Ariel Goldberg's The Estrangement Principle Reviewed at The Brooklyn Rail

Ariel Goldberg's The Estrangement Principle (Nightboat Books, 2016) is reviewed in the current issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Writes Phillip Griffith: "In The Estrangement Principle, Goldberg adopts [Renee] Gladman’s notion of estrangement as a methodological principle, finding in this expression of alienation the permission to inhabit a community of writers with a self-critical distance, and to report back as a critic from the queer artistic scene in which they themself participate." An assessment of the particulars of this scene and a mélange of criticism and accession follows:

In response to Goldberg’s uneasy gut reaction at the [NYC-based Bureau of General Services] Queer Division readings (based partly, as Goldberg acknowledges, on the fact that they never received an invitation to read), one of their friends offers a simple explanation: that [Andrew] Durbin just invited his friends to read. For Goldberg, the obviousness of this fact points to the power of social relationships in defining who or what passes as queer, or as part of any given queer in-group. “I came to value not being included so I could watch myself briefly slip into that pernicious role of policing what is ‘queer,’ which doesn’t result in making anyone more or less queer,” Goldberg concludes. Goldberg’s ultimate implication of their own—and, indeed, most of our—identity-policing tendencies makes a suppler argument for prodding the ambiguities of the queer while respecting other limits of self-identification. This acknowledgment by Goldberg, as with their sensitivity to the trespass they might commit as a white writer claiming to identify with the writing of women of color like Gladman, accedes to the (queer) critic’s responsibility to not only criticize but to accept criticism in return.

Goldberg is also a photographer, and The Estrangement Principle has been packaged in the subtle codes of photography. Their photograph Triangle Microphone (2012) illustrates the book’s front cover, and in a text on the back cover they reflect upon being “pricked” by the phrase “queer art.” Readers of photography theory will recognize this prick as conjuring Roland Barthes’s theory of the photograph, in which the studium of a photograph (its ostensible subject, or the scene depicted) is shattered by the punctum—a visual detail, or psychologized non-sequitur—that pierces the smooth transparency of the image. Of this chance encounter with a detail in the image, Barthes writes, “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” (For me, the punctum in Triangle Microphone is the ripple of the jean jacket’s collar, as if it had until recently been in contact with someone’s warm neck.) The obsessive impulse to collect—represented by this queer, photographic “pricking”—places Goldberg’s essay in the company of other recent queer interventions by Maggie Nelson and Brian Blanchfield, among other LGBTQ-identified essayists who create texts out of fragments and details.

Read the full review at the Rail.