“Remember when humans were mostly biology and kept getting caught up in parochial relations of gender?” — Diann Bauer
“Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is a convergence misinterpreted by mankind” — Sadie Plant + Nick Land
In “No Future,” Lee Edelman says that queerness is oppositional to “reproductive futurism,” particularly as manifested by the figure of the child. He suggests that queers ought to embrace these antithetical and destructive aspects. The future, he writes, is “for kids.” Edelman is not alone in noting the temporal dimension of heterosexuality. The child and its surrounding cultural frenzy can only be products of what José Esteban Muñoz calls “straight time,” or,
“an auto-naturalizing temporality [which] tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life. The only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction.”
As ixijn_ notes in their post on Marinetti and “No Future,” majoritarian heterosexuality has a tendency to territorialize queerness, replacing political struggle with resigned assimilation into a corrupt order. They write: “The cage of eschatological time has been replaced with the prison yard of the bright and impossible future — swapped out lakes of fire and brimstone for visions of eternal improvement without attrition. Both structures need to be assaulted and razed to the ground.”
But why abandon hope for a queer future? Unlike Edelman, Muñoz offers a radical vision of queer futurity precisely because the present is so “poisonous and insolvent.” In this view, queerness is what Agamben called a “potentiality” or Badiou referred to as “the thing-that-is-not-yet-imagined.” This temporal displacement of queerness helps us to escape the trappings of straight time: to imagine the future differently, “as the illumination of a horizon of existence.” Muñoz says that to imagine the world as otherwise is “to participate in a hermeneutic that wishes to describe a collective futurity, a notion of futurity that functions as a historical materialist critique.” Muñoz uncovers a nexus between queerness and utopia — queerness is a horizon which lies outside of straight time. A queer utopia is one of difference, belonging, affection, anticipation, desire, and pleasure. It bursts at the seams with relics of the past and the future; it arrives in moments of ecstasy and contemplation, both because and in spite of the ossifying forces of heteronormative culture.
Queer futurity is somewhat insulated from assimilative or reformist politics because it suspends queerness in what Muñoz calls “a sort of ontologically humble state, under a conceptual grid in which we do not claim to always already know queerness in the world.” Doing so inoculates queer struggle against “neoliberal ideology and the degradation of politics brought about by representations of queerness in contemporary popular culture.”
The queer menace who threatens the child and destroys the future is a mythological creature who belongs to straight time. Thwarting heterosexual and patriarchal culture is necessary, but it can be done without capitulating to naturalized or essentialist definitions of queerness. Whatever is given to us (whether through nature or culture) must be understood as fundamentally mutable. The given, though influential, is subject to disruption and contestation. If queerness is at all radical, this is because it seeks a reality beyond the one imposed by biological limitations or cultural norms. Anti-natural queerness need not be just destructive, but also creative. In “The Two Modes of Cultural History,” Shulamith Firestone writes that humans possess both self-consciousness and the ability to impose their fantasies and myths on the world, transforming and displacing their reality. Far from a moralizing statement about human nature, she in fact shows that human culture is rooted in overlapping and interlocking attempts to “transcend the limitations and contingencies of reality.” Isn’t this also queer? A queer ethic which sees beyond the horizon and outside the present is the one capable of ideological critique and the construction of something new. Though it is imperative that we exit from the trappings of straight time (and all other naturalizing tendencies which result in hierarchies of power), it is less clear why queerness means the abandonment of hope. The future is not a prison— but an escape hatch.
hectoslag 