Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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as visual myopias—one cannot actually see the ghost of public sex in Just’s project. But if the eye is sensitized in a certain way, if it can catch other visual frequencies that render specific distillations of lived experience and ground-level history accessible, it can potentially see the ghostly presence of a certain structure of feeling.
In the photos, the shine of porcelain and metal, the way in which light reflects around and off these surfaces and objects—be they a porcelain urinal or a slightly corroded chrome fixture—cast an effect that is strangely mimetic of the haunted structures of feeling that circulate around the sites of the project. The pictures interrogate the curves and arches of lifted toilet seats and the rounded edges of porcelain toilet frames. The emphasis on tile, in conjunction with the empty foreground of the rooms, makes one think of an echo chamber. The connotation becomes one of reverberation and resonance. The pictures, through the negative charge of absented bodies, instill in the spectator a sense of gathering emptiness. Such an emptiness is not the project’s teleological objective; rather, that space of emptiness is meant to make room for other worlds of sexual possibility.
The deciphering enterprise at the center of this chapter accounts for these visual effects (which are also photographic effects) as a performance of a familiar yet otherworldly affective function that leaves a certain ephemeral trace, the appearance of which I am calling the production of ghosts. Then ghosts. Jacques Derrida, in his study of ghosts in Marx, employs a notion of hauntology, which he understands to be a conceptual tool for the understanding of being within the postmodern age of an electronic res publica: “neither living or dead, present or absent” and ultimately “not belong[ing] to ontology, to the discourse of the being of beings, or to the essence of life and death.”19 I suggest hauntology as a powerful mechanism for the work of situating semipublic phenomena such as public sex within queer history and politics.
Earlier in this chapter I discussed dialectics while conjuring Adorno. One reading of the absence of people and acts in Just’s riffs on public sex would consider these representations of hollowed-out, mournful, and fetishistic spaces to be those of determined negations, the casting of pictures that represent utopia through the negative. Without casting out this dialectical optic, another critical vista, again found in Derrida’s Marxian study, helps us to think about ghosts in terms that attempt to surpass the dialectic. Take, for instance, the moment in which Derrida ponders what he considers to be the logic of the ghosts:
If we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of the ghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event that necessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishes or opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical, living—or not) and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence). The logic of effectivity or actuality seems to be of a limited pertinence…. [The limit] seems to be demonstrated better than ever by the fantastic, ghostly, “synthetic,” “prosthetic,” virtual happenings in the scientific domain and therefore in the domain of techno-media and therefore the public or political domain. It is also made more manifest by what inscribes the speed of a virtuality irreducible to the opposition of the act and the potential in the space of the event, in the event-ness of the event.20
Derrida is discussing a modality of techno-media that would include broadcast, videographic, and cybernetic communication, not the more established photographic technologies that Just works with and manipulates. Nonetheless, I continue to find an edifying understanding of what Derrida means by the surpassing of a binary between ideality and actuality when I consider these photographs. Within dialectical terms, Just weighs in on the side of determined negation, since, when one tries to unpack a dialectical opposition between “the act and the potential in the space of the event, in the event-ness of the event,” we see with great clarity what Derrida has called the “eventness” of the space. Just’s work represents the idealism of utopia while also representing the importance of effectivity and actuality. Its negation of physical players and its choice to represent absence permits a viewer, strangely enough, to occupy a space both inside and outside the predictability of such an established dialectical pattern.21
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