Matthew Cheney

News & Views

Cockroach Theory

Last week, I attended the annual Modern Language Association Convention, this year in Philadelphia. While in general I am still skeptical of the amount of resources that academic conventions require (money, time, stress), I enjoy MLA — it’s an opportunity to hear about things I don’t get much opportunity to hear about otherwise, especially since in my daily professional life I’ve left the discipline of English/literature (having taken a job in Interdisciplinary Studies). The academic circles I’ve landed in — particularly the circles devoted to Virginia Woolf and Samuel Delany — are friendly, generous, and supportive; there’s little of the poisonous behavior academia is sometimes rightly famous for. I’ve never been on the job market at MLA, and so don’t have the painful memories of people who have survived that trauma-inducing gauntlet. For me, MLA has mostly been a good time, and I always leave with lots of new ideas about language and literature.

This year, I’ve come away thinking about two of my favorite topics — power and theory — in potentially new (for me) ways. Two sessions, back-to-back in the same room, led me to these ideas, ideas which I want to stress are utterly provisional and which I may disavow immediately after I write them, but which I need to begin to write my way through to see what I (even provisionally) think.

The two sessions that sparked these ideas were “Queer Relationalities” and “On Climate Change: A Conversation with Amitav Ghosh”. There is little in common between these sessions, but going from one to the other, I couldn’t help but think about the various crises facing the world at the moment and how we as individual people, writers, and scholars ought to relate to those crises.

Relate is an important word here, because usually we think of crises as things we must address, ameliorate, challenge, struggle against. All of those approaches are valid and perhaps necessary, or at least unavoidable, parts of how we relate to the crisis. The jargony term relationality is one I mostly want to avoid, but it expresses something important. How we relate to each other, to social structures, to institutions, the environment, etc. is one of the foundational questions of social life. Society is a web of relationships.

But then, everything is a web of relationships — we could define ecology that way, too. (It’s the types, the genres of relationship that differentiate.) Being is interbeing. Our bodies are webs of relationships between the atoms, molecules, chromosomes, nerves, blood, bones, meat, stuff in our stomachs, ideas in our brains…

This is not what got me thinking, though. What got me thinking was a certain tendency I have toward resistance, contrarianism.

“What if—” I wondered while listening to very smart people discuss queer relationality “—what if I … don’t want to relate? What if I don’t relate? Can’t relate?” I thought of the noxious calls of Goodreaders and TikTokkers for “relatable” characters. I thought of the murderous priority American society puts on romantic and familial relationships as the only way to access care and sustenance. I thought of how I’ve lived most of my life quite happily single and how often well-intentioned people ask about romantic/sexual relationships, as if such things are to be universally desired.

And so I began to think about power and theory, about cockroaches and Bartleby.

An audience member asked a question at the end of the Queer Relationalities panel: What about queer refusal? There wasn’t time to address it well, and in any case none of the panelists really had much to say off the cuff about such a question. How could they? They chose and were chosen for the panel because they already have an idea of the benefits of queer relationality, which at least suggests they do not have much experience of queer refusal of relationality.

My literary hero is Bartleby the Scrivener. Since I first read Melville’s story in high school, I have loved Bartleby. He’s my guy. Literary scholarship is, for me, something like working in the Dead Letter Office. I have spent a lot of time staring at walls. And there is tremendous power in those simple words of Bartleby’s motto. I would prefer not to.

I began to wonder if there is power in queer refusal. Queerness itself is a refusal of the norm, a residence in the margins of society. Queer is not synonymous with other words for sexuality or gender expression because queer contains within it both the older definition of “strange” or “weird” and the history of the word’s use as an insult and the history of the word’s use within subcultures. Uses of the word that don’t attend to that complex etymology, uses that reduce the word to a rainbow umbrella, lose sight of the word’s possibilities and provocations.

Queer Nation was a great inspiration to me when I was young — seeing tv news reports when I was a teenager where protesters shouted out, “We’re here! We’re queer! Get used to it!” was important to my ability to continue to imagine a space for myself in this terrible world — but I mostly identified as gay in my late teens and twenties. It wasn’t until I realized that I did not aspire to the familial and relational ideals of virtually everyone else I knew that I fully embraced queer as the most accurate descriptor for myself. It was, I realized, less my desire for gay sex that separated me from the norm than it was my growing sense that partnership, marriage, etc. are horrifying (for myself; my partnered/married friends mostly seem to like it). If I wanted to express my homosexual desires via partnership, monogamy, etc., then I would be far better able than I am to assimilate into American society, would be better supported by American society, would be perceived as more normal by American society. This wasn’t always true, of course, because it wasn’t long ago that homosexual desire itself was a primary criterion for abnormality. Progress has been made. But progress is always a mix of achievement and destruction, a shifting of lenses that allow new things to be seen, heard, felt; but also new areas of invisibility, silence, pain. That’s the human condition. Ah humanity! Ah Bartleby!

All Bartleby had to do for people to understand him was agree to some of the common elements of everyday life in his workplace and society. Bartleby remains a beguiling figure even now, over 170 years since he first appeared, because we still don’t know what to do with someone who refuses so many of the norms that guide most of society. Bartleby as a character, as a person, defies interpretation because the ability to interpret something relies on givens and assumptions that, if refused, render interpretation rudderless, unmoored. Bartleby is, in that sense then, best described as queer.

What about, I thought, the refusal of power? “I would prefer not to,” is itself powerful, it leaves few possible responses, but it is not productive. Where do you go from it? The power of refusal is that it is an end point. It is not progress, it is a stop. A stepping aside. A denial. Still, we must be able to tease out the possibilities within such an impossibility, the ways of being and ethics and epistemology and maybe even metaphysics that refusal proposes. The Queer Relationalities panel mentioned Lee Edelman’s No Future, a book that takes a Bartlebian approach to queer theory, and that’s a good start, but it’s a tiny step. There’s a lot more to be done with refusal’s nonproductive, nonprocreational possibilities — and not just for queer folks.

Most activism — maybe even most life — is about maintaining or gaining power. That’s not necessarily power over somebody else; it might simply be the power to shape our daily life, our environment, our choices. We might be ambitious, striving for more power over other people, or we might just want the power to do as we wish. The world is always imperfect, so we seek ways to bring it more into harmony with our ideals. On an individual level, it’s almost impossible to escape the will to power without becoming so passive you barely function. But at the Queer Relationalities panel, I began to wonder how true this is for groups and movements.

What if, I wondered, we stopped trying to gain political power and instead sought protection against power? What if we tried to become irrelevant to power? What if our heroes weren’t crusaders, but Bartleby?

Then cockroaches came to mind. I find cockroaches repulsive. Not scary — I don’t run or jump when I see them — so much as vaguely nauseating. (When I lived in Mexico for a summer twenty years ago, the family I lived with called me Señor Cucaracha because everybody else in the house would run screaming from cockroaches and I would kill them.) But I also admire them greatly. My recent story “A Short History of Decay” is all about why I think cockroaches and similar creatures are superior to humans.

Cockroaches have the power of endurance. They preceded humans on this planet and they will outlive us after we have destroyed most of the biosphere, killing ourselves and so much else. While certainly, a swarm of cockroaches can effect real change in their environment, for the most part, cockroaches’ claim to fame is that they survive and that we humans generally hate them. This is their power.

The words cockroach theory scuttled through my mind. I thought of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of the Undercommons (a concept I love, as far as I can begin to understand it, even as I think their writing is unnecessarily opaque and thus limited in its usefulness). I thought of the queer art of failure. I thought of Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of interbeing. I thought of anchorites, those people who quietly inhabit a specific space and who, in some religious traditions, are considered “dead to the world”. I thought of Chinese mountain hermits. I wrote these notes as the Queer Relationality panel came to an end:

Queer unpower / underpower — the refusal of power — how might we go in the opposite direction from the will to power? Toward the humble, ephemeral, minor, failed, marginal.

Disawowal, surrender, ambivalence

Cockroach theory, anchorite theory

Enmeshment, interdependence

Repulsion (cockroaches)

Close to the ground

I’ve been reading Michael Cisco’s Weird Fiction: A Genre Study, which takes some of Deleuze & Guattari’s idea of “minor literature” and puts it to pragmatic use, and I kept thinking of this while thinking about queer unpower. (I think Cisco’s use is reductive, but it’s not necessarily a bad or unwelcome reduction, because it makes a pretty vague and abstract concept practical for literary interpretation.) In Cisco’s use of it, “minor” becomes antinormative, antihegemonic. The minor is whatever is marginal, outside the realms of common sense and good taste and cultural dominance. The truly queer and minor always go together.

Later, I realized I probably thought of the phrase cockroach theory because of artist and critic Manny Farber’s famous idea of “termite art”:

Good work usually arises where the creators … seem to have no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn’t anywhere or for anything. A peculiar fact about termite-tapeworm-fungus-moss art is that it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity.

Instead of seeking the white elephant of power, what if our goal was to be left alone? What if instead of trying to insinuate our way into the corridors of power, we instead sought out the dark corners and quiet outbuildings? Steal from power, appropriate it, but don’t aspire to it. As many people have said before me, a world of gay soldiers and lesbian cops is still a world of soldiers and cops. To queer power is to disavow it.

Such were my thoughts as the Amitav Ghosh session began. Here, the topic was aesthetics and the climate crisis, with Ghosh giving some remarks, followed by brief statements by various scholars who know his work well, then questions and conversation between them all, plus a few questions from the audience. (It was one of the best sessions I saw at MLA, full of ideas I’m still thinking through.)

One point Ghosh made is that the various commitments countries have made to address the climate crisis are woefully inadequate, and what countries are really doing is gesturing toward climate mitigation while expending most of their effort in “arming up”. Militarism is constantly growing, and governments are behaving in the same way as apocalypse preppers and survivalists.

Ghosh has long linked climate crisis and colonialism, and he returned to that idea at this session, proposing that the people who really know how to survive are not the billionaires with their bunkers, but the people who live in the least powerful countries in the world, the people who are most marginal, because life for them has always been crisis, always been about survival. The colonized people of the world are very familiar with worlds ending. There is a kind of power in this, as Ghosh described it — he said that the U.S. since World War II has projected its power via aircraft carriers and other large, hugely expensive equipment, but the U.S. has been defeated by small-scale, simple weapons in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. For all our militarism — and our whole economy is based on it (cf. the Pentagon budget) — we are actually a massive failure at war, most recently having been drawn into two decades of war that accomplished nothing other than the enrichment of defense contractors and oligarchs while causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

And so I kept thinking about power and humility, about guerrilla warfare and improvised explosives, about the impossibility of ever finding moral justice through association with institutions of the state, about the magnitude of suffering in the world.

I kept thinking about cockroaches.

Where are the crevices in which we might find some refuge from the machines of war and destruction, the forces of ambition and competition, the grand heteronormative success narratives? How might we ally with the insects and anchorites rather than the rulers and warlords? What space remains for us if we want nothing to do with militarism, nationalism, supremacy?

After MLA, I returned home and found in the mailbox a book I forgot I had ordered: Jed Esty’s The Future of Decline: Anglo-American Culture at Its Limits. I have not yet read it, but I am a fan of decline. (“I would prefer not to,” is a more effective, more passive-aggressive way of saying, “I decline.”) The American Empire needs to decline and fall. Make America small and provincial again.

I assume Esty is more positive than I am, more optimistic — in an interview with the University of Pennsylvania, he said, “I think the number one new story is emphasizing the need for American goodness rather than American greatness.” Gag. Whatever. It’s the sort of thing you have to say to get people to take you seriously and not see you as a nihilist or pessimist or something.

I prefer to let the cockroaches inherit the Earth rather than expend much thought on the goodness of humanity. We are a bad species. We have, for millennia now, built a world of power struggles, oppression, destruction, mass murder. There is no good time in history and the future is either a mass of suffering or a fanciful dream of progress. We live in a time of total war, and no white-elephant final paragraphs calling vaguely for hope in the face of humanity’s destructive impulses and death-driven institutions can erase the facts of misery and immiseration, the facts of human existence.

Such ideas as mine — pessimistic, antihumanist, and pro-declinist — are not useful politically, they are anathema to all public relations, they will not make you popular at cocktail parties. They are cockroach theory: creeping around in the dark corners, nibbling on old wooden support structures, repulsing the VIPs.

Cockroach theory is not good for anything. (It might be good for nothing.) It’s not good for advancing a philosophical agenda, because it denies philosophical agendas. (It denies all agendas. Agendas are bothersome, and cockroaches can’t be bothered.) It’s not good for impressing the powers-that-be because it doesn’t even want to expend one second of energy on feeling contempt for those powers. What, to the cockroach, matter the powers-that-be?

Cockroach theory has no ambition. Humans are full of ambition, and cockroaches laugh at them because cockroaches know that all human ambition ends up in the same place: a grave. (Go ahead and leave the most beautiful corpse your ambition will afford you, or don’t; cockroaches will feed on its flesh regardless.) Strive to be the greatest human being who ever lived; the result will be the same: you will become a corpse. The layabout, least-achieving person you know and the greatest person in the history of great persons are the same in the end. Thinking such thoughts, I always find my way back to Utah Phillips’s great version of the song “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum!” — a call for uselessness and indolence, a refusal of capitalist imperatives, a denial of ambition, a middle finger at authority, a celebration of the cleverness and guile of the rogue.

Cockroach theory says Gregor Samsa missed his chance. He let his human attachments and work ethic keep him from happiness, or at least contentment, which is, I think, superior to happiness because contentment at least has the potential to be sustainable. Happiness always disappears. Contentment is a better goal, more reasonable. Cockroaches are often content.

Also, Gregor was too big. You can’t be a human-sized cockroach. This is perhaps key to cockroach theory: It won’t do to stay human. Humans take up too much space. Humans are no good at scuttling around in the dark.

Cockroach theory requires that we get smaller, that we find our way to the hidden parts of the world, that we chew on whatever is near, that we wait out the apocalypses, that we find power in our swarms but only for reasons of survival, that we embrace the fact that our existence repulses those creatures we will outlive and outlast.

I don’t actually know how much of a cockroach I aspire to be, how much I want to refuse; it will take some time and thought (cockroaches are good at mulling). I know, though, that Bartleby’s story need not end with his death. Kafka helped us see how to rewrite the conclusion and open it up to, if not progress, at least a sequel:

Bartleby awoke one morning after uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into his preferred form: a simple cockroach.

And at last he was free.