Abolitionist Techniques of Weathering

Abstract

Eric Stanley's work—up to and including Atmospheres of Violence—has focused on queer and trans lifeworlds that tarry with the effects and affects associated with living under siege, subject to myriad forms of policing, surveillance, lockdown, captivity, and isolation. Given a progressive political milieu that remains stubbornly focused on rights and inclusion, Stanley's sustained attention to structural violence and the material realities of immiseration is essential: a necessary counter that refuses to pretend that bodily autonomy and gender self-determination are extricable from the broader, saturating operations of racial capitalism. Their ongoing articulation of the necessity of abolitionist politics for the realization of trans and queer justice remains both timely and urgent. In the ongoing onslaught of transantagonism that takes the form of legislative attacks on trans people (especially trans youth), it is imperative that the abolitionist analysis Stanley articulates comes to the forefront of trans political theorizing and action. While the contemporary proposed, passed, and passing legislation (155 anti-trans bills introduced in 2022 as of October, and 131 in 2021, compared to 19 in 2018) is indeed draconian, it is crucial to recognize that even in a world wherein trans youth aren't systematically prevented from accessing affirming medical care and participating in sports, the racial and economic violence that stratifies health care, education, and access to organized extracurricular spaces of play and belonging will persist. The horizon of trans justice must not be limited to the rollback of such legislation; such rollback is necessary, but not sufficient.Stanley's work is not centered on the imagined figure of the (supported, loved, included) trans child, though it is not antagonistic to it. Rather, it focuses on the experience of those made to live a damaged life, a life that is “produced by, and not remedied through, legal intervention or state mobilizations” (39). Atmospheres of Violence examines forms of criminalization, precarity, exposure to violence, systemic misrecognition, and outright exclusion that shape experiences much more common among folks who are distant from the “booming whiteness and gender normativity of what consolidates under the sign of LGBT history” (3)—people who are poor, disabled, unhoused, trans, Black, brown, Indigenous. Coining the term near life, Stanley traces how such existences are estranged from, though “adjacent to the fully possessed rights bearing subject of modernity” (17). They think through an archive of trans/queer life and death in relation to what they call “overkill,” the kind of excessive, surplus violence that shapes many trans homicides. Overkill, for Stanley, pushes a body “beyond death” (33), attempting to end “not a specific person . . . but trans/queer life itself” (33). Specific bodies become metonymic stand-ins for unruly, ungovernable trans/queer vitalities and are punished excessively for the threat they pose to regimes of governance intent on pacification, docility, and a very narrow winnowing of possibility and desire.Stanley's commitment to thinking this nexus of near life and overkill comprises a form of fugitive study that does not take trans subjects as its object, but rather the conditions of violence, subjection, and desubjectification that place trans/queer life in a zone of indiscernibility that is also, on account of such indiscernibility, a space of resistance, insurgence, invention, and experimentation. They articulate “trans/queer” as a non-identitarian site of resonant experience, rather than an identity, and refer to it in a few ways: as a “collective of negativity,” a “void of a subject but named as object, retroactively visible through the hope of a radical politics to come,” and a “horizon where identity crumbles and vitality is worked otherwise” (26 – 27). Their work prompts readers to ask the kinds of questions deeply worth collective (though perhaps always provisional) response: What forms of political coalition are possible when trans/queer identity isn't the ground for collective/communal belonging? What does a politic that refuses legibility as the ground for inclusion do? What does it mean to foster other-than-liberal-humanist vitalities, to work vitality otherwise?A response to such questions might begin with the kind of turn that Atmospheres of Violence performs—toward the crucible of near life and overkill, away from promissory progressive narratives of equity and inclusion and the companion fantasy that the state would equally distribute life chances, if only it could. One of the remarkable things about this book is that it dwells in the phenomenology of trans/queer violence without sensationalizing it or rendering it a series of exceptional examples or hyperbolic limit cases. Rather, Stanley frames such violence as mundane—hence, an atmosphere. That which envelops. “The layers of vapor that constitute the conditions of breathing life” (16). They challenge us to “think atmospherically,” to recognize that “there is no escape, no outside or place to hide, yet through techniques of struggle collective life might still come to be” (16). Experiments in geoengineering aside, there is no straightforward way to transform an atmosphere—any attempt must be collective, hydra-headed, comprising actants who recognize the miasma (that is, those who are not entirely or mostly insulated from it, those who are atmospherically exposed, vulnerable, both in it and of it). Moments of reprieve are surely possible, and necessary. But atmosphere remains; one always steps back out into the weather of structuring antagonism. One learns how to weather such weather, whether they want to or not.What Stanley calls techniques of struggle might also be thought of as tactics of weathering: skills cultivated to endure in atmospheres of violence. The cultivation of such tactics enables the refusal of fantasies of transport to an elsewhere that does not exist, the lures of discourses of rights and inclusion. This is what I think of as Stanley's commitment to a kind of materialist pragmatics; one might call it pessimistic, or cynical, but it's not (or not merely). Rather, it is an acknowledgment that atmospheres are extraordinarily difficult to transform; that they render a motley us inevitably subject to their modes and moods; that they tend to shift only via revolution. Atmospheres of Violence exposes the violent ruse of settling for equality within nested systems bent on widespread immiseration, precarity, and violence, and intricately theorizes near life as a space of inventive resistance, a lab for existential experiments in ungovernability.