art and life practice are inseparably intertwined, that the division between low and high art is arbitrary, that the scholarly and artistic are one and the same practice, aiming overall at an eclectic de-disciplined and de-valued dramaturgy. By limiting myself to materials sanctioned by my university I have pushed my research towards a sort of institutionalisation, robbed it of its main routes of dissent and trapped it within a form subject very directly to co-option and capitalisation. From being a gracious host of my research, I turned to be its landlord, demanding proofs of origin, income and stability. I have turned a research vocally opposed to narratives of progress into an exploited subject made to work for the betterment of an institution it has been sidestepping for two years. I accidentally transformed a passionate kinkster who throws bricks at nazis into a vanilla bootlicker.

Mistake No. 2

By trying to endow my research with an air of being reasonable I once again crossed a boundary never crossed before. This entity, which has always regarded itself as opposed to rationalisation, pseudo-scientific thought and all kinds of overgrown pragmatism was suddenly made to ditch its mystical, seductive, tactile weapons, get a haircut and show up for work as inconspicuously as possible. Deprived of its flamboyance, it just slumped over stupidly waiting to die. Instead of sensible it became sense-less, dumb and blind without any means of communicating its needs to the world it resigned no longer able to recognise itself.

Mistake No. 3

Re-appropriating my own material and rendering it fragmentary was an enlightened spasm of self-defence, it was however too late. With the above-mentioned mechanisms insisting on a consistent message, consensual clarity and a sensible presentation, whitewashing the shit out of everything in sight, the fragmentary was left humourless and therefore immobile and powerless. I harbour a long-proven love for the miniscule and the immeasurable due to the ability of both qualities to delay recognition and immerse the viewer in a world of ambivalence. Taking something out of scale similarly, to taking something out of context is a powerful tool gnawing fervently at the ankles of normativity through what Brecht called the distancing effect – by seeing something in a way which enhances the feeling the difference towards this phenomenon aids the forming of critical thought towards said phenomenon and one’s own position. But by dwelling on creating understandable meaning and maintaining the singularity of the materials I completely inhibited the fragmentary nature of my material to act in this way, always forcing them to reiterate their statement clearly – depriving them both of their right to speak freely and equally of their right to remain silent.

Revelation!

Sidenote:

But what truly warms my heart is that even when I put my research through this strange “conversion therapy” it still had bite. Even cornered and crippled it still found the fight to remain jagged, frizzy and bitchy, which only leads me to thinking that I raised it well. My baby is here, and it is queer!

"(…) the queer legend Quentin Crisp transforms the apparent pathos of the gender queer into an asset: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style” (1968: 196). In this witty refusal of the dogged Protestant work ethic Crisp makes the crucial link between failure and style and, in his own effeminate persona, embodies that link as gender trouble, gender deviance, gender variance. … This particular ethos of resignation to failure, to lack of progress and a particular form of darkness, a negativity really (…), can be called a queer aesthetic."
― Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“what would it mean to no longer have to be fabulous to survive”
― Alok Vaid-Menon

You might not help but wonder, if all these procedures were so unnatural and painful, why did I go there and how come I did not notice sooner? It is hard to admit to, but I was exhausted. The central theme of my research is the resistant object. I employ the resistant object in exploring alternative narratives of emancipation of non-dominant subjectivities and disposing of binary distinctions in the process. A traditional narrative of emancipation would have a marginalised subject move away from its respective historical process of objectification and utilise the assertion of its subjectivity in this movement. Such narratives are closely tied with an active, productive approach linked to the idea of progress and growth and as such are easily subject to co-option by a capitalist society. To put it in a slightly less wordy manner; traditional narratives of emancipation often make the mistake of creating a new market instead of offering liberation. This worries me. What also worries me is that a marginalised subject, in the demand to assert their subjectivity must remain very open. I am referring to the classical queer dilemma of either not being seen for what you are or going through a total loss of privacy and autonomy in the process of repeatedly coming out with great emotional labour and to mixed success. This sort of adds insult to injury since a feminine or queer subject is traditionally believed to be and required to be very open and accessible – it requires to have clear entry points. It is conditioned to be had.

This is true to some extent for all human subjects – In the process of distinguishing themselves from objects and animals’ humans have acquired a misguided bias about other humans, that these can be understood. It is common that when encountering another human we expect to understand them and we expect them to actively offer us guidelines on how to do so – even in gestures such subtle as asking somebody’s name upon meeting them as a first move in our communication. We categorise and simplify each other as a matter of habit. But while in the context of dominant subjectivities this might be harmless social gesture, in interaction with marginalised subjects these attempts to put people in understandable categories may amount to acts of violence.

The notion of a resistant object in my understanding offers the possibility for a marginalised subject to retreat from being known, to resist being seen as something which can be used or had by consciously entering a state of object-ness clearly separated from utility. This is in no way a neutral position even though it is decidedly passive. As we know from the mechanics and ethics of BDSM the strength of the submissive is not something that should be discounted.
As I mentioned above, I was tired from using my strength. I did not want to fight and seduce and persuade. It was my short-lived resignation into the hope that I might try to just be that showed me how easy it is to be led down the path of normative presentation and positioning in the pursuit of relief from continuous labour. Which proves to me how urgent it is for me to keep exploring the possibilities of the resistant object and perfect ways of resting in unrest, which allow for sufficient space to breathe.

THE RESISTANT OBJECT Interview

Conclusion for further work:

“Do I wanna do right?
Of course
But do I really wanna feel I'm forced to answer you?
Hell no
I've acquired quite a taste
For a well-made mistake
I wanna make a mistake
Why can't I make a mistake?”
― Fionna Apple, A Mistake

1. Do not attempt to consolidate. Keep in mind that your aim is to maintain an atmosphere of sense-making and questioning rather than presenting solutions and creating singular meaning. Keep in mind that you have an arsenal of operations at your disposal, which will help you achieve these ends.

2. Do not subscribe to values you do not share and institutions you do not wish to fully represent unless this is an elaborate ruse to overthrow capitalism and the patriarchy. If you wish to call upon a sense of collectivity and belonging, turn to those who share your values and concerns.

3. Do not try to make yourself palatable. Instead try concise, strong, distinct, or even moody, irrelevant, unreliable or promiscuous. Use what is available to you, not what you feel is appropriate.

4. Do not push categories on yourself unless they serve a purpose. Trust chaos. Only pray to those who pray to you. If resistance is your credo, resist.

Dear viewer,

What lies before you are still the ruins of a website, named in an attempt at tickling the special place where poignant literality caps the glittering pinnacles of dry humour: website about my research. This name still remains in place as a monument to my failure, which akin to volcanic dust covered the entire view in an impenetrable screen of soot, but with time settled to make the local countryside extremely fertile. What follows is an affectionate account of how fauna and flora started taking over a ruin and made it an organic part of the landscape.

An affectionate account of how fauna and flora started taking over a ruin and made it an organic part of the landscape

Interviewer:

You've gone total primitive
Instinct, just the will to live
Never been there, never been there
But I'll go, I'll go, I'll go

They're so intellectual
Deep thought, psychosexual
Got what they want, got what they want
And they know, they know, they know

I can see it in their eyes
They're coming for you, honey
Painted faces, sharpened knives
Do you think it's funny?
If you dress it up, you'll have to break it in
But you never look better then when you wear your animal skin

Research:

Seems that you are a bit worried about me. Ha-ha. I do think it is actually quite funny, but I appreciate your care. And the compliment. Though I’m not quite sure, what you’re getting at. Do you mean to tell me that I look my best when I’m cornered? Are you fascinated by my wildness? Or the fact that every skin I wear, I can take off and change?

Interviewer:

Wow, a lot to unpack here. Some have suggested that everything is a joke to you. Is this true?

Research:

Only the things that matter.

Interviewer:

Do you feel cornered?

Research:

Often.
But not by you.

Interviewer:

Do you consider yourself beautiful?

Research:

Yes.

Interviewer:

Would you say that you are wild?

Research:

Isn’t that what you would expect from me?

Interviewer:

Ha-ha. Its not for me to say. So, you admit you are a shapeshifter. Can you say something more about that?

Research:

I think I am hardly anything but that. But its not so much about me. Its about the other. What I can give to the other.

Interviewer:

And what can you give to the other?

Research:

Anything.

Interviewer:

That suggests quite a lot of virtuosity. Is that something that you are comfortable with?

Research:

No.
But it has its advantages. If it is done with feeling.

Interviewer:

Affect seems to play a big role in what you do.

Research:

Oh, honey. You do not know the half of it.

Interviewer:

What role does the body play in all this?

Research:

My father was once asked what the role of animal production in the economy of the Soviet Union is. You know what he said?

Interviewer:

What?

Research:

He said the role of animal production in the economy of the Soviet Union is significant. So that is my answer. Significant.

Interviewer:

You make a lot of references to your heritage. What does your heritage mean to you?

Research:

Family is everything to me. I do not necessarily mean this in the conservative sense of man and woman and kids and traditional values. It just plays so much into who I am and as you know I make a great deal about utilising primarily what is available to me. It is an ecological concern and a concern of the heart. It is a part of my material conditions. My poetics. Where I emerged from.

Interviewer:

And yet you never seem to be in one place too long.

Research:

An exile does not have to feel overly guilty, when they don’t want to see their friends, because they can’t. Also, I just really fancy a good disappearing act.

Interviewer:

You don’t want to see your friends.

Research:

I go to bed with all of my friends.

Interviewer:

Oh I remember.

Research:

The heart wants what it wants.

“People will kill you. Over time. They will shave out every last morsel of fun in you with little, harmless sounding phrases that people use every day, like: "Be realistic!"[…] You never hear someone go "Be realistic! Let me oil you."”
― Dylan Moran, What it is

Why so giddy, you might ask? You have worked very hard, now you have nothing to show for it and the deadline is at midnight at the start of Monday. Well, I beg to differ. I have a lot to show, it just might not be what I intended for originally. Unveiling a failure and its gentle trappings instead of a neat success might just be the appropriate affective gesture, which does not force the research to reveal itself, but lets it disrobe on its own terms. Let me elucidate mistake by mistake and show you how my epic failure led me to see the light.