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. Marcuse looked back and realized that the phenomenological version of historicity was not necessary. Although I too have a great disdain 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
