How to Do History with Pleasure

 
In the final paragraphs of The History of Sexuality Vol.1, Michel Foucault imagines a future society looking back on ours with bewilderment. This society, organized by a “different economy of bodies and pleasures,” will be perplexed at our infatuation with confessing the “truth” of sexuality and at the ways our devotion to this illusion subjects us to the ruses of power (159). Foucault conjures this future in order to encourage his readers to reflect on the present. But if we were to take Foucault’s narrative more seriously, how exactly would this society relate to its sexual past? How might sexuality mediate, even instigate, its historical imagination? Could a critical reanimation of a society’s erotic past inspire resistance to the ruses of power that dominate its present? These are the kinds of questions encouraged by Elizabeth Freeman’s provocative contribution to recent debates in queer temporality, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Freeman outlines an affectively-based relation to history that encounters the past in the present and registers this encounter through the sensations of the body, particularly through pleasure. Time Binds elaborates this affective historiography (“erotohistoriography”) through a vast archive, but it primarily focuses on experimental films from the era of New Queer Cinema (predominately in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s) that denaturalize and formally reconstruct queer relations to time. Freeman’s analysis provides a welcome counterpoint to queer, psychoanalytic, and Marxist historicisms based in melancholia and trauma. Her greater insight, however, is to reveal how erotic historicisms can “jam whatever looks like the inevitable” by maintaining a “commitment to bodily potentiality that neither capitalism nor heterosexuality can fully contain” (173, 19). Even as Time Binds gives us hope that today’s radical energies will lie dormant for future generations, it makes a compelling argument that queers might turn to the recent and long past to challenge the strictures of this present, now.
 
Why has queer theory turned to “time” as a primary category for analysis, and why is queer theory in general in a “retrospective mood,” as Michael Warner recently put it (“Queer”) ? The answer to both questions lies in the paradoxical mainstreaming of queer theory within the humanities, which has occurred in the shadow of a pervasive neoliberalization of sexual politics. On the one hand, queer theory now has an institutional past. A radical discourse that emerged out of a direct-action movement fighting for AIDS awareness, queer theory now has journals, anthologies, and introductory courses for undergraduates. On the other hand, its (highly uneven) assimilation within the humanities has taken place alongside a mainstreaming of the LGBT movement itself. The latter receives unequivocal scorn from queer theorists precisely because it has, for the moment, supplanted the radical activism of the AIDS era. The mainstream LGBT movement exemplifies, according to José Esteban Muñoz, the “erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination” in favor of a pragmatic assimilation into heteronormativity (21). Indeed, we can glimpse the willful jettisoning of queerer politics in the privatization of a public sex culture, the commodification of queerness into a market niche, and the drive for LGBT inclusion within nationalist citizenship, symbolized by efforts to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and legalizing gay marriage. In short, “homonormative” polices—to use Lisa Duggan’s term—have become the endgame of sexual politics. Consequently, it has fallen to queer theory and, as Freeman demonstrates, queer artists to foster an historical relation to a non-normative past, to spit on the scrubbed visions of middle-class “respectability” espoused by the mainstream, and to imagine alternative forms of belonging beyond those sanctioned by heteronormativity.
 
Queer theories of time are thus split between a collective challenge to sexual politics that would wave a “mission accomplished” banner and an internal discussion about how to best mount this challenge.¹ For example, Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future (2004) famously refuses any attachment to homonormative discourses of futurity, particularly those crystallized through the reproductive figure of the Child. But he also urges queer theory to embrace negation—the radical unbinding of selfhood and the concomitant refusal of any “better” social alternative—as its most critical force. By contrast, Munoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) aligns queerness with a utopian potentiality that refuses to accept any enclosure of the present, whether in the form of homonormativity or queer negativity. In many ways, Time Binds converges with Munoz’s methodology, which we might call “queer untimeliness.”² This approach values the immanence of the present, and it insists on a virtual relationship between the past and present in which the past serves as a reservoir of possibility waiting to be activated by the present. This perspective underlies Munoz’s account of “potentiality,” and it echoes Elizabeth Grosz’s recent description of the past as seeking “to extend itself and its potential into the present, waiting for those present events that provide it with revivification” (Nick 254).
 
Time Binds takes this revivification quite literally, demonstrating how queer texts frequently represent the reactivation of the past as an erotic and embodied encounter. Indeed, it locates Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831) as a queer progenitor of erotohistoriography. On the one hand, then, Time Binds defines the queerness of its artists through their method of “mining the present for signs of undetonated energy from past revolutions,” which they revivify within representations of the body (xvi). On the other hand, it insists on the material force of aesthetic form—particularly film’s manipulation of time—to provide the jolts the past needs to enliven the present. These stylistic reconfigurations of time enable “glimpses of an otherwise-being that is unrealizable as street activism or as a blueprint for the future” (xix). While Freeman, like Munoz, does not rigidly segregate culture from politics, Time Binds locates potentiality in the aesthetic that exceeds pragmatic and even direct-action politics, and it argues that queer eroticism provides a potent tool for representing alternative relations to history and time that exceed those consolidated by the dominant culture.
 
Time Binds clearly shares queer theory’s tendency to affirm practices of sexual experimentation as a conductor of political radicalism. However, it does not take homo- or hetero-normativity as its primary opponent to this potentiality. Instead, Freeman targets “chrononormativity,” capitalism’s temporal synchronization of bodies for the purpose of generating socially meaningful productivity. She conceives queerness as a political “class” insofar as queers are marked by “failures or refusals to inhabit middle- and upper-middle-class habitus [which] appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint” (19). Her first chapter (“Junk Inheritances, Bad Timing”) tracks the queerness of “familial arrhythmia” across working-class “dyke narratives” including Cecilia Dougherty’s film The Coal Miner’s Granddaughter (1991), Diane Bonder’s film The Physics of Love (1998), and Bertha Harris’s novel Lover (1976). These texts depict how heteronormative ideologies of genealogical sequence and domesticity suture the family into the progressive time of the nation-state. By recasting “reproductive futurity” into the historically specific social form of industrial labor time, Freeman forestalls any conflation of queer time with the sacred, eternal, or cyclical times of “domesticity” that are industrialism’s dialectical counterpart. The representation of domestic time as a respite from history only effaces the expropriation of women’s labor in the home. While Freeman’s materialist narrative is not, in itself, new, it provides a welcome insistence that capitalism’s time must be thought alongside any queer alternative; it reminds us, too, that “queer time” is decidedly not ahistorical but equally engendered, if also uncontained, by capitalism’s temporal regulation of bodies. Therefore, Freeman’s appeal to a “bodily potentiality” is neither romantic nor utopian. The “bodies and encounters” that she describes are instead “kinetic and rhythmic improvisations of the social… scenes of uptake, in which capitalist modernity itself looks like a failed revolution because it generates the very unpredictabilities on which new social forms feed” (172). Through her readings of queerness as a classed habitus disjoined from the dominant timing of capitalism, Freeman provides an important bridge between Marxist and deconstructive modes of queer theory. The payoff of their synthesis is that queer theory can understand the ways performative and embodied “improvisations” challenge historically specific (and rapidly changing) bindings of embodiment, labor, and capital.
 
Freeman’s primary example of an untimely, queer performativity lies in her in concept of “temporal drag”—the revivification of an anachronistic gendered habitus. Temporal drag extends Judith Butler’s account of performativity, but it also complicates Butler’s conflation of novelty with subversion. Freeman views the body’s surface as the “co-presence of several historically contingent events, social movements, and/or collective pleasures” (63). Rather than focusing on gender transitivity, then, she seeks a “temporal transitivity that does not leave feminism, femininity, or other so-called anachronisms behind” (63). To my mind, temporal drag captures a key pleasure of drag—namely, the experience of “lovingly, sadistically, even masochistically bring[ing] back dominant culture’s junk” and evincing a “fierce attachment to it” (68). Yet temporal drag expresses more than identification; it can unleash the “interesting threat that the genuine past-ness of the past… sometimes makes to the political present” (63). Freeman marshals temporal drag in her second chapter (“Deep Lez”) to refute the generational model of feminism’s progression in forward moving “waves.” She values, instead, the undertow, the pull backward of temporal drag, as a non-heteronormative form of archival transmission. If Susan Faludi’s recent essay (“American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide”) is any indication, the desire to represent feminism’s intergenerational relations in maternal terms remains strong. Therefore, temporal drag provides a timely queer alternative for those who believe it is destructive to disavow a relation to second-wave feminism and for those who also refuse the heteronormative “generational” model it sometimes idealizes. Curiously, Time Binds does not apply the model to “waves” of queer politics, which have their own sentimental and sadistic narratives; the latter can be seen in queer disavowals of cultural-political formations such as gay and lesbian studies, identity politics, and lesbian feminism. Insofar as queers lack institutional forms of inheritance, as many theorists argue, Freeman’s chapter could complicate future historical narratives about queer theory’s own complex generational relations. However, Freeman helpfully points to queer theory’s debt to and affinity with second-wave and French feminism. Indeed, her readings of Shulamith Firestone and Julia Kristeva model, in conceptual terms, the temporal drag she values in queer art. Time Binds‘s investment in lesbian and feminist texts (and their problematic intersections with one another and with queer theory) also provides a counterpoint to some masculinist descriptions of “subversive” eroticism. For example, her inspired reading of Kristeva’s “slow time” as an “ongoing breach of selfhood” expands the punctual self-shattering valorized by Leo Bersani (45). Yet Freeman also challenges any attempt, including Kristeva’s, to “recontain[] the messy and recalcitrant body” through “good” (naturalized) timings of “patriarchal generationality” and “maternalized middle-class domesticity” (45-46).
 
What kind of a historiography could escape these heteronormative, diachronic models and keep faith with the queerness of “temporal drag”? Freeman’s answer is “erotohistoriography,” which she outlines in her third chapter (“Time Binds, or Erotohistoriography”). Erotohistoriography uses the body as a “tool to effect, figure, or perform” an encounter with history in the present (95). Freeman locates the origin for this concept in Edmund Burke, who considered “manly somatic responses… a legitimate relay to historical knowledge” (99-100). Although Burke’s theory was ridiculed by Thomas Paine and ultimately rejected by Romantic and Victorian historicisms, Freeman tracks its exuberant afterlife in queer texts, including Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Hilary Brougher’s The Sticky Fingers of Time (1997).These texts represent a “carnal” relationship to the past. In Orlando, for example, Freeman argues that the “writing of history is…figured as a seduction of the past and, correspondingly, as the past’s erotic impact on the body itself” (106). For Woolf, this queer “ars erotica of historical inquiry” counters both “a masculine national progress narrative and the dilettantish and anhedonic hobbies left to female antiquarians” (106). For contemporary readers, erotohistoriography challenges the narrow affective range of dissident historicisms, such as those conceived by Marxism and queer theory; in the former, pain functions as the index of the oppressed’s true historical consciousness, and in the latter, melancholia offers the most ethical relation to the lost objects of the past. While Time Binds does not discount these historiographies, it does insist that pleasure can also contribute to a radical historical imagination.³ Of course, pleasure in the past can take the form of reactionary nostalgia or triumphalism. In a key move, though, Freeman reads Walter Benjamin’s call to the working-class to “turn back toward the suffering of their forbears” through Nguyen Tan Hoang’s film K.I.P. (2002), in which the young director’s open, desirous mouth is reflected in the screen of a 1970s gay pornographic film (19).
 
If “history is not only what hurts but what arouses, kindles, whets, or itches,” as it is in K.I.P, Freeman suggests that “suffering need not be the only food the ancestors offer” (117, 19). In other words, pleasure, in its multifarious figurations, can be a relay to historical consciousness as well.
 
Freeman is aware of the potential romanticism and racism that can result from an ars erotica of history.⁴ Her analysis of Sticky Fingers turns precisely on the burden the film places on Ofelia, the sole black character, to figure a threat to lesbian trans-temporal eroticism. Yet Ofelia is also the “film’s best historiographer” because she “neither forgets nor repudiates the past, but she also refuses to dissolve it into something with which she unproblematically identifies” (134). Freeman’s own erotohistoriography follows this imperative, refusing to sacrifice the violence of racist histories for a redemptive intimacy with, or a reparative erasure of, the traumatic past. To explicate this precarious balance, Freeman’s fourth chapter (“Turn the Beat Around”) turns to Isaac Julien’s The Attendant (1992), which links sadomasochistic, interracial gay sex to Trans-Atlantic slavery. In the film, the attraction between a black guard and a white visitor is sparked by F.A. Biard’s 1840 painting of a slave auction, The Slave Trade, Scene on the Coast of Africa. The painting comes to life and morphs into a fantastical S/M orgy. Through an attentive reading of the film’s formal experimentation with time, rhythm, and sound, Freeman argues that it reveals how S/M disaggregates and denaturalizes the body’s re lationship to normative timings. In “reanimating historically specific social roles, in the historically specific elements of its theatrical language, and in using the body as an instrument to rearrange time,” S/M can become “a form of writing history with the body” that challenges linear history and preserves a relation to the traumas of the past (139). Freeman’s chapter ultimately stops short of identifying the content of the historical consciousness written through S/M, precisely because her investment lies in how the temporal form of S/M reveals the carnal dimension of ideology as such. In her reading, S/M literalizes and makes conscious the temporal regulation of racialized habitus. Affective dynamics such as bodily rhythm can subsequently be apprehended as a “form of cultural inculcation and of historical transmission rather than a racial birthright” (167). Freeman’s provocative argument has profound implications, certainly, for queer readings of S/M and of interracial desire; it suggests a way of attending to racist histories without disavowing their problematic intersections with desire. But it will also interest those seeking to understand how affect is fundamentally bound up with, and a binding force of, history, power, and aesthetics. Time Binds reveals how power structures become habituated within affective dispositions, and it also insists that experimentations with affect can disaggregate the body’s normative bindings within time, releasing new relational possibilities.
 
Freeman’s profound argument about affect is paired with a refreshing investment in fantasy’s “power of figuration” (xxi). In this respect, Time Binds extends Freeman’s earlier definition of queerness as a combination of “wild fantasy and rigorous demystification” (Wedding xv). While the latter has been central to queer theory’s paranoid position, the former is still met with suspicion. Note, for example, that Edelman’s polemic locates fantasy as the “the central prop and underlying agency of futurity” (33-34). For Edelman, jouissance names an explosive unbinding of the self’s narcissistic, fantasmatic, and normative attachments to desire. Freeman reminds us, however, that selves “must relatively quickly rebound into fantasies, or the sexual agents would perish after only one release of energy” (xxi). Rather than lament fantasy’s falsity, she values its unpredictably “beautiful and weird” figures. These figures, she argues, often literalize alternative paths to apprehending historical knowledge. Although erotic figurations and practices are “no more immediate than language,” Freeman notes “we know a lot less about how to do things with sex than we know about how to do things with words” (172). Time Binds therefore has much to teach contemporary queer theory about how to read experimental representations of erotic encounters. Indeed, I cannot do justice here to the way Freeman’s readings generate critical insights about time from the uncanny friction of fingers, tongues, mouths, lungs, fluids, tails, and whips. Certainly, time’s binds will always lash us to systems of power and to their traumatic histories, which we forget at our peril. But Time Binds also shows that there are practices of (re)binding the body’s time that engender sustenance, consciousness, and potentiality. Through its insistence on the critical use of pleasure for thinking history otherwise, Time Binds offers a powerful imagination of how we might loosen certain binds so that we can knot some new ones.