Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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Muñoz’s death, his friend and colleague Barbara Browning issued a call for people to inscribe the following passage from the book’s opening paragraph in a paradigmatic location of queer cruising, the bathroom stall: “Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the word, and ultimately new worlds.”9 People sporadically performed the act in bathrooms or other public spaces (including a bathroom in the department where Muñoz taught), sometimes posting a photo of the transgression (or of the encounter with its written trace) to social media. It circulated in other ways as well: a group of queer activists designed and distributed stickers with the passage printed across Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds (an installation of balloons discussed in the book’s eighth chapter). And in a statement to the Windy City Times discussing her gender transition, the film director Lilly Wachowski wrote: “I have a quote in my office … by José Muñoz given to me by a good friend. I stare at it in contemplation sometimes trying to decipher its meaning but the last sentence resonates: ‘Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.’”10
The popularity and circulation of this sentiment—which pits futurity against the present—is reflective of the general reception of Cruising Utopia since its publication, which draws upon and emphasizes the text’s positive elaborations on queerness, hope, and futurity by positioning them against the (negating) poverty of the present. As Muñoz insists throughout the book, “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations.”11 But along these very lines, an overemphasis on futurity, a flat rejection of the present, and an over-romanticization of the past risk eliding Muñoz’s nuanced insistence on the political (if not revolutionary) dimension of a queer utopian imaginary as a negative dialectic.
Muñoz warned us against disappearing wholly into futurity since “one cannot afford” to simply “turn away from the present.” The present demands our ethical consideration and the task at hand is not to refuse the present altogether, but rather to maneuver from the present’s vantage point at the crossroads of life that is lived after catastrophe (as may be the case with queer, black, and brown life) and simultaneously before it. The utopian impulse yields the idealist power of the utopian imaginary to offer a negative critique of the present and past (framing the insufficiencies of both) while opening up different avenues through which we might construct alternative possibilities for queerness’s future beyond the limited options that are presently before us. That we are standing before the possibility, even likelihood, of hope’s disappointment does not so much negate the principle of hope as confirm it.
Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz insists that “hope and disappointment operate within a dialectical tension in this notion of queer utopia.”12 The utopian imaginary is understood to be an act of failure in the face of a stultifying regime of pragmatism and normativity: “Utopia’s rejection of pragmatism is often associated with failure. And … utopianism represents a failure to be normal.”13 Queerness, blackness, brownness, minoritarian becoming, and the utopian imaginary thus resonate with each other as they all cohere around a certain “failure to be normal,” unwilling or unable to submit to the pragmatic dictates of majoritarian being. This failure, which is situated both after and before defeat does not counter-intuitively confirm the totality of defeat, however, so much as it opens up queer avenues for other potentials to flicker in (and out) of being.
Bloch described hope’s failure as the ontological grounds on which hope is defined: “It too can be, and will be, disappointed; indeed, it must be so, as a matter of honor, or else it would not be hope.” That hope will be disappointed, and fail us, is not its negation but its condition of possibility. When the acute failures and dangers of the present (of “normal”, “straight,” “white,” or “capitalist” time) threaten us, we turn to the utopian imaginary in order to activate queer and minoritarian ways of being in the world and being-together. We do so to survive the shattering experience of living within an impossible present, while charting the course for a new and different future.
The frequent and even necessary disappointment of hope is due to an incommensurability: things do not line up; loved objects (whether persons, theories, or social movements) let us down. Theories about identities and politics frequently miss actually existing subjects in their complexity, messiness, and plurality. To paraphrase Muñoz’s powerful concluding paragraph in “Hope in the Face of Heartbreak,” however, this missed encounter, this incommensurability, far from disqualifying queer of color critique or cultural production, is instead the very condition—however blasted and painful it can sometimes feel—of our being-with others. Hope may not be commensurate to reality; our hopeful actions may not produce—may not ever produce once and for all—the hoped-for end. But this prizing of the incommensurate over the equivalent is a queer angle of vision, a queer ethics for living through the gaps between what we need and what we get, what we allow ourselves to want and what we can survive and transform in the now.
The value and the challenge of the incommensurable are the focus of another essay published in this expanded edition of Cruising Utopia, “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate: Gary Fisher with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.” In this essay, too, we can see Muñoz clarifying arguments he first made in Cruising Utopia. The focus of this essay, which was first published in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, edited by Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis, proleptically figures this foreword: Muñoz is writing about the collaboration between Fisher and Sedgwick. Fisher, like Muñoz, was one of Sedgwick’s graduate students (Fisher at Berkeley, Muñoz at Duke). When Fisher died in 1994, too young and “ahead of his time,” as the saying goes, Sedgwick took on the task of editing and publishing a collection of his short stories and poems, Gary in Your Pocket (1996). Muñoz is interested in the difficult reception of this text, and what it can tell us about “a kind of queer politics of the incommensurable”—an incommensurability characterized by differential power dynamics (advisor and student), race (Fisher’s blackness and Sedgwick’s whiteness), and gender. But he is equally referring to Fisher’s and Sedgwick’s collaboration and a communism begun in life, continued after the death of one of them, living on in their readers—known, anticipated, never imagined—after the death of all.
This mode of communism was anticipatory, but also material. Muñoz understood it as manifest, or performed, within the lived experiences of queers of color and in the brown commons. In “Race, Sex, and the Incommensurate,” he illustrates this mode of communism (as he did in Cruising Utopia) through stories about relationships between incommensurably different types of beings (here, Sedgwick and Fisher) as well as the aesthetic example (Fisher’s short story “Arabesque”). This commons was an experience of, in Muñoz’s words, “a dynamic that partially transpires under the sign of ‘queer of color,’ that is routinely misread by the lens of a politics of equivalence, but that becomes newly accessible as a sharing (out) of a nonequivalent, incommensurable, and incalculable sense of queerness.” This theorization of the queer of color commons anticipates the turn in his final works toward describing a brown commons. There, he was attending to the way certain racialized people (primarily Latinx, but not solely) are made to be brown through “global and local forces [that] constantly attempt to degrade their value and diminish their verve. But they are also brown insofar as they smolder with a life and persistence; they are brown because brown is a common color shared by a commons that is of and for the multitude.”14 This brown commons, like the mode of queer of color communism depicted in the essay on Sedgwick and Fisher, is “an example of collectivity with and through the incommensurable.”
As editors, we find ourselves incommensurate to the task of completing his work, even as we recognize that this form of adjacency was precisely what he sought to theorize in some of his very last writings on the concept of being singular plural. Some interpret this concept as a pretty but vague synonym for something like “community,” but community was a normative, even hegemonic term, of which Muñoz remained consistently skeptical.