Queer theory’s fixation on discourse, signification and performativity means that, despite its interest in the non-normative, it is primarily shaped by humanistic and language-related concerns. As Judith Butler once commented self-critically: “Every time I try to talk about the body, the writing ends up being about language”.1 Jasbir K. Puar, who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey and currently holds the Edward Said Chair of American Studies in Beirut, has contributed significantly to a post-humanist displacement of emphasis in her book [i]Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times [/i] (2007)2, aiming to break down the fixation on the humanistic and identitarian. After publishing an edition of the journal [i]Social-Text[/i] on the topic of [i]Interspecies [/i] in 2011, she is now working on a new book that combines discussions on assemblages and affects with a globalisation-critical perspective in which questions of health and “disability” are linked to analyses of neo-liberalism. She once said “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”3. In the following interview, Puar talks about scope for a (post-)queer politics of post-humanism.

Tim Stüttgen: Your works, which can be read as queer-of-colour interventions, have first and foremost been discussed in the context of political debates relating to 9.11, Islamophobia and homonationalism. Your theoretical analyses, which address post-humanism, assemblage theories and the affective turn, have perhaps not yet been examined sufficiently – although it is clear that both aspects of your work are inter-related. How would you describe the way in which you approach post-humanistic discourses, and the utility of such discourses?

Jasbir K. Puar: My approach to post-humanism came into being in connection with critical Race Studies, women-of-colour feminism, Disability Studies and queer theories. At its best, post-humanism asks how and why boundaries are produced between the human and the non-human. In this context I am, for example, interested in the relationship between speciesation and “racialisation”. However, many post-humanist approaches suffer from an often unmarked Euro-American tendency, which ultimately once again strengthens “the human” as a transparent category. My work is inspired by post-humanist theory, or, to be more precise, I am interested in how this field enters into a dialogue with other fields. Animal Studies, the new materialist turn, affect theories, object-oriented philosophy, as well as the growing interest in “things” and objects pose methodological and political challenges in respect of the construction of the human body and the humanistic subject.
For me the “post” in post-humanism is not so much about overcoming the human in concrete terms through moving in the direction of the technological or towards a different species. Instead, post-humanism undermines the centrality of human bodies and the way in which they are purportedly bound to the organic, emphasising instead the technological production of bodies and their rarely considered dependency of consciousness, tools, bodies and culture. Within these types of discursive networks, the human becomes one of many nodes rather than the central figure governing categories, material or meaning. A project like this is not merely relevant [i]for[/i] the present – it is also driven [i]by[/i] the present, for example through questions pertaining to human extinction, climate change, chaos capitalism, the devaluation of ecology and of course through the interface with technologies: from mobile phones as prostheses of the body right through to drone attacks as an extension of the body of the nation.

Stüttgen: According to Foucault, as a consequence of biopolitics human beings become a species, which is educated, observed and optimised. It becomes clear through your work how the understanding of biopolitics changes in the light of post-humanist perspectives.

Puar: That’s right. Biopolitics, as Foucault explains, is the process whereby human beings become a species and thus join the circle of all other biological species. This becoming is the process through which the anthropomorphic framings of the human enter into force and are consolidated. This gives rise to a paradox: the animalism of humans merges with the project of population construction whilst humans become a species. The androcentric human is therefore rearticulated as an exception to the rule of animality, namely in the form of humanity.
Foucault’s interpretation of racism as a “caesura in the biological spectrum” provides important food for thought for post-humanism, which otherwise often ignores race as the critical threshold of exclusion. However, this interpretation also continues to consider biological difference as being created, divided and arranged [i]in[/i] the human. Even if Foucault’s humanistic tendencies perhaps keep him from investigating a biopolitics of non-human species in greater depth, his theory of biopolitics views anthropocentrism as a defining facet of modernity. What I call biopolitical anthropocentrism relates to the biopolitical processes that produce the centrality of the human – or of certain humans. It takes an interest in the biopolitical analyses that include the centrality of the human species in their thinking as a primary locus in which separations based on race and sexuality occur.

Stüttgen: If the human is decentred, does language, as a central category of the human, find itself in crisis?

Puar: Language as a concept contains multiple aspects: mathematics, for example, can be viewed as a language, and many animals use forms of communication that could be contextualised as linguistic. And yet language, bizarrely, is viewed as an exclusively human characteristic. Language is not just the defining element that is supposed to divide humans from animals, but instead – as Mel Chen writes – “linguistic criteria are immutably cemented in human categories, which establishes human authority before the discussion on the linguistic subjugation of animals to humans even begins”.
Humans thus decide, on the basis of linguistic capacities which are defined by human language, that language appears as human language, which makes this language by definition into an argument to depict humans as being superior to non-human animals.
Two interventions are necessary at this point: first, language must be understood as multiple, as in a sense running through species rather than marking a boundary between the human and the non-human. And secondly, the primacy of language needs to be destabilised and the locus of the linguistic per se must be called into question. That not only opens up the question of what language is, but also allows us to understand it as an intensification of physical capabilities, as one of many forms in which the body can articulate itself and as one of many levels on which politics can be expressed. Ultimately language in this context can also be understood as a form of material – not as the contrary of material but as one material that exists alongside many others.

Stüttgen: Don’t you see dangers in this perspective too, if many still operative categories of power are disqualified to such an extent?

Puar: My work has always been rooted in concrete political paradoxes and phenomena, whether it was the exceptionalism of queer suicides, which has triggered kitsch humanist projects such as Dan Savage’s [i]It Gets Better[/i] project,4 the use of “pinkwashing” for projects of war and the occupation in Israel-Palestine, or the historical development of homonationalism. When we talk about something that we want to call “real life”, I would, on the contrary, assert that queer theories and politics have become too identitarian, too preoccupied with the concrete nature of human bodies and too fixated on ideas of the political ability to act which are tied to individuals and subjects.

Stüttgen: You have caused quite a stir in the debates on intersectionality conducted in the Gender and Queer Studies context through your interest in assemblage theories and other post-humanist approaches. Intersectionality as a critical approach, which has developed in particular out of women-of-colour critiques, decentres gender and sexuality and brings them face to face with other categories such as race, class or nation. However, this approach, which adds together various categories, comparing and relating them to each other, does not seem to you to go far enough.

Puar: I am a convinced advocate of intersectional analyses, which foreground the equally constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender and nation, but I am also involved in reformulating assemblage theories. Many feminists, for example Leslie McCall, define intersectionality as “the most important contribution developed to date by Women’s Studies, in conjunction with other fields”. At the same time, I observe post-structural exhaustion with the predictable, yet still necessary, need for recognition of the subject, which led me to suggest in my book [i]Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times[/i] that intersectionality as an intellectual category and as a tool of political intervention should be supplemented or complicated by the term “(queer) assemblage”. Brian Massumi for example critiques categories, such as those at play in intersectionality too, as a “retrospective ordering of identities” and as a “back-form(ation) of their realities”. Picking up on this, I also view intersectional identities more as by-products, which immobilise and oppress, torpedo, reduce and expropriate the subversive mobility of the activity of assemblages, i.e., of complex structures of subjects, technologies and things, which are in motion. The positioning of the subject in the grid of identitarian markings never comes into being of its own accord, but is always generated by movement. Epistemological correctives cannot grasp ontological becoming in this way; the complexity of the process is continually misunderstood as the resulting product.
Since the book was published, I have often been called on to elucidate the political utilization of assemblage theories. These theories often seem to trigger doubts about their political applicability, whereas intersectionality is defined as a successful tool for political and academic transformation. These doubts are rooted partly in the assumption that representation and the subjects it encompasses constitute the dominant, primary and most effective level for political intervention, whereas a Deleuzian, non-representative and non-subject-oriented politics is held to be impossible. Perhaps these misgivings are also symptomatic of a belief that these two approaches are incompatible or contradictory, although intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous in terms of their content, usefulness or applicability.

Stüttgen: The Afro-American civil rights and legal theory expert Kimberlé Crenshaw has shaped the image of a crossroads (“intersection”) that is so central to intersectionality5, as if race and gender, for example, were two lines that intersect at one particular point. If we add more categories and lines to our thinking, a kind of identity grid emerges.

Puar: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s image of the road intersection is constitutive in metaphorical invocations of intersectionality. In this metaphor, intersectionality appears as a kind of grid within which identity is positioned, whilst assemblage is what precedes or evades this grid. In this sense intersectionality and assemblage do not intersect directly, even if it would be entertaining to draw on the image of intersection once again, but they engage in argument with each other. You could also say that I would like to encourage an affirmative dialogue between two apparently opposed approaches: on the one hand, intersectional feminist theory, renowned in particular for taking women of colour into account; on the other hand feminist theory which addresses post-representative, post-human and post-subject-oriented conceptualisations of the body. My motivation is however not to get to the bottom of the limits and potential of intersectionality once and for all, with a view to either renewing intersectionality or condemning it as outdated and obsolete, but instead to place it in a dialogue with assemblages and to see what can be done with the two theories in tandem.

Stüttgen: Temporality is another relevant category with which you and others attempt to renew queer theory.

Puar: I am interested in new conceptions of queer theories and queer politics that are receptive to the non-human, the cyborg, the weak and the ecologically precarious. In this respect we should take seriously Lee Edelman’s “No Future” exhortation,6 by means of which he criticises the structure of “looking forwards” and “believing in the future” as reproductive ideologies of the commons, represented most pronouncedly by the child, which is supposed to resolve everything that has failed. I am interested in “No Future” not as a nihilistic or death-driven gesture, nor as a polemic limited simply to a rejection of human reproduction and the child as the ideological patron of the “good future”, but instead as a serious political gesture to deprive biopolitics of its regenerative authority.
From this perspective I ask: what comes after biopolitics? If biopolitics produces a desire for a fully lived life, a life of duration, capacity, and fertility and a fantasy about the meaning of the past, present and future that is anchored in the statistical, in the perfect and in the population, then would it not be true to say that contemporary movements which emphasise austerity and precarity are already post-biopolitical? Don’t they make us aware that narratives about development or the past-present-future of growth, debts, the human, ecology and capitalism have failed? Whilst the structures of government and capital continue to propagate the myth of a good life in a highly insulting manner, I interpret the social order through the prism of a different notion of temporality, one in which happiness and satisfaction are not presented as pre-existing or as something that can be brought up to date at present.

Stüttgen: You address capacity and debility, capability and weakness as new analytical categories – innovatively combining analysis and critique of neo-liberalism with questions of (physical and mental) ability and disability.

Puar: My current book project [i]Affective Politics: States of Debility and Capacity[/i] works with approaches from globalisation theory, queer theory and the increasingly significant field of Disability Studies. I argue in this book that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, sexuality, nation and disability does not suffice to grasp the increasing physical capabilities and the parallel growth in visibility of normative and even exceptional forms of disability. I observe the way in which the able/disabled dualism runs through social, geographical and political spaces, and the way in which disability as identity contributes through human rights discourses to a standardisation of physical usefulness and uselessness. This standardisation does not merely ignore the specificity of social contexts, but also the affective dimensions of bodies and their tendencies to elude or defy identitarian parameters. Here too I attempt to combine intersectionality and assemblage theories in order to consider how and why bodies are understood as being depleted or competent – and often even both simultaneously.

Stüttgen: You say “nothing will be better”. Has the ideology of “everything will be better” reached its limits?

Puar: Disability produces two different narratives. On the one hand “it gets better”, on the other hand “it gets worse”– and we will all be disabled at some point. Nowadays this crisis is no longer characterised by transience, but is extended into a kind of normalisation of an exceptional state. The re-configuration of bodies and capital implies immense displacements; the narrative structures of “it gets better/worse” transition into a neoliberal structure that no longer needs to overcome disability and debility. Instead they only begin to really flourish due to the shocks of the system, and this system benefits if the crisis is maintained as a normative state, both physically and economically. In keeping with this, we should discuss not only how neoliberalism attacks weaker segments of the population, but also, over and above this, how it invests in producing and maintaining disability and debility.
One example for the interconnection of disability and the normalisation of catastrophe capitalism is to be found in what are dubbed “crippling debts”. These can be situated in the biopolitical proximity of physical, cognitive and mental vulnerability, contrasting with “fiscal health” as a form of wealth/capacity. Theorising debts as a form of physical vulnerability entails recognising the historical and structural relationships between poverty, disease and disability – for example in destruction of the environment, in war and in exploitation of the workforce. At the same time, certain forms of exceptional disability are renegotiated as cultural capital, which enables access to medical care. In the context of financial expropriation and the lack of social health care in the USA, conceptualizing debts as debility/weakness means that a profit system opens up to the capital that is displaced from the labouring body to the sick body. This becomes the most fertile and reproductive trope of contemporary capitalist exploitation.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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