The Logic of the Lure / Edition 1

by John Paul Ricco

Overview

The attraction of a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot—such feelings permeate our lives, yet we usually dismiss them as insubstantial or meaningless. With The Logic of the Lure, John Paul Ricco argues that it is precisely such fleeting, erotic, and even perverse experiences that will help us create a truly queer notion of ethics and aesthetics, one that recasts sociality and sexuality, place and finitude in ways suggested by the anonymity and itinerant lures of cruising. Shifting our attention from artworks to the work that art does, from subjectivity to becoming, and from static space to taking place, Ricco considers a variety of issues, including the work of Doug Ischar, Tom Burr, and Derek Jarman and the minor architecture of sex clubs, public restrooms, and alleyways.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226711010
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	01/15/2003
Edition description:	1
Pages:	195
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Paul Ricco is an assistant professor of art history at Texas Tech University. He has curated several contemporary art exhibitions on gender, sexuality, and AIDS.

Read an Excerpt

The Logic of the Lure

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By John Paul Ricco

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 John Paul Ricco
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226711013

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Chapter One - Minor

The middle: the only place where one can begin, as I shall, here and now. A here and now that in its singularity is not properly designated by the middle, but more so as a middle or simply as middle, thereby marking the impropriety of every singularity, every here and now. A middle, then, that is in the midst of the middle, a now here that is at the same time nowhere but elsewhere.

In an attempt to address the specificity of queer forms and forces of sociality and spatiality as "absolute destitutions of empirical singularities" one can neither begin nor end with the architectural (or any other predicate for that matter). Rather, one must remain someplace other than where "a rational space or an adequate place" remains; the singular multiplicity of spatiality, itself, some-place like, wherever.

The relation to wherever is the specificity of relationality itself, such that the ontology of existence is defined as relational (being as being-with). And yet this is a relation that is not a relation "to" or "with" something, someplace, or someone. The form and force of relationality that I am interested in is a relation with-out rapport, a relation literally marked by the"simultaneously conjunctive, disjunctive, and undecidable" hyphenation between with and out. It is precisely the double refusal of neither being-with (a relation) nor being-without (a non-relation) but rather being-with-out (a non-relational relation). It is what Blanchot refers to as a relation of the third, which Derrida in turn defines as

not the third as the condition for the symbolic and the law, but the third as destructuring structuration of the social bond, as social disconnection (deliaison) and even as the disconnection of the interruption, of the "without rapport" that can constitute a rapport to the other in its alleged normality.

The Blanchotian/Derridean third, in its sociality-spatiality, is what I take to be the specificity of relationality. It is a midst (amidst) without being a between (mediation), since it refuses the logic that insists on a choice between either a one or an other, or even that which is argued to lie between the two. Rather, one might begin to understand how relationality lies both before and after the subject, identity, the social, the architectural, etc.-- in other words, to begin to think relationality as something other than either grounding or transcendence: conditions for the symbolic and the law.

The "out" of being-with-out (a non-relational relation), is what Blanchot and Foucault refer to as the Outside. With every inside-outside opposition there comes something, something that is outside the closure that is this coupling, something that is not a thing at all (at least not necessarily). This is the Outside that not only remains outside of every inside, but outside of every outside. The Outside might be understood as that which exists prior to and stands in the wake of every inside-outside opposition. It is what remains before and after all is said and done. Being-in-relation-with-the-Outside is a way of thinking the relationality that is being, as being-with-out.

The topoi of the Outside may be what Foucault meant when he spoke of heterotopias, or other spaces. Heterotopias are radically other spaces, and like the Outside, cannot be said to be outside of anything; they are solely or solitarily outside. As the refusal of the inside-outside dialectic, nothing comes in from, or out of, the Outside, except for coming, which comes as the Outside. The Outside is the outside to come, the coming outside, "the coming of what does not come, of what would come without an arrival, outside of Being and as though adrift," or amidst. As coming, the Outside is a relation without a context, a future without futurity (an end). The Outside is simply outside, simply coming.

The spatiality of the Outside as the defiance of emplacement is something like relationality itself, whereby we can now understand the latter as the rapport with-the-outside, or simply the rapport with-out. A rapport with-out (as opposed to the negative relation of being without rapport) is a folding of space, which occurs at the limit and in the midst of it all; a perplication that "introduce[s] a creative distantiation into the midst of things." It is a social-spatial folding that is at the same time the attenuation or stretching of social and spatial fabrics. It is indeterminate or virtual--which is to say it bears the indeterminacy and virtuality of all singularities--and necessarily will remain so here, throughout this text. Nonetheless, it need not be reduced or elevated to the level of either universalizing or minoritizing abstraction, both of which would posit it as an object of inquiry and interpretation. Rather, it is a form and force of social-spatial folding that in its double refusals and evacuations of contents might be taken as perverse, if not--perforce--as queer. During an interview in 1981, Foucault spoke of this social-spatial form and force as the slantwise position of the homosexual.

Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational vir tualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because of the "slantwise" position of the latter, as it were, the diago nal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.

Note that Foucault is speaking not of homosexual content, identity, or perhaps even specific acts, but of a relational logic that is indeterminate, one that neither begins nor ends with homosexuality, but through which one might come to relate socially and spatially other-wise, and perhaps actualize other-spaces. And yet a passing through homosexuality that in turn may be a relinquishing of homosexuality (as determinable object, position, and agency), which in the end might not be such a bad thing. Foucault's slantwise or anamorphic trajectory, like Deleuze's fold, and Rajchman's perplications, are ways one might begin to understand a relation to the Outside, as a force of experimentation (a coming) and a form of implication (an insinuating).

We can invent the other peoples that we are already or may become as sin gular beings only if our being and being-together are indeterminate--not identifiable, given, recognizable in space and time--in other words, if our future remains unknown and our past indeterminate.

This suggests, in the here and now, an ethics and a politics articulated through a future-anterior logic of pasts to come and futures that have been. This is indeed untimely, yet it is a temporal interruption that folds across futures and pasts, and thereby strives neither towards revolutionary ends nor nostalgic origins. It is what it might mean to give oneself over, without expectation, objective, or certainty; and to act ethically yet without a project, and to engage in political practice without a program. Spatially, it defines an ethics and politics that puts one neither within oneself nor outside of oneself, but rather, beside oneself.

Defining a self as being-beside-itself is to define a self relationally, which is to say as other than a self, without being the Other of a Self (neither one nor the other). Being beside oneself is the relation that is the relation to the Outside, such that a self can no longer be posited prior to a relation with the Outside into which the self may or may not move. Rather, the very definition of the self, its ontology, is this relation to the Outside. The self 's ontology is hereby re-inflected as a topology: whoever as wherever.

To the extent that distinctions between figure or body, and ground or space, allow one to speak of the architectonic, the foldings or implications that I have been unfolding and explicating in their refolding and complication of these distinctions place the architectonic beside itself. Architecture beside itself is what one might call minor architecture--architecture that is neither the inside of architecture nor the outside of architecture, but architecture outside architecture--the architectural Outside. Minor architecture is prior to and in the wake of architecture. It is less a form than a force, one that folds across architecture: "the force of an Outside that is not merely the outside of the inside, but the outside that is inside, the insidious inside." Minor architecture's insidiousness, its insinuation and intense implication (which is, at the same time, not an instantiation) is a hollowing out of major architecture, an evacuating of the latter's recognizable content (i.e. signification), verifiable substantiality (i.e. monumentality), and determinate status (i.e. positive type). In writing an "architecture from the outside," Elizabeth Grosz has asked, "Can architecture be thought, no longer as a whole, a complex unity, but as a set of and site for becomings of all kinds?"

Along with Deleuze's notions of the virtual one might say that minor architecture is virtual architecture, to the extent that it is "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract." In its imperceptible, non-verifiable, and indeterminate force, which is to say, in its virtuality, minor architecture is the architectural informe. Descriptions of it may be only useful as a means of tricking the enemy (e.g. the police, bashers, etc.) into thinking that it knows where and what minor architecture is.

As the architectural informe, minor architecture is an undoing of architecture, although less in terms of a deconstruction than of a withdrawing of the architectural from itself, something like an architectural ascesis or unworking of architecture, in the midst of architecture. It is the coming of--without approach to--architecture, a coming of architecture without becoming architecture. It is a relation to architecture that is poetic, erotic, perhaps perversely poetic or poetically perverse.

Simply a coming without the "be"; a coming without the identity relation of the "to be"; a coming to the surface of the present tense presence; super ficiality in all its glory . . . bent and re-designed in the instant coming of its come, by self-immolation, self-exhibitionism, self-abuse...

Minor architecture is rather unbecoming architecture.

In terms of visuality, minor architecture is neither visible nor invisible, but imperceptible. It is itinerant architecture (not necessarily "architecture of movement" or "mobile architecture") that refuses territoriality and ownership, as it operates through a deterritorializing spatial logic. It is neither here nor there, but elsewhere, wherever. This conjunctural relationality or infinite substitutability--of not only wherever, but whoever, whatever, and whenever--effects an architecture of promiscuous spatiality, sociality, and sexuality. No place is safe any longer, and therefore none is more enjoyable.

As unbecoming architecture, minor architecture is also necessarily the forgetting of architecture, and of what architecture forgets (what remains after the architectural). This is its virtuality and its critical capacity: neither to be architectural, nor to not-be architectural, but--as though in terms of Bartleby the Scrivener's neutrality--simply to prefer not-to. Which might be to say that it is an architecture of abandon and abandonment that is often actualized as abandoned and nondescript folds in the urban fabric--an architecture without qualities, truly unbecoming. Manhattan's West Village piers and after-hours meatpacking district, the trailer trucks parked and empty on New York's West Side, what we think we see in Stephen Barker's penumbral Nightswimming photographs, Matts Leiderstam's public park/cruising ground installations, Doug Ischar's visual-spatial-aural foldings (figures 1-5)--for instance if not for example.

These then are sites where architecture is betrayed by forms of sociality, sexuality, and spatiality that betray architecture, including whatever it is we might designate by the term minor. For it is virtually (if not actually) only once "the head... bursts through the roof or the ceiling" that one realizes not that the body is gigantic, but that the architecture is minor. However, such a designation at the moment of its realization (its historicity) is no longer relevant, since the limit has at the very same moment become a point of departure. What is implicated here is what remains after the architectural: the Outside, poetics, erotics, and for all of these, the forces of attraction, uncertainty, and itinerancy.

In his essay "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside," Michel Foucault points to the

role that houses, hallways, doors, and rooms play in almost all of Blanchot's narratives: placeless places, beckoning thresholds, closed, forbidden spaces . . . hallways fanned by doors that open rooms for unbearable encounters... corridors leading to more corridors where the night resounds, beyond sleep. .. .

This architecture of corridors, insomnia, and endless wandering would seem--at first glance--to be a description of minor architecture. And yet it is not, since it alludes to the recuperative capacity of architecture to provide shelter and to create spaces of enclosure/disclosure (even if these were nothing more than underground passageways). For as Blanchot reminds us, there are others who

neglect even to construct the burrow, for fear that by protecting them this shelter will protect in them that which they must surrender, would bolster their presence too much and thus avert the approach of that point of uncertainty toward which they slip.

The itinerant path described by Blanchot as "the approach of that point of uncertainty" is the trajectory towards the Outside (neither of the outside nor from the outside)--of coming at the point of departure. This trajectory, insofar as it slips toward wherever, whatever, whoever, whenever, will always be the betrayal of architecture, identity, the social, etc. For if there is a trajectory towards the outside, it is one that is obliterated in its wake, leaving no visible signs of its movement or path. It is an indeterminate cross-folding of spatiality and sociality, the attraction of uncertainty through itinerancy that is (for instance if not for example) the cruising of a cruising ground, and more accurately, the incessant withdrawal from grounding that is cruising; an ungrounding that is not the Abgrund (abyss).

Although a cruising ground may be geographically located it is nonetheless not delimited or circumscribed from the outside, but operates through an exteriorizing logic by which it is constantly departing from and approaching towards its indefinite limit. A cruising ground is a placeless place; about which it is impossible "to say where," since it is the spatiality of (that is) wherever, at once now here and nowhere, any place rather than, or before it is, some place. Such a groundless ground may have customary paths (a circuit of movement), although these are lines of diversion, iterance, and abandonment, and therefore never culminate as a contour, border, or other such device for the circumscription or delimitation of space (i.e. as a phenomenological ground). The movement that is cruising may be from point to point, although always as a spatial proximics rather than a spatial convergence, since it is a movement towards a point, and another, and still another, only to leave each of them behind. The exteriorizing spatial logic of the cruising ground always renders each point as a point of departure. Cruising is an "ungrounded movement that is no longer bound to move from one fixed point to another [something other than a spatial punctuation through points of contact] but rather traces its own unbounded space through the trajectories or paths that it takes."

Blanchot's others are those who, in their incessant itinerancy, ceaselessly approach that point of uncertainty, and thereby remain as indeterminately anonymous and unbecoming as the placeless places through which they pass. They too are without qualities or content: infamous (infame) any-bodies-whomever of formless (informe) any-places-whatever. "No one hears tell of these. They leave no account of their journey, they have no name, they are anonymous in the anonymous crowd because they do not distinguish themselves, because they have entered into the realm of the indistinct." This anybody is the approach towards the Outside, nothing more or less than the trajectory of an anonymous, itinerant erotic sociality; a trajectivity that is not yet and no longer a subjectivity.



Continues...

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Excerpted from The Logic of the Lure by John Paul Ricco Copyright © 2002 by John Paul Ricco. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Foreword, by William Haver
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Minor
2. Disappeared
3. Wink
4. Public
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

The Logic of the Lure is simultaneously a meditation on contemporary art, French philosophy, and recent debates in queer theory. But beyond this, it is a restrained yet forceful call to cultivate an erotics of the imperceptible and to attend to the minor architectures that always surround us. Ricco’s haunting writing is itself a bold enactment of non-representational ethics.”

Eleanor Kaufman

John Paul Ricco is rapidly establishing himself as a voice to reckon with in both contemporary art criticism and queer theory. The Logic of the Lure is an absolutely wonderful and original work that is bound to have a long-term impact in and outside of its field.”

W. J. T. Mitchell

This original and frequently dazzling work explores sites that might be defined as queer spaces, and in which we might think of a queer architecture being located. What results is an extremely fascinating effort to redefine notions of architectural space and identity, and to reimagine the spatial dimensions of subjectivity itself.”

Leo Bersani

Ricco’s book is polymorphously theoretical, with Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault most in evidence. It is well written and this reviewer cannot recommend it highly enough.”

Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

“Ricco’s book is polymorphously theoretical, with Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault most in evidence. It is well written and this reviewer cannot recommend it highly enough.”

Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

Ricco’s book is polymorphously theoretical, with Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault most in evidence. It is well written and this reviewer cannot recommend it highly enough.”

Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory