Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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for what Heidegger’s writing became, I nonetheless look on it as failure worth knowing, a potential that faltered but can be nonetheless reworked in the service of a different politics and understanding of the world. The queer utopianism I am espousing would even look back on Heidegger’s notion of futurity in Being and Time and attach itself to aspects of that theory of temporality. In Heidegger’s version of historicity, historical existence in the past allowed for subjects to act with a mind toward “future possibilities.” Thus, futurity becomes history’s dominant principle. In a similar fashion I think of queerness as a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility in which subjects can act in the present in the service of a new futurity. Is my thesis ultimately corrupted because it finds some kind of historical resonance with the now politically reprehensible Heidegger? Readers can clearly glimpse the trace of Marcuse’s renounced mentor in his later writing, and indeed that problematic influence is part of the theoretical force of his left philosophy. To draw from such sources and ultimately make them serve another project, one that the author himself would have quickly denounced, serves as a critical engagement—critique as willful disloyalty to the master. Heidegger is therefore not the theoretical protagonist of my argument; more nearly, he is an opportunity and occasion to think queerness or queerly. Heidegger is then philosophical master and abject political failure. Thus, we see the thematic of virtuosity and failure that I describe in chapter 10 as queerness’s way.
Thinking beyond the moment and against static historicisms is a project that is deeply sympathetic to Judith Halberstam’s work on queer temporality’s relation to spatiality, most immediately the notion of straight time. It also draws on Carla Freccero’s notion of fantasmatic historiography, Elizabeth Freeman’s theory of temporal drag, Carolyn Dinshaw’s approach to “touching the past,” Gayatri Gopinath’s theorizing of the time and place of queer diaspora as an “impossible desire,” and Jill Dolan’s work on the utopian in performance.40 Along those lines, although this writing project is not always explicitly about race, it does share much political urgency with a vibrant list of scholars working on the particularities of queers of color and their politics.41 I have spent some time arguing against the antirelational move in queer theory. Queer feminist and queer of color critiques are the powerful counterweight to the antirelational. I situate my work squarely in those quarters.
Certainly Lauren Berlant’s work on the politics of affect in public life has had a structuring influence on this project. In a 1994 essay, titled “’68 or Something,” Berlant explained the article’s project in a way that resonates with much of the powerful writing that has followed it: “This essay is written in favor of refusing to learn the lessons of history, of refusing to relinquish utopian practice, of refusing the apparently inevitable movement from tragedy to farce that has marked so much of the analysis of social movements generated post ’68.”42 The refusal of empiricist historiography and its denouncement of utopian longing has been an important cue for this project. Berlant’s insistence on the refusal of normative affect reminds me of the Great Refusal for which Marcuse called years earlier. Cruising Utopia is a critical move that has been forged in relation to the work of Berlant and other scholars with whom I have had the luxury to work under the banner of the Public Feelings Group.43 That theoretical project has had an important activist component thanks to the inspired work of the Chicago Feel Tank.44 The very idea that we can even venture to feel utopian in the here and now has been nourished through my fortunate association with this collegial cohort.
Ultimately, this book offers a theory of queer futurity that is attentive to the past for the purposes of critiquing a present. This mode of queer critique depends on critical practices that stave off the failures of imagination that I understand as antirelationality and antiutopianism in queer critique. The mode of “cruising” for which this book calls is not only or even primarily “cruising for sex.” I do see an unlimited potentiality in actual queer sex, but books of criticism that simply glamorize the ontology of gay male cruising are more often than not simply boring. In this book I do nonetheless distill some real theoretical energy from historical accounts of fucking and utopia, such as John Giorno’s journals (chapter 2) and Samuel Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light and Water (chapter 3). That may have something to with the historical texture those texts provide. Indeed this book asks one to cruise the fields of the visual and not so visual in an effort to see in the anticipatory illumination of the utopian. If, as indicated by the famous quotation from Oscar Wilde that appears in the epigraph, “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth glancing at,” then affective and cognitive maps45 of the world that a critically queer utopianism can create, maps that do include utopia, need to be attended to in a fashion that indeed resembles a kind of politicized cruising. In the place of various exhausted theoretical stances Cruising Utopia not only asks readers to reconsider ideas such as hope and utopia but also challenges them to feel hope and to feel utopia, which is to say challenges them to approach the queer critique from a renewed and newly animated sense of the social, carefully cruising for the varied potentialities that may abound within that field.
1
Queerness as Horizon
Utopian Hermeneutics in the Face of Gay Pragmatism
for John
I BEGIN THIS chapter on futurity and a desire that is utopian by turning to a text from the past—more specifically, to those words that emanate from the spatiotemporal coordinate Bloch referred to as the no-longer-conscious, a term that attempts to enact a more precise understanding of the work that the past does, what can be understood as the performative force of the past. A 1971 issue of the gay liberation journal Gay Flames included a manifesto by a group calling itself Third World Gay Revolution. The text, titled “What We Want, What We Believe,” offered a detailed list of demands that included the abolition of capital punishment, the abolishment of institutional religion, and the end of the bourgeois family. The entire list of sixteen demands culminated with a request that was especially radical and poignant when compared to the anemic political agenda that dominates contemporary LGBT politics in North America today.
16.) We want a new society—a revolutionary socialist society. We want liberation of humanity, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation, free health care, free utilities, free education, free art for all. We want a society where the needs of the people come first.
We believe that all people should share the labor and products of society, according to each one’s needs and abilities, regardless of race, sex, age or sexual preferences. We believe the land, technology and the means of production belong to the people, and must be shared by the people collectively for the liberation of all.1
When we consider the extremely pragmatic agenda that organizes LGBT activism in North America today, the demand “we want a new society” may seem naive by the present’s standards. Many people would dismiss these demands as impractical or merely utopian. Yet I contend that there is great value in pulling these words from the no-longer-conscious to arm a critique of the present. The use of “we” in this manifesto can be mistakenly read as the “we” implicit in the identity politics that emerged after the Third World Gay Revolution group. Such a reading would miss the point. This “we” does not speak to a merely identitarian logic but instead to a logic of futurity. The “we” speaks to a “we” that is “not yet conscious,” the future society that is being invoked and addressed at the same moment. The “we” is not content to describe who the collective is but more nearly describes what the collective and the larger social order could be, what it should be. The particularities that are listed—“race, sex, age or sexual preferences”—are not things in and of themselves that format this “we”; indeed the statement’s “we” is “regardless” of these markers, which is not to say that it is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences but, instead, that it is beside them. This is to say that the field of utopian possibility is one in which multiple forms of