Wednesday 15 May 2013

Thaemlitz Ain't Got No Soul


For reasons I cannot yet divulge – although it may be the allure of anti-theology sparkling at the centre of the ideas being slowly unpeeled – Terre Thaemlitz’s Soulnessless is the most intriguing of Arika’s offerings in Episode 5 (Hidden in Plain Sight). I am not sure whether its promised slot will add much more to its description in the pamphlet, but the challenges it presents to the conceit of identity certainly pleases my cheeky deconstructionist soul.

Did I say soul? What I ought to say is something less spiritual. Thaemlitz is having a good look at the language used to describe transexuality, and seems worried that it buys into the sort of gloopy, new age humanism that is the closest thing late capitalism has to an original religion. When there is talk about a person “becoming” a gender, it applies a positive process, a bit like the process whereby someone becomes fit by going to the gym, or maybe becomes more fully themselves by doing fifteen minutes meditation a day and going to therapy for fifteen years.

Thaemlitz goes in the other direction: isn’t transexuality an act of unbecoming, as it says in the pamphlet, “stemming from an inability to live with your birth body.” While Thaemlitz is using this description to challenge the idea of an essential self, which a person can evolve into, I have a feeling that this way of putting it is likely to be controversial.
The assumption might be that the very concept of an essential self is a trick, a fiction used by religion (and later, capitalism through its advocacy of individualism). Rejecting this can make the transgender expression as process of liberation from those nasty ideas about souls and selves.

Unfortunately, unbecoming doesn’t really have such a good set of associations: while becoming can imply a transition from one state to another, to unbecome sounds a bit like disappearing. It’s a negative process. This might escape the religious implications of the self – although I am not sure that religion is really that big a bother these days – but it also ties nicely into those opinions that see transexuality as destructive.

But hey – game on.

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