The Included Middle - the non-binary era

Preface M (prefaces to books I probably won't have time to write)

I grew up in the 20th century. Everything was in opposition: the West vs. the East, male vs. female, the North vs. the South, the good guys vs. the bad guys. In this binary age I found myself so wishy-washy; I even was wishy-washy at being wishy-washy. I was not opposed to binaries. Hell, as a cis white heterosexual male from up North, I didn't even notice them. After all, I was one of the good guys who needed to play his part in taking on the bad guys. The end of the 20th century was the all-out capitalist mobilization against everything else. I was no good at being mobilized though. I was a child of luxury or - as the tough say every time they get going (and unfortunately: they get going again and again) -, the rot within. So I stayed immobile. I drank Perrier & I ate mousse au chocolat all day. Grew fat. Swallowed all the BS the good guys fed their own. I elieved in the need to civilize the whole wide world in our own, very weird, Western image. It was so self-evident the rest of the world needed liberating from their superstitious primitivity that it could remain unsaid how effing supreme we were, as a civilization (we finally do express this thought after a civilized hesitation, feeling more smug than ever to have dodged the very bullet that the West continues to fire at itself)¹.

I am growing old in the 21st century where everything is wishy-washy. Or as the young say nowadays: forget male and female, we are all non-binary now. It took me a bad white while to cancel all that 20th century indoctrination. Shame on me. Luckily, I have kids (three: my favorite odd number) who taught me my wishy-washiness was A-OK. I don’t need to ‘Man Up!’ for them (a horrible phrase catching the 20th century by its barest of balls). Slowly but surely I realized that the good guys are bad and the bad kind of good, and that fathers who cannot mother invariably end up smothering their kids. Keep them well kept in a 20th century where boys will be boys HaHa-laughing their ass off with anything trans-gendering. “HaHa laughing, is that already a crime?”, such dads tell the boys who will need to become anything but wishy-washy woke-up boys. I myself played a boys’ game once, a wee li’l boy, the toy pistol made a hole in my head. My dad mothered me with kisses, no rough games for this son anymore! Weak wishy-washy Jo - with his unisex name - got his parents compliments for the fair looks their 17-year old daughter possessed. Maybe this would not have hit home so hard in the 21st century?

So here’s me. Hear me. The 20th century is waging war against the 21st and it will, if necessary, go as far as the 21st century simply not coming to term: blow up the planet, to remain the last wholesome century, forever the pinnacle of capitalist civilization, to be revisited eternally in the same way it constantly revisits the Greco-Roman era. The Abendland turned into the abendera, the evening of all era’s when humankinds’ final twilight set in². Which brings me, seamfully, to Aristotle. As a good Greek citizen his philosophy was as embodied as Greek everyday life was. No soul without body: and so perspiration as conditio sine qua non of animation; all that good life³ stuff. What lives on, though, is only the disembodied thought of The Excluded Middle: the cornerstone of 20th century logic by which something either is X or isn’t X (and thereby leaving no room for wishy-washy non-binaries like a ‘gender X’). Zoon logon echon so loses all its power of differentiation and becomes a magic spell of power that categorically divides rational from non-rational animal in neat binary rows ready for computation (mostly, of course, division)⁴. All the wonder about animals making sounds intelligible to each other is lost together with the analogue world of more or less. Leading to a divisionary achievement crowned by Descartes bridging the originless - non-original - rationality of ‘our’ humanity directly to God. That crimes against humanity presuppose this type of eternal, timeless definition of what it is to be human goes without saying; the action of the 20th century West will forever speak louder than any of its presumptuous words.

Clearly this 20th century logic flies in the face of the logic as is developed in the 20th century. It talks about essential features as if family resemblance necessarily required sharing germ-lines. It has a blind faith in digital divisions as if Gödel did not divide until conquering the myth of digital provability. So on, so forth. But all this fleshless opposition, remember the rot within, bears no resemblance to the bullish resistance offered by the losers of the 20th century. Women, gays, disabled, mentally divergent, … and all kinds of queer intersections thereof, marched (and rolled) actively through the streets denouncing the inhumanity of being regarded as - somehow - less than fully human⁵. Civilized as the West presumed itself to be, all of this marching (and rolling) was reappropriated: the sign of the West’s good cop liberal inclusive magnanimity to be offset against the barbaric bad cop practices of all badlands to the East and South. So the 20th century logic continues to exclude the middle creating its own infrahuman resistance that, in order not to be futile, necessarily needs superhuman strength not to be assimilated to the ever-transforming (inescapably capitalist) hivemind.

And with this we come black to footnote 2 (the lesson being that you cannot unmask a text if you skip all the footnotes; shorter that: Black to square one): I give the floor to Frantz Fanon, black skinned, unmasking the white mind: “Let’s leave this Europe behind that doesn’t stop talking about humanity whilst slaughtering it wherever it goes, in every corner of their own streets, in every corner of the world.” Addressing the Wretched of the Earth, he denounces the ultimate prejudice of the 20th century West: that it destroys prejudice rather than being built on it. If we talk about European identity, we need to talk about an identity of colonizing peoples, and of whitewashing the weak, the poor, the different so they identify against the other. That this is the weakest sense of an us is brought home by Maria Lugones, winner of the Fanon lifetime achievement award, who strives to Include the Middle where colour, queerness, Latino culture, femininity and even masculinity non-binarily intersect. Because the strong us is an inclusive us when opposites attract, instead of continuously fighting some universal non zero sum game of survival within an eternal, timeless clash of civilizations.

When is the key word of optimism here. The 21st century children know they will all be the wretched of the Earth if they allow 20th century culture to wretch the Earth. So, the digital generation cannot but rediscover the analogue world of nuance; waking up to the truth that coming out on top negates coming to fruition; that excluding the middle is tantamount to an exclusion of their future. This book is about the concrete when and where of discovery of a non-binary world and how this provokes the only reaction the 20th century culture knows: a struggle of life and death about any dead wood it sees floating around: freedom to insult, Western/White supremacy, athletes having feelings, the privilege of not taxing privilege, an individual freedom to infect the collective, und kein Ende. The 21st century will win when it ends this 20th century recurrence of attente or attentat - resisting every new binary bind, to avoid desiring new strong men and hence to rightfully arrive in a truly non-binary era of beauty.

PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).

1. Difficulty parsing this sentence? Do not despair: if you get to the end of this book you will understand to what extent the problem of the West is to never come because we are always trying to come out on top.

2. Forgive me the wishy-washy word games, but is it a coincidence that “abendera” in Spanish means ‘to champion’ as in “being the poster boy”? Yes, it is a coincidence, I’ll give you that. Still, it is one that is now allowing me to double the double entendre of the remark to which this is a footnote. Non-binaries do have a way of carrying off into Derrida-land. I stand my ground at opposing nothing whatsoever because (as I said, creating internet mockery) some things are false, and one of those things is that things can be, let alone are, black-and-white.

3. Including the Greek good lie stuff: that (t)his body is better than their body. The West may have distorted Greek thought, it did not at all disturb their unnatural sense of self-arrogant complacence (aka hybris).

4. The echon following zoon logon is what is lost in its Latin translation ‘animal rationale’. It refers to sounds (or signs) which make one intelligible to an other. A reference which has been lost in modern translations disabling inclusion of the middle of those animals making sense of each other’s traces. The deaf and the mute show with their hands how dumb it is to exclude echoing thought from the thought of thought itself.

5. A 20th century reading of this sentence would lead to exclaiming: “But it does!” forgetting things as varied as adoption, cultural habits and, why not, the capitalist reason/treason pair. Neo-Darwinian belief in DNA bears, by the way, the strongest of family resemblance to the central dogma(s) of religions.