Archives and Feelings

Failure and Killjoys, Stories and Justice-through-Chaos

Megha Baikadi

December 3, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0  
Writing Assignment Five, draft 12/3/2013

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Expand and elaborate a previous essay. Cite 5 readings from the course and two from outside. [3000-6000 words.]

¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 0  

¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Ok, its short, and late, and not quite done… but I had a really bad weekend and I didnt get more than this done.  I would appreciate any feedback that can be managed, considering the deficiencies in the source material.

¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 As I was looking over my past essays to choose the one I would like to expand upon, I saw Janelle’s comment (and my own response) to the most recent assignment, the analytical reflection. Looking at failure and the adult/child dynamic in other power dynamics makes a lot of sense to me on several levels. It also ties back into some of the things we’ve been exploring all semester, questions of what does our academic work mean to us, and what are we trying to do, and what archives are we drawing on to accomplish this. I have considered myself a rabid anti-dichotomist from about the middle of high school, when I first came across the term. I wanted to include some chaos, something to shake up the binaries and bring change.

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 And this is something I could see myself attempting in my scholarly work, in the classroom especially. I want third places, fourth ways, fifth alternatives, boths and neithers and sudden reversals into actually-we-were-really-arguing something else. I think spreading the ability to look at problems in different terms, questioning the ‘obvious’ rhetorics and prying at every edge for other possible ways to see and know the situation, is something really strong and valuable for students to learn. I think this way of looking and knowing might serve social justice, might make people more likely to look beneath the surface, and once it is seen more will act on it. In a way it is being a killjoy, like Ahmed’s feminist killjoys. It is easy to be blamed for being the one to drag up the problem, point out the issues, when others are content to gloss them over. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 The passage in Halberstam’s “The Queer Art of Failure” that speaks so strongly to me because, the difference between failure and success has often been to me one between children and adults – between who has the authority to say one way over being over another is right, or is normal (and not just “more common”). It has been the way that two arguments, well thought out but based on two different understandings of what the world should be or what has value, are not even allowed to be in conversation with each other, that one is automatically accepted and the other rejects because one speaker is taller than the other, is ‘older’, has the power to label adult and child, “experience” and “stubborn childishness”, has the power to just refuse to listen, refuse to understand.

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 The difference between children and adults and the difference between winners and losers can so often be neatly laid atop each other, with overlaps so few and gaps so far between. It goes far enough, I think, to see that often winners and losers will have the difference between adults and children laid back on top of their challenge or loss. The metaphor of parent and child is what is there in the depths of so many relationships of power. It is not just an imbalance, but an imbalance with a story, a rationale, a built in defense. This story has served the colonizer against the colonized, the ‘advanced’ against the ‘undeveloped’, those with power – political, social, financial, rhetorical.

¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 I would see colonizer and colonized as cultural versions of this adult/child concept, colonized countries are termed third world, less developed, backward, young… while others are more developed, advanced, first world. It seems to me to be very rare to have raw power differences at the heart of a conflict, without the stronger taking a parental rhetoric. Actions being justified as for the best, something they will understand, lasting only until they pass some marker of status (shifting over time, of course) that will let them finally deal as equals. Which won’t happen, at least not without a fight, of course. The relationship is a power dynamic at heart, no matter how it is dressed, and the story of parent and child is just that – a story used to justify and explain, that allows people to accept actions that should not be accepted because the story (not reality) makes sense. Because it is such a strong and versatile metaphor, because it justifies a relationship of tyranny that may be needed (or may not be, depending), and because it is designed to be unarguable – after all, who would give a child something dangerous, or not guide them properly no matter how hard it is on them?

¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 There was this tv show when I was younger – I don’t recall the name, someone else was watching it while I was in the living room reading, so I only caught bits and pieces. One thing I remember was that there were these ‘great races’ (of aliens), and humanity running around a wide and dangerous galaxy with relatively uncomplicated badguys who preyed on others. Anyway, one thing that I noticed at the time was the great races used a parental metaphor, which for me at the time flopped so badly it didn’t even make sense. And still doesn’t. The claim went something like these races wouldn’t share technology (to defend against the slaving badguy race) on the ground that humanity was too young, had not developed on its own (noninterference in ‘primitive’ cultures, I guess), and some emotional “would you put a gun in a child’s hand?”. I wanted to know if they believed the adult-child metaphor, how could they justify leaving the ‘children’ undefended against the badguys? And not just offer not tech or weapons, but no teaching, no safe places, no other help? What people would treat actual children so harshly, getting nothing at all till they’re adults?

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 The answer is, I guess, what I’ve been talking about. Parent/child is a powerful metaphor, one that lets all kinds of things be justified. That isn’t the same as being real, or offering the positives of the relationship like protection and responsibility for along with the negatives, like control and inequality. This was the analysis from a tv show, I mentioned… but these are drawn from the now, the ideas we have now. This is a metaphor that isn;t questioned, as far as I can see, in the story where it was set – the contradictions didn’t come up or were thrown back at those races by those who said, this doesn’t make sense. I don’t know if the audience thought differently, but I suspect not because of the way it was naturalized in the show, and in our culture. These metaphors have been in use, and are now in use, in the colonizing mindset, in the cultural imperialism, in a lot of the dynamics between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ nations.

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