Return of Munoz!
Mar. 22nd, 2022 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
radiantfracture
This is part two of my readthrough of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, by José Esteban Muñoz.
(I didn’t forget or abandon this project! I even had the chapter read well in advance. However, once again neglecting to use the study skills I teach every day, I did not budget enough time to do the actual writing. This is a humbling experience in which my empathy for students only grows. If nothing else, this process will be useful in that respect.)
This week I’m looking at Chapter 2, "Ghosts of Public Sex: Utopian Longings, Queer Memories."
Last chapter, we identified the unifying theme of Cruising Utopia as something like “we should look back at (recent) past queer communities, politics, cultures, and especially utopian visions, in order to create a more livable queer present and future.”
The past utopia in “Ghosts of Public Sex” is the world of gay male public sex, especially in the era just before the AIDS pandemic.
I like that this is about sex, and specifically public / collective sex. Without much consistent access to them, cultures of sexual possibility have featured powerfully in my own visions of utopia all the same, and I had a kind of distant appreciation for them through the flourishing of “sex-positive theory” in the 1990s. (If you were around then -- remember all those anthologies out of San Francisco? They bloomed right up until the Internet took over discourse.)
I think Muñoz’s core move here is really valuable: he tells us to take up utopias not as perfect visions of the future, but as tools to explore what is missing from the present.
It would be useful to know/remember for the purposes of this discussion that some queer folks reacted to the AIDS pandemic by trying to sanitize and narrow queer sexuality into a "safe" shape, one that emulated heterosexual relations (at least the surface of them) – to make it seem “clean.” Anonymous group sex in public bathrooms did not fit into that image.
“Ghosts of Public Sex” is divided into four sections.
Part 1, “Witnessing Queer Sex Utopia,” examines Douglas Crimp’s 1989 discussion of queer mourning in the AIDS pandemic. Crimp points out that this mourning is grief not only for lost people but a lost vision of community, and particularly “a culture of sexual possibility” (48). Muñoz asserts that these spaces have never been wholly lost, but that even so, the memory of these spaces, called up as a utopian ideal, can “nourish the possibility of our current, actually existing, gay lifeworld” (34).
(Or the spaces had not been lost in 1996, when this section seems to have been written. I know very little about dating apps, but I immediately think of Grindr, et al, and how such an app, by satisfying an individual urge immediately, potentially forecloses the need to create communities around desire and public visions of sexual community. (But has it actually done this? I don’t really know.))
You can see that while there was something more ecumenical and inclusive about the scope of Chapter 1, this chapter is very much focused on the recent history of gay men’s public sex cultures.
Muñoz turns to Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” as a useful corrective to imagining the past as perfect: Bersani debunks the utopian queer space Crimp rhapsodizes about, pointing out that it consisted of “elitist, exclusionary and savagely hierarchized libidinal economies” (34). (Muñoz points out that Bersani is an odd duck, in that he both critiques the weakness of insincere coalition politics and misses the fact that queer men aren’t all white, able-bodied, and cisgender.)
Here’s where Muñoz makes his move.
Muñoz says something like this: we need utopian visions, but not for the visions themselves. Those visions will always miss things, contain absurdities, be fragmented and ultimately failures, if success would mean envisioning a whole livable future.
Instead, utopian visions function by showing us what is missing from the present. They are like ghosts or mirrors of our own time, showing us its flaws through what is absent from or foreclosed by the way things are now.
That is the value of utopia: not to be an ideal to strive towards, but as a light to shine on the unacknowledged machinery of the present, on the ways of being that hegemony forces us to reproduce, and on the possibilities for dismantling that machinery.
Visions of past queer utopias make visible the failures of the present to create livable lives for queer folks (and trans folks, but Muñoz isn't addressing us specifically here.)
Art, Muñoz says, is a powerful way to evoke these utopian visions and start our minds working on that machinery.
Part 2, “Fucking Keith, Remembering Utopia,” discusses John Giorno’s auto-theoretical memoir-thingy, You’ve Got to Burn to Shine. Muñoz quotes Giorno’s beautiful account of having public sex with Keith Haring: “he was making love with great energy and focus, affection and delight, different than the routine going on around me. The guy’s heart was pouring love and I went with the flow” (Giorno, qtd. In Muñoz 36).
I love this image of Haring as joyous devotee of public sex as a complement to Haring as that guy whose drawings everyone had on a T-shirt in the 1990s. (Haring died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 32. Giorno lived to be 83 and died in 2019.) There’s a copy of Giorno’s memoir in Special Collections at the university. I wonder if alumni have privileges.
Muñoz then shifts to a conversation on utopia held between Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch. Muñoz finds in this dialogue, printed in 1964, foundations for his own take on utopias. Bloch says, “the essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present” (37). Again, utopia shows us the limitations of the present so that we can transform and surpass them. Muñoz shows that Giorno, by recalling the past, points to our present lack of what that past provided – joyful public spaces for shared erotic experience, which for Giorno is spiritual as well as sexual (38).
Again, Muñoz makes sure to acknowledge that Giorno’s vision is flawed – it’s an idealized vision, like Crimp’s, and Giorno’s “fantasies of rapturous unsafe sex” could well have had “a damaging effect on gay men living in the AIDS pandemic” (39). But it is a vision of sexual community that involves “reconfiguration of the social” (38) towards a kind of erotic sociality those specific people wanted, and that some people presumably still want. And even if we don't desire that specific form of community, there are elements of that milieu we might lack and wish for, such as a sociality that centres shared pleasure, or a sexuality outside of heteronormative structures of reproduction.
Muñoz points out a trend that I also noticed in conversations I experienced in the 2000s, but that I could not formulate with his skill: “a trend… in which Utopia becomes the bad object” (39) – meaning that we as political thinkers began to refuse to create visions of utopia because all such visions are flawed and exclusionary.
And again – that’s a good reason.
But the refusal to imagine always troubled me: it did not seem like the answer to the problem.
(This is one reason I like games: their visions are necessarily constrained and temporary, and therefore don’t have the burden of eternal perfection.)
But again, Muñoz urges us to think about not only the content of the utopian memory, but also (and more importantly) the work it does (39).
This is a bit like cultures of queer readings of TV shows – the show itself may offer almost nothing to a queer viewer in its text, or just cynical queerbaiting, but the visions and stories that arise from the activity of queer reading are valuable and meaningful and build community and public articulations of desire.
Muñoz isn’t talking about speculative fiction or even utopian writing per se, but he easily could be. A given utopian ideal of public sex cultures – say Samuel R. Delany’s in Stars in My Pocket Likes Grains of Sand or his memoir The Motion of Light in Water. or the visions of the past in Giorno and Crimp – will always be flawed and should be critiqued, but for Muñoz, the most important question about them is “what lack do these utopias make visible in the present?” or, put another way, “How do these utopias show us what we need but do not yet have?”
Part 3. “Ghosts and Utopia,” is an extended analysis of the work of artist Tony Just, especially a series of photographs from 2004. Just cleaned, sanitized, and photographed ex-tea rooms (bathrooms where public sex took place) in New York, and then photographed them. Through the way light works in the images, the effect is haunting, ghostly (40).
(I couldn’t find very many of these images online to link to, unfortunately.)
Muñoz says that the photos do a clever and tricky thing. They don’t just mourn the absence of the dead and the cultures they performed in these spaces, though they do that: they literally show an absence. But Muñoz says they also invoke the presence of these people and cultures as conceptual ghosts evoked by the visual effect of the images.
If I understand what Muñoz is saying here, the photographs, by evoking emotion, recreate the ghost of the social relations that took place within these spaces. The viewer stands both outside and inside the relations of the image – witnessing the absence and invited to imagine and therefore participate in the relations.
Muñoz now brings in Derrida.
(This is the point at which I feel like saying “surely there are enough theorists at this party now, Dr. Muñoz.” The sheer proliferation of ideas starts to get away from me.)
He evokes Derrida’s idea of “hauntology,” here referring to the idea that in a technologically mediated world none of us really has full presence or being: we’re all hypotheticals. (I sure feel like that.)
I think the connection for Muñoz is that the utopian vision is a hypothetical that sheds light on the actual – images like Just’s neither fully are nor fully are not. But I am a bit shakier here on his reason for bringing this in -- it seems like a different kind of haunting, the haunting of depersonalization rather than repudiation and grief.
Part 4, “Situating Ghosts,” the concluding section, continues this riff on various ideas of ghosts and hauntology as they’ve manifested in queer theory: homosexuality as the ghost that haunts heterosexuality; public sex as the ghost that haunts sanitized images of gayness (46). Muñoz critiques the formation of “HIV negative” as an identity, which further stigmatizes and reifies HIV-positive status – the danger of creating new binaries with new ghosts.
Muñoz concludes with the need for a queer criticism that does not abandon the queer past, even if that past is currently considered unsavory or a “bad object” in some way, the wrong ideal to hope for. He calls us to examine “the ways in which the politics around queer memory, fueled by utopian longing, can help us reimagine the social” (47). Muñoz calls for “a strategic and self-knowing modality of queer utopian memory” (48) that is not idealizing or nostalgic, but is “the impetus for a queerworld” and “culture of sexual possibility” (48). You do not have to wish you could have sex in a public washroom to wish for a different cultural relationship to shared sexual pleasure and sexual possibility.
* * * * * *
A Few More Notes
I got on better with this chapter, especially in the first half, probably because I know these sources better. I don't remember much about "Is the Rectum a Grave?" but I did read it, and I have a least a vague mental shape for Leo Bersani and John Giorno as touchstones of queer writing. I read a lot of queer sex writing in the 1990s. (In that respect, and only in that respect, I miss the 1990s.)
One thing Muñoz doesn't talk about in this essay is consent. I would really love to see a study of what consent was like and how it worked in those spaces. My anecdotal sense is: not that great. Whatever present cultures of sexuality lack, the rich discussion of consent has certainly been transformative for my own understanding of desire and boundaries.
And of course now there is a new pandemic, so that all talk of pandemics echoes queerly in the empty bathroom of theory, or something. Has anyone written about "the affects of Covid?" -- the emotional structures it produces? They seem relevant to this conversation. Relevant in general.
It's funny how our reading converges. After I wrote up Chapter 1, I happened to pick up Ursula K. LeGuin's book of essays, Dancing on the Edge of the World (1989). I flipped to, and read, "A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be," which turns out to be about the function of art in creating a vision of utopia, very much in alignment with Muñoz's thinking (and quite close in time.)
Dancing was actually on my "Maybe give this away?" shelf. Now I don't know.
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Date: 2022-03-23 03:48 am (UTC)DEFINITELY READ MARK FISHER.
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Date: 2022-03-23 04:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-23 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-23 06:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-25 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-25 04:38 am (UTC)I mean, I already wanted to read your novel, but w00t.
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Date: 2022-03-23 11:20 am (UTC)I wonder about consent too. I feel not entirely at home in today's consent-based sexual culture for reasons (not because I don't want consent to be front and centre, but because I find the aesthetics and structures of consent discussions alienating). Delaney of course explicitly talks about it in his writing, but I haven't read broadly enough to see if he's the exception rather than the rule.
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Date: 2022-03-23 06:08 pm (UTC)That sounds really interesting -- are you able to tell me more?
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Date: 2022-03-25 04:37 am (UTC)I have not, either, but
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Date: 2022-03-25 04:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-03-25 05:04 am (UTC)I'll find out. I am inclined to assume not, however, or not in a way that it is upsetting to encounter, because
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Date: 2022-03-26 05:49 am (UTC)I found this on wikipedia:
Writers such as Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds used the term [hauntology] to describe a musical aesthetic preoccupied with this temporal disjunction and the nostalgia for "lost futures". So-called "hauntological" musicians are described as exploring ideas related to temporal disjunction, retrofuturism, cultural memory, and the persistence of the past.
The idea of people writing about "nostalgia lost futures", broadly but especially as it pertains to music, feels very exciting to me, like learning there's a name for a phenomenon I experience. I have a playlist of music that makes me feel a very specific way titled "nostalgia for a future that doesn't exist anymore" and seeing someone doing philosophy about this exact thing is blowing my mind a little bit.
The idea of utopia does feel retrofuturist to me (by which I mean, it feels like it belongs to a view of the future from a certain point in the past, not that it feels like it belongs to the retrofuturism art movement).
Muñoz concludes with the need for a queer criticism that does not abandon the queer past, even if that past is currently considered unsavory or a “bad object” in some way, the wrong ideal to hope for.
This makes me think that Muñoz brings in hauntology to utopia to say that the queer past's "lost futures" aren't dead ends and that even if utopias of the past have become some kind of "lost futures" they still have something to offer us in shaping the real future.
Hmm maybe I shouldn't have tried to read this and write about it after midnight :P
Having read some of the other comments on this post I'm also interested in reading Mark Fisher's books Ghosts of My Life and The Weird and the Eerie so if you do end up reading and posting about them I will be following along. Thank you for your analysis and for this new concept, if nothing else I am going to be thinking about hauntology for days.
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Date: 2022-03-27 04:39 am (UTC)I need to do some more reading on the concept, as it's such a beautiful word but I'm not 100% sure how everyone is using it, except as I've specified for Munoz, (I know nothing of Fisher's use re: music!) -- so your thoughts on it are really useful.
Hurray! It sounds like that will probably happen in some form. So far I find Fisher much more transparent and readable than Munoz, and (also so far) informed by a narrower range of theorists, which I think makes him quite a bit more accessible. (But so far is not very far.)
I'm reading Fisher on weird fiction and same same.
That makes sense! Thank you. I think I was applying too narrow a definition of hauntology based on the brief sketch Munoz gives.