Losing Consciousness With John T. Warren

Death and Its Future

Maybe my mom thinks I am not good at death because I have never experienced what she considers a significant loss?

I used to want to know struggle and grief, to dwell with the feeling of a deep cut, so that I might probe its contours. There are a number of possible explanations for this desire: maybe some armchair self-psychologizing to help explain my childhood? The socio-cultural privileges I am granted as a highly educated, White male? The politely deferred horrors of middleclass life? Or, maybe even go a step past that appraisal and into the realm of “mommy and daddy issues”? I prefer to leave those themes aside, for now at least, and instead focus on the experience of disorientation that is symptomatic of the desire.

Thinking back to my experience with Ed’s death, it makes sense this would be the moment in my autobiography that I tie to the experience of disorientation manifest in loss. Ed was the first friend of mine to die. Certainly, older relatives and “family friends” had died in my conscious memory, but no one in whom I freely and for the sole sake of friendship invested care had died. I thought the first loss of a friend would be different. Maybe it was that I hoped for some kind of strength to arise out it—to have a memory that could motivate me in those moments when all feels lost. But I can not remember with any epistemological exactitude why I assumed a difference, and can only imperfectly remember the feelings.

John’s death is different; it is fresher in memory and feeling, still raw 2 years on. Reflecting on Ed’s death tells me something about losing John in spite of this. Sitting in my parent’s living room not knowing how to feel about death over a decade ago reminds me that my desire to know struggle and grief was not so much about an inability to feel such things, as much as it was about an inability to understand their effect(s) on me. Like the unsettled affects I feel when I work to find meaning in John’s death, I felt the same in Ed’s, and so I wonder what it is about the experience of loss that constitutes these feelings?

I might turn to any one of several literatures to answer this question, given that human reflection on death is not new. But it is precisely the tropes embedded in these literatures that give me pause. Research conducted under the broad umbrella of queer theory has given form to a powerful critique of the concept of “futurity” that is woven deeply into White/Western/heteronormative conceptualizations of social order (Berlant & Freeman, 1993; Dinshaw et al., 2007; Edelman, 2004; Freeman, 2007; Halberstam, 2005, 2008; Lorenz, 2012; Love, 2007; Winnubst, 2010). Critical examinations of futurity in its various forms show a prevalent thread in heteronormative culture that places specific emphasis on generational renewal through reproduction of various kinds, most specifically, biological reproduction. But also included in the conversation are the intersectional influences of capitalism, racism, and homophobia in general. One type of response to the suffocating demands of “the future” is formulated in an embrace of the “backwardness” attached to queerness in Western cultural history. Myriad representations accomplish this attachment in a negative sense by placing queered bodies outside of evolutionary trajectories of biological, social, and psychological development. In response, a range of intellectual positions work to question these attachments by undoing the trope of futurity, especially as it is embedded in heteronormative and heterosexist narratives of “the Child.”

Lee Edelman (2004) argues that social order is authenticated in its intention to transmit the future in the form of the “inner child” that “remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics” (p. 3). This is to say that the figure of the Child operates as the raison d’être of the social order by providing a telos with which to measure the good of one’s actions. There are obvious moments when the subtly of this discourse is broken in favor of outright acknowledgment. Think, for instance, of the politician’s charge that we ought to take action for “the sake of our children because they are the future.” No specific children are named (usually), but all the same, an identifiable sense of who/what is being invoked is engaged and made available. The Child is positioned in discourse as an “emblem of futurity’s unquestioned value and propose” (p. 4). Edelman’s response is to propose an embrace of the Freudian death-drive as it invokes features assigned to the idea and concept of “absolute negativity” identified with queerness that stand in contrast to, and at times as an existential threat to, child-as-future (e.g., as counter to reproductive coupling, predatory threats to children’s lives, etc.).

Critiques of futurism like Edelman’s are powerful in their contribution to thinking through the tropes of life and death, particularly in their interrelation. However, even an embrace of the “ideal-absolute-negative” found in Edelman’s account of how the death drive might be used to construct a counter narrative does not undo a connection to the future. In the Christian faith tradition, for instance, death is connected to a sense of futurity precisely where a “dying god, the mortification of the flesh, and the hope of a world come, after the death of the body” activate belief in “a new birth” (Jantzen, 2007, p. 250). In some way, death always already finds connection to a future, where birth (or rebirth) serve as motivation for a certain set of actions.

There seems to be nowhere to go, no grounding point from which to comfortably theorize the problematic of death. Signs of this reality are present at nearly every funeral I have attended. There are those who choose the path of celebrating the life lost, those who embrace the pain of the moment, and, of course, those who strike some kind of middle ground in the enactment of solemnity. These performances and their attendant characteristics remain at odds in me.

Staring down at my lap, the warm arm of a friend around my shoulders, while I’m waiting for John’s funeral service to start, I find myself back in the uncanny position of not quite knowing how to feel his death. Not because I did not know what he meant to me, and not because I did not have a clear sense of finality, and not because I was trying on the performance of quiet solemnity. I’m trying to figure out how to move. Do I go forward or backward? Do I try to arrest this moment? Do I hold on to the depth of this cut to probe its contours and find motivation in it? I am disoriented.

Memory and writing in the context of death work to construct a kind of preservative imagination that, at least in the beginning, holds close those recollections in the fullness of their lived expression. Always already forgotten, however, is the “gap between what one receives and what one becomes [that] is opened up as an effect of how things arrive and of the ‘mixtures’ of any arrival” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 155). This is to say that the arrival of death produces a becoming in those who remain to mourn loss. The process is, however, unpredictable, differential, and unevenly distributed. To write about memories of loss is challenging, because it calls for a tracing of unreliable fragments, and comes without the promise of any sacred origins (Gannon, 2006).

The becoming produced in loss demonstrates one of the ways in which consciousness is sustained within otherness as much as it is sustained within the “I.” As a species, we have discovered and rediscovered that experience is confronted by what G. W. F. Hegel (1807-1977) identifies as two “thises”: “this” being as “I” and “this” being as “object.” And because of this doubled structure of “thisness,” we see the world within and as part of our everyday being with others, and not in some mode of detachment. To grapple with loss is, thus, to grapple equally with the loss of consciousness, not simply in an embodied/physiological way, but within, and as part of, us. To imagine the world without John is to imagine it in a newly disoriented way, which stems from the inability to locate in the other-no-more the fullness of embodied sense. If, as Hegel proposes, consciousness is relational, we rely on the other to sustain the “I,” and when that other is no longer available, the “I” is thrust into a world made alien, a world of reconfigured relationality.

The Phenomenology of Disorientation

Maybe my mom thinks I am not “good” at death because I invoke dead loved ones after they are gone, refusing to let them rest?

The recollection of the “who” within the experience of loss further confounds the feeling of disorientation, because it compresses time in a way that forms the past, present, and future into one “now,” which manifests for me in the feeling of impasse: of being not quite sure when this started, what it is, or what will move me beyond it. Sara Ahmed (2006) argues that experiences of disorientation hold within them the potential to “shatter one’s sense of confidence in the ground or one’s belief that the ground on which we reside can support the actions that make a life feel livable” (p. 157). Impasse is marked by a shattering of perceptual ground, which brings with it a fundamental rearticulation of the possibilities for reflecting on the fragments of memory remain. It also serves as an opportunity to reconstruct a place on which to stand while looking back out on to the world from a vantage point that reveals the contingent possibilities of meaning. Ahmed’s use of the metaphor of “ground” in describing disorientation is significant in this sense because

[s]pace and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his [/their] birth, the perpetual contribution of his [/their] bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought. That is why they saturate consciousness and are impenetrable to reflection. The instability of levels produces not only the intellectual experience of disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fill us. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962-2002, p. 296)

The “giddiness” and “nausea” that Merleau-Ponty references speak to the experience of disorientation as an imminent condition of space and the constitution of perception in an always already dynamic relationship in one’s finitude—our understanding of existence as finite—presents itself. The importance of Merleau-Ponty’s insight for framing Ahmed’s concept of disorientation lies in showing the risk of loss and the possibilities of reconstruction as conditions of perception, which we struggle to contain. Death, in particular, presents the mechanics of this experience by reminding us of the contingency of the physical body and consciousness.

Thinking about the ebb and flow of my own disorientation within the experience of John’s death, I can, in moments, chart the historical chronology of events before that ability is taken away in the predawn moments of psycho-visceral incoherence. I remember, in particular, the moment I received a call from a dear, mutual friend who informed me about John’s diagnosis and subsequent prognosis. This was the first site of rupture, of being changed within the Hegelian experience of thisness. One way of naming this rupture within Ahmed’s phenomenology of disorientation comes from Martin Heidegger’s (1926-1962) concept of “throwness.” Heidegger argues that the way we come to form the ground of being-in-the-world occurs through a kind of “giveness” to which we are delivered. We never gain full consciousness of this moment, even though we typically chart it historically with the celebration of birthdays. All the same, we take the moment of our emergence into the world on faith because, like Ahmed’s metaphor of disorientation suggests, we are “thrown” into a world in which we must begin making sense from the nothing of shattered perceptual ground.

In the moment of learning the details of John’s diagnosis, I saw the very real chance of his death within the horizon of possibilities, and in that is/was anxiety about John’s life, and also my own. Heidegger proposes that “anxiety in the face of death is anxiety ‘in the face of’ that potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped” (Heidegger, 1926/1962, p. 295). This experience is nonrelational in the sense that it is fundamental and singular in its appearance within the individual, although its effects are most certainly of a trans-individual orientation. John himself remarked on the experience in describing the dread he felt when hearing a voicemail message from his mother. He writes,

It was four o’clock on a Friday. I remember because I was surprised to get home after a busy day and discover the one message on the machine was my mother. Her voice on the machine seemed stressed, as if she was going to drop some bad news. I am always aware of this voice, this tired and strained voice that draws me back to the death of my aunt—Sweetie, Aunt Pat has cancer. It’s bad. I fear that this voice is calling to me about my grandmother—She is not well. (Berry & Warren, 2009, p. 597)

In this description, he captures some of the features of disorientation that come along with being thrown-toward-death: the paralinguistic characteristics of his mom’s voice, the timing of her message, the expectation of the content that will accompany these attributes, and so on. Although it was ultimately not the loss of a loved one, but the loss of a family home in which rich memories were made, the sense of what-was-to-come retains an important parallel character. I come back to this experience of being thrown-toward-death when I think about the moment of receiving the call that John had died. It is the experience of being thrown-toward-death—real or perceived—that is at stake. And it is not simply about facing the reality of one’s own mortality, but rather being thrown into an experience of disorientation marked by a rearticulation of relationality instigated by loss.

I had an email exchange on this theme, which helps capture the concept of disorientation and its connection to temporality, perception, and being thrown-toward-death. The exchange was unique in part because my interlocutor, Lenore Langsdorf, taught John and me as students, and so participated in our lives in a way that connects generational difference as an element of relational consciousness. She wrote in response by way of thematizing this issue in a parallel experience of loss. She wrote,

The 19-year-old son of a good friend was killed in a car crash . . . early last month, and we went to the memorial/celebration of his life. In talking within a small group of friends after the large public gathering, there was a recurrent theme which I’ll translate into your words: we older folks expect there to be much more “future” for the “other” than for ourselves, the “I.” Thus, the grief over this death was different, and so much deeper, than it would have been for the passing of her grandfather, or even, father. I anticipated that future for John; when present with him, the “past” and the “present” were embodied and open-ended, because I had that expectation. (L. Langsdorf, personal communication, December, 2012)

This connection captures an important relationship between the concepts of disorientation and relational consciousness. One’s expectation of an open-ended future for the other appears by virtue of the myriad linkages which tie consciousness of the “I” to the presence of the other. When that temporal expectation is ruptured, it disorients what we take as accepted fact about the endurance of ourselves and the other in time and space.

Thinking About John, Thinking About Difference

Maybe my mom thinks I am not good at death because I don’t believe in the stages of grief?

Nearly every semester, I lead students in a short exercise that is designed to make specific the abstract functioning of consciousness. I begin by asking them to close their eyes, envision their orientation in the classroom, and then, by way of developing as much detail as possible, imagine a route out of the room and away from campus. The goal is to render the richest stream of memories possible, which includes the kinds of details they would expect to encounter: people they interact with, geographical details, smells, sounds, and so on. After participants have arrived at their destination, I welcome them to open their eyes, and we discuss how far they traveled, what they noticed along the way, and all the living things that shaped their experience. From this process, we draw-out connections among relationality, memory, and awareness as a way to understand the concept of consciousness. This exercise is helpful because it reminds participants of the fracturing of memory, the unplanned interruptions of thoughts that take us elsewhere, and also the disconcerting feeling of forgetting what is so familiar.

OPEN IN VIEWER

This picture sits next to my desk at home. It was taken at the 2010 meeting of Central States Communication Association in Cincinnati, Ohio, and serves as a memento of a gathering at which I persuaded a number of people, John included, to perform 80s-style poses. Thinking about this moment in time, I find myself in the midst of a self-directed version of the consciousness exercise I lead with students. My motivation in keeping this picture near my work space and engaging in the exercise comes from a desire to do what loss almost universally prompts us to do, which is activate in memory the richness of what is no longer available to live, embodied sense. But to be sure, this process is not as simple as conjuring an image-in-mind; rather, I and “we” are called to the trans-individual character of consciousness, that is, called to the ways in which our awareness is shaped by difference within and outside of us.

Thinking about John in this regard requires an interesting task of meta-contemplation-feeling. In his scholarship, he engages the concept of difference from several different intellectual directions, but perhaps most centrally from his subjective identification as a bisexual man in a heterosexual marriage. He names this subject position as a difficult one: an identity fraught with the persistent demand for a “membership card that grants entry” and also one that enjoys the benefits of “heteronormativity at play on and atop my body” (Gust & Warren, 2008, pp. 117-118). In this way, he conceives of his experience of a heterosexual partnership as an inherent grant of privilege, and also one he simultaneously worked to undo in his everyday living through the queering of love. He marked this work in/by a

performance of self that would force folks to question themselves, myself, and the nature of our relationship—to be put into, what one might call, a question mark, a performative ambiguity, a playful and yet important crux, tension between what they see and what they might imagine. (Gust & Warren, 2008, p. 118)

These performances raise important questions about the nature of how difference is constituted. For a host of reasons primarily associated with the politics of visibility and identity, difference is often tied to identity characteristics that are readily identified with otherness, which in turn qualify one to claim a subject position. Here too is heteronormative, dominant culture at work: disciplining bodies into the rigidified categories that are, at once, politically important, but in another sense, the very restraints placed on the open, creative expression of identity. This is to say, that only certain forms of difference are legitimated, and only to the extent that they fit within a framework of preestablished meanings. Within this conceptualization of difference there are, of course, resonances with the now landmark work of Judith Butler (1990), who calls our attention to the ways in which the intelligibility of subjective identity positions constitutes a framework regulated by the demands of heteronormative culture. Through a reading of the work of Gilles Deleuze, John takes on the question of difference in an attempt to reframe the ways in which negativity defines difference. He argues, in “large matter, difference has been conflated with opposition, reduced to a binary that is pitted against something else” (Warren, 2008, p. 295), and in this way forced back into the binarism of the identity thinking that proposes that difference is matched by an equal and opposite identity. We might name this view “difference-as-lack” in the sense that one is “this” identity by virtue of not being “that,” and so on through deductive considerations that place bodies in categories by virtue of what they are not. To these ends, Deleuze (1968-1994) argues,

[W]hen difference is subordinated by the thinking subject to the identity of the concept (even where this identity is synthetic), difference in thought disappears. In other words, what disappears is that difference that thinking makes in thought, that genitality of thinking, that profound fracture of the death, in the pure and empty form of time. To restore difference in thought it to unite this first knot which consists of representing difference through the identity of the concept and the thinking subject. (p. 266)

Deleuze’s point—and John’s by way of the former—is that difference is lost when we remove from consideration the “who” that constitutes the concept as part of its application to the full complexity of being in the world. The restoration of difference within thinking starts with an acknowledgment that “we come into being within cultural performance, within the (re)productive, collaborative enactment of our lives” (Berry & Warren, 2009, p. 604). In that acknowledgment, we find ourselves opened up to a world of existential possibilities that are at once frightening and invigorating. Frightening in the sense of embracing contingency, and invigorating in the form of locating the pathos of novelty, of embracing creativity in its mundanely wondrous manifestations.

Creative Coping

Maybe my mom thinks I am not good at death because I think too much about death, rather than an open-ended future?

What’s so tricky for me about embracing the ideas of disorientation, difference, and relational consciousness is how dream-like they make loss. Thinking about John-as-past is especially difficult to reconcile in concert with friends postings on his Facebook wall, the private dialogues I find myself slipping into, and thoughts of him in his everydayness, all of which bring him back into the present, forming an impasse in understanding. How does one move past the end when the other’s digital existence remains as a haunting conducted by a convivial ghost? As a reflective question to myself, I often ask: Do I want to move past this into a future without the impasse? The question is arresting and satisfying. Maybe that is part of the reason why I don’t want to know what my mom meant by telling me I’m not good at these things.

Retreating to the experience of theory, which is where I often go, does not seem appropriate either, because it feels too uncomplicated to dive into an emotional resolution formed of words when the “who” that’s been lost remains vivid in melancholia of feeling and memory. As part of this tension, a poignant line from bell hooks (1994), whom John held in great esteem, is ready to hand:

I came to theory because I was hurting . . . I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me . . . I saw in theory then a location for healing. (p. 59)

I come back to this line time and again as evidence of the fact that ideas matter, and that John taught me about some very important ways in which that’s so.

In the scholarship I read and discussed with John when he was alive, the idea of “critical consciousness” rings out as a central theme. Although developed in a variety of ways, generally speaking, the concept signifies the negating and reconstructive capacity of social and political critique; it is the kind of awareness in which our response-ability³ to the other is made sacrosanct. Reflecting on how John acknowledged and performed these principles, I think about his character as a great scholar and teacher of empathy: the value of empathy, what it means to be empathetic, and how empathy changes a community’s orientation to the world. This is one very important aspect of my learning from/with John that I work to bring forward in my own living, and thus serves as part of my enactment of creative coping.

I had the opportunity to know John in a number of different roles, and what was apparent in all of them was his investment in the transformational possibilities of seeing things otherwise. He had an ability to challenge and be challenged in ways that mirror his scholarly perspective. In his work he advocates for a view of communication grounded in the idea that identity and relationality are co-constituted through situated doing over time. A component of this advocacy is the recognition that we hold one another in balance, and the care with which John held us demonstrates so much about his character. If we think about consciousness on a continuum, which means that it has shallower and greater depths like arboreal roots systems, he was one of those precious figures in life that connects us to a deeper level of understanding of the whole.

Within critical consciousness also dwells the opportunity for a kind of creative coping that embraces the self-alienation of “not being good at these kinds of things,” and pairs that with a capacity to generate the imaginative redemption of that condition. This is to say, it makes possible the opportunity to “tarry with the negative . . . for it transforms the terrors and midnights of the spirit into symbolic formations, imaginative undertakings, and sites of delicate beauty” (Ruti, 2008, p. 119). Rather than trying to “undo” disorientation, to guard against its appearance, one strategy of creative coping is to embrace the symptoms of the condition. The affective impulse to know one’s self is powerful, but perhaps equally empowering is the opportunity to dwell in uncertainty as an indication of a metaphysical fact, rather than epistemological failure. To say “I’m uncertain” because the world is uncertain; the dust has not settled because it is inclined to float, to be grounded in groundlessness; constantly taking new shapes.

Sometimes when I meditate, I try and imagine looking at myself from the outside as if I were a hummingbird. Not because I see hummingbirds as delicate and beautiful (which they are), but because they are among the most neurotic animals in the kingdom—always trying to maintain a delicate balance in flight. I come back to imagining what it would be like to be this small bird gripping a thin branch in a thunderstorm. I can never get past the point of wondering if it is frightened or finds pleasure in the moment. This is, in a sense, an analog for my experience of disorientation. Do I retreat in fright from existential contingency, or do I embrace it? What I hope is the case for the hummingbird and myself, is some feeling to hold on to in the experience of disorientation.

I purposefully haven’t spent much time in my life thinking about the experience of loss, because I expect faith alone could not staunch the flow of hurt that seems likely to result from deep contemplation. I’ve never learned a method for coping until writing and thinking about John’s passing. To consider what’s lost from experience when a beloved other irrevocably escapes our awareness in the living present has helped me begin to innumerate the things-that-are-no-longer with John’s passing, while also taking solace in thinking through the environment he worked to create, and imagining how to continue its cultivation. I write with the picture of John by the side of my desk and I include it with this essay to live the experience of disorientation that comes with losing the consciousness that has been lost.