What is movement anyway?

I would guess by now that no one is particularly surprised that I was immediately struck by and caught up in Flusser’s discussion of time and modes of ‘reading’ history. I am very interested in Flusser’s investigation of linear time, “if by history we mean a project toward something,” (24) or "the sense of going somewhere" (23). As I continued reading, I was further struck by his thought that “those who write and read written lines” are part of “a ‘historical’ being-in-the-world,” while “those who make and read surface images” are part of an “‘unhistorical’ being-in-the-world” because “they represent the world by means of static images” (25, 26). I loved Flusser’s choice of the word ‘static,’ because in queer and performance theories when critics discuss biological bodies and/or gender performance, terms like “freeze” and “static” are often used. Beth Freeman in her book, Time Binds, has a nice summary of what it is I am trying to say:

"Judith Butler has shown how the rhythms of gendered performance - specifically, repetitions - accrete to 'freeze' masculinity and femininity into timeless truths of being. Zerubavel's 'hidden rhythms,' Bourdieu's 'habitus,' and Butler's 'gender performativity' all describe how repetition engenders identity, situating the body's supposed truth in what Nietzche calls 'monumental time,' or static existence outside of historical movement." (Freeman, Time Binds, 4). 

I am sure it will come as no surprise that my favorite form of time is queer time, or more specifically monumental time (since we have a few ways to define 'queer time' depending on what it is you seek to relocate or view). Monumental time (originally credited to Nietzche as mentioned above) can be said to render gender performance into timeless modes of being; i.e. as time passes and history continues to write itself/be written, there are certain definitions and expectations that seem to stay more or less the same. In this case that definition and expectation is the male/female gender binary that continues to be privileged by society (I'm making a generalization of course) as the ‘right’ way to live, as well as what and how those bodies are supposed to (re)produce and function. So how does this tie back to Flusser? Whether or not he intended it, his effort to figure images and films as ways of reading history gets at the heart of what it is to look at something and immediately form an impression, and to only later (seconds later in that moment or hours or days later when revisiting the memory of the image) “reveal how [your meaning] got there” (23). In a nutshell, he is (most likely accidentally) probing what it is to read bodies as images and derive meaning from those images. How do we ingest cultural norms and again and again paste them onto an image? And is it possible to translate that image back into written text to once again become part of the linear “‘historical’ being-in-the-world” (and do we want to?).

And so, you might by now be wondering how I am going to tie this to What Maisie Knew. I would like to posit that Maisie’s mother Ida Farange seems so abhorrent to the reader because she has so little regard for the child she birthed that was once part of her body. Though we learn of this secondhand through Sir Claude (Maisie’s step-father), who is rather unreliable, it is still no stretch to believe him when he replies in relation to the question of whether Ida wants children, “Won’t hear of them – simply. But she can’t help the one she has got…She must make the best of her, don’t you see? If only for the look of the thing, don’t you know? One wants one’s wife to take the proper line about her child” (James 48). Part of what makes this book so wonderfully astonishing is the queer space occupied by all of the women in this novel – each is either trying to get rid of or steel the only child visible in the novel, while, despite all the sex that most certainly is going on in the background in these relationships, none seems able or willing to produce another child. There is a bizarre detachment emotionally and physically from the thing that renders womanhood legible in society’s eyes: babies. These women, then, operate in a sort-of static and therefore unhistorical time because their bodies aren’t functioning in the way they’re ‘supposed’ to. So though we are reading them in a text, and therefore according to Flusser being led toward a certain ending, James instead renders any expected outcome topsy-turvy because we cannot figure out what gender role each character is supposed to or wants to inhabit.