Manifesto for an Art of Metabolic Disorder

Jonathan Alexander with Antoinette LaFarge

University of California, Irvine

We live in a time of metabolic disorder, one that extends from numerous bodies and communities to cultural and political systems to the planet itself and its damaged ecologies. The linkages between these separate realms is more than homology. Put more accurately, there are no linkages, just as there are no separate realms. The metabolic disorder of individual bodies, of individual cultures, and of individual parts of the globe are all one disorder, even if they can be studied, described, represented, interrogated, and critiqued as separable realities.

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Is it over yet?

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This is the wrong question. And it will never again be the right question, or even a question that makes sense. It shouldn’t make sense.

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The creation of separable realities might have been our first mistake, even if some of us have had to withdraw at times, to separate ourselves out, to ensure our survival. The human mind is fantastically good at imagining and then creating separations, pulling the pen or the knife down anything that looks like a possible boundary.

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Already we have an impulse to blame. And who could blame us? There’s much blame to go around. So much blame, in fact, that we have given up on the pursuit of an order that is pre-disorder, a utopian world of plenty, a formerly Edenic state. We are now so accustomed to apocalypse that, while we recognize the need to continue to critique, we also assert the need to figure out how to live with disorder.

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So much now depends both on what we mean when we say disorder as well as how we respond to disorder as our now fundamental state of being.

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JA: This starts, for me, with a case of gout. It doesn’t really, because metabolic disorder has been going on for a very very long time. But I might as well start with my gout, an arthritic inflammation of my big toe because my body can’t quite clear out enough uric acid (what my husband calls piss crystals), so they collect as far away from my body’s central processing systems as they can: in my case, my right big toe. I imagine my body thinking about where to put these piss crystals as my kidneys report that they are tired, that they’ve been asked to do too much over the decades, so the body decides to put the acid as far away as it can from itself. The resulting condition feels like someone is holding a lit match to my big toe. Doctors prescribed anti-inflammatories but these have the undesirable effect of raising my blood pressure, which is already being medicated. One cure interferes with the ability of another cure to do its job. I am experiencing metabolic disorder, the failure of a body to maintain itself, to distribute its resources and remove its toxins appropriately to sustain life. In my most philosophical moments, I realize this is the disorder of our entire culture, of our entire world. We fail to distribute our resources and remove our toxins to sustain life. We are becoming a culture and a world of metabolic disorder, the cures for my disorders creating disorder for you.

***

This is a manifesto for works of art, many different kinds of making, that do not yet fully exist. But there are hints and glimpses. First, though, we need to re-orient ourselves to a world of metabolic disorder. Then we can ask what it means to have an art worthy of that disorder, an art of educating our desires to understand, perhaps even appreciate the disorder that is not going away, that is now our order.

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Yes, we said “appreciate the disorder.”

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What would it mean to appreciate, even embrace disorder? That is the question we are now grappling with. To be sure, we are not interested in promoting disorder for disorder’s sake, though we admit there are moments when interruption and the provocation of chaos are important, necessary, the only vital and sustaining move a person or a group can make. With that granted, we also assume that we are too far down the path of disorder to do anything but work with our world’s disorder.

What does that mean for us, for our culture, for our world?

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First things: We characterize the current disorder — now become ubiquitous through economic structures we cannot seem to imagine our way out of and through ecological change inhospitable to human life that we have not only exacerbated but that now is irreversible — we call this disorder metabolic. And we choose this term to parallel the metabolic disorder of bodies because both the bodily and the global disorders are incapable of maintaining themselves, of sustaining life, of distributing resources across a system (a body, a state, a collective) in ways that sustain and promote life. We can no longer regulate ourselves or our world. 

Our mistake very likely is in believing that we were ever fully in control, that full regulation was possible.

Now we must learn somehow to live with this disorder while relinquishing our fantasies of total control.

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Art will be the primary way through which we learn to live with disorder, perhaps through which we learn to love disorder — with “love” here meaning, finally, belatedly, too-lately, to care for it. Art not solely in the sense of making but of being open to, aware of, in tune with. Art itself begins in disorder— a half idea, some messy materials, an experimental process. It proceeds by fits and starts, according to no recipe. It goes off trail, runs into trees, falls down holes, breaks some bones, making an even bigger mess than was there at the outset. This process is justified through the idea that at the end there will be a kind of order, the special perfection that is a work of art brought to its state of rightness and completion. But even when this happens to the artist’s satisfaction, the result is still quite likely to look like an advanced form of disorder to viewers—a peculiar, incoherent melange. And in disturbing settled ideas (why can’t you just paint a pretty landscape, since we like those?), it has the potential to stir up uncomfortable thoughts, disorder itself holding the power of contagion.

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Axiomatic: The opposite of disorder is not order. We will not actively fight the metabolic disorder of our world with the goal of eliminating it. That is now an impossible task. Believing we can eliminate disorder only sustains fantasies of a pristine world, an order of orders, a great chain of being with everyone and everything in its place. That is no longer possible and it should, frankly, be no longer desirable, just as it was always not desirable to those who justly objected to their place in the chain, who were enchained, often materially, by the imposition of order. 

As the writer Robert Macfarlane observes in his book The Wild Places, we have in recent centuries steadily and deliberately separated ourselves from all that we now encapsulate under the term wildness or wilderness: remoteness, abundance, elemental forms of order. Whether to control it or preserve it, we consider ourselves as separate, even as nearly all wildernesses now bear traces of ancient humanity. But what if, as he writes, this idea of wildness as something inhuman, something outside history, is “nonsensical, even irresponsible,” allowing for no end to our encroachments on it? What if wildness brings to us—or brings us to—one form of disorder that we actually need in our bodies and minds?

So we say no to order.

***

With this said, we recognize that disorder is not comfortable. Disorder can often suck. We see our world, dying. We see people abnegating anything that looks like responsibility. We see our culture, rotting from within. We see our bodies, poisoned, become toxic, born toxic into a world that bears the histories of orders that have proved themselves toxic. The toxic orders are many, with capitalism being the order that has most made poisonous our world, our culture, our bodies.

We have no one but ourselves to blame, even if some of us must learn to recognize that we share more of the blame than others.

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And yet, while we learn to live with blame, we have not yet learned to live with disorder. 

We must learn to live with disorder.

We must learn from disorder, adapting to it, correcting when and where possible, yes, but refusing the urge to reject disorder in favor of an order that now can only ever be phantasmatical. Refusing also to reject it in favor of the urge to blow everything up so that there is nothing left, and no one left to care about the nothing.

No, instead, now we need to learn to care for disorder, a disorder we have helped create, yes, but a disorder that has much to teach out.

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What is the great lesson of disorder? There are many. But of the many, one of the most important is openness.

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David Wojnarowicz: “It makes me weep to feel the history of you.”

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Required reading: Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World. Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain. 

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What does feeling the history of you mean for art? What does embracing disorder mean for art?

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ALF: It begins for me with thinking about how we associate productivity with order — how we come to see making as making rightly— and how that productivity has become a gigantic waste-making engine fueled by the requirements of capital. I am haunted by a sense of the mountains of art we have created, especially in the last hundred years or so, billions of fabrications of the mind and hand that are only seen by a few people because they are mostly stashed away in museum and gallery warehouses and private storage spaces and artist studios when they are not actually being thrown away by indifferent heirs. A gigantic midden heap, dispersed instead of mounded. Unloved treasures, an oxymoron of the present era. Something similar is happening with digital photographs, which now exist in numbers so great that even for an individual scrolling the archive rapidly becomes more chore than pleasure. And yet the mores of Western art have developed such that almost nothing can ever be justifiably thrown away. We are not just drowning in our toxic waste and unrecyclable forms of garbage: we are also drowning in treasures. Back around 1990, I created a project called Smothered Art, which consisted of two dozen ways to dispose of art through a process of creative transformation, a kind of ritual downcycling that would result either in objects that could be more easily disposed of, or in even simpler forms of debris like ash. There were instructions for drowning, burning, dragging, pancaking an artwork, and a set of cards on which these destructive events could be recorded, substituting a small and portable record for the artwork itself. In one sense this is merely substituting one form of order for another, but in another, it is a way of undoing a conceptual order that has tied our hands in how we think about living with artworks. The undoing of conceptual orders is a first-order task.

***

We are neo-vitalist, neo-expressionist, but not neo-futurist. We will not determine what the future needs or looks like. We will not order the future. But we do have some desires, some desires that are already well on their way to being re-oriented toward embracing disorder. 

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We love the work of Francis Bacon, the tortured faces, the mutilated bodies. They resonate with our contemporary self-perception. But Bacon’s figures are often encased in glass boxes, or otherwise framed off, separate, isolated. As images of contemporary social isolation, they are powerful. But even more powerful, we maintain, are images from contemporary artists such as Salman Toor, Jennifer Packer, Doron Langberg — all figurative artists who show us people wandering, sometimes with each other, through rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, apartments, alleys. Their faces and sometimes slack postures suggest a different kind of isolation than Bacon’s, one less tortured perhaps but nonetheless weary. And they are frequently with others like them, even at times transporting their psyches beyond the deeply felt alienation to something approaching, if not community, then communal awareness, awareness of each other. And they are surrounded, not by transparent boxes, but by sheathes of color, sometimes bright, sometimes muted, almost always fuzzy, blurry, an atmospheric fug. Toor, Packer, Langberg and their contemporaries do not see their figures as separate from this fug, the haze of a world grown fuzzy, lines blurring. Their struggle to ameliorate their isolation is never not within this ecology of blur. 

See Salman Toor’s various paintings of figures dancing or drinking in a greenish smoky apartment interior. Figures seem to conglomerate, their semi-blank faces looking with the remnants of wistfulness at one another, the green fug surrounding everything, itself the remnant of a vibrant world whose edges are grown indistinct. Such rooms contrast with nearly any 18th-century painting of the grandeur of nature, colonizers approaching and appropriating it, and even more romantic 19th-century work, such as Turner’s, that has a similar blurring but is nonetheless all about the impossibility of fully capturing the sublimity of our world. No, the green fug is the shadow of such natural glory, as is Langberg’s hazy oranges and reds seeming to inter-penetrate the youthful boys lying outside, as in Packer’s blurs of color saturating portraits of black and brown bodies. Sublimity is being replaced with sliminess, but a sliminess still oddly attractive. This time we are more cognizant of the medium through which we move, the medium that is us, the colors in these paintings shared and inter-seeping between inside and outside, figure and place.

This shift — from the tortured and isolated figures of Bacon in existential agony to the blurred wandering of these contemporary artists’ figures as they search and sift through rooms of colorful fug — this shift tracks a shift in ecological and environmental awareness. We are never not without the world from which we have tried to remove ourselves in our fantasies of controlling it or in our equally tragic romantic fantasies of being overwhelmed with it. We can’t afford either view. We must learn now how to live in and with the fug. We must learn to live in the disorder.

***

You can look at the banquet of your life in so many ways. Some of us are served platters of poison. Now we are all eating poison, even as the billionaires hope to escape into the vacuum of space, the purity of death that they imagine they can colonize with their entrepreneurship. They gesture towards taking along a few of us who are, by their standards, worthy, but that is merely a form of dissimulation; the ruling ethos here is “sauve qui peut,” but it turns out that the lifeboat is by reservation only.

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Artists working with and through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, that earlier pandemic, that foreshadowing, that warning — AIDS WAS OUR WARNING — were not just battling the injustices of a government that failed to care for some of its most detested citizens. They were often acutely aware that the problem was a more fundamental disorder of things. 

Here’s David Wojnarowicz, artist-activist, dead at 37, writing in “From the Diaries of a Wolf Boy”: 

Sometimes I wish I could blow myself up. Wrap a belt of dynamite around my fucking waist and walk into a cathedral or the Oval Office or the home of my mother and father. I’m in the last row of the bus, the seven other passengers are clustered like flies around the driver in the front. I can see his cute fuckable face in the rearview mirror. I lean back and tilt my head so all I see are the clouds in the sky. I’m looking back inside my head with my eyes wide open. I still don’t know where I’m going; I decided I’m not crazy or alien. It’s just that I’m more like one of those kids they find in remote jungles or forests of India. A wolf child. And they’ve dragged me into this fucking schizo-culture, snarling and spitting and walking around on curled knuckles.

Yes, Wojnarowicz as wolf boy wants to blow up the Oval Office, just as the artist had asked that his AIDS-ridden body be dumped in front of the White House upon his death. But the rot is deeper, deeper into this fucking-schizo-culture, in which, dragged, he can only snarl and spit, its immense disorder now disordering his wildness. 

There’s more than a bit of Rousseau here, the wild wolf boy pure in his own before, as he brings some of that wild with him into the disordered world. And in the midst of this schizo-culture he still has the capacity to see a cute fuckable face in a rearview mirror, the rear-viewness of that mirror signaling that we are letting pass by quicker and quicker the possibility of connection.

Everything is passing us by. But still we desire the fuckable face. We are in the midst of disorder but still wild at heart.

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This is the art we need. This is the writing we need. This is the call to remember (when it is already too late) our original wildness — but not a call to return to a romanticized natural world. We cannot. That world is gone. We live in the fug. We live in the built world. We live in the crumbling world we have built, in the natural world we have helped destroy. The natural world that humans first cultivated carefully, often sustainably, and then destructively, thinking that somehow ‘the natural’ would endure no matter what we did. That we would never be able to eviscerate it into an empty signifier.

There is no way to restore Eden in just one place. It’s all one garden.

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ALF: I grew up exploring and fishing along a small spring-fed river in Rhode Island. It wasn’t a wild place as most people imagine wilderness: there were potato farms nearby, a psychiatric hospital (long closed), a quarry. Walking through the woods, you would come across the foundations of vanished cabins and capped wells. You stumbled on lone apple trees where once there might have been an orchard. But to my way of thinking, it was something better than wild: it was its own place, whose ways and history I learned slowly over the years, by foot and by canoe. It grew into me, as I grew from it, and to this day I carry with me at all times the color of its dark pools, the taste of its wild blueberries, the feel of a watercress patch against the thighs, the sound of alerted ducks around the next bend. We saw ourselves as stewards of the stretches of river where we fished and picnicked, spending whole afternoons clipping back overhangs along the paths, picking up litter, placing logs and rocks to improve streamflow and keep the river from silting up. I am lucky to have known this beautiful place in all its seasons, and I wonder how one would come to a love of such places if one never had the opportunity to experience them? How does one come to see oneself as a steward or caretaker of the world when no one is taking care of you? The river did not take care of me, but I felt rewarded by contact with it in ways I do not feel in cities, where I have spent most of my adult life. To amputate from many people the possibility of these kinds of experiences is a brutality, a disorder of being. If we are going to survive in a crumbling world, we need to connect back to the small-scale cycles of decay and renewal in local habitats.

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Listen to Audre Lorde, writing at roughly the same time as Wojnarowicz, thinking not of AIDS but her own cancer, and the racism, sexism, and homophobia she had encountered throughout her life, those social and cultural and political cancers that we have not yet figured out how to excise, that we may never fully free ourselves from now in our world of metabolic disorder:

[An] important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.

This is from “Uses of the Erotic,” and we cannot read this passage without marveling at her capacity to continue to think of how to use the erotic despite everything she had experienced, despite everything she was going to experience. 

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Thinking of Susan Sontag and her two books on illness and AIDS as metaphor: TB evoked an imagery and language of attenuation, of living ghosts; cancer a military approach to the body as a zone of endless war and betrayal; AIDS the threat of a plague, with its implicit subtext of a punishment for sin. If metabolic disorder is our new metaphor, what does the related language imply about us? Perhaps it will be helpful to our thinking that metabolism is fundamentally about sustaining life, all life, including disordered lives.

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Required reading: Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals. Catherine Lord, The Summer of Her Baldness.

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We don’t want to imagine a novel or a work of creative nonfiction or a painting of a piece of music that isn’t also an erotic theory of making — of making both out of and within the disorder of our world.

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JA: I’d felt my queer yearnings since I was a boy. And while I loved women, I also wanted to fool around with boys. I’d tried a bit of the forbidden fruit in college during the 80s, but was otherwise too scared to actually come out, staying firmly in the closet. Years of homophobic Catholic schooling, a decade of equally homophobic Southern Baptist church-going, the continued criminalization of “unnatural” acts in Louisiana, a lifetime of having been called a faggot, a queer, a pansy, a pervert – and then the various crushes, the unrequited feelings, the lack of any role model, the absence of any gay adult I could talk to. Nothing added up to coming out. I’d had a gay uncle, but he died when I was 12, right before my entrance into puberty, when he might have helped in some way, in any way. But instead, his death of multiple myeloma cancer was read by some relatives as a divine punishment for his queer ways. Any creaking open closet door slammed shut instead. I waited as long as I could. And then my move to Colorado, and then my divorce, allowed me the chance to take that first tentative steps to assert my identity as a queer man.

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Artist Mark Morrisroe, who died far too young from AIDS, marked up X-Rays of his deteriorating bodies to create luminous, creepily beautiful “self portraits” while he was dying in a hospital. The body turning itself inside out is one of the key features of an art of metabolic disorder.

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Kim TallBear, a queer indigenous Canadian scholar, joins other feminist, queer, and indigenous scholars in critiquing the heteronormative drives toward reproduction and human expansion that contribute significantly to climate change, to the ongoing disordering of our world, to its now fundamental metabolic disorder. In particular, Western thinkers have shown themselves almost entirely unable to construct an economic model not predicated on endless growth— a strange lacuna in a culture that has devoted itself to imagining alternative realities of many kinds through centuries of speculative fiction. She points out in particular how the monogamous couple form has largely been one foisted on indigenous populations by Western colonial settlers, with indigenous kinship practices and nonmonogamies stigmatized, forbidden, and punished to this day. She describes the ways in which indigenous children were often taken from their extended families to be raised by white settlers. Most interestingly, TallBear asserts that, particularly at this time of anthropogenic assault on the environment, what is needed is less reproduction, more “kinship” – a radical decentering of the kind of reproductive family that has dominated Western culture. TallBear’s nonmonogamy is in the service of extending pleasure, working the sexual as a modality of creating community and extending kinship. In her words, some indigenous kinship practices might very well be “culturally, emotionally, financially, and environmentally more sustainable than the nuclear family” – particularly as sex is re-understood as primarily creating ties, not just producing children – and ties in which the caretaking of children is shared and extended across multiple people, multiple relations.

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We think of what Salman Toor calls “fag puddles,” the conglomeration of drawn images, people, bodies, faces, figures, even objects, one on top of or next to one another. He paints his canvases out of these fag puddles, the painting drawn from the thick kinship of the puddle, the connections that sustain, that somehow even thrive in the metabolic disorder of the world grown (groan) into fug.

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As she is for so many, Octavia E. Butler is a foremother, a writer who refused to pull back from the difficulty, who saw in her speculative near futures the fullness of the horror we have allowed – however unwittingly, however at times even consciously – to take root and germinate in this world. In Parable of the Sower, she pulls no punches. The world as we have known it is over. There’s no going back. The best that Lauren and her ragged band of damaged and damaging folk can do is huddle together and embrace change. Change indeed becomes the basis of Lauren’s quasi-religious and political mythology, a mythology built not on an external set of deities but an internal re-education of desire, a desire this time to flow with the change. There is no other answer. Many will die. All will be altered. Life may go on, even human life, but only if it educates itself to live with the changes that it is in no small part responsible for.

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Desire is consequential.

Desire is constantly disciplined by images of the consequences of it, particularly when it becomes unruly or nonnormative. (Think early anti-queer AIDS propaganda, how homosexuals deserved to die.) But we only punish desires that disturb the norm. We do not punish the desires that disorder our world: which tells us that disordering our world is the norm. Think of how consumerism is often divorced from consequence – that is, of all the forms of desire, acquisition and acquisitiveness seem to be given a pass when it comes to circulating images of the consequences of desire. And yet can any one particular desire be more consequential for ourselves and our planet? Is greed not the desire that has most disordered our world?

And how is it that these few, approved desires have been encouraged by being yoked to a collective indifference to the chaos they create? Should we not be paying more attention to how the creation and maintenance of indifference operates as a gearspring of Western culture? To how we are trained that certain things are necessarily somebody else’s problem, cans to be kicked down the road until they meet the already mountainous landfill of cans and we allow ourselves to be surprised when it collapses upon us.

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JA: A friend, even a liberal one, once mocked me for my persistence in recycling. In a bad moment, she quipped, “Do you really think you’re changing the world? Do you really think recycling that bottle is going to make a difference?” I admit that I couldn’t answer her positively. I know for a fact that so much more goes into landfills than goes into the recycling bins. But I also couldn’t help but think that, even if I wasn’t changing the world, I was changing myself in the world. I was choosing hope.

Referencing the neo-Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse, utopian thinker Ruth Levitas notes that, in an age of advanced capitalism, “There is less and less space in which individuals can develop their own demands and decisions, although they may have the illusion of having an increasing amount of choice.” We all experience this – the choices that don’t seem to count, many of them focused on consumerism. I have come to know better, though. Every consumer choice counts. Every click to purchase, every item browsed, every moment spent participating in this economy is a vote cast through money, time, and attention to sustaining – or potentially remaking, depending on our choices – the status quo, the world as it is, and the world as it could be. 

Consumer choice is hardly our only way of participating in (or questioning) the global atrocity of advanced capitalism, but connecting our everyday choices about where we put our money, time, and attention can be the beginning of our reeducation of desire. The trick is to recognize first how we are lulled into believing that any of our choices might be illusions. No, they are all consequential; they are all contributing to a worldbuilding of some kind. The balance must come in recognizing the consequentiality of our choices and then continuing to choose better. We express our desires through our choices, so in proposing that we start by looking at our everyday choices, I’m actually proposing a difficult thing: that we interrogate those choices, but that we also “teach desire to desire, to desire better, to desire more, and above all to desire in a different way” so that we can choose with hopefulness in building a better, more just, more equitable world. 

***

We have been given a particular kind of life, one perhaps more amenable to statistical accounting, to the accumulation of bodies, to the deadening of affective response through overwhelming numbers.

We have heard of wasted lives, but what of wasted deaths? How does the excision of the face of death, or the channeling of images of death into very narrow channels, keep us not only from confronting our own mortality, but from understanding the motivating power of death to alter our worlds, to prompt change, to insist on living differently?

We should demand a different death, while we still can, and then live in honor of that death, be deserving of the faces of death to which we bear witness, the faces of death that are now the ubiquitous figures of our world of metabolic disorder.

***

We think of the work of performance artist Carlos Martiel, a striking Black man who often puts himself into painful poses, sometimes bound, in public spaces, usually museums, to re-present the ongoing torture of Black bodies in Western and capitalist cultures. In one piece, he’s hogtied with an American flag. In another, he stands in the open interior of the Guggenheim Museum, naked and handcuffed. Spectators applaud. But what are they applauding? Why are they not ashamed — ashamed of what our culture continues to do to Black bodies? Similarly, Kara Walker’s cut-paper figures enacting horrors of slavery in silhouette along the pristine white walls of the museum vividly remind us that, to quote one of her own titles, the moral arc of history ideally bends towards justice but just as soon as not curves back around toward barbarism, sadism, and unrestrained chaos.

***

Our phones, as we write on them, keep wanting to change our dictation of the word “death” into “stuff.” More stuff. Always more stuff is the answer it provides, even when we’re not asking a question.

***

We can figure all of our relationships as investment, as putting time and energy into something upon which we hope to receive a return. But is there anything in the natural world that works along the lines of this model? Is the cat we live with “investing” in me? Surely he relies on us to some extent. But is he expecting an exchange, a transaction, a give-and-take that forms, that is the form, of our relationship? Or is it, as Donna Haraway and others tell us, a wholly different and in some ways irreducible and ultimately unknowable relationality?

***

The world in which we older folk grew up was one minute away from global nuclear apocalypse. Even the games we played offered no possibility of winning. Today’s youth grow up in a world in which the Apocalypse is not localized into moments and flashes of terror. It has saturated the personal, cultural, political, ecological fields. It is a world of immense, vast, ubiquitous disorder. Moreover, it is no longer a world in which disorder can be prevented by simply refraining from pressing a button: it is not a choice between normality now and (possible) catastrophe later. It is a matter of catastrophe now and more catastrophe later.

***

Here now is Eli Clare, writing as a transman about experiencing the world alongside a context of experiencing transphobia, now in a forest in the Pacific Northwest, picking up and fondling stones:

My childhood sense of being neither girl nor boy arose in part from the external lessons of abuse and neglect, from the confusing messages about masculinity and femininity that I could not comprehend; I would be a fool to claim otherwise. But just as certainly, there was a knowing that resided in my bones, in the stretch of my legs and arch of my back, in the stones lying against my skin, a knowing that whispered, “not girl, not boy.” 

I turn my pockets and heart inside out, set the stones—quartz, obsidian, shale, agate, scoria, granite—along the scoured top of the wall I once lived behind, the wall I still use for refuge. They shine in the sun, some translucent to the light, others dense, solid, opaque. I lean my body into the big unbreakable expanse, tracing which stones need to melt, which will crack wide, geode to crystal, and which are content just as they are.

***

No, this is not a vast world of unmitigated joy, and we wonder: was it a fantasy, something dreamed or longed for, a world of unmitigated joy? Eli Clare teaches us something not just more realistic but more real.

***

Yes, inevitably, we have to turn the spotlight on abuse and injustice at times. But we might also be surprised at how everyday experiences can become motivation for systemic critique. 

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JA: As a queer man, I think of the It Gets Better Campaign, established in part by columnist Dan Savage in the wake of a rash of gay teen suicides. The campaign’s message was simple: things might be difficult for you now, but hold on: they get better; as adults, you might have more agency and a sense of self-determination. Whether the latter is true, several of us gay activists felt that, however well intentioned, the campaign missed an important point: it’s our responsibility not just to remind young people that things might get better when they are older, but that we should also be actively helping them make their worlds better right now. That is, as opposed to holding on and persevering, why not actively and collaboratively engage in world transformation? While I still believe that critique is right, I’ve also come to respect the intentions – and the groundbreaking work – of It Gets Better in recognizing that, before we can transform the world to make it a safer place for diverse young people, we need to first believe that such transformation is possible. And that belief is the result of no small amount of work. As the victim of intense homophobia while growing up in the ’70s and ’80s in the Deep South, I carry with me to this day the psychic scars that continually invite me to mistrust other people, that prompt me toward the masochism of self-hatred, and that have made death seem a welcome relief from the lingering pain of rejection and ostracism. Reflecting on such pain and keeping alive hope for a future has been no simple task for me. Cultivating hope and educating desire — once you start to take such tasks seriously — are hardly naive. They might be amongst the most difficult endeavors we can undertake and that we can invite each other and our students to attempt.

***

Educating ourselves to desire such change is slow and arduous, particularly as such work often cuts against so much focus on individual choice and agency that is cultivated by a consumer-driven society increasingly bent on responibilizing everyone for their own well-being. Doing so requires that we not linger in our own pain, that we not relish or fetishize either our victimhood or our complicity. By the same token, we must also relinquish the narcissism that expects us individually to be world-transformative. We must resist the narrative that invites us to desire our individuality as our most precious commodity. While we recognize the power and complicity of our choices, we also need to begin desiring the collectivity — the work together, that, in aggregate, might multiply our choices into transformative power. And then we need to desire together something better for the collective, for the whole of who we are. This is learning to live with the disorder.

And yet, individuality does matter; the trick is to not turn it into a matter of us vs. them, a zero-sum game in which for my individuality to prevail, yours must be lesser. True individuality requires traveling alongside one’s changing desires, as the touch-sensitive nine-year-old becomes the teenager seeking heated bodies becomes the elder appreciative of wrinkles. Individuality lies in the particular pattern of our changes, not in clinging to an image of self-perfection, perhaps that sparkling moment of our youth when we felt ourselves a most beautiful animal. And allowing ourselves such changes permits them for others, creating the fellowship of being-human. Making room for the disorderly desires of others. 

***

This movement is not contra disorder.

Rather, just maybe, this movement might be in praise of disorder.

Or in praise of ordering differently than we have.

Definitely in desiring differently than we have.

***

Required reading: Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.

***

These are the things we can do without (a partial list):

Private education. (All education should be a public good.)

Private health care. (All health care should be a public good.)

The assumption that shelter is a privilege rather than a basic right of all human beings.

Private funding of elections.

The inheritance of wealth. (Only this can even start to “level the playing field.”)

Class stratification. (We should refuse to see it except to dismantle it.)

Chemical-dependent agriculture.

Billionaires. (We should make the maximum anyone can have at one time, say 10 million dollars. That’s more than enough. No one needs more.)

American football. (Teaching kids to play it should be considered child abuse.)

Undischargeable debt. (As a general principle; right now education debt is being used to cripple people’s lives, but in the future it could be something else.)

***

What we do need is an art that can foster the kind of thinking and feeling — and action — that can do away with these things, that can unclench our fists from holding on to them.

***

One of the most important things we can do without is billionaires. It should be illegal for anyone to be a billionaire. It should probably be illegal for anyone to amass more than fifty million dollars. No one needs even that much.

***

Smell the fires while you can. Eventually you will not be able to.

***

If we feel ethically, how can we not feel ourselves always right now smitten to the heart and extremely small? This is where we need to begin.

***

Yes, we need economic change, equity, and justice. And we need the art that will show us what such looks like, because we have not yet known them.

***

JA: In my bed, before I fall asleep, I dream of a collectivist society that spans, responsibly, the solar system, as humans have decided that Earth needs a break from our presence and we have launched ourselves into space to settle other worlds, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, Triton. Perhaps Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, serves as a home base, coordinating the distributed sociality of the system. But even here, on Titan, underneath the domes that keep humans alive, I imagine a group of resistors who live in a forested area, having cut themselves off from the collective, from other humans. Who are they? What are they resisting? And do they realize that even their choice to opt out of a culture is dependent upon that culture, particularly one living on an alien world inhospitable to human life? What is the value of the resistance then? And why do I imagine resistance as necessary, even in this collectivist society, this society that has decided to leave Earth to give it a break from our presence?

***

Where is our home? What does it mean to have a home, to be at home?

***

What are the habits conducive to democracy? to justice? to equity? to sustainable survivability?

***

David Kiehl and his co-curator, David Breslin, purposefully ended their exhibition of David Wojnarowicz’s work at the Whitney with an untitled photograph from 1990 showing the artist holding a tiny frog, with a chunk of text asking, “What is this little guy’s job in the world. [sic] If this little guy dies does the world know? […] Do people speak language a little bit differently?” Perhaps everything we might want to know about Wojnarowicz’s contemporary relevance is contained in this image and its attendant questions. In the picture, nature is telescoped into a tiny frog lying in a human hand, with that human asking about its connection — and, by implication, about all of our connection — to the rest of the universe. Approaching his own death, Wojnarowicz meditates on life’s meaningfulness, but his foregrounding of such a powerful image — the human holding a frog — gestures beyond the immediate politics of AIDS to broader questions of agency, interconnection, and ethical responsibility.

***

Here now is philosopher Jane Bennet in Vibrant Matter, a book from the before, a book itself too late, but still necessary, needed:

We are now in a better position to name that other way to promote human health and happiness: to raise the status of the materiality of which we are composed. [ . . . ] The ethical aim becomes to distribute value more generously, to bodies as such. Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human exploitation or oppression, but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations. And in a knotted world of vibrant matter, to harm one section of the web may very well be to harm oneself. Such an enlightened or expanded notion of self-interest is good for humans.

ALF: I grew up with a severely alcoholic mother. She spent much of her middle and later adult life attempting to self-medicate this metabolic disorder without ever acknowledging that she was doing so, working out daily tactics for maintaining her fix with no long-term strategy for changing anything. I do not know if she ever had hope that things could get better for her, since she refused to accept that there was a problem in the first place. Her disorder spread out in endless dark waves to create a disorder in which the other members of the family all not-quite-drowned together, an infective chaos. In those years, my early teens, I tried to cope by withdrawing, building walls, becoming silent, refusing response, tamping down emotions that would make me more vulnerable to the next wave of terrible events. Necessary at the time, these did not turn out to be productive ways to live in the long term. My body also asserted its own response in ways I did not control, from nightmares to intestinal disorders of various kinds. All our bodies were enmeshed together in a disorder of the unacknowledged, the shifting net of lies, evasions, and gaslighting that constitute life with an alcoholic. If there was a problem, if there was a fault, it was always somewhere else (and often the blame landed on us, the children, by nature undisciplined, poor at self-defense, and unclear on the rules of the adult world). One of the things I took away from this long, bitter experience is that one learns to cope with things at a rudimentary level when one has no choice; but also that living with disorder is more possible when everyone agrees that there is disorder, even if they are not clear on either the causes or the best responses. The only insupportable disorder is when someone insists and insists AND INSISTS that everything is all right. That is not disorder: that is annihilation.

***

No, there is no movement for an art of metabolic disorder. This manifesto signals no explicit intention, no deliberate coming together of artists and writers and thinkers and lovers to embrace an art of metabolic disorder. But still it is. Here it is. 

We are fakers here. But this is where we are, in our own metabolic disorder. This is where we have to begin because there’s no going back. This is where we begin to care for ourselves and for others around us and for the world we inhabit differently. So what if it starts with something fake? Isn’t our tragedy that we look at everything already around us and assume it’s real, itself not already and always fake, already damaged and disordered, already in deep need of care?

***

We count the costs on the journey here, lovers come and gone, but so too laws and attitudes that sought to limit who we might be, the people we are forever becoming, the selves we are always wanting. 

***

Surely there’s a danger in hope. We who embrace and care for our collective disorder are not necessarily promoting only hope. We accept that we are inevitably disappointed. At times, we are outraged. We are understandably uncivil. Our lives and the lives of others might depend on that incivility. But we also learn to recognize that outrage as the expression of hope itself. And in the process we educate our desires to want better –for ourselves, for each other, for the planet itself.

***

We have scorched the sky and the earth. Isn’t it still beautiful? How must we now learn to see the beauty — and not just the beauty of what is gone, and certainly not the beauty of what we’ve done, but the beauty that opens when we see that we are never separate from this disorder we have become, this disorder we have made. How must we now learn to see that disorder as an opportunity, finally, however belatedly, to care? To learn, at last, to care for each other and our world?

About the Authors

Jonathan Alexander is a writer and professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. The author, co-author, or co-editor of twenty-two books, Alexander studies the rhetorics of popular culture and the rhetorical force of life writing in the contemporary world. His recently published Dear Queer Self: An Experiment in Memoir completes his “Creep” trilogy of critical memoirs. He is also a podcaster and works across multiple media, and his public-facing writing is frequently published at the Los Angeles Review of Books, for which he hosts the web-based interview series “Writing Sex.” For more on Jonathan, see https://www.the-blank-page.com.

Antoinette LaFarge is an internationally recognized artist and professor of art at the University of California, Irvine. She describes her approach like this: “My beat is virtuality, its allure and its discontents. I’m especially interested in heteronymic practices and in the emergence of a new respect for the idea of a cultural commons. In art as elsewhere, I subscribe to a philosophy of stewardship rather than ownership. This arises first of all from strong affinity; but it is guided by a deliberate refusal to participate in the dominant modes of the current art system, which has trammeled art within forms that are recognizable by institutions and collectible by investors. I champion the affordances of the ephemeral, the collaborative, the virtual, and the immaterial.” For more on Antoinette, see: http://www.antoinettelafarge.com/

Reading List

Adorno, Theodore. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Verso, 2020. 

Bellamy, Dodie. When the Sick Rule the World. Semiotext(e), 2015. 

Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. 

Butler, Octavia E. Parable of the Sower. Grand Central Publishing, 2000. 

Clare, Eli. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. South End Press, 1999. 

Lord, Catherine. The Summer of Her Baldness: A Cancer Improvisation. U of Texas P, 2004. 

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Penguin Classics, 2020.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 2007.

Macfarlane, Robert. The Wild Places. Granta, 2007.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford UP, 1987.

TallBear, Kim. “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming.” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies Vol 6 No 1 (2019).

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Vintage, 1992.

Wojnarowicz, David. “From the Diaries of a Wolf Boy.” The Waterfront Journals. Grove, 1997.