On Mutants, the Moon and Bubble Beats
first "philosophical" text by Márin Haela Lunala Villas Bôas
“and I knew that I know something no one else knows; I knew that I knew something beautiful and wordless, and if I ever figure out how to say it, I’ll say it immediately. I promise I won’t keep it”.
-Tim Rogers, on his review of Final Fantasy VI.
The desire to write tends to originate from somewhere between a bubbling euphoria and an itching bother. Gender-sex transition came to me from a similar place. When I was 13 years old, I wrote a short story about someone dying in a busy street and staying there, without ever being noticed, for one or two months. My portuguese teacher at the time did not think much of it and gave me a B-.
The concept was not hard to grasp: I was the body, clearly. Another queer subject reduced to the indifferent gaze of catholics and protestants alike. I would not have described myself as LGBT at the time. All mutants know it: the Family and its lackeys build a comprehensive list of our deviations way before we become conscious of them. If one can still reference Mark Fisher without losing all credibility (or either gaining it from the wrong people), one could say that the fact that capitalism offers us "thought at the speed of business" was the reason behind the tragic failure of my short story. After all, it wholly failed to be "a simulation of innovation and newness that cloaks inertia and stasis". My story aimed to do the opposite. I wanted to cease the movement of my unccanny apparitions under the appearance of the unremarkable.
My adolescent aesthetic ambitions, all summed up in that last sentence, are probably the furthest one can get from the artistic proposal of a producer such as Arca. Brimming with ghosts, psychotic beats, cyborgs and other Fisherian favorites, Arca’s music is the sound, the texture and the rhythm of a Mutant "future". I weep for the written word’s inability to cite music, so you will just have to believe me that "Mutant", from Arca’s mixtape of the same name, is a seven-minute-spanning, weirdly dystopic, ever-pulsating electronic behemoth. It also is at the center of my ethics. It has become commonplace to state that "queer" stands for "uncanny" (to the Norm and all else), be it a feeling, a subject, an aesthetic, or a critical lens. Listening to Arca as "Queer Electronic" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Of course her work touches on being queer, on angst and being haunted, on Gender, on somatic communism*. However, the pretentious hack in me insists, have we postmoderns become incapable of enjoying art as a sensorial
experience first, before all the adjectives manage to start to flow?
I can agree with Susan Sontag on many topics. First, yes, Camile Paglia hardly has any discernable qualities. Second: interesting critique is as erotic as the good critic's vocabulary is able to make it. As "Against Interpretation" came around, many misinterpreted (you can laugh) Sontag's endeavor as an anti-intellectual one. Rather, her erotics are a case of interpration in and of themselves. The text's thesis can be synthesized as
art has no Content, it only has Form.
I like to think that Sontag would have hated The Last of Us (or only enjoyed it because of stealthing on the Grounded difficulty option) and played Vampire Survivors for 250 hours. But let us return to Arca. What makes her remix of "Rain on Me" so effective? Is it because it is "unexpected", or even worse, "post-ironic" to hear Ariana Grande's vocals juxtaposed with "mete-lo, saca-lo" and deconstructed club beats? Hopefully it is not. Hopefully others too can hear the ethereal synthesizers and the non-euclidianly layered vocals and think: "this is the first ever instance of something quite like this".
"Why 'first ever', Márin? Had SOPHIE never done something very similar way before?", says a well-meaning liberal, trying to contribute to the discussion. Unfortunately for him/her, that is the worst thing you can say to a ketamine transgender and they will never have my forgiveness. The only reason to compare the motivating triad of this text, DJ Maju, Sophie and Arca (besides the most vulgar reason that needs not be mentioned) is that they, each in their own way, reveal something Eternal about music. An Eternal which is not One, but a Multiple of Multiple eternals. As Zupančič put it, when discussing the ontology of sexuality, "an 'inconsistent multiple' [...] such that the eventual 'stopping point' can never be an 'one', but only a 'void' [...] a pure 'excess beyond itself". The Eternal is the occurrence of a orgasmic value (meaning that orgasms are the cognitive processing of an instance of the Eternal), a caused aesthetic effect, no less relevant than the Sublime. I don't think that a life can be ethically lived without recurring encounters with experiences of Eternality.
I will elaborate. This notion of Eternal art came to me yesterday at 4am, August 26th, during Maju's dj set on SPEEDTEST RAVE. Only two days before, I had begun a course on Adorno's "Negative Dialektik" and, although we are still discussing the introduction, the idea of a negativity so insistent it blocks off systematization wouldn't leave my mind as Maju played tuim and bubble-beat tracks. Cotton-candy pink lights shined on her CDJ. Cotton-candy pink streaks of paint colored my hair. Isn't the bubble-beat, as SOPHIE's genre-defining snare drum before it, precisely this negativity Adorno wished Hegel had taken more seriously? If dialectics are right and contradiction is the root of all movement, then the bubble-beat and experimental electronics like it are the element of radicality capable of uncancelling the Future.
This is an instance of Eternal (as it is impossible to reach for "the" Eternal, its totality lies behind and beyond its conceptualization). Eternality can be thought of as a experience of radical repositioning that gives us what we always wanted, but never thought as being possible. Possible, thankfully, is not a static frame, it is a field whose shape is cut from all sides by our political imagination, shaped fundamentally by our material conditions of production. If Sublime paralyzes me in enchantment, Eternal sends me at a nauseating speed to a new direction. For me? I always go to the Moon.
The story of how SOPHIE died, the most important musical artist of our generation somehow no longer physically here with us, needs to be more widely known. One day she was climbing a mountain, trying to see the Moon from high up, as it was on a particularly big and shiny night (clumsily referred as "Super Moon"). She fell. She did not survive the fall. SOPHIE had released a collaboration with Autechre, only two weeks prior. The British duo had been her own source of Eternality. As SOPHIE believed the album-form was a walking corpse, Autechre’s remix of BIPP, a song from her seminal PRODUCT collection of singles, stood tall as the sky as a crowning last achievement for a perfect yet short-lived oeuvre. SOPHIE’s catalogue crystallizes the desire for a beautiful future, managing to be (like Autechre before her) pure soundshape with no identifiable instrument to her timbres. To the non-rhyzomatic, that description can sound too abstract to ever be enjoyable. Still, despite being at times abstract and distant, SOPHIE’s sound made waves because of its bounce. It was at a rave where I found the Eternal once again, smiling at me, reminding me that "I can make you feel better, if you want to // I can make it all clearer // Try so hard, baby, you can’t conceal it".
As a transgender person (an object at times, not quite a subject, a living critique of identity as such) I was the one to choose my own name. "Lunala", the middle one, makes direct reference to the Moon, mediated by the figure of the legendary pokémon able to dimension-hop and born from pure cosmos. Lunala is a batlike creature supposed to appeal to us goth girls with a 3DS. Symbolically, the Moon itself is commonly associated with femininity. My gender-sex transition can thus be put in one phrase, that being
the Moon is mine, I Am the Moon
or less criptically, femininity is something that I grab within arms distance and reshape through Eternal means. The Immaterial Girl, made from SOPHIE’s waveform flesh, walking Belo Horizonte’s streets, utmost and vulgar. The Moon, palid in its beauty, resists capture by gendered terms. No xenogender is exactly a gender, in the sense that if I say (wholeheartedly) that I am moongender and moebiusgender, no normative institution will take me seriously. I am not dangerous, I am just silly. When I look at the night sky and sense SOPHIE’s presence, a psychiatrist calls me delirious and prescribes me neuroleptics. "Stop doing drugs immediately", he says, "and stay with your Family".
What the psychiatrist did not consider (or did not want to consider) is that being away from my family (and at times yes, being high) is precisely what got me so far, and being coupled with Family, like a monstrous necrotic limb, was what had gotten me to the lowest points of my two decade life. What was my first experience with Eternality? One moment that comes to mind is, after having smoked marijuana at a park with my closest friends and the rich kid who had the good weed, I sat at a bench just outside my high school and realized: "the Present is all that is. This moment in time, in constant evanescence. I am in peace with that". That kind of peace lead me through São Paulo, drinking soju with the Girl**, and through the Pandemic, thinking things were getting better until the eventual death of my most dear uncle. Eternality kept being a good friend ever since.
Most lacanians must have already realized that Eternality is the aesthetics of the non-whole. Some deleuzians might be frustrated that I just gave "deterritorialization" a new name. This is frequent throughout the class struggle of psychoanalysis: all terms are always being disputed, a signifier only acquires meaning when it is chained, a signifier represents a subject to another signifier, etc. Even so, I would like to try to argue that Eternality is necessarily not deterritorializing. The Eternal is a spiral that runs parallel to the subject's personal history, being able only to rewrite the fundamental fantasy, never to change it into a new one. Eternality brings forth what was once named impossible, severing the line that defined the Outside where impossibility appeared to reside. Non-whole, the left side of the Table we usually call "enigmatic jouissance"***, has no concept of Outside-Inside, and as such, is never easily positioned in any of the registers.
Occupying this non-position, the Eternal is not Real nor Symbolic nor Imaginary****: it is an opportunity to bind the knots in a new arrangement. Non-binary people tendentially use this instant to create a mobius strip shaped binding, where femininity is not the complementary opposite of masculinity and, even more radically, Gender is not a negation of Non-Gender (or at least not a reconciliatory negation of a negation). This, to me, is the intersection between gender, psychoanalysis and Eternality. Transness seen through a psychoanalytic lens tends to be the cause of skepticism to those well informed with the field's horrible history with transgender people. I will firmly defend that there is plenty of potential in psychoanalysis in general and lacanian topology in specific to theorize the Non-Binary, but that will be a lifetime effort. Let us stop before things become too weird.
Textual and Musical Inspirations:
Fisher, Mark. Terminator vs. Avatar.
Fisher, Mark. Realism Capitalism.
Zupančič, Alenka. Why Psychonalysis - Sexuality and Ontology.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation.
DJ Maju. AKI TEM SPEED TEM TEST E OLD QUE TEM RAVE.
Arca. Mutant
Arca. Rain on Me (with Ariana Grande) - Arca Remix
Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialetics.
SOPHIE, Autechre. BIPP - Autechre Mx.
SOPHIE. PRODUCT.
SOPHIE. Immaterial.
Game Freak. Pokémon Ultra Moon.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire, Livre Xx: Encore.
Guerra, Andréa Máris Campos. O gozo na topologia borromeana: um novo paradigma?
*Arca is a known reader and likely a good friend of Queer Studies' paradigmatic Paul B. Preciado.
**The Girl, not by coincidence, is not one particular girl, but a multiple of multiple girls.
***Here we may ask who exactly would compare this mode of jouissance to a intriguing question, when to us it has always served as a calm answer.
****Only in the sense that the sinthome does not belong to any of the registers.
