Cruising for Gorbachev
Queer Theory, The Global Left, and the Historical Trauma of 1989-91.
In his 1998 essay “Against Monogamy”, Leo Bersani laments the sanctity of ‘the couple’ and the institution of marriage found in contemporary culture, a predicament caused by the ascent of the New Right and its advancement of a political programme centered on ‘family values’. Fidelity to your spouse, your children, and your country (or “wife, kids, and flag” for short) became the primary symbol of sociability to such a degree that if you failed to embody them, you either had to be reformed until you did or simply left to perish. From Newt Gingrich’ Christian coalition to Clinton’s more moderate and supposedly more progressive version of ‘family values’, monogamous coupling and domesticity had become the norm across the political spectrum. It even took a central role in anchoring gay and lesbian bids for civil rights, a move to redact the open embrace of sexual promiscuity that had garnered notoriety over previous years.1 While this new celebration of ‘the couple’ amongst gays and lesbians was obviously a reaction to the AIDS crisis, Bersani suggests that the resurgence of ‘the couple’ was a symptom of a larger global crisis regarding the meaning of community and sociability as such.
According to Bersani, the crisis was precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was not just the end of a country, but also the end of a political imagination, one that animated a sequence of experiments that lasted for most of the 20th century and, at its peak, provided the ideological framework for the governance of a third of the world’s population. Even though communism was inseparable from nationalism in practice, its “universal revolutionary aspirations” promised the advent of what Lenin called the “worldwide socialist state”, a universalist vision that supported “a global social project independent of substantive local identities.”2 The “horizon of expectation” set by the proclamation of the communist dream after 1917, was part of what compelled its detractors to make concessions to their own working classes in the form of post-war social democracy, the new deal, and the Great Society.3 It’s better to give them something and keep them away from communism than to give them nothing and drive them into the Russians’ hands. But by the 1980s the Soviet Union - and with it the communist project - were on its last legs. Faced with the limitations of third world national liberation movements, the nightmare breakup that was the sino-soviet split, and the consequences of the Volcker shocks, 20th century communism came to an end. If you had hopes of one day cruising behind one of Moscow’s many Brezhnevka’s, Gorbachev’s decision in favour of neoliberal market reforms and Pizza Hut dashed all hopes of that one day becoming a reality. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the world fractured into “frequently antagonistic communities,” a reality on full display in the Yugoslav wars and other major conflicts involving ethnic, religious, and national identity in the 1990s.4 In this new political landscape, where ideas like the universal satisfaction of needs or even a more timid idea like “the social safety net” were things of the past, the family and the nation came rushing to fill the void left by communism.
For Bersani, this newfound emphasis on communal identity and intimate relationships like marriage and family is a defensive, or even phobic, reaction to the absence of that which has underwritten our shared sense of collective life, for both communists and anti-communists alike. For this reason, the collapse of the Soviet Union opens a series of questions: “what relations exist, or should exist, between the various communities in which we live, most notably between minority communities and the dominant culture? Are communitarian identities necessary, or even desirable? Does sociality depend on such identities? To what extent do antagonistic confrontations between different communities derive not merely from particular historical and sociological conditions but, more profoundly, from the very value attributed to communitarian identities?”5 What we have on our hands, says Bersani, is a “relational crisis,” and although potentially dangerous in many ways, it presents us with an opportunity to think about “the ways in which who or what or how we are depend on how we connect.”6
What I want to do in the rest of this paper is spend some time thinking about some of the core problems of queer theory as they relate to the 1989-91 conjuncture and the ‘Reagan Revolution’ in general. While queer theory emerged under a wide range of political and theoretical conditions, the Reagan administration’s response to the AIDS crisis, the emergence of AIDS organizing that not only criticized the official rhetoric of the state but rejected assimilation as a political strategy, and the exhaustion of the post-1968 feminist theory under the weight of its internal contradictions are the conditions that are most essential for understanding both its emergence and coherence as a field of inquiry. Naming these conditions helps us to understand why queer theory has always been concerned with unsettling normativity and the assumption of stable identities, not only because gender and sexual identities are effects of modern regimes of power but also because of the way that they naturalize themselves by repressing their own conditions of possibility and in doing so become a standpoint from which other positions can be assessed. Normativity is a problem because it requires you to identify ‘others’ in order to assert your position as a coherent interest group with a legible set of interests that can be recognized by the state.7 In this way, queer theory’s defining commitment to anti-normativity seeks to combat the kind of defensive posture identified by Bersani when writing about the near unquestioned value of communitarianism and local identities.
More needs to be said about how this particular arrangement came to be. Lauren Berlant fleshed out some of the specific factors at play when they mapped out the ways that the ascent of the New Right had transformed public life in the United States over the course of the 1980s. The right-wing push to “shrink the government” meant displacing the costs of social reproduction onto private households and privatizing many of the state’s administrative capacity. What came of that was a new practice of citizenship where the ideal of public deliberation over the organization of society gives way to what Berlant calls the privatization of citizenship where “acts that are not civic acts, like sex, are having to bear the burden of defining proper citizenship,” and issues regarding personal morality are central to public discourse.8 The privatization of citizenship was part of the New Right’s counterrevolution against 60s radicalism which centered on the claim that black people, women, gays, and communists were trying to lay claim to state power, curtail the freedom of private individuals and families, and appropriate the wealth of the nation for their own unearned leisure and enjoyment. In light of this we can think of the turn to ‘intimate publicity’ as an attempt to bury the history of 60s radicalism so as to prevent ideas such as redistribution or the establishment of an anti-imperialist international order from returning to public discourse. With these ideas safely out of view, all that should matter is that if you work hard and abide by family values then the state will secure the conditions for you to enjoy the fruits of your own labour in peace. In short, the state exists to secure the conditions for your private enrichment and aid you in setting up your children to do the same. The last point brings the problem of social reproduction into view, namely, the fact that within this schema, the intergenerational transmission of private wealth as well as the cohesiveness of the national body rests upon the (reproduction of children who successfully bear the image of the existing national identity. What we have on our hands, then, is a problem of succession.
It is hard to find anyone who has focused on this problem more intensely than Lee Edelman, with his now well known polemic against reproductive futurism and its figuring of ‘the child’ as that which secures the reproduction of the social order. The drive to ensure that the future is identical to the present requires eliminating that which threatens the succession from one generation to the next. But no identity ever truly realizes itself and this failure is structurally integral to its constitution such that it must be figured in some positive form and then repeatedly eliminated. This is why “the sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer.”9 Political rhetoric on both the left and the right, presupposes the paramount value of the future and both legitimize their positions by appealing to the Child, a habit that suggests that, within boundaries of contemporary political discourse, forsaking the Child means forsaking the political altogether. If politics is animated by the structural necessity of its own failure and has to oppose itself to its other for the sake of its own fantasy of coherence then embracing the structural necessity of queerness - that which figures “the radical dissolution of the contract” - entails taking up an anti-political position.10
That being said, I think that Edelman’s conception of politics warrants some scrutiny, not only because of his repeated slippage between the terms ‘social’ and ‘political’ but because of how politics and queerness are linked together in right-wing discourse. Let’s recall that for the New Right, the figure of the “60s radical” represented a political threat to the social order. They feared that their positions on the family, property, and inequality could only mean destroying the value of accumulated wealth, claims to inheritance, and kinship ties. This is why the 1980 Republican party platform declares “we oppose any move that would give the federal government more power over families.” If queerness figures the dissolution of the contract, the possibility of the social order failing to have a future, it’s because queerness figures the excessive exercise of political power. With this in mind, we can ask what happens when we return to Edelman’s thesis with these revisions in mind. For starters, we could identify a stronger resonance between Edelman’s intervention and the earlier work of one of his sources, Guy Hocquenghem, who makes a very similar argument but with an explicitly communist position. We can also draw a connection between Edelman’s polemical insistence on embracing negativity and Bersani’s speculative project of rethinking our immersion in the world around us, holding them together as two attempts to reckon with the theoretical and political problem of community coughed up during the end of the Cold War.
Thinking with Edelman and Bersani together allows us to say that the “political fantasy of shaping history into a narrative in which meaning succeeds in revealing itself, as itself, through time,” is a symptom of the subject’s traumatic relationship to the world in general, where history is a record of the antagonism between subject and world in which the former seeks to violently absorb the latter into itself, making it a mirror that confirms its own identity. History, in as much as it is concerned with the problem of succession, of passing down a legacy, is all about finding an exception from our common condition, because trying to make a name for yourself that you will subsequently pass down to your descendents requires you to narrate your difference from others. And so, the connections that precede the enforcement of distinctions, what Bersani calls the “extensibility of the human subject,” has to take a backseat to the preservation of the name and everything that has been invested in it.11 For Bersani, the assumed antagonism between subject and world is not just a theoretical problem, but is also a practical one because it bears upon how “human subjects are educated into how they see themselves as being-in-the-world.”12 If the opposition between self and other is something that people are educated into then it’s something that people can be educated out of. In bringing this to our attention, Bersani not only poses an ethical question regarding the shape of our lives and our immersion within the world around us , but also expresses a desire for a new experimental ethos where we might be schooled in the art of “nonpermanent friendship,” that form of coordination that that does not require permanent personal association (at least not the kind that must be defended and reproduced), and that fosters a reflexive and experimental disposition towards the positions we take up in relation to the world.13 But for some reason, the work of doing this has stalled as we have “yet to elaborate the concrete steps (in education, in politics, in the practice of sociability, in the organization of living spaces) that might help to erase the hegemony of this relational regime and institute a relationality grounded in correspondences, in our at-homeness in the world’s being.”14 It’s as if the word “cultural revolution” and the process of subjectivation that it named has become a kind of hieroglyph, a term from a language that we used to speak, but that has since become unfamiliar as our fluency has waned.
And yet, the desire for communism lives on, and perhaps something like Lenin’s dream of the world-state can still provide us with an image of a politics that nurtures “the security humans can feel when they embrace difference as the supplemental benefit of a universal replication and solidarity of being.”15 In light of this, it might be worthwhile to think of queer theory as one among other intellectual traditions that might help us develop the practical wisdom (what Aristotle called phronesis) that being a true citizen of the world-state requires, making queer theory a theoretical practice that trains us to perceive the “reoccurence of the same” in all things, beyond the proprietary claims of the nation, the family, and private property.16
Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? : And Other Essays (Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press, 2009), 85.
Ibid, 86. See also V.I. Lenin, “Third All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies: Summing-up Speech at the Congress January 18,” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/10.htm.
Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia : Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
Bersani, Rectum, 86.
Ibid, 86-87.
Ibid, 86.
For an analysis of the status of ‘normativity’ in queer theory, see Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions,” Differences 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2015): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2880582.
Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City : Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 5.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 28.
Lee Edelman, “The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive,” Narrative 6, no. 1 (1998): 23.
Bersani, Rectum, 87.
Ibid, 150.
Ibid, 201.
Ibid, 150.
Ibid, 118.
Ibid.