Abstract

A four-part theoretical investigation of the limits of architecture, visuality, sociality, and pedagogy, as precipitated by cruising and anonymous sex, AIDS, ethical betrayal, and crises in the production of knowledge. Each of these axes is marked by an attenuation of relations between the social and the visual, and this slender gap, necessarily impoverished in its representability, is theorized through a vocabulary or poetics of elusivity and imperceptibility. ;This vocabulary is an attempt to register the conceptual limits of community posed by the practices and conditions listed above, without abandoning notions of collectivity. In other words, the terms that are theorized here, elicit the social bond that is materialized as nothing more nor less than a wink, a nod, a discarded snapshot, a handwritten note on a scrap of paper, two drinking glasses stacked together and left on a counter. These are moments of uncertainty that anonymously punctuate our everyday lives, and these are also occasions for the work of contemporary visual artists: Tom Burr, Doug Ischar, Derek Jarman, Matts Leiderstam, Glenn Ligon, and Jurgen Mayer. The work of these artists is addressed in terms of the various ways in which each critically intervenes in hegemonic logics of representation invested in a politics of identity. ;Such a critical questioning of identity-based logics of representation, sociality, and sexuality, is also a means to redress work in architectural and spatial theory that has recently appeared under the title of "Queer Space" . For it is this discourse of spatial identification and categorization that has been most incapable of attending to those practices, moments, and places which, in their tactical itinerancy and anonymous uncertainty, defy the impulses of representation, and are worthy of being thought precisely because of this defiance. ;These forms of representational defiance inevitably raise questions for pedagogical practice as they undermine assurances as to the possession of objects and rational methods of inquiry. By extending recent queer theories of pedagogy beyond the classroom and other conventional sites of learning, relations across publics, forms of publication, political movement, and public sex are explored