Cruising Utopia, 10th Anniversary Edition. José Esteban Muñoz
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in what can only be seen as a binary logic of opposition. Radical negativity, like the negation of negation, offers us a mode of understanding negativity that is starkly different from the version of the negative proposed by the queer antirelationist. Here the negative becomes the resource for a certain mode of queer utopianism.
Once again I turn to a literary example with the hope of describing the performative force of that particular queer utopian writing project. A paragraph from Eileen Myles’s extraordinary memoir of coming into queer consciousness in the 1960s and ’70s is especially salient for my purposes. Chelsea Girls is a ribald text full of fucking, drinking, and other modes of potentially lyrical self-destruction. Near the end of this testament to the aching madness of lesbian desire, a powerful yet diminished figure briefly enters the frame. At this point the young poet has become the part-time caretaker for the great queer voice of the New York School of poetry—James Schuyler. Myles attended to the old and infirmed Schuyler in his residential room at the legendary Chelsea Hotel.
From his bed he ran the show. It’s a talent a few people I know have, mostly Scorpios which he was. You’d be hesitatingly starting your story, or like a cartoon character running right in when you realized the long wharf you were taking a short run on, his attention was not there. It was hopeless. The yellow in his room became brighter, the air became crinkly your throat became parched—you felt you had simply become a jerk. The presence of his attention was so strong, so deeply passive—such a thing to bathe your tiny desperate words in that when it was gone you had to stop and hover in silence again. Then he might begin, or perhaps you could come up with something else once the brittleness, the void passed. You had to stay silent for a very long time somedays. He was like music, Jimmy was, and you had to be like music too to be with him, but understand in his room he was conductor. He directed the yellow air in room 625. It was marvelous to be around. It was huge and impassive. What emerged in the silence was a strong picture, more akin to a child or a beautiful animal.35
In the spirit of the counterpolemical swerve that this introduction has been taking I want to suggest that this passage could be seen as representing an anti-antirelationality that is both weirdly reparative and a prime example of the queer utopianism for which I am arguing. Anti-antiutopianism is a phrase that I borrow from Fredric Jameson and index when marking this passage in Myles as anti-antirelational.36 Anti-antiutopianism is not about a merely affirmative or positive investment in utopia. Gay and lesbian studies can too easily snap into the basically reactionary posture of denouncing a critical imagination that is not locked down by a shortsighted denial of anything but the here and now of this moment. This is the antiutopian stance that characterizes the antirelational turn. The prime examples of queer antirelationality in Bersani’s Homos, Edelman’s No Future, and all the other proponents of this turn in queer criticism are scenes of jouissance, which are always described as shattering orgasmic ruptures often associated with gay male sexual abandon or self-styled risky behavior. Maybe the best example of an anti-antirelational scene that I could invoke would be another spectacular instance of sexual transgression. The moments of pornographic communal rapture in Samuel Delany’s work come most immediately to mind.37 But instead I choose to focus on this relational line between a young white lesbian and an older gay white man because it does the kind of crossing that antirelational theorists are so keen on eschewing or ignoring.
Myles is paid to take care of Schuyler. On the level of political economy this relationship is easy to account for. But if we think of Delany’s championing of interclass contact within a service economy and the affective surplus it offers, the passage opens up quite beautifully.38 The younger poet notes a sense of “hopelessness” and feeling like a jerk as she works to take care of the older man, whose attention waxes and wanes. The relationality is not about simple positivity or affirmation. It is filled with all sorts of bad feelings, moments of silence and brittleness. But beyond the void that stands between the two poets, there is something else, a surplus that is manifest in the complexity of their moments of contact. Through quotidian service-economy interactions of care and simple conversation the solitary scene of an old man and his young assistant is transformed. A rhythm that is not simple relationality or routine antirelationality is established. This is the music that is Jimmy, this is the music of Eileen, this is the hum of their contact. This is Jimmy directing “the yellow air in room 625.” It is Eileen watching, listening. It is the sense of contemplative awe that I have identified in Warhol’s “wows” and O’Hara manic upbeat poetic cadence. It is the mood of reception in which Bloch asks us to participate. It is the being singular plural of queerness. It is like the radical negativity that Shoshana Felman invokes when trying to describe the failure that is intrinsic in J. L. Austin’s mapping of the performative. There is a becoming both animal and child that Myles ultimately glimpses in an infirmed Schuyler. In this passage we see the anticipatory illumination of the utopian canceling the relentless shadow play of absence and presence on which the antirelational thesis rests. The affective tone of this passage lights the way to the reparative.
This book has been written in nothing like a vacuum. I have written beside many beloved collaborators, interlocutors, and comrades. And while these friends have been a source of propulsion for me, they have expressed qualms about some of the theoretical moves I make in Cruising Utopia. For example, some friends have asked me why I have chosen to work with the more eccentric corpus of Bloch and not Benjamin’s more familiar takes on time, history, or loss. I have also been asked how I could turn to a text such as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization after Michel Foucault famously critiqued that work in History of Sexuality, Volume 1. One reader of an earlier draft expressed concern that I take time to talk about Bloch in the context of Marxian thought but do not contextualize Heidegger in relation to Nazism. I have not had any simple or direct answers for these thoughtful readers. Their concerns have made me aware of a need to further situate this project. I have resisted Foucault and Benjamin because their thought has been well mined in the field of queer critique, so much so that these two thinkers’ paradigms now feel almost tailor-made for queer studies. I have wanted to look to other sites of theoretical traction. Bloch was noted as not being especially progressive about gender and sexuality, Heidegger’s eventual political turn was of course horrific, and Marcuse’s insistence on avowedly liberationist rhetoric may seem like something of a throwback. A fairly obvious reading of Foucault’s writing on the repressive hypothesis39 would perceive it as a direct response to Eros and Civilization. Although Marcuse’s version of surplus repression may potentially make reprehension the basic constitutive element for thinking about sex, it nonetheless offers a liberationist and critically utopian take on subjugation. Marcuse and Heidegger were not radical homosexuals like Foucault or romantic melancholics like Benjamin, with whom queers today can easily identify, but my turn to a certain modality of Marxian and phenomenological thought is calibrated to offer new thought images for queer critique, different paths to queerness.
Let me momentarily leave Bloch aside and instead look to the problematic figures of Marcuse and his onetime mentor Heidegger. My interest in their work (and Bloch’s, for that matter) pivots from their relationship to the tradition of German idealism. Marcuse’s Marxism sought out a philosophical concreteness that, in a provisional fashion, resonated with phenomenology and specifically with the interest of the Heidegger of Being and Time in pursuing a concrete philosophy. Both strains of thought rejected German idealism’s turn to abstraction and inwardness. Both craved a practical philosophy that described the world in historically salient fashion. Marcuse turned to Heidegger as a philosophical influence and a source during what was described as the crisis in Marxism in Germany during the 1920s. At that point a mode of scientism dominated Marxism and led to an antiphilosophical and mechanistic approach to Marx. Marcuse and Heidegger’s relationship famously faltered as Marcuse joined the Frankfurt School and Heidegger eventually joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933. Although we can now look at 1928’s Being and Time and locate philosophical models that were perhaps even then politically right-wing, it is precisely this relational and political failure on which I nonetheless want to dwell. Marcuse saw in Heidegger’s ontology a new route to better describe human existence. He was taken with his mentor’s notion of historicity and what it could potentially do for what was then a Marxism in duress. Much later, Marx’s 1844 manuscripts were discovered, and the concrete philosophical approach understood as historical materialism became fully manifest.