Spotlight on … José Esteban Muñoz Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) *

* (restored/expanded)

‘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 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

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

Excerpt

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p.s. Hey. ** jay, I’ll take your word for it about the air pistol thing, haha. At least in my searching, in the last 8 or so months, ‘side’ has become an increasingly popular alternative to top and bottom. Not among the slave set, mind you. Wow, very long time banner mystery solved, thank you. I’ll go check the context. ** _Black_Acrylic, ‘Saucy’ doesn’t seem to be in my media wheelhouse, oh well. There’s gotta be a torrent somewhere. ** Måns BT, Howdy, Måns! Yes, definitely really into the possibility of showing ‘Room Temperature’ there. That’s the film’s name. Generally speaking, the film is about a family turning their house into a Halloween haunted house attraction, but lots of other things happen. It’s in English, using non-actors as always, shot in the Southern California desert area. I’m excited to finish it so you (and everyone can see it). I’m really, really happy with it. Yes, if you decide to share ‘Papaya’ when you’re finished, I would love to see it! I don’t know Malaga. Actually, I really only know Barcelona and around there. I’ve been to Portugal more often for some reason. We’re having a heatwave right now. Generally Paris has a pretty mild climate year around. Summers used to be a breeze, but in the last severral years we get these really hot bursts for several days each summer. And hardly any AC here, so it’s kind of rough. I love ‘120 Days’, but even I do a whole lot of skimming when I read it. Sade is very blah-blah-blah. Right now I’m reading Gary Shipley’s new novel ‘Stabfrenzy’ which is quite good. And a graphic novelist, Josh Simmons, sent me a bunch of his books, so I’m reading them. Are you traveling around at all while you’re there or staying mostly still and reading/daydreaming? ** Lucas, Hi. Oh, cool. Guided tour, huh, but maybe that’ll come in handy when you go back autonomously. It’s really humid here. It’s really awful, but I think it’s supposed to start becoming more humane tomorrow. My week has been pretty lowkey because of the heat. Nothing very exciting, but I’m going to try to use the last two weekdays more wisely. ** Steve, Right. I’m glad the visit was effective, and safe trip back to the Apple. Why is it called the Big Apple, actually? Do you know? ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, David! ** Thomas H, Hey. Oh, gosh, yeah, I have a few friends in that job/residency conundrum. It’s so stressful. Mostly Russian escapees living in LA, most of whom ‘secretly’ worked on Zac’s and my film. Great, thank you for the link! I’m on it. Everyone, Thomas H does a podcast entitled Flash In The Pan about ‘the animation that fueled the early Internet’, and there’s a new episode up featuring Ranged Touch’s Michael Lutz. They talk about ‘Bush-era political satire, the Fallout games, and the Homestuck phenomenon, by way of online cartoons’, and if that sounds as exciting to you as it does to me, click here and listen up. Awesome! I’ve never watched a moment of ‘Golden Girls’. I think the particular delighted squealing of my ‘GG’ besotted friends kind of warded me off. But ‘cosy but sharp’ doesn’t sound too bad. ** Joseph, I agree that those three were highlights. Those slave dudes can write. Goes to show you why MFAs are so overrated. Congrats on your car’s uprighting and the consequent writing. I will check Ni Nu Koni. Sounds good. ** Harper, Yeah, no car needed here in Paris either at all. The public transport is kind of sublime as such things go. As opposed to LA where public transport is kind of disastrous. It’s just too big and disorganised a city to be organised in that way, I think. I’m way down with the Gaddis quote. Writing fiction always feels like solving a puzzle, and I guess like inventing the puzzle at the same time. Happy ‘Out 1’ is panning out for you. Jean-Pierre Leaud makes anything highly watchable. I think I’d pay to learn how to talk like a mouse. Yeah, sounds like overcompensation to me. What’s that thing you Brits are so famous for doing … stiff upper lip? Until September, eek? ** G, Hi, G! Good to see you! Hm, I don’t think I have favorite this month. Mm, maybe Johnjohn in a pinch. I hope things are great and less roasted for you than they are here. ** Deisel Clementine, Hm, that was nice. I can’t absorb lit well when I’m barreling through the p.s., but I’ll go back to it when I’m freed. Happy the forum is proving useful to you thereby. Thoughts … I guess not? I think the heat here is turning my thoughts very passive, very bottom, and not power bottom. ** Nicholas., Hi. Boom! Uh, I obviously love Paris and live here, so Paris seems like an option. It’s not cheap, but it’s actually cheaper than NYC or LA or London apparently. I’m not big on Berlin, but people sure are. Amsterdam is okay, but it gets a little boring. Someone just the other day asked me if I was going to do another digital gif book thingy. Maybe not. I feel like I achieved what I wanted to do in that form with ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ and ‘Zac’s Drug Binge’. I’m not sure if I could go anywhere else. But they were super interesting and fun to make, so who knows. Right now my mind is really geared towards making films. There are still a lot challenges left there. Thank you a lot for asking. I am really happy with that gif work. Maybe you should make one? You mean today? I’m going to meet someone from here on the blog who’s visiting Paris, and I’m being interviewed later, and I’m going to try not to overheat. What about you? ** Darby😸, Great: writing! And exiting the classes. Did you get an A+? A pet supermarket job doesn’t sound bad. I don’t really think I have a favorite car. Cars aren’t really a fetish for me. They’re just like transportation slaves. I do think 60s era Corvettes are pretty attractive. You have a dream car? Happy birthday to your pal! It’s been really hot, so I haven’t been amazing. Good movies … no, actually. ‘Twisters’ was fun. Everything was kind of so-so. What about you? ** Dev, There’ve been a couple of Dennis slaves. Here, I mean. I mean Dennis slaves who wrote who interesting pitches. Good luck with the prep, whatever that involves. Have you had to buy a lot of books? Do they still use real books? I’m dying in our relatively wussy heat (36-ish degrees C), so, yes, I would be floating face down in the Mississippi River if I were there. ** Justin D, The slaves do have the gift of haunting. At their best. Or, wait, at their worst. Fall, winter, spring and even very early summer is A-okay in Paris. If you don’t mind rain. It rains a lot here, and more and more. That’s our global warming form of punishment so far. My ear is still not normal, but I think, knock on wood, that it’s heading there. Thank you for caring, pal. ** nat, Early enough that I was still asleep when you were here. And I get up pretty early. I’m glad the slaves caused a reverie in your mind and typing fingers. Maybe you’re not going insane, you’re going genius. You ever think about that? Sounds like lots of fun to me. But I like doing things until I’m crazy. ** Right. The post up there is a restoration, but I ended up changing it so much that’s also practically a new post. Anyway, whatever, it’s a fine book, do look it over. See you tomorrow.