I decided to take a look at Sara Ahmed's Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology for an exploration on The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot for my Victorian Media and the Novel class. I'm interested in Maggie Tulliver's longing throughout the novel that seems to maintain itself towards some horizon, but one that is constantly receding and always out of Maggie's reach to fulfill. I'm interested in how this longing is related to the overarching "haunting" nature of the narrative and perhaps how her unrequited longing actual haunts the text as a life beyond the corporeal. I'm interested in how this longing is distinctly associated with time and the Anthropocene and that her longing only becomes visible/legible when she arrives into the Red Deeps, an old, past, stone quarry that is both provincial, but also has the residue of past industrial activity. This landscape is situated beside the hetero-familial Dorcolte Mill, quite literally on a slope away from it, as if existing as one potential departure from that already demarcated path of marriage, wifehood, motherhood, and conformity.
Sara Ahmed opens her introduction with a question: "What does it mean to be oriented?" (543). In doing so, she not only gives us a little taste of the uneven U that Hayot talks about--putting forth the article's investment or the problem she will take up. She does this without outlining or making explicit how that argument will be taken up or what the answer/solution is to that argument. She also, I think, let's us know who her theoretical kinfolk are. Her question reminds me a lot of Lauren Berlant who seems to also take up certain key terms or phrases that have a lot of exchange value in society, but could perhaps benefit from a deeper analysis. For Ahmed, that word is "orientation." Affect studies seem deeply interested in these kinds of arguments of feelings or impulses with cultural baggage. Her opening paragraph, which is not necessarily her only introductory paragraph sprinkles hints throughout about what will come up in her discussion of orientation and also introduces us to some key terms as well: "objects," "grounds," "turning/to turn," and "toward." It isn't until the second paragraph that we get to see where queerness fits into the argument, and even then, it's still vague enough to beg us to continue reading: "what does it mean for sexuality to be lived as oriented? What difference does it make what or who we are oriented toward in the very direction of our desire?" (544). So, within the introduction we learn that Ahmed is interested in the construction of "orientation" as a means to talk specifically about queerness. She is basically saying, if we look deeply into the meaning and implications of "orientation" as a general concept, we can actually develop and articulate what there is for us in the term "sexual orientation" which tends to be a toss away term, easily conflated with and replaced by sexuality. Ahmed makes a case for why orientation is important: "I would say that being oriented in different ways does matter, precisely because of how spaces are already oriented, which makes some bodies feel in place, or at home, and not others. Orientations can affect what bodies can do" (563).
This slow unfolding within the introduction, moves from orientation to sexual orientation, then to methodology. What does it mean to study orientation, or where to return to in order to study orientation? Ahmed, very comfortably speaking in "I" statements tells us that she starts "here in part because phenomenology makes orientation central...phenomenology emphasizes the lived experience of inhabiting a body" (544). For me, this is Ahmed's gentle "so what" or why her methodological inquiry/engagement is important: by coming at queer studies with the angle of phenomenology, she is situating the argument in something that is of the utmost importance to queer studies: the lived body and the lived experiences attached to those bodies. She then introduces us to her main phenomenological case study: Edmund Husserl as well as the feminist trail she picks up on in regards to phenomenology.
Rather than hopping right into Husserl, Ahmed gives us one of those small transition paragraphs Hayot talks about as a means of getting us at that level 5 at the end of the introduction which widens her scope, re-posits her critical question, and what her aim is: "my aim in this article is not to prescribe what form a queer phenomenology should take" suggesting such an encounter could start from a variety of different places (545). Instead she sets out her task as being "to work from the concept of orientation as it has been elaborated within phenomenology and to make that concept itself the site of an encounter. What happens if we start from this point?" (545). What I like about the end of this introduction is that she makes her task extremely clear. She is not trying to suggest the one way queer phenomenology can/should take place, but instead wants to argue that the very possibility of queer phenomenology can be sussed out of previous, historical concerns surrounding orientation within phenomenology. And that is exactly where she starts.
In order to make her argument, she starts with "orientations," or "starting points"--"how we begin, how we proceed from here" (545). To do such a task Ahmed looks at what Edmund Husserl has said about "orientation." She emphasizes that to start with the point of here suggests then a focus on unfolding, forward, away from the here. She brings in direct evidence from Edmund Husserl and his engagement with the writing table and how though he sees the table, he can only see part of the table from his particular point of view and that he is using mind/memory to fill in the gaps of the parts of the table he cannot see from this vantage point. She uses his example of the table in order to get to one of her main points: the association of temporality in regards to orientation by adding her own narration of Husserl's writing table: "if the table is the same, it is only given we have conjured its behind. What is behind the object for me is not only its missing side, but also its historicity, the conditions of its arrival" (549). This sentence concludes the paragraph, letting us know that the next point she will make has to do with the significance of temporality in regards to orientation. In order to do this, her next paragraph discusses the term "background." Basically suggesting, by situating something behind, we are not just talking spatially, but also temporally--a family's background or how things/objects in the distance foreground other objects. Without explicitly telling the reader, Ahmed is helping to plot out how orientation is associated with the development of a line and a path where certain objects are foregrounded on such a path and others are not.
By this point, we may have long forgotten the table metaphor/analogy from Husserl, but Ahmed ends her paragraph about temporality and backgrounds with: "after all, phenomemology has its own background, its own conditions of emergence, which might include the very matter of the table" (549). This point concludes her section on "Orientations." Her next section, called "Bodily Orientations" starts with "we can stay with the matter of the table" (550). She's pulling this example all the way through her article, but all though Husserl suggests the table is the only thing that remains stable in perception of said object...Ahmed's table does not. She continues to put pressure on the phenomenological by staying with a single object. She traces Heidegger's concerns with the table as one where people sit "in order to do something." This is yet another element of orientation Ahmed sticks in her back pocket. She expands upon what's really behind this idea of orientation and "doing something" suggesting that orientation is based in habitus--the constant repetition of "some actions over others as actions that have certain objects in view" (554). Therefore, the repetition of certain actions towards certain objects creates a particular type of orientation.
These two earlier sections about spatial and temporal orienting are not a part of the forgotten points as Hayot articulates, but the ones that come together and tie together in order for us to actually understand one of her major sections, "Becoming straight." We needed to understand the spatial and temporal qualities in order to understand this section which seeks to answer the question: "what then does it mean to be oriented sexually?" (553). It feels very significant to me that this section is about "becoming straight" as opposed to "becoming queer" which perhaps fits more rhetorically in our culture imaginary. But, to argue that people also "become straight" is not only a provocative point, but one that builds on all the ground work she has laid out in previous paragraphs. We get the same kinds of keywords as before but with a new emphasis. Her new emphasis is that orientation is not random and that we are not randomly accruing objects, but that those objects are there because of a repeated turning towards certain objects and certain paths--those belonging to heterosexual culture. Much like the structure of her argument, we understand that people "become straight" by "reaching certain points along a life course. Such points accumulate, creating the impression of a straight line" (555). So, by being born, going through childhood, adolescence, marriage, reproduction and death, also known as linear/family time and implicitly heterosexual, you are following a path, a straight line. Therefore straightness is a matter of repeatedly choosing or having a certain path chosen for you. The significance of the path, is that it then lends Ahmed to argue for how certain paths are made visible in so far as they possess the trace of being walked upon.
To really hit home what she means by "lines" Ahmed returns us to the table only "this time it is the dining table around which a 'we' gathers" (555). Now the table introduces us to the relational perspective between peoples rather than between a single person and surrounding objects. If someone at the table calls two boys "a little Mark and a little John" referring to the children as mini-versions of their parents, we see a relationship between two lines: the blood line which is vertical (biological connection) and then the horizontal line which reveals connections between a husband and a wife. As Ahmed puts it, "the hope of the family tree...is that the vertical line will produce a horizontal line from which further vertical lines will be drawn," and this point where they meet is the point of reproduction (555). Ahmed is interested in structurally articulating how we become interpolated into sexual identity and how phenomenology helps us articulate not only that process, but what it means to be queer and within such a process.
A reader might presume that her last or final task is to help locate a queer path. However, Ahmed's final point is that she is not interested in demarcating a queer path, with path yet again replicating a linear/progressive connotation. One of her final sections, entitled "Queer Slants" takes up queer moments rather than queer paths. Queer moments are instances where queer subjects are unaligned--or things have gone a bit slant or oblique from the path. The importance of that straight path is to re-align, hence the momentary nature of the queer. Ahmed concludes that "our response need not be to search for permanence, but to listen to the sound of the "what" that fleets" (565). Her conclusion argues for a queer politics interested in disorientation. She brings us back to that seemingly banal straight line: "queer is not available as a line that we can follow, and if we took such a line, we would perform a certain injustice to those queers whose lives are lived for different points. For me, the important task is not so much finding a queer line, but asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be" (571). Rather than orienting ourselves toward a path, we should be focused on how we will orient ourselves in the fleeting moments off the trajectory.
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