EMIKO
TEXT
Infinite Balance
Infinite balance tells a story. It is one of a body in a life in a world washed in a sea of melancholia. It is one of being suspended in the cushioning of the tangibility of existence, where adversity may hurl itself at your flesh yet you never really fall. Held in the arms of the world, you balance, one leg always holding the rest, infinitely, exquisitely resting in the tension of discord and harmony. In the search for equivalence is my identity- infinitely balanced. The film, “Infinite Balance”, is the story of the cadence of a life lived in balance, told through performance, by a queer, disabled, non binary fellow human, who in the telling, shapes a new queer world.
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A story, unlike the passing on of information, is active. It is a collaboration between the storyteller and the listener, the narrator and the audience. When the telling of a story is also a performance, involving the body, movement, voice, fact or fiction is rendered irrelevant because the story, when told through the body and performance, is able to collapse history, to enact the past through the presence of the present body of the teller. A truth materialises which is in the moment and which carries on into further truths as others continue to re-enact and re tell the story at later times, bringing the past continually into the present, enlivened, embodied, active moment.
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For Fiona Buckland, who writes of the role of performance in queer lives, performance is a way of engaging in queer world making. The queer body becomes a deliberate tool in the enlivening of space, where the body speaks the past, reenacts memory and converges past and present into a newly created queer world in which a queer sense of self is central.
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Performance can become like an act of shamanism, with the performer taking on the role of another, blending and blurring the space of present and past, fact and idea, as the performer acts out stories and concepts to deliver ideas. The performer occupies a liminal space of meaning and identity and asks the audience to join them in this space through empathetic connection.
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The performer, like a mage, slips and out of roles, separating the self from the moment and from inner knowledge whilst taking on aspects of another. This blending has been termed “conceptual blending” and is both a conscious and unconscious activity that relies on empathetic connection with others. [1]
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When the performer operates in the space of the mask, miming instead of inhabiting another, from a place separate to self, the performer opens the space to loss then mourning. As the performer operates with the mask they render a tear in the phenomenology of movement, space and inhabitation. Judith Butler, writing of performance, describes narration as being an implement to stem the experience of loss. When the narrator, or performer, uses mime, or the mask, the artifice creates a mis identification and in the confusion the stability of actuality leaks away, as the mask wearer moves and shimmers in the misidentification of self, other and artifice.
In this sense, a performance always rests on the tension of truth, melancholia, mourning and new world creation. The queer world that is created through enactment can easily become a place of mourning if it verges into parody, mime, artifice. If we are to create a queer world through the retelling of our stories, it must be done by ourselves, save others inject the loss of our voice into our very own histories when they attempt to speak our truths for us.
The performative body has a self-agency that the body written in print does not. As Sue Ellen-Case notes, the body that is inscribed (described) through print is controlled by the word and the word is disseminated through the institutions who inscribe the word into text. Thus the body, waiting for inscription, gives its agency, its meaning, to the institutions of textual discourse. Agency is lost in the mediation of self, discourse and text.
The performative body, when it operates in a space of self-agency, speaking its own narration, can be likened to the body of the adventurer that theorist Goergio Agamben writes of in his discourse “The Adventure”. [2] For Agamben, when the narrator tells their story they are participating in a world making that is inseparable from the act that creates the story. Each must transpire with the other in a process of speech and action.
“We then understand why the event is also always an event of language and why the adventure is inseparable from the speech that tells it. The being that happens here and now happens to an “I” and, for this reason, is not without relation with language…. The adventure, which has called him into speech, is being told by the speech of the one it has called and does not exist before this speech”. [3]
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The event happens outside of the subject, but the event is made through the experience and the relating of that experience. Each is dependent on each other, and all parts make up the whole. Each happens in a moment in time but if just one does not occur then none do. The adventure creates the person, it is in the adventure that one finds oneself. But as Agamben says, the being is made through the happening(experience) but just as important is the language (the tale of the adventure) that reveals the being. When the performer relates their history, they collapse time, create new (queer) worlds and bring into being their state of self. “By becoming human, he has devoted himself to an adventure that is still in progress and whose outcome is difficult to predict”. [4] We can look to Joan of Arc as the exemplar of this idea- she is the adventure, the telling of the adventure and the person and none can exist without the other.
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[5] Joan of Arc painted between 1450 and 1500, oil on canvas.
Sonya Boyce is a British artist and Professor of Black Art and Design at the University of Arts in London, UK. For Boyce, her art must be political. Boyce, explains, “ I stretched my tiny arms to enfold the world the world but my embrace was inadequate. I put on political arms as an extension”. [6] Boyce shows how art, self and experience conjoin to create work that speaks to contemporary life in a way that is unsparing, immediate and real. The personal is political and the political is always personal. `
“Good Morning Freedom” 2013 Sonia Boyce
When you are an artist working in a space that is historically denied to you, or where your participation comes at the cost of pushing against walls, then you are automatically making political art. As the artist David Wojnarowicz points out, when speaking about the way just living becomes a political statement,
“ Is the fact that I may be dying of aids in 1989, is that not political? Is the fact that I don’t have health insurance and I don’t have access to adequate health care, is that not political? “ [7] For David Wojnarowicz, sometimes simply existing is in itself a political act.
David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Hujar Dead), 1988–89. Black-and-white photograph, acrylic, screenprint, and collaged paper on Masonite, 39 × 32 in. (99.1 × 81.3 cm). Collection of Steven Johnson and Walter Sudol, courtesy Second Ward Foundation. Image courtesy the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W, New York
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Patriarchal systems depend on totalitarian strategies if they are to survive long term. As has been noted by feminist theorists such as Catherine Vitris, the patriarchy, like most fascist and totalitarian systems, is ultimately fragile and relies on violent suppression to maintain power. Any discourse which threatens the patriarchal structure needs to be quelled quickly and violently before an alternative outlook becomes established. Being queer is a direct counterpoint to the heteronormative, gendered based structures of the patriarchy and historically, at the same time the patriarchal structures were becoming stable, during the late Middle Ages, there was a similar shift in the way that queerness was managed in the institutional space of public discourse and laws.
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Being queer is a dangerous space but it is also one of liminality, where being on the edge allows a freedom that being on the mainstream denies. The queer, for Vitris, is like living in the space of the carnival, where normal social rules don’t apply, a borderland of being where the queer are outcast and free in the space of rejection. This space is charged with queerness and those within it band together to create worlds of the outcast that recognise the power that comes from solidarity. Such a history, that can be recalled as being a force of change in the 80’s and 90’s, where queer groups came together to fight repression, can also inform new challenges, such as the way queer groups came together to support the disability community during the pandemic response in America. The governmental response saw many disabled people put at risk through policies that put lives at risk. Stepping into the vacated space of caring were Disability Justice groups, ensuring that those who were deemed not worthy of care by the state were not invisible or left suffering.
“ The ten principles of disability justice” https://www.sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-principles-of-disability-justice
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Judith Butler has written extensively on social and cultural frameworks that place more value on some peoples lives over others. Writing on the pandemic and the social response to it, Butler points out that this often showed us how some lives were deemed not necessary to safeguard from harm and death. When restrictions were removed before the virus had come under control, leaving vulnerable people and communities unprotected, or when people were asked to socially isolate at home even though many people lived without a home or lived in overcrowded conditions, we were reminded that for those with power, only some lives are thought about when the safeguarding of life is enacted in public policy.
The people most often left out of these equations were the ones already placed on the margins of policy making- the disabled, queer, the poor, black, brown and Indigenous peoples, were adversely affected the most during the pandemic through death or long-term disability from the effects of the virus.
We live in a world connected through technology, social relations, governmental structures and legislations, power, and capital. Yet we are also living in a world in which we are connected in space, in our movement with our bodies through tangibility. For Butler, the body may feel that it sees the world from a position away from it, making it separate to what is outside of it, yet in fact the body is in and of the world- the world is in me, on me, within me, and I am forever shifting between understandings of the self as world -object and object. “The world that is usually assumed to be over there, or around me, is in fact already in and on me…” [8]
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This idea can be seen reflected in Giorgio Agamden’s describing of the act of adventure and the way it creates the person who creates the act. Certain acts of the world for phenomenologists such as Butler create the conditions that make them possible. The act of touch makes real the tangible- touch illuminates the touched. This is a world which operates in relationality and where one is never singular but always connected through acts which are active and enlivened.
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The body, experiencing the world through its senses, creates an opening up of possibility in an interconnected and interlaced world. “To be a body at all is to be bound up with others and with objects, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that is breathed in and out air that belongs to no one and everyone”. [9] If we look at the way we journey through life with this phenomenological mindset, then we start to see that we are all connected and thus share a responsibility for each other beyond the moral. Our responsibility is tangible, present, indelible. When I breath air ripe with a virus that can cause devasting harm to another, or when I touch an object that carries this virus, I am participating in the interconnection of myself to other, and the virus becomes an avatar for the thick spaces of phenomenology.
The virus showed us how we do not innocently move through space as separate bodies, we are bodies that move through a wadded space of relationality-I to you, I to object. We are all connected and thus when we let some lives fall into the world of the forgotten and uncared for we also take ourselves there.
For Butler, to be human is to be living in a space of loose boundaries. “I am not fully sealed as a bounded creature but emit breath into a shared world where I take in air that has been circulating through the lungs of others”, a position that the covid virus clarified. [10]
The pandemic highlighted the interconnections we share in the spaces we inhabit and the acts we choose to carry out. When people went out into the world carrying a potentially fatal virus transmitted through the act of breathing and touching, that action was no longer one of self. “So my action holds your life, and your action holds mine, at least potentially”. [11] Butler goes onto assert that in the relationality of each other that the pandemic shows us, we can no longer think of individuality in the same way. Butler asks us to place individually in the space of the imagination. It is simply not a real thing. “Individuality is an imagined status and depends on specifically social forms of the imaginary”. [12]
ROCKVILLE - OCTOBER 11: AIDS activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) protest at the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on October 11, 1988 in Rockville, Maryland. The action, called SEIZE CONTROL OF THE FDA by the group, shut down the FDA for the day. (Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images)
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When we live in a time where life for so many is precious and nothing is done, and when the world is continually also placed in a position of precarity and this does not change, the sorrow that arises is so thick it can seep back into us, it becomes tactile in its denseness. We live in a world where we are all connected yet this connectivity is punctuated by the tragedy of the world. The tragedy becomes a state, an object, that sits in relation to us and each other.
When we try and cover ourselves, we try and firm up our boundaries, and possibly stave against the emanation of the tragedy of the world, of life lost, of destruction that could be stopped, of the loss of the value that all life is worthy. As we seek to cover ourselves, our borders of flesh to other, our openings, we also risk losing the awareness of our relationality, the embrace of intentionality in touching the Merleu Ponty describes. In doing this we risk becoming more ready to let our fellow life forms fall way into an abyss of uncaring.
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Freud saw melancholia as happening when we do not acknowledge a loss that has happened. In this sense, if we do not acknowledge this process of tragedy that is happening to the world and many life forms within it, we may find ourselves swimming in an ocean of melancholia, baffled at our sadness and nostalgic for some way of life that is too far in the past to return to.
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Not only are some lives made unlivable and are simply let go of in the process of safeguarding lives, some conditions of life also make lives unliveable, such as poverty and violence. Butler reminds us that when the question is moved from, what do I need to ensure my life is liveable, to, I will not live like this, you have entered the political arena of social thought.
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As a queer, disabled, non binary person, I have experienced the intentional forgetting that all lives are valuable. I have felt the falling into uncaring, the being placed at the periphery of the safeguarding of life. When I have held on, despite the turning away from my desperate grip by those that could put out their hand, and when I have finally clambered back into the space of care, I have found myself saying, enough. Enough rationing of care and compassion. Enough hoarding of capital, property and wealth, enough not caring that some lives are held in higher esteem then others. If wanting more than scraps is political, then I am political. When wishing to be seen as equal in value to others, is a radical wish, then just living becomes a radical statement.
Audre Lorde reminds us that if we do not define ourselves we will be defined by others and I define myself as a radical for life.
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Infinite balance- the process of staying in the space of life despite the volley of adversity that is thrown my way.
In the words of Sarah Ahmed, “ Balance in an unbalanced world is never balanced”. [13]
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Film still, “Infinite balance” Emiko Artemis 2023
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My life can be arduous but the process of infinite balance and the impossible task it offers keeps me in the space of blissful suspension, never here nor there yet always held in the wadding of the world.
Film still, “Infinite balance” Emiko Artemis 2023
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This research was presented in the format of the film, "Infinite Balance", for the 2023 QTRG conference, QTRG Conference (wordpress.com)
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Bibliography
(Ed), Alice Correia. What Is Black Art. London UK: Pengiun Press 2023.
Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure. USA: MIT Press, 2019.
Ahmed, sarah. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. UK: Penguin, 2023.
Ahmed, Sara. Orientations, Objects, Others, Queer Phenomenology. Durham and London: Duke University Pres, 2006.
Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance : Club Culture and Queer World-Making
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=776819: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
Butler, Judith. What World Is This?
A Pandemic Phenomenology. USA: Columbia University Press, 2022
Case, Sue-Ellen. The Domain-Matrix : Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture / Sue-Ellen Case. Theories of Representation and Difference the Domain-Matrix. . Bloomington, Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press,, 1996.
Dalia Kinsey, RD, LD. Decolonizing Wellness
a Qtbipoc-Centered Guide to Escape the Diet Trap, Heal Your Self-Image, and Achieve Body Liberation. Dallas TX: Imprint: BenBella Books, 2022.
edited by David Eng, and David Kazanjian. Loss : The Politics of Mourning. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=223354: University of California Press, 2002.
Langa, Helen. " Seeing Queerly: Looking for Lesbian Presence and Absence in United States Visual Art, 1890 to 1950." Journal of Lesbian Studies 14:2-3 (2010): 124-39. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1080/10894160903196509.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.Chicago (17th Edition). NY: Crossing Press, 1984.
McQuinn, Austin. Becoming Audible : Sounding Animality in Performance
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=6425787: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020.
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs. Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Pres, 2022.
Poitras, Laura. "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed." 113 minutes. United States: Neon, 2022.
Silverman, Kaja. "Apparatus for the Production of an Image." Parallax 6:3 (2000): 12-28.
Vrtis, Catherine (Katya). "Defending the Patriarchy
the Monstrous (Queer) Other and the Anti-Carnivalesque." Taylor and Francis group online: Routledge 2022.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London, England: Verso 2009.
[1] Buckland, Fiona. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making
ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unisa/detail.action?docID=776819: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.
[2] Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure. USA: MIT Press, 2019.
[3] Ibid p 69/70
[4] Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure. USA: MIT Press, 2019.
[6] (Ed), Alice Correia. What Is Black Art. London UK: Pengiun Press 2023.
[7] Poitras, Laura. "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed." 113 minutes. United States: Neon, 2022.
[8] Butler, Judith. What World Is This?
A Pandemic Phenomenology. USA: Columbia University Press, 2022
[9] Butler, Judith. What World Is This?
A Pandemic Phenomenology. USA: Columbia University Press, 2022
[10] Butler, Judith. What World Is This?
A Pandemic Phenomenology. USA: Columbia University Press, 2022
[11] ibid
[12] ibid
[13] Ahmed, Sarah. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. UK: Penguin, 2023.
