simply to wax anecdotally but, instead, to reach for other modes of associative argumentation and evidencing. Thus, when considering the work of a contemporary club performer such as Kevin Aviance, I engage a poem by Elizabeth Bishop and a personal recollection about movement and gender identity. When looking at Kevin McCarty’s photographs of contemporary queer and punk bars, I consider accounts about pre-Stonewall gay bars in Ohio and my personal story about growing up queer and punk in suburban Miami. Most of this book is fixated on a cluster of sites in the New York City of the fifties and sixties that include the New York School of poetry, the Judson Memorial Church’s dance theater, and Andy Warhol’s Factory. Cruising Utopia looks to figures from those temporal maps that have been less attended to than O’Hara and Warhol have been. Yet it seems useful to open this book by briefly discussing moments in the work of both the poet and the pop artist for the purposes of illustrating the project’s primary approach to the cultural and theoretical material it traverses. At the center of Cruising Utopia there is the idea of hope, which is both a critical affect and a methodology.
Bloch offers us hope as a hermeneutic, and from the point of view of political struggles today, such a critical optic is nothing short of necessary in order to combat the force of political pessimism. It is certainly difficult to argue for hope or critical utopianism at a moment when cultural analysis is dominated by an antiutopianism often functioning as a poor substitute for actual critical intervention. But before addressing the question of antiutopianism, it is worthwhile to sketch a portrait of a critical mode of hope that represents the concrete utopianism discussed here.
Jill Dolan offers her own partially Blochian-derived mode of performance studies critique in Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater.8 Dolan’s admirable book focuses on live theater as a site for “finding hope.” My approach to hope as a critical methodology can be best described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision. I see my project as resonating alongside a group of recent texts that have strategically displaced the live object of performance. Some texts that represent this aspect of the performance studies project include Gavin Butt’s excellent analysis of the queer performative force of gossip in the prewar New York art world,9 Jennifer Doyle’s powerful treatise on the formative and deforming force of “sex objects” in performance and visual studies,10 and Fred Moten’s beautiful In the Break, with its emphasis on providing a soaring description of the resistance of the object.11 I invoke those three texts in an effort to locate my own analysis in relation to the larger interdisciplinary project of performance studies.
The modern world is a thing of wonder for Bloch, who considers astonishment to be an important philosophical mode of contemplation.12 In a way, we can see this sense of astonishment in the work of both Warhol and O’Hara. Warhol was fond of making speech acts such as “wow” and “gee.” Although this aspect of Warhol’s performance of self is often described as an insincere performance of naiveté, I instead argue that it is a manifestation of the utopian feeling that is integral to much of Warhol’s art, speech, and writing. O’Hara, as even his casual readers know, was irrepressibly upbeat. What if we think of these modes of being in the world—Warhol’s liking of things, his “wows” and “gees,” and O’Hara’s poetry being saturated with feelings of fun and appreciation—as a mode of utopian feeling but also as hope’s methodology? This methodology is manifest in what Bloch described as a form of “astonished contemplation.”13 Perhaps we can understand the campy fascination that both men had with celebrity as being akin to this sense of astonishment. Warhol’s blue Liz Taylors or O’Hara’s perfect tribute to another starlet, in the poem “Lana Turner Has Collapsed,” offer, through glamour and astonishment, a kind of transport or a reprieve from what Bloch called the “darkness of the lived instant.”14 Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating presentness and allows one to see a different time and place. Much of each artist’s work performs this astonishment in the world. O’Hara is constantly astonished by the city. He celebrates the city’s beauty and vastness, and in his work one often finds this sense of astonishment in quotidian things. O’Hara’s poems display urban landscapes of astonishment. The quotidian object has this same affective charge in Warhol’s visual work. Bloch theorized that one could detect wish-landscapes in painting and poetry.15 Such landscapes extend into the territory of futurity.
Let us begin by considering Warhol’s Coke Bottle alongside O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You”:
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it16
This poem tells us of a quotidian act, having a Coke with somebody, that signifies a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality. The quotidian act of sharing a Coke, consuming a common commodity with a beloved with whom one shares secret smiles, trumps fantastic moments in the history of art. Though the poem is clearly about the present, it is a present that is now squarely the past and in its queer relationality promises a future. The fun of having a Coke is a mode of exhilaration in which one views a restructured sociality. The poem tells us that mere beauty is insufficient for the aesthete speaker, which echoes Bloch’s own aesthetic theories concerning the utopian function of art. If art’s limit were beauty—according to Bloch—it
