in between futures: : Miranda July meets Rancire, Edelman, and Bifo

Jordan Gillespie ENG 417-Advanced Study in Critical Writing: Queer Theory Dr. Elizabeth Schirmer 8 December 2012

You know how, like in cartoons, when the building gets hit by the wrecking ball, right before the building falls down, there's always like this moment where it's perfectly still right before it collapses? We're in that moment. The wrecking ball has already hit all of this, and this is just the moment before it all falls down. Jason

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We begin the film in darkness, with only a creaky, high voice speaking to us. The voice is that of the notorious Childpersonified by a cat named Paw-Paw. The Future came in 2011 from the mind of Miranda July: writer, director, actor, and performance artist, who tells the story of 35-year-olds, Sophie and Jason, and (the late) Paw-Paw; but it also tells another story, what is to become of a post-Millenial age? With the two-way mirror of the Internet, the trials of living and working in a semiocapitalist system, and the most problematic natures of sex, sexuality, and gender, July confronts the future and makes her audience no promises. This paper will initially thrash out the future as imagined by Franco Berardi, Sadie Plant, Lee Edelman, and Jacques Rancire with help from others. Then, using the 21st century as a foothold, will propose that queerness is a state of historical and social transition as we move into postfuturity (or whatever it will be called one day). This original reading of postmodernity, queer theory, and sociopolitical analyses will be sustained by Miranda Julys beautiful, dense, and captivating film, a model of the aesthetics of being presently in between futures. After the credits, which include Miranda July as director, writer, and actor, we see the eerily analogous Sophie and Jason, splayed symmetrically into one other on the couch, both absorbed by matching Macbooks. Through their appearances, Sophie and Jason both refer to one another and also back to July, forming an insular and complex web of persona. July stated in an interview with The New Statesman magazine that even her close friends often make the mistake of identifying the auteurs self within her filmic creations. July refutes this, claiming that her personality tones her descriptors, perceptions and visual aesthetic, but not her stories. The twin-like position of the first frame sets up a kind of dialectical synthesis of gender, oppositional in position but also merging. A unique form of mimesis splits the consciousness of the film from the start, hinting that Sophie and Jason are in many ways, the same, two sides of

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the same personal coin. It also recalls Judith Butlers elaboration of the incest taboo as a regulative term of heteronormative discourse and desire-- the emblem of heterosexual intelligibility and cultural coherence. Butler considers how the coherence of heterosexuality is a function of its incoherent alternatives in deviant desires, stating that mimicry and masquerade form the essence of gender. Then she deconstructs how normals and deviants are mutually determined, especially in tragic art (Ganani-Tomares 6). For The Future, the incest taboo is subversively exposed in Sophie and Jasons matching haircuts and postures, but Sophie still worries about getting into an accident, getting amnesia, and not being able to recognize Jason. Foucault delineates between two kinds of mimicry: Resemblance has a model, an original element that orders and hierarchizes the increasingly less faithful copies that can be struck from it. Resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and classes. The similar develops in series that have neither beginning nor end, that can be followed in one direction as easily as in another, that obey no hierarchy, but propagate themselves from small differences among small differences. Resemblance serves representation, which rules over it; similitude serves repetition, which ranges across it. Resemblance predicates itself upon a model it must return to and reveal; similitude circulates the simulacrum as an indefinite and reversible relation of the similar to the similar (Foucault qtd. in Sobchack 138) So while it can easily be said that the actors resemble one another, such a statement infers that there exists an original which can be copied and judged in terms of closeness to the original. For The Futures characters, it is more fitting to employ Foucaults relational model of similitude, which asserts difference instead of likeness as criterion and is, as Vivian Sobchack states in Postfuturism, a chapter in the Gendered Cyborg reader, reversible. Such a model allows for a more in-depth understanding of how July queers a seemingly heterosexual couple and herself as their inventor. Sophie and Jason, quit their jobs suddenly (a childrens dance teacher and a stay-at-home tech support agent, respectively) in order to reprioritize their lives. They do this because they are

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confronted with the reality that their lives will end and their dreamed accomplishments will be unobtainable, given the world and time they have to work with. We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future. So hopes Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, a scholar of economics, social-relations, and art. 20th century revolutionary politics were obliged to the temporal form of the future they even gave a name to the first movement of the avant-garde: Futurism. The future was on the side of the revolution. It was a hopeful and empowering way of thinking, Berardis diagnosis is that the future is over, recognizing 1977 as the end of the future and citing Sid Viciouss declaration of no future! Where the future was once a promise for progress, now there is only the precariousness of life. That precariousness bleeds into the sphere of labor and production. Capitalism, or what Berardi designates as semiocapital, has evolved into the living labor of cyberspace. Jasons position as a tech-support agent and Sophies internet addiction both create what is termed infolabor, the primary method of creating semiocapital. Berardi proposes a kind of communist politics and activism based on radical passivity and suggests a new refusal to work. Sophie and Jasons sudden economic upheaval when confronted with the futuredeath, ostensibly, coordinates with Berardis thesis. Slowly, this moment evolves into a more abstract sensation of dread at the thought of the capitalized Future, begging questions of the value of this kind of connectivity; We talk of precarious work, precarity, precarisation. But the word precarity does not perfectly define the figure or the notion of fragments of time, of life, that are available for the process of de-territorialised recombination. Your time can be called for on the phone and for one day, one week, two hours; you will be recombined inside the ever changing process of exploitation. So, work becomes de-territorialised and just as fractal and recombinant as financial capital. But at the same time the social body is pulverised and is deprived of the very bodily existence of the body itself; a disembodied body in a sense, dissolved in the process of work (Bernani).

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Julys character, Sophie, wants to recommit her life to dance in a more personal way, she begins a project in which she hopes to perform 30 unique dances in as many days and plans to post the results on the internet. But she quickly becomes stuck in a Youtube k-hole, comparing her own body and moves to those of other dancing women on the internet. But instead of passively accepting the internets affect on her project, Sophie chooses to disconnect her home connection (even though it will interfere with her uploading scheduleshe says she can just go to a caf) in order to focus on her work. When Jason arrives home from his new, paused -future job (he begins selling small trees door-to-door for a nonprofit, at the spontaneous urging of a canvasser), Sophie informs him of her actions and in hysterical moment before they lose connectivity, they attempt to look up important things that are only online only to come up with Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year. This comical moment actually points to a kind of alienation that is exposed both by Sobchack in her consideration of how machines and dueling figurations of alienation function in postfuturistic speculative fiction and by Berardi in his diagnosis of postmodern cybercapitalism/semiocapitalismhe points the discourse that is occurring in intellectual and economic realms and anticipates a revolution of sorts: insurrection will not be an insurrection of solidarity, it will be an insurrection in the search of our own body as a social body, as an erotic body, as a body of solidarity. And this is the main problem of the cognitariat nowadays; that the general intellect is looking for its body. Much of Sophies problem in The Future deals with her body and how she conceives of it. The unique two-way mirror that the internet presents is indeed alienating for so manyfor all the connection that it appears to offer, much of the internet functions in such a way as to disconnect the body from the mind and substitutes a symbol (i.e. an avatar, a screen-name, a personal brand) for a tangible body (Sobchack). In a transcendent turning point of the film, July with help from a

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choreographer recreates a dance performance shed once performed, in which she dances with a XL mens t-shirt. This sounds absurd. However, as Sophie stretches her body into the anthropomorphized garmet and compresses her entire 6ft frame into the folds of the yellow tshirt, and blindly, beautifully, stumbles around the bedroom of her lover to a Beach House song, the viewer begins to understand something about how Sophie understands her body. When she hides her body within the cotton, the viewer first sees Sophie as Sophie sees herself: amorphous, faceless, and surreal, confined within the material world. The dance ends when Sophie is no longer alone. She pulls the shirt over her head and is confronted with an agape spectator, the man she chooses to have an affair with. July says: its also a break -up scene (NY Times). Lee Edelmans book No Future introduces the concept of sinthomosexuality (symptomatic queerness) as a rebellion against child-centered futurity. In order to defy the notion that the most meaningful thing one can do with ones life is reproduce, one must embrace irony and subjectivity, according to Edelman. By extension, queerness then becomes an overtly political statement: a refusal to participate in the future as imagined by dominant discourses and systems of power. According to Edelman, working on ground first laid by Lacan, who distinguished Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders of existence, queer occupies a space between Symbolic and Imaginary realms as an inherent foil to heterosexuality, dismantling static hetero symbols and aiming to forget the future. Rather than rejecting, with liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social order; but rather to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane (4). A short critical analysis of Edelmans theorization of futurity from renowned queer

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theorist Jack Halberstam, insightfully notes that while hes titled his book w ith a reference to the quintessential punk bands famous chorus, theres no mention of punks rejection of tradition, While The Sex Pistols used the refrain no future to reject a formulaic union of nation, monarchy and fantasy, Edelman tends to cast material political concerns as crude and pedestrian, as already a part of the conjuring of futurity that his project must foreclose. Perhaps Edelman is correct to ignore the material problems that would complicate the deployment of his theory as a form of political activism. Halberstam is correct in that Edelman does not do all of the work in creating a plan of semantic action for an individual once he/she embraces queerness and rejects a dictated future. Jackie Wang continues the assault on Edelman: Yes Edelmans notion of queer is as cold and lifeless as a corpse the two options that Lee articulates constitute a totally false and bogus binary. There is production and there is its negative. All forms of production or any interest in livability automatically adhere to the logic of heteronormative reproductive futurism. Judith Butlers strategy of utilizing the instability of signifiers to undermine their dominant meanings (resignification) is re-cast by Edelman as liberal politics and an all too American reading of Lacan. In the conclusion of his framework, Edelman forcefully articulates negativity: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name were collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop (29). Even with this outburst against these symbols for the Child and their strangulation of culture and how it has impacted the postmodern psyche, Halberstam claims that Edelmans brand of queer theory is incomplete in its development, calling his futurity unnervingly tidy in part because of his reliance upon Lacans realms but in a more confrontational move, he indicates that Edelman does not go far enough, ultimately, he does not fuck the law, big or little L, he succumbs to the law of grammar, the law of logic, the law of abstraction, the law of apolitical formalism, the law of genres (3).

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The Future uses Paw-Paw, that cat, as a symbol for the hypothetical child of Sophie and Jason. Upon learning that, if cared for, the old and decrepit cat will live as many as 5 more years, they freak out thinking about what life might be like in 5 years: Well be 40 in 5 years 40 is basically 50 and after 50 the rest is just loose change. Loose change? Like, not enough anything to get anything you really want. Oh god. So for all practical purposes, in a month, thats it for us... This melodramatic consideration of temporality begs questions of Edelmans Child; can it refer to more than the One? the fruits of reproduction? Wang continues to say that the true process of identity synthesis destabilizes Edelmans tidy binary, for doing and undoing always happens concurrently, as becoming always requires an undoing of what came before. But we dont know what happened to Sophie and Jason before Paw-Paw, so were left to question their childhoods, the origin of their relationship, and how they came to find the abandoned and injured cat. Our indication of how the relationship between Sophie and Jason functions is more informed once we see their relationship fall apart. For Jacques Rancire, politics, like art, centers on the possible ways that the world can be configured and represented. Any aesthetic act is political when it effects a reordering of the social world. Some works of art transcend the physical and theoretical limitations of their media when they wander, they threaten to confuse categories and incite questions about the world as it is. (193-198) Much of Rancire's work on art and politics engages implicitly with traditions of queer art and queer representation. Queer aesthetics make use of the ambiguities that temper the politics of represent ation and bring about new possibilities for the distribution of the sensible world. Aesthetics is the study of the formative logics of a particular aesthetic enunciation and the regimes of being, doing, or saying. The Future also has a companion piece that July created

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in the process of attempting to finish the film. Its called It Chooses You and is a compilation of interviews that July does with people she finds in a junk-mail classifieds circular, the PennySaver (this quote is lengthy so as to convey the shifting queer aesthetic that July is confronted with):
Perhaps because I did not feel very confident when I was writing it, the movie was turning out to be about faith, mostly about the nightmare of not having it. It was terrifyingly easy to imagine a woman who fails herself, but Jasons storyline confounded me. I couldnt figure out his scenesSo now I was past faith. I was lying in the field staring at the ants. I was googling my own name as if the answer to my problem might be secretly encoded in a blog post about how annoying I was. I had never really understood alcohol before, which was something that had alienated me from most people, but now I came home each day and tried not to talk to my husband before Id had a thimbleful of wine I tell you all this so you can understand why I looked forward to Tuesdays. Tuesday was the day the PennySaver booklet was delivered. It came hidden among the coupons and other junk mail. I read it while I ate lunch, and then, because I was in no hurry to get back to not writing, I usually kept reading it straight through to the real estate ads in the back. I carefully considered each itemnot as a buyer, but as a curious citizen of Los Angeles. Each listing was like a very brief newspaper article. News flash: someone in LA is selling a jacket. The jacket is leather. It is also large and black. The person thinks it is worth ten dollars. But the person is not very confident about that price, and is willing to consider other, lower prices. I wanted to know more things about what this leather-jacket person thought, how they were getting through the days, what they hoped, what they fearedbut none of that information was listed. What was listed was the persons phone number.

When July discovers the owner of this particular jacket, it turns out to be Michael, a man in his mid 50s undergoing a gender transformation. This interview becomes the most powerful of the book and also allows July to become unstuck in her work: Now when I drove past this building I would always know that Michael was in thereenjoying life and desiring only one last thingto transform into a woman. His conviction ignited me. I decided to remove myself from my computer and the implication that I might be on the verge of a good idea . Ranciere explains that any rhetoric that celebrates an unmediated pure imageor art objectis always undermined by its dependence on a further codifying discourse. He studies how these oppositions misunderstand the relation between seeing and sayingthe way visual meaning and linguistic meaning depend on and cooperate with one other. As he puts it, There is visibility that does not amount to an image; there are images which consist wholly in words . The meaning of

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The Future might be grounded in It Chooses You. Its especially interesting that Julys own retreat from her computer allowed her to finish the script; her characters without their connection to internet are thrust into a world of previously unthinkable interactions with strangers and one another. Jason begins to shirk his volunteer duties in order to spend time with an older man who writes his beloved wife fifteen unique limericks on every major holiday. He says the hardest part of the relationship is the beginning. He says people do terrible things that seem unforgivable. When Jason replies that he and Sophie have never had those kinds of problems, the man responds, Well, the thing is, youre just in the middle of the beginning right now. And that moment marks the beginning of the end of the movie, in which Sophie and Jason psychically unravel in the face of the dreaded future. In the second surreal moment of the film, Jason harks back to a sarcastic conversation from the first scene about his ability to stop time because he finds himself actually able to freeze the clock at 3:14AM, his hand on top of Sophies head (just about to tell him of her affair) . The viewer might intrinsically understand why Jason chooses to stop time, but if unpacked, it seems that he is motivated firstly by fear fear of the truth and the subsequent end of his relationshipand secondly by his need to control his environment with his bodyhis position over Sophie emphasizes that. July chooses to not to keep Jason totally alone while time is frozen; she anthropomorphizes the moon as seen from the Los Angeles window and cleverly gives it the voice of Jasons friend, the old man. But in The Future, solutions dont come from elderly wisdom or from anything else. Not even catharsis. July never gives the audience the catharsis of a cinematic pummeling like a brutal argument, falling out of love, or the death of a character. Theres no possibility of relief, since nothings happened in the 3 days that Jason sits in stasis, time is frozen but paradoxically still moving. So when he removes his hand from Julys head and finds himself unable to reinstate the usual

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linearity of his life, he descends further into panic and dramatically walks to the beach to aid the moon in pushing and pulling the tides. Time restarts, Sophie is gone, but they reunite in the last scene when they realize that both have forgotten to return to the animal shelter to collect PawPaw. Hes been euthanized. The future never arrived. And so the viewer is left with the knowledge that a movie called The Future actually presents a story of two people who, despite a desperate attempt, dont seem to have one. As the final credits flick by and Sophie and Jason sit in separate rooms of their original apartment, in the process of sorting their things and leaving one another, it is hard not to see the film as a complete confirmation of Edelmans thesis: that to reject the Child is to reject the future. But these characters make a concerted lunge to recapture the present so as to procrastinate the future as typified by Paw-Paw. They try very hard do something life-changing with their lives in the course of the month, but end up doing nothing. If, as Bernani and Halberstam advocate, they had refused to do anything, perhaps their passivity would seem more optimistic to audiences, more radical; Jackie Wang says: maybe the self-destructive impulse arises when we realize that we are at odds with the system that surrounds us, when we realize that participation would mean symbolic death and we are fashioning a new kind of refusal. When Sophie returns to the apartment for what seems to be the final time, only to find Jason with dark circles around his eyes and the ultimatum: you can stay for the night, but thats it, the viewer might find herself wondering why a final departure scene is omitted. Until we again hear Julys creepy cat voice: After a long time a long, long timeI gave up. No waiting anymore. As it turns out, living is just the beginning. And so the beginning is over. Im cat of nobody. Im not even cat. Im not even I. Its warm. Its light. It goes on and on and on. The beginning of our future is indeed over. It seems best to accept that, even if we do hope for tomorrow.

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Works Cited Berardi, Franco, Gary Genosko, and Nicholas Thoburn. After the Future. Edinburgh: AK, 2011. Print. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP, 2004. Print. Elmhirst, Sophie. "The NS Interview: Miranda July, Writer and Film-maker." The NS Interview: Miranda July, Writer and Film-maker. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. The Future. Dir. Miranda July. Perf. Miranda July, Hamish Linklater, David Warshofsky. Roadside Attractions, 2011. Netflix. July, Miranda. "It Chooses You." The New Yorker. N.p., 14 Oct. 2011. Web. 14 Dec. 2012. Onstad, Katrina. "The Make-Believer: Miranda July Is Totally Not Kidding." The New York Times. 17 July 2011. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/the-makebeliever.html>. Rancire, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2006. Print. Sobchack, Vivian. "Postfuturism." The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. Ed. Gill Kirkup, et al. London: Routledge in Association with the Open University, 2000. 136-47. Print. Wang, Jackie. "Is Death Queer?" Web log post. Ballerinas Dance With Machine Guns. N.p., 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 14 Dec. 2012.