NI ZHENG: DECOLONOISE

How to desire in a world that homogenizes desires? How to play in a world that is dictated by bare survival and views the act of playing as luxury? How to charge ourselves with the power of the erotic in the face of a society that seeks to vilify and snuff out its flame? (1) How to aspire beyond the appropriate use and expectation of this body, this very existence, that is deeply enmeshed in this “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy” milieu? How to relate intimately to each other and to love in ways that exceed the limits of the normalcy and narratives of the cultures of domination?

My response is that it is the creative act of fabulation — the make/ remake/unmake-believe — that can instigate a break from a reality where all the aforementioned activities are deemed inappropriate, impossible, incompossible, unthinkable, and it is in the viscerally creative and the imaginative terrain of art that we see the ripest opportunity to cause affects and ruptures which open up to, (2) what Chela Sandoval, drawing on Roland Barthes, calls, “a third, differential zone, a somewhere else” that is an unlocatable, encrypted “nonsite, no-place” voided of any preexisting meanings and colonial signifying systems by which it can be measured, represented, surveilled, and ordered. (3) This somewhere else, which holds noise or any creative act that seeks to “create another reality,” like Nguyễn + Transitory’s Bird Bird, Touch Touch, Sing, (4) requires unmediated conflicts with — incompossible and unthinkable to — this social order and is exactly the place where we can experiment and “rehearse for the subsequent transformation of the external environment.” (5)

We were taught to fear creativity, adventure, and play for the risk of the unknown. We were taught to fear the love, the passion, and the desire we possess for what they would reveal. But what I have encountered in the violent excess and the mad affectivity of many good noise performances, like the performance of Transitory, is the negation of the fears, the negation of the risks of being fully honest, of revealing oneself to and being lacerated by those that are unknown and unknowable and those that we desire and love. In Nguyễn + Transitory’s performance, love is manifested as the “lost magic” that utilizes the ritual of erotic and ecstatic intertwining of the two performers, whose wounding intimacy paradoxically and simultaneously exposes the selves, in spite of the selves. (6) They willfully become with each other by creating crevices through which the other can slip into the self which then unfolds itself toward the other. They communicate through the secret languages of touch, sound, noise, and scream and by opening themselves towards the possibility of having their boundaries lacerated and dissipated, themselves disorientated and reorientated by the other. They contemplate and receive each other not as the unwanted suggested by dominant cultures, but as limitless lovers with all their unpredictable and chaotic potentialities and possibilities. Love is understood here as the thing that “we cannot know […] if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts,” writes bell hooks, as committing “to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized.” (7)

Our experiment, our rehearsal, which occurs through the desire to live in connection with the others (humans or nonhumans) across and despite differences, through the desire “to get a little closer to the longed-for but unrealized world where we each are able to live, not by trying to make someone less than us, not by someone else’s blood or pain,” (8) can be with little discipline — like the unpreformed moments of intensity and affectivity in Nguyễn + Transitory’s performance, but is based on and driven by the kind of love that can challenge the system of oppressions in its entirety even if it means to put ourselves at risk. And we can be afraid, because it is hard and painful, because we have no plan, because we hold no certainty of where it leads, because we see no visible end. We are destined to be enveloped by fear, but fear is not synonymous with paralysis. We still must take action.


NOTES
(1) Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic.”
(2) And this opening, or “crossing” in Sandoval’s words, can be painful, as Sandoval writes, “it is initially a painful crossing to this no-place, this chiasmus, this crossroads, for here new kinds of powers imprecate the body as it is dissolved […] where everything is possible—but only in exchange for the pain of the crossing.” Sandoval, “Love as a Hermeneutics of Social Change,” Methodology, 141.
(3) Sandoval, ibid. 142.
(4) Write Transitory and her collaborator Nguyễn Baly. nguyentransitory.com/index.php/bird-bird-touch-touch-sing-sing-2019/
(5) dave phillips writes in the linear note of his 2023 album release Human Nature Denied (Flag Day Recordings, 2023).
(6) My favorite noise performances are the kind that can be seen as a willful self- sacrifice in which the performer becomes the sacrificer forsaking the power of the luxuriating self and is simultaneously the sacrificed, the power of whom is forsaken, and that what we sometimes experience in noise as the loss-of-self and ecstasy-outside-of- self can only happen through submission — action through passive, as a form of openness for encountering and being utterly altered by what is other to the self. This is, to me, a “more fully self-actualized” state enabled by love and the beloved as understanding the I as complicit in being a part of a coalition or what Michel Serres calls “the natural contract.”
(7) bell hooks, “Romance: Sweet Love,” All About Love (William Morrow, 2001). 185-187.
(8) Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” Yours in Struggle (Long Haul Press.