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'The work of José Esteban Muñoz—as a student, a teacher, a writer, and a friend—was electrified by his desire to tip the world toward something joyous in the face of intense opposition to that joy, toward a place that is more just and generous, but also more ferocious.
'José’s lifelong passion was to express the utopian gesture that responds to the awfulness of things as they are. The work of balancing hope against despair ran through his writings from the earliest to the most recent, and it was a work he associated with the queer, the minoritarian, and the brown. Under his attention, those terms became not generic categories but critical passageways. Queerness, for José, named the possible but also the “not yet.” The “sense of brown” (both the title and the subject of one of his books still forthcoming from Duke University Press, and first theorized in a seminal essay on the playwright Ricardo Abreu Bracho) indicated a form of discontinuous commonality, “not knowable in advance” but actually existing as a world, in the here and now. He mined a Marxist tradition that included Althusser, Bloch, Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and used this radical tradition to show how the affirmations in his work required negations of and deviations from the status quo.
'“The challenge here,” José writes in an essay on the LA punk band The Germs, “is to look to queerness as a mode of ‘being-with’ that defies social conventions and conformism and is innately heretical yet still desirous for the world, actively attempting to enact a commons that is not a pulverizing, hierarchical one bequeathed through logics and practices of exploitation.”¹ There was something heretical about his own work in the academy, the art world, and everything betwixt and beyond them. In making a world for himself in which to flourish, he couldn’t help but build one for others too.
'Born in Cuba in 1967, brought to Miami by his parents as an infant, José Muñoz was always on the move. Leaving the Cuban-America enclave of Hialeah, where his youth played out to the sound of bands like X and the Gun Club, he studied at Sarah Lawrence College, where he first read Cherríe Moraga’s Lo Que Nunca Paso por Sus Labios (Loving in the War Years, 1983), which became for him a touchstone (especially its chapter, “La Guera”). José then entered Duke University’s doctoral program in Literature, which at that time was at a high point of prestige and influence. Under the guiding love and friendship of his mentor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and among a precocious, brilliant cohort of fellow students, José, a rising star and only twenty-six years old, was hired to teach at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He brought the “symposium of Eve” to “the broke-ass institute,” as his friend Fred Moten put it in a poem for José that appears in Moten’s 2010 collection, B Jenkins.
'When he arrived in Greenwich Village in 1994, José planted himself at the center of a circle of influence that would expand over a short two decades. His home functioned as a true salon. The most ferocious personalities conspired amid stacks of comic books and philosophical treatises, surrounded by punk ephemera, the remnants of late-night sessions, toys belonging to one of his adored animal companions, piles of manuscripts, and friends’ artwork. “José had this endless stamina for socializing,” friend and dramatist Jorge Cortiñas remembers. “It was a wonderfully seamless way of engaging with art and with artists.”
'José brought to the academy an archive of film, art, and performance that still astonishes readers of his first book, Disidentifications (1999). And he interpreted this archive using a sturdy theoretical apparatus that was never directed toward its own legitimation, but was instead devoted to the value of queer and minoritarian life, and to the mourning of queer and minoritarian loss. For José, experimental art, performance, and poetry were keys to “the practice of survival.” Prescient readings of the work of Félix González-Torres and Isaac Julien (attending to the forms of queer exile that shape the aesthetic practices of both) sit alongside groundbreaking writing on figures who, at the time, had received little or no critical attention. From the very beginning of his development as a thinker, he formed intense and collaborative relationships with artists. Vaginal Davis, Carmelita Tropicana, and Nao Bustamante figure heavily in his thought, and he figured heavily in their lives as an advocate, a friend, and as a critic. “José’s serious engagement with artists’ lives, practice, and work,” social theorist John Andrews observes, “has changed how many academics conceive the practice of theorizing. His work as a theorist countered the more rarefied modes of how academics and art critics use and produce theory.”
'The list of other artists whose careers José supported through his advocacy, his intellect, and his friendship is vast: Wu Tsang, Justin Vivian Bond, Kenny Mellman, Marga Gomez, Tony Just, Miguel Gutierrez, Jorge Cortiñas, Michael Wang, Kevin Aviance, and Kalup Linzy to put names to some. José sought links among artists few had the capacity to imagine as part of the same world. His second book, Cruising Utopia (2009), an exciting antidote to both mainstream gay and lesbian politics as well as to the “anti-social” turn in queer theory, set LeRoi Jones’s play The Toilet in conversation with the philosophy of Ernst Bloch, the paintings of Luke Dowd alongside performances by Dynasty Handbag and My Barbarian or poetry by Frank O’Hara and Elizabeth Bishop. Some of the book’s most moving passages grow from his familiarity with a wide range of gay scenes in New York City and beyond, especially those off the white, homonormative map. Underground and experimental social spaces were as important to him as Marxist philosophy and queer theory. He encouraged people to follow him, as a thinker and happy participant, into those zones.
'In José’s writing a performance, painting, photo, or literary text is not merely an “object of study” but a philosophical encounter, one that sits alongside other kinds of encounters, moments of collision and contact. For this reason, in his writing he did not lead with the information that facilitates the absorption of an artist’s work into the academy (a defense of the work’s relation to a canon, to art history narrowly imagined, to a disciplinarian articulation of “performance”). He offered instead a language that invites the artist’s work into the reader’s life, by way of his thinking. He drew other scholars into conversation about his muses, his Furies; his experiences of their work were not intended to be “his” but “shared out.”
'José redefined the meaning of “academic superstar” in Warholian terms: He had a way of finding beauty in what others considered to be their own damage, recalls Jonathan Flatley, a friend and co-editor (with Jennifer Doyle) of Pop Out: Queer Warhol (1996). José quickly transformed the academy not only through his writing but through his mentorship of a generation of scholars, many of who now work at some of the country’s most dynamic and prestigious departments.
'And so we met the news of José Esteban Muñoz’s death on December 3, 2013 with a collective howl. A constellation of artists, writers, curators, and scholars have spent the winter shaken by paroxysms of grief: José’s lifework as a philosopher/critic, which includes his practice of friendship, has been so integral to this community that we feel as if the very ground beneath us has disappeared.
'On February 8, at a memorial gathering at NYU, Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman reprised Kiki & Herb’s rendition of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in tribute to José. Later that afternoon, Carmelita Tropicana" nofollow="nofollow">Carmelita Tropicana welcomed his friends to a Village basement bar, where filmmaker Guinevere Turner roused the crowd with a performance of her correspondence with José; the electronic duo Matmos staged a “Germ Burn for Darby Crash” in his memory; Miguel Gutierrez amplified a farewell “I love you” into a gorgeous sonic loop; Gus Stadler and Barbara Browning sang their cover of “Take Ecstasy With Me”; Kay Turner led a rousing reprise of Cruising Utopia as a punk anthem; and Nao Bustamante, wearing a nude body suit and veiled in the black cloud of a Vegas widow, planted herself face down on the stage and tore through “Lara’s Theme.” Nao peeled the skin off its lyrics (“Someday my love…”), marking out the distance between its sweet fantasy and the place we are in here and now. Then she rolled and crawled across the floor, from the front of the stage to the back of the bar.'-- Jennifer Doyle and Tavia Nyong’o, Artforum
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Extras
Tribute to Jose Esteban Muñoz
Jose Esteban Munoz's Memorial at Poisson Rouge
2013 Feminist Theory Workshop Keynote Speaker José Esteban Muñoz
Dr Vaginal Davis in dialogue with Jose Munoz
JNT Dialogue 2013: José Muñoz and Samuel Delany
José Esteban Muñoz 'Mark Morrisroe: Neo-Romantic Iconography and the Performance of Self'
Having A Coke With You, For José Esteban Muñoz
José Muñoz: Queer Utopianism and Cruel Optimism
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Further
'Remembering Jose Esteban Munoz' @ Social Text
'José Esteban Muñoz, in Memory and Futurity'
TAP DOCK | Celebrating José Esteban Muñoz
'José Esteban Muñoz (1967-2013): A Collage'
JEM 'Revisiting the Autoethnographic Performance: Richard Fung’s Theory/Praxis as Queer Performativity'
JEM '"The White to Be Angry": Vaginal Davis's Terrorist Drag'
JEM 'Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts'
JEM 'Performing the Punk Rock Commons: Queer Germs'
'Disidentification'
'The Disidentifications of Vaginal Davis & José Esteban Muñoz'
'Trading Futures: Queer Theory's Anti-antirelational Turn'
'Locating hope and futurity in the anticipatory illumination of queer performance'
'Muñoz, Basquiat, and Warhol: how bringing in comics with theory makes me wanna do art activism'
'Cultural Q's: In Memory of Jose E. Munoz: Making Queer Future'
'Who Was José Esteban Muñoz? 6 Things To Know About The Deceased Queer Theorist'
Buy 'Cruising Utopia' @ NYU Press
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Interview
from Bad at Sports
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Tell us a bit about Cruising Utopia.
Jose Muñoz: In Cruising Utopia I considered the work and life of figures from the historical queer avant-garde. I will discuss the life and work of Warhol superstar Mario Montez. Montez collaborated with Warhol, Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel and many other key figures from that scene. But Montez dropped out of the art and performance scene in the 1970s. He has recently reemerged and has great stories to tell. I look to him as a “Wise Latina” which was a phrase used by republicans who attacked Sonia Sotomayor when she was nominated to The Supreme Court. I describe Montez as a Wise Latina because she made a sort of “sense” that I think is worth considering today.
The prose style of your 2009 book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity is at once poetic and deeply rousing. In particular, I’m enamored of this statement from your book’s Introduction:
“We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. 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 world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing." I love the radical openness of that idea. Can you talk a bit about the ways in which you want to re/define the concepts of ‘hope’ and ‘utopia,’ particularly when it comes to queerness and what you describe as a ‘queer aesthetic’?
JM: I was advocating an idea of hope that refuses despair during desperate times. I reject naive hope and instead offer a version of hope that is counter measure to how straight culture defines our lives and the world. I was trying to describe an idea of utopia that is not just escapism. Queer art or queer aesthetics potentially offer us blueprints and designs for other ways of living in the world. In Cruising Utopia I look at performances and visual art that are both historical and contemporary. But what all the work has in common is the way it sketches different ways of being in the world.
Which contemporary performance artists do you think best represent your idea that ‘hope’ can be more than just a critical affect, but can also present us with a viable methodology for mapping utopias?
JM: I am interested in so much work that happens under the rich sign of performance. For years I have been following the work of artists like Vaginal Davis whose performances always insists on another version of reality than the ones we are bombarded by. I could substitute Vag’s name in the previous sentence with that of artists like Nao Bustamente, Carmelita Tropicana, Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian and so many other artists that I have encountered. I look forward to seeing more work that helps me glimpse something beyond the here and now.
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Quote
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Book
Jose Esteban Munoz Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
NYU Press
'The LGBT agenda for too long has been dominated by pragmatic issues like same-sex marriage and gays in the military. It has been stifled by this myopic focus on the present, which is short-sighted and assimilationist.
'Cruising Utopia seeks to break the present stagnancy by cruising ahead. Drawing on the work of Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz recalls the queer past for guidance in presaging its future. He considers the work of seminal artists and writers such as Andy Warhol, LeRoi Jones, Frank O’Hara, Ray Johnson, Fred Herko, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop, alongside contemporary performance and visual artists like Dynasty Handbag, My Barbarian, Luke Dowd, Tony Just, and Kevin McCarty in order to decipher the anticipatory illumination of art and its uncanny ability to open windows to the future.
'In a startling repudiation of what the LGBT movement has held dear, Muñoz contends that queerness is instead a futurity bound phenomenon, a "not yet here" that critically engages pragmatic presentism. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Cruising Utopia argues that the here and now are not enough and issues an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.'-- NYU Press
fromIntroduction: Feeling Utopia
A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at. —Oscar Wilde
Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. 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 world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insis- tence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.
That is the argument I make in Cruising Utopia, significantly influenced by the thinking and language of the German idealist tradition emanating from the work of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. An aspect of that line of thought is concretized in the critical philosophy associated with the Frankfurt School, most notably in the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. Those three thinkers within the Marxist tradition have all grappled with the complexities of the utopian. Yet the voice and logic that most touches me, most animates my thinking, is that of the philosopher Ernst Bloch.
More loosely associated with the Frankfurt School than the aforemen- tioned philosophers, Bloch’s work was taken up by both liberation theology and the Parisian student movements of 1968. He was born in 1885 to an assimilated Jewish railway employee in Ludwigshafen, Germany. During World War II, Bloch fled Nazi Germany, eventually settling for a time in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After the war Bloch returned to East Germany, where his Marxian philosophy was seen as too revisionary. At the same time he was derided for his various defenses of Stalinism by left commentators throughout Europe and the United States. He participated in the intellectual circles of Georg Simmel and, later, Max Weber. His friendship and sometime rivalries with Adorno, Benjamin, and Georg Lukács are noted in European left intellectual history. Bloch’s political inconsistencies and style, which has been described as both elliptical and lyrical, have led Bloch to an odd and uneven reception. Using Bloch for a project that understands itself as part of queer critique is also a risky move because it has been rumored that Bloch did not hold very progressive opinions on issues of gender and sexuality. These biographical facts are beside the point because I am using Bloch’s theory not as orthodoxy but instead to create an opening in queer thought. I am using the occasion and example of Bloch’s thought, along with that of Adorno, Marcuse, and other philosophers, as a portal to another mode of queer critique that de- viates from dominant practices of thought existing within queer critique today. In my estimation a turn to a certain critical idealism can be an especially useful hermeneutic.
For some time now I have been working with Bloch’s three-volume philosophical treatise The Principle of Hope. In his exhaustive book Bloch considers an expanded idea of the utopian that surpasses Thomas More’s formulation of utopias based in fantasy. The Principle of Hope offers an encyclopedic approach to the phenomenon of utopia. In that text he discusses all manner of utopia including, but not limited to, social, literary, technological, medical, and geographic utopias. Bloch has had a shakier reception in the U.S. academy than have some of his friends and acquaintances — such as Benjamin. For me, Bloch’s utility has much to do with the way he theorizes utopia. He makes a critical distinction between abstract utopias and concrete utopias, valuing abstract utopias only insofar as they pose a critique function that fuels a critical and potentially transformative political imagination. Abstract utopias falter for Bloch because they are untethered from any historical consciousness. Concrete utopias are relational to historically situated struggles, a collectivity that is actualized or potential. In our everyday life abstract utopias are akin to banal optimism. (Recent calls for gay or queer optimism seem too close to elite homosexual evasion of politics.) Concrete utopias can also be daydream-like, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group, or even the solitary oddball who is the one who dreams for many. Concrete utopias are the realm of educated hope. In a 1961 lecture titled “Can Hope Be Disappointed?” Bloch describes different aspects of educated hope: “Not only hope’s affect (with its pendant, fear) but even more so, hope’s methodology (with its pendant, memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy.” This idea of indeterminacy in both affect and methodology speaks to a critical process that is attuned to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as potentiality. Hope along with its other, fear, are affective structures that can be described as anticipatory.
Cruising Utopia's first move is to describe a modality of queer utopianism that I locate within a historically specific nexus of cultural produc- tion before, around, and slightly after the Stonewall rebellion of 1969. A Blochian approach to aesthetic theory is invested in describing the anticipatory illumination of art, which can be characterized as the process of identifying certain properties that can be detected in representational practices helping us to see the not-yet-conscious. This not-yet-conscious is knowable, to some extent, as a utopian feeling. When Bloch describes the anticipatory illumination of art, one can understand this illumination as a surplus of both affect and meaning within the aesthetic. I track utopian feelings throughout the work of that Stonewall period. I attempt to counteract the logic of the historical case study by following an associative mode of analysis that leaps between one historical site and the present. To that end my writing brings in my own personal experience as another way to ground historical queer sites with lived queer experience. My intention in this aspect of the writing is not 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. 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, Jennifer Doyle’s powerful treatise on the formative and deforming force of “sex objects” in performance and visual studies, and Fred Moten’s beautiful In the Break, with its emphasis on providing a soaring description of the resistance of the object. 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. 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.” 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.” Astonishment helps one surpass the limitations of an alienating present- ness 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 theo- rized that one could detect wish-landscapes in painting and poetry. 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 it
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 is simply not enough. The utopian function is enacted by a certain surplus in the work that promises a futurity, something that is not quite here. O’Hara first mentions being wowed by a high-art object before he describes being wowed by the lover with whom he shares a Coke. Here, through queer-aesthete art consumption and queer relationality the writer describes moments imbued with a feeling of forward-dawning futurity.
The anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself. This illumination seems to radiate from Warhol’s own depiction of Coke bottles. Those silk screens, which I discuss in chapter 7, emphasize the product’s stylish design line. Potentiality for Bloch is often located in the ornamental. The ornament can be seen as a proto-pop phenomenon. Bloch warns us that mechanical reproduction, at first glance, voids the ornamental. But he then suggests that the ornamental and the potentiality he associates with it cannot be seen as directly oppositional to technology or mass production. The philosopher proposes the example of a modern bathroom as this age’s exemplary site to see a utopian potentiality, the site where nonfunctionality and total functionality merge. Part of what Warhol’s study of the Coke bottle and other mass-produced objects helps one to see is this particular tension between functionality and nonfunctionality, the promise and potentiality of the ornament. In the Philosophy of Andy Warhol the artist muses on the radically democratic potentiality he detects in Coca-Cola.
What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drink- ing. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
This is the point where Warhol’s particular version of the queer utopian impulse crosses over with O’Hara’s. The Coke bottle is the everyday material that is represented in a different frame, laying bare its aesthetic dimension and the potentiality that it represents. In its everyday manifestation such an object would represent alienated production and consumption. But Warhol and O’Hara both detect something else in the object of a Coke bottle and in the act of drinking a Coke with someone. What we glean from Warhol’s philosophy is the understanding that utopia exists in the quotidian. Both queer cultural workers are able to detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity.
Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s De Anima makes the crucial point that the opposition between potentiality and actuality is a structuring binarism in Western metaphysics. Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense. Looking at a poem written in the 1960s, I see a certain potentiality, which at that point had not been fully manifested, a relational field where men could love each other outside the institutions of heterosexuality and share a world through the act of drinking a beverage with each other. Using Warhol’s musing on Coca-Cola in tandem with O’Hara’s words, I see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening. Bloch would posit that such utopian feelings can and regularly will be disappointed. They are nonetheless indispensable to the act of imaging transformation.
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p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I so wish I could raise and lower the comments section like a drawbridge. Maybe after the next Blogger upgrade. Oh, yeah, nice interview with Scott about Derek Jarman and TSA. Everyone, _B_A recommends, and I second him, that you pop over to The Quietus site and read this interview with super artist and my pal Scott Treleaven about his experiences with Derek Jarman and re: his seminal '90s era punk/art zine 'The Salivation Army'. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Actually, a bunch of them were fully clothed, but, oh wait, leaping, hold on. Oh, him. Interesting choice. Oh, you wrote on the new Wes Anderson, awesome! I'll be so all over that asap. Everyone, Here's a total treat: David Ehrenstein writing on the new Wes Anderson film over at Fandor. I extremely recommend that you go over there immediately or soon thereafter and read said tome. It's called 'The Zweig Stuff: Wes Anderson’s Muse'. Hit that. ** Pilgarlic, Hi, buddy. Really glad to hear you're doing good. The trip related post is proving to be very hard to do well/get right, but I'm still on it. I saw a bunch of whales, yeah. Orcas, Humpbacks, Minkies, ... Amazing. You won't bore me to death if you want to ask. Feel free. Okay, yeah, it seems that I need to watch 'True Detective.' How, I don't know yet. I have a kind of loose policy against watching TV/movies on my computer because I spend so much time here already writing and doing the blog, but some friend's computer is fair game, so I'll see if any of my Parisian friends are addicted and into sharing. ** Bill, Probably, re: saving that money, I think. They were a jolly lot of escorts, relatively speaking. Luck of the draw. Oh, very cool! Your videos! Sweet! Everybody, This is cool, and this is a must-click situation we have right here. I.e., video re:/of master artist/d.l. Bill (Hsu's) two recent installation works is now online and available for your viewing pleasure. Hence, first click this, which will take you to video documentation of 'City-to-City' as recently seen at Zero1Garage in San Jose, CA, and then click this, which will lead you directly to 'Narcissus II', and, in that case, here's a behind-the-scenes description to whet your appetite: 'Narcissus II uses a biometric sensor to capture and amplify each visitor’s heartbeat. The EKG data is analyzed in real-time and translated into a unique sequence of short phrases specific to each user. The resulting animation is projected into a reflecting pool containing 9 gallons of spent petroleum. The poem that emerges is a true reflection of who we are – a moving image that both expresses, and then interrogates, our current sense of self.' Really excited to watch them, Bill, in just a mere half-hour to forty-five minutes, depending! ** les mots dans le nom, Hi. I too really like the hause escort's way with wordage. No, I haven't moved. 'Some form of personal life change'? You mean right now? Not that I know of, but I'm not sure what you meant by that. What did you mean? ** Sypha, Hi, James. You finally got your paws on the Current 93 book, cool. Good luck with that agent. That agenting stuff/negotiation can be really tough. Hang in there. Man, I'm obviously so sorry to hear that you particularly haven't been feeling well, outside and inside. What's your scheme to end this spate of maladies? Do you have a plan, or are you just waiting and seeing? ** Gary gray, Hi. Relevant or not, in my experience, it's pretty frequent that a newer writer will say (to me) that their work is too derivative of someone or something, and, when I read their work, I don't see the derivation or even necessarily an influence at all. It can be hard to see the signage of one's own distinct voice from the inside, I guess is what I'm saying. I like those two new ideas, duh. Yeah, nice. Definitely interesting. Never heard of Linco Printing, no, but their stuff looks good, so I hope they take your work on. I had never heard of Magcon before, or else I'm spacing out. Naturally, the clips are weird and very intriguing. In other words, if you want to do a Magcon post, consider this sentence to be a linguistic embodiment of me down on one knee saying 'yes, please'. ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul. Oh, cool, about the Siratori thing. I'll go see if I can track down those video collages and the new book. Maybe I'll upgrade my old post about his stuff and relaunch it. I've only listened to two of BEE's podcasts: the Kanye West one, which kind of bugged me, and I started listening to his interview with The National, but I didn't get through it because I don't like The National, basically. I'll get in the habit of keeping up with his podcasts. I should. Oh, that's nice of Bret to say I'm nice. And to Marilyn Manson no less. He's actually quite nice too, although he'd hate that I said that, probably, if he saw this. I didn't get any jet lag, strangely and pleasantly, so I'm cool. B'day ... it's your b'day? Is that what you mean? Happy b'day, if so, and, okay, even if not 'cos ... why not? ** Steevee, Hi. No, I was going to see 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' on Saturday, but my plan got rerouted to the latter part of this coming week. I would be really surprised if I don't totally love it since I love all of his films except for 'Bottle Rocket', which I only like. I generally don't think that any subject matter creates an unsuitable approach. In fact, a lot of my favorite films and books and music, etc., start from a place of seeming unsuitability, I think. But, anyway, we'll see. ** Marilyn Roxie, Hi, Marilyn! Great to see you here. Thanks a lot about the escorts post. That's cool. Oh, and thank you so very much for the email/post! I just saw it moments ago, and I'll get it set up, and I'll let you knew the launch date really soon. Thank you, thank you! ** Mikel Motorcycle, Hey. I'm pretty sure Yow stopped drinking. Or I recall a bunch of press a ways back about his giving up the bottle. Not sure if that stuck or not. Hm, ah, interesting re: the dilemma about whether to move to Berlin or not. I see. Of course, albeit from very far away, I tend to think that if a life shake-up is tempting, it's probably the thing to do. But of course giving up a rent-controlled apartment is a tough decision. You couldn't sublet it? Is Berlin weak on the rock front? That's interesting. I guess, huh, yeah, I can't think of current bands from Berlin off the top of my head. That's curious. Let me throw your question out and see if any Berliners or Berlin-knowledgeabvle people can give you an answer. Everyone, Hey. Maybe you can help Mikel Motorcycle out by answering the following question if you have any knowledge in that area. Could you do that, if so? Thank you. Here's Mikel: 'I've been writing psychedelic rock and classical/ minimalist film-type stuff and I want to pursue both of those veins... which is one of my concerns about Berlin, is that from what I see/hear it's a very electronic scene and not rock, and while my rock stuff def has a lot of fuzzy/droney synth components and is driving/motorik, it's hard enough to find reliable people to play with here and I'm wondering if it's a rock-music wasteland in Berlin. I'm not concerned about the scene being small but want to be able to find people to play with. Hey other DC readers, anyone live in Berlin or have input on that?' So you're post-lit, or I mean post-writing fiction. That's interesting. (And thank you for the kind words.) Yeah, you can't do everything, and fuck fiction, relatively speaking, truly, if it doesn't excite you to make it. Where can I hear some of your music? Is it online anywhere? Could you direct me to access points, if so, and if you don't mind? I would of course love it if you feel like poking your head in here more often. It's a great thing to see you and get to catch up and talk. All love and respect back from me! ** Misanthrope, Hi. It's true that I haven't hung out at a Walmart in ... well, forever, since I don't think I've ever entered a Walmart for some reason. So I'll take your word about the preponderance of really big people in your neck. You still going to the gym? Well, yeah, who ultimately knows about e-cigarettes. This is really superficial of me, I know, but I've never seen anyone smoking one who I didn't think looked kind of ridiculous. Cool about the return of LPS, even with the unwanted baggage. I have Japanese bills for him, remember. Yikes, so, yeah, she sounds, you know, ugh. I'm sorry, but it's worth it to have the little big guy around, right? ** Rewritedept, Hi. Was David Brenner a comedy legend? I feel like that word 'legend' gets stuck on anyone who merely does what they do in public for long enough. If you appeared on The Tonight Show a lot, you're a legend? I don't know. Oh, I was going to say the auditions are next weekend, but you caught yourself, I see. Good fave GbV tracks. 'Red Men and their Wives' has often been my fave GbV track. No, I'm in no way nearly done with the first draft, Like I said, I'm maybe halfway through, and quite far from done. My weekend was fine but not especially amazing. Pretty work-printed and low-key with some pleasant wandering around. ** Brendan, Hi, B! Oh, sweet about that giant painting. I'm try too picture it. I can't picture it. You're such a surprise generator, man. God love you. I wish I could astral project into your studio. It even sounds really exciting so I can only imagine the in-person effect, wow. I know of Rupert Thomson, or of his name at least, but I don't think I've read him. I'll go goole that title. Thanks for the share. Photo of your garden please? On FB even? Or is it on FB somewhere already? I heard about the 90 degrees. Crazy as in scary. Or, is it not scary? It sounds crazy as in scary. ** White tiger, Aw, thanks, on behalf of the boys themselves, imminent Angeleno/angel buddy! ** Okay. The wonderful José Esteban Muñoz died suddenly and extremely too soon last year, and I thought I'd spotlight his most recent and possibly best book today out of respect and genuine hope that you'll check it out if you haven't. See you tomorrow.