Leaving; or, Wide Awake and Staring into Nothing (with Pet Shop Boys)

Mikko Tuhkanen (bio)

Abstract

This essay identifies two modes of “escape” in the “gay fugues” of Pet Shop Boys, differentiated by their (non)fascist potential. To trace this potential, the essay engages the work of Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, and Ernesto Laclau, while extracting further lessons from Stefan Zweig, Village People, Russian history, Fourierism, AIDS eulogies, West Side Story, and the mathematics of zero.

For Austin James Crews, an escape artist

… I bolted through a closing door …

– Pet Shop Boys, “Being boring”

In its eight verses and a chorus, “Wiedersehen” captures the mood of the celebrated Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s departure from Salzburg, his hometown of fifteen years. Zweig left soon after the Nazis had consolidated their power in the neighboring Germany with Adolf Hitler’s appointment as the country’s Chancellor in January 1933. In the song, he bids “farewell to the mountains,” “the trees,” and “the ski slopes” of his longtime home; the devastated man has packed his books and sold his paintings. Having finished the necessary tasks, he says goodbye to the friendly, tearful women in the village, while facing the gardener who, perhaps emboldened by the surging antisemitism, looks at him “with suspicion in his eyes.” The departure is now imminent: “The train is on the platform / the knife is in your back.”

The song by Pet Shop Boys reflects the stupefied surprise at the ascent of fascism that Zweig recounts in The World of Yesterday (1942). The memoir registers a generation’s disbelief that Enlightenment Europe, full of hope for an ever-brighter future—”There was progress everywhere” (Zweig, World 216)—could degenerate into the murderous totalitarianism of the Nazi regime. In breathtaking peripety, modernity, as Neil Tennant sings, “bore the angry children / who only saw extremes.”

Zweig recalls his own mood as he turned fifty in 1931, some two years before German and Austrian intellectuals finally began to regard Hitler as something more than a tasteless joke:

Zweig’s grumblings about his staid life—Do I want to live in this boring world?—sound like all ill-advised wishes in fairytales. Incipit Hitler, and the author gets what he wants: in three years he will be forced to leave Salzburg, “the knife in his back.” He becomes “a stateless expatriate,” “a condition,” as he writes, “hard to explain to anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment” (417). His will be a life lived “in a temporary rather than a permanent mode” (418). In escaping Salzburg, he begins his search for a world that would match up with his European yesterday.

The story is melancholic not only in its tone but also because we know that the escape—like Walter Benjamin’s doomed flight from Germany in September 1940—will end in the escapees’ suicide: Zweig and his wife, Lotte, despairing of the world, will die of an intentional barbiturate overdose in Petrópolis, Brazil in February 1942. Seeking that which was presumably lost with the fascists’ rise, Zweig ultimately finds disillusionment in Brazil, his purported “land of the future.” This makes him an exemplary subject for a Pet Shop Boys song. Retrospectively told, his trajectory—his zeal for the New World, followed by disappointment—resonates with the by-now familiar Stimmung of the band: pop passion supplemented by a recognition of the impossible odds ahead, “great enthusiasm intertwined with a great sense of loss,” as Andrew Sullivan puts it in an interview with Tennant. Zweig’s story of flight is one of many in the PSB catalogue. “There is a huge thing about escaping in our songs,” says Tennant (“West End”); many of them are about fugitivity.1 Yet such flight dreams entail the unforeseeability of their trajectories. We learned a lesson from the twentieth century: dreamworlds often metamorphose into catastrophes (Buck-Morss).

While Stan Hawkins writes that the band’s music “provides a gateway from the here-and-now into the utopian domain of that-which-might-be” (43), what I propose we call their “escape anthems”—which are often “gay fugues”—indicate the need for further disambiguation. Such disambiguation concerns our thinking about the “zero” that, as the first song on the band’s first album suggests, grounds dreams of leaving. In “Two divided by zero,” the narrator tells his friend or lover that they should “not go home” but “catch the late train,” leaving in the night for a place that, later in the song, is specified as New York City. “Let’s run away,” he urges the silent interlocutor:

Tomorrow morning
we'll be miles away
on another continent
and another day

Such seemingly utopian sentiments are occasionally shared by Leo Bersani, who admonishes us to tap into our potential for “simply disappear[ing]” from the self sedimented in toxic encounters, for “simply leav[ing] the family tragedy” in which the queer kids, from Astyanax onward, find their futures written (Bersani, Thoughts 35, 13). When, in 2015, he urges us to abandon the scene of our subjection, he is channeling his impatience, in Homos (1995), the presumed locus classicus of queer antisocial thought, with the program of dialectical negotiations that by then—after Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)—had come to seem the only available practice of freedom in the landscape where we are always already “subjects” in Michel Foucault’s and Louis Althusser’s double sense (Foucault 1:60; Althusser 182). Bersani is a thinker of departures: let’s not resignify, he says—let’s run away. Yet he would also understand the darkness that, in “Two divided by zero,” accompanies the “rush of excitement” at the thought of escape: “At the same time,” Tennant says, “you know that there’s no way the people in the song are really going to end up in New York” (“Two”). If endings do come, we end up somewhere but not in the imagined telos of our dreams. Subsequent songs in the catalogue suggest that the heady flight may shift into the scene, observed in “King’s Cross,” of the uprooted “linger[ing] by the fly poster for a fight / It’s the same story every night.” Such a dark tenor always supplements the band’s alleged “queer utopianism” (Hawkins 42).

If Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe open their oeuvre by thinking the zero, in his recent work Lee Edelman considers the queerness of this number. Often assigned to queer theory’s “antisocial” wing, he helps us disentangle the varieties of nothingness we encounter in Pet Shop Boys and, by extension, the thought of the antisocial that we have come to associate with Bersani’s oeuvre. The shared ground of Edelman’s queer theorizing with Ernesto Laclau’s account of “radical democracy” will, in turn, allow us to identify the temporal modes in which various escapes operate. As Laclau puts it, the time of our flight must remain “out of joint” if our imaginative projects are not to harden into totalitarianisms. Here Tennant’s abiding interest in Russian history, rife with tragic forms of the disappointment that infuses the band’s mood, becomes instructive.2 “We loved the future,” many post-Soviet Russians recall (Alexievich 185); “now they say we were never even saved,” they might continue, melancholically contemplating the nonarrival of their imagined lives (Pet Shop Boys, “My October symphony”). Pet Shop Boys turn to Russian themes—but also evoke Thatcherism, Fourierism, West Side Story, 9/11, the Black hopes that propelled the Great Migration, the gay utopianism of Village People, and the persistence of the fascist lure—to affirm the enthusiasm of dreamworlds and, at the same time, to acknowledge their catastrophic potential. How is an escape not to congeal into the totalitarian murderousness we witness in such songs as “Fugitive” or whose uncanny echoes some commentators have seen in the images of male collectivities in “Go West”? If not the totalitarian imagination’s “past-to-come” (Hage), what is the nothing that keeps us awake?

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“Go West” (1993), the most prominent of the band’s escape anthems, is a cover of a 1970s disco classic by Village People, itself inspired by Jean-François Paillard’s 1968 reimagining of Johann Pachelbel’s seventeenth-century composition (Khawaja; Smith 331). In many ways, the mood coincides with that of “Wiedersehen”: the song, as Tennant says, is “about finding a promised land” (“Go West”).3 In the original, this was the Bay Area in California: San Francisco with its flower children and the emergent gay neighborhood of Castro. With the phrase that gives the song its title, Village People demonstrated the persistence of an old yearning for queerer futures: a collective existence organized around innovative sexual and affective norms.

The phrase “go west” is frequently attributed to the nineteenth-century US journalist and publisher Horace Greeley (1811-72). He was, if not the coiner, then at least the popularizer of the slogan “Go west, young man,” with which he, and those that followed, urged the fulfillment of the young nation’s “manifest destiny.” In imagining the utopian potential in the flight to the American West, Greeley borrowed from the ideas of Charles Fourier (1772-1837), the French thinker of communitarianism who advocated the establishment of “phalanxes” or “phalansteries” (phalanges), independently operated communities of sexual freedom. Having been introduced to Fourier’s ideas by Albert Brisbane, Fourierism’s primary Australian advocate, Greeley became a founding member of the North American Phalanx (1843-56), the Fourierist community that in turn functioned as a model for other such experimentations in sodality as Brook Farm, fictionalized by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance (1852).

Although much of their sexual content was purged as they were introduced to American audiences in translation, Fourier’s books had a considerable influence on those who sought to reimagine their sexual and affective lives. Michael Moon suggests that Walt Whitman was among them: experimentations in homosocial sodality, his poems drew from Fourierist utopianism, gleaned from Greeley. In their different cultural contexts, Whitman and Fourier were “two of the most influential sexual-utopian writers and theorists of the nineteenth century” (Moon 314). “Fourier’s exorbitant and outrageous theories of sexuality,” Moon writes, “are the closest thing we have to anything like a fully elaborated system of erotic invention and discovery of the kind that Whitman sometimes gestures toward in his poetry but leaves generally more invoked and implicit than avowed and articulated” (313). If Fourier’s ideas were “ex-orbitant,” Whitman may have taken the opportunity to veer toward weirder constellations than that of his home planet. He was followed in this by a number of early-twentieth-century feminists who turned to Fourier for inspiration in their effort to think about the organizational possibilities in women’s-only communities (Goldstein; Poldervaart 59-61).

This effort to go off the orbit of one’s habitual life rings in “Go West.” The Village People version expresses the post-Stonewall era’s yearning for a flight into what Fourier called, in his posthumously published work, le nouveau monde amoureux: “the new amorous world.” Such is the telos of the escapees in “Two divided by zero,” too: the song depicts a flight from the trap of humdrum, potentially deadly, normativity. With the likes of Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy,” The Smiths’ “London,” George Michael’s “Flawless (Go to the City),” and Tracey Thorn’s “A-Z,” the song belongs to a long tradition: the search for “a gay arcadia,” a utopian space that enables “the union of lovers, the loving and sexual fraternity of men, and the washing away of societal guilt,” examples of which we find in the works of Virgil, Christopher Marlow, Walt Whitman, E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann, and Gore Vidal (Fone 13).

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What becomes of such dreams of escape? They tend to dissipate, like “Go West,” into stranger afterlives. Against expectation, the Boys’ cover version does not finish with the “cold end” that presents itself at four minutes and twenty-three seconds, the triumphal dénouement of the final “Go West” sung by the male chorus. Instead, the climactic moment is followed by an outro in which the song is extended into instrumentation. This is not exactly unusual. In live jazz performances, we sometimes hear such outros as the singer punches in the song’s climactic line, but rather than ending here, the band continues with the theme of the song. What follows offers the singer an opportunity to thank the audience and the musicians before she exits the stage.

The outro in “Go West” is of a different character.4 Unlike the more familiar extended fadeouts in popular jazz pieces, the song’s remaining fifty seconds do not repeat the melody but introduce new instrumentation, accompanied by a wordless vocalization that sounds like pained moaning and then, as the song fades, the repeated, speeded-up, distorted line “Do you feel it?” by an apparently female voice.

This strange supplement—magnified into a five-minute club experimentation in the “Mings Gone West: 1st & 2nd Movement” remix—stretches the song beyond the conclusion toward which it has tended. What we thought will have been our arrival in the promised land appears, in retrospect, to have been a false ending: the moment is immediately transformed into an afterlife in which we hardly recognize our hopes’ major chords. Behind the hill from which we thought we would gaze at the promised land lies a more unfamiliar landscape. While Chris Lowe notes that “Go West” is “a song about an idealistic gay utopia,” he adds:

The outro makes musically explicit the fact that, as Ramzy Alwakeel observes, “Go West” is a “hymn to an unfulfilled dream.” If the song seeks to bring “waiting” to an end, as a manifesto of escape it is, like “Two divided by zero,” melancholic commentary on a failed project.

________

The historical context for the story’s dark turn concerns the AIDS epidemic, which emerged between the original song and its cover by Pet Shop Boys. The 1993 version speaks from the midst of the nadir: the epidemic had been rampant for a decade; the introduction of antiretrovirals and “combination therapies” will have to wait another two years, until the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the first protease inhibitors in 1995. Because of the AIDS crisis, the song, as Tennant says, “now had a kind of pathos. It was a memory of the dream of gay liberation” (qtd. in “Secrets”).

The song is an AIDS elegy in the sense in which Dagmawi Woubshet uses the term. Unlike the classic examples of the genre, early AIDS elegies, such as the poetry of Paul Monette and Melvin Dixon, are marked not only by despondency over the lost but also by a recognition of the poet’s precarity: “AIDS elegies are poems about being left behind, but they are also poems about leaving” (Woubshet 30). More often than not, AIDS elegists contemplate their own impending departures. If Pet Shop Boys give us elegies of gay life in the late twentieth century, their fugues include the elegist among the departees.

Typical to the band, the combination of futural hopes with their immediate—even strictly simultaneous—dissipation is frequently registered in the kinds of supplements exemplified in the Village People cover. An outro as discrepant as that of “Go West” is introduced into the Beatmasters’ 7-inch mix of “I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing” (a song included on Very and, after “Go West,” the band’s next single release). As the narrator of the irresistibly upbeat song lists all the unusual ambitions inspired in him by the thought of a new love, he concludes with the declaration, “I feel like taking all my clothes off / dancing to ‘The Rite of Spring.'” The wait is about to be over, yet we also understand that the speaker will not meet his beloved, any more than the Chosen One at the end of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet lives to witness the season for which she becomes the sacrifice. It is this moribund aspect of the final verse’s conclusion that get sonically repeated in the remix’s new ending.

The same theme—of time’s disordering of one’s hopeful plans—organizes the opening track of the band’s preceding studio album, Behaviour (1990). If the lyrics of “Go West” anticipate an escape to a homosexual promised land, those of “Being boring” recall one’s arrival in such a world: the narrator flees the suburban existence of his teenage years into the heady subcultural demimonde of 1970s London. He remembers how, “bolt[ing] through a closing door,” he had discovered the possibilities of what Fourier would call “association”: he embodies “the general desire of many persons to leave behind them the claustral work and family relations … in order to associate more freely with each other and to form bonds and alliances with likeminded and likehearted persons based on shared passions” (Moon 314).

The sound of the harp that is heard before the first and third verses—and that thus bookends the first two verses and the twice-repeated chorus—recalls the convention with which classic Hollywood cinema indicates the insertion of a flashback sequence into a film’s narrative. The gesture is appropriate: the first two verses consist of the narrator’s recollection of his childhood friendships and early adulthood flight to London. The second harp trill brings the recollection to an end, and we move to the present day of the 1990s. As much as “Go West” concludes with what sounds like an unexpected epilogue, the third verse, awakening the narrator from his reminiscence, recounts the disappearance of many of his friends and lovers from the stage in which the future unfolds: “All the people I was kissing / some are here and some are missing.” The absence is a surprise, for, as the narrator continues in an apostrophe, “I thought in spite of dreams / you’d be sitting somewhere here with me.” As in “Go West,” the epidemic disrupts the hope for a queerer future, recalling as it does Christopher Dowell’s early death (Tennant, One Hundred 11).

________

While “Go West” was released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, with no end in sight, it entered the charts amidst the turmoil precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union two years earlier. The connection echoes musically, too. Lowe has observed that the song “sound[s] surprisingly like the former Soviet anthem” (“Go West”). The two are eminently mashuppable; fans have set footage of Soviet military prancing to the song, images from which the band presently want to disassociate themselves.⁵ The Soviet imagery of the video—the flag-flying military parades, the Kremlin, the Yuri Gagarin Monument—only enforces the association. Early on in the video (directed by Howard Greenhalgh), the computer-animated Statue of Liberty seems to be transmitting messages to the world with her torch. Soon, the Boys invite us to ascend a flight of stairs at the end of which we again discover Lady Liberty, now in the form of Sylvia Mason-James (fig. 1). Still later, we see the song title’s imperative phrase illustrated with Tennant and Lowe as they, standing in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral on the Red Square, point skyward (fig. 2). At the time of the song’s release, such gestures evoked bad blood among my friends. Are the Boys telling the ex-Soviets to join capitalism’s unstoppable march, the world that promises to end waiting with the immediate satisfactions of Western consumerism (figured in the video’s colorful beachballs)? Is the United States presented as a global beacon of “diversity” and “tolerance” (with the Statue of Liberty as a Black woman)? Is the song affirming the triumphalism that Francis Fukuyama and others represented in arguing that history had achieved its telos in neoliberal capitalism?

Fig 1. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 2. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Here, too, the song’s melancholia complicates its messianism, whether homosexual or neoliberal. If we know that the homosexual communitarianism à la Fourier was sustained but for the briefest of moments, we might guess that the market forces’ promise to end the boredom satirized in Vladimir Sorokin’s late-Soviet novel The Queue (1985) is swiftly deflated. Such is the suggestion in “To step aside,” the penultimate track on Bilingual (1996). If Very had seemingly finished with the call for the Soviets, disappointed at the promise of the October Revolution, to join market capitalism, “To step aside” witnesses their lives some years henceforth: at another square—or why not, again, the Red Square—we meet

workers still queuing
patiently there
for market forces to provide
what history's so far denied:
for a different kind of fate
than to labour long and always wait.

The October Revolution pledged that a full life and a livable individuality was to be actualized in the proletarian society—hence the question of one of the shipmates in the beginning of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (“Why are we waiting?”) and its repetition in “No time for tears,” one of the songs on the band’s soundtrack for the film’s 2005 live performance at Trafalgar Square. The same promise—an end to waiting—was proffered with the move to market economy at the Soviet Union’s dissolution, a promise inscribed in the imagery of “Go West.” Yet “To step aside” is an addendum, if we need one, that thwarts what to some of my friends looked like the video’s capitalist triumphalism. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, waiting does not cease but changes form: the ex-Soviets join the Western citizenry not in their enjoyment of the consumer goods that tempt Sorokin’s Soviets but in their scrounging for work in conditions of shared precarity.⁶ All are subjects of, and to, optimism’s cruelty (Berlant).

________

The opening scene of Maria Schrader’s film Vor der Morgenröte (2016)—a depiction of Stefan and Lotte Zweig’s exilic years in South America—evokes Brazil’s appeal for the Austrian author. Preceded, under the opening credits, by the sound of birds’ singing, the first shot is of a sea of exotic flowers; a hand in a dainty white glove enters the screen, readjusting the arrangement. The birdsong is joined by chords of samba. The camera cuts to a full shot of a large dining hall; the colorful flowers are the centerpiece on a lengthy table around which numerous servers hover, suggesting the commencement of a state event. The doors are opened by uniformed attendants, and the man who we will learn is Zweig enters with Brazilian dignitaries, his hosts. Speaking in French, he flatters them with an anecdote with which they surely would have been familiar: “Do you know what Vespucci said as he arrived in the Bay of Rio in 1502?” he asks. “‘If paradise exists on Earth, it cannot be far from here.'” Polite laughter is prompted by the well-worn legend of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who “discovered” the New World (as he called it), the world to whom he ultimately bequeathed his name.

Vor der Morgenröte is an analysis of a journey west. Zweig tells us that, as he began his South American sojourn, he was hoping “to build the sense of community [die Gemeinsamkeit] [he] had always dreamt of, but on a larger scale and to a bolder concept” (World 426 / Welt 452). Since nineteenth-century German sociology, such togetherness has often been considered an attribute of Gemeinschaften, the “organic” communities presumed to have existed before industrial modernity turned them into Gesellschaften. In a Gemeinschaft, one is at home, known, fully adapted to the soil; in a Gesellschaft, one becomes a stranger, an anonymous cog in a system, alienated from oneself and others. For a moment, Zweig was convinced that in Brazil he had discovered the communitarian intimacy of what Hegel, too, calls Gemeinsamkeit.⁷ He recalls re-finding the world of European yesterday there:

He similarly writes in Brazil: Land of the Future (1941) of his excitement over the fact that “no colour-bar, no segregation, no arrogant classification” seemed to organize the population, a color-blindness that had enabled “the creation of a uniform national consciousness” (8, 9). In Vor der Morgenröte, Lotte shares his enthusiasm as she gushes about her “incredible experience” in Brazil: “The various races live together so naturally that it seems like a miracle to us coming from Europe.” They seem to have found the Gemeinsamkeit that we hear expressed in repeated performative declaration of “Go West[‘s]” male chorus: “Together!”

The Zweigs refer to the country’s state-supported policies of racial mixing (mestiçagem), which have often been favorably contrasted with the hypodescent-based practices of racial segregation in the US or the perennial antisemitisms in Europe. Brazil’s cultural practices render the country a beacon of hope in the midst of fascism’s spread: “the experiment of Brazil, with its complete and conscious negation of all colour and racial distinctions, represents by its obvious success perhaps the most important contribution toward the liquidation of a mania that has brought more disruption and unhappiness into our world than any other” (Brazil 9). Such racial harmony is indicated in the film’s opening scene as one of the waitresses preparing for the arrival of the dinner guests places a flower behind the ear of another, the darkest of the women. Their colleague comments, in Portuguese: “Very elegant. Nobody would think you’re working here. You look like a madam.” We cannot imagine such a scene taking place in the contemporaneous United States, where the so-called one-drop rule demobilized darker bodies.

Startled by the unthinkable in fascism’s rise, Zweig sets his sights on “the land of the future,” where he identifies an alternative to the lousiness of Europe. Yet Schrader’s film also complicates the expatriates’ impressions. In a later scene, Stefan and Lotte are visiting a sugar plantation in Bahia in January 1941. One of their guides, an Afro-Brazilian man in work clothes, asks him, his question mediated by a lighter-skinned and more formally dressed translator, “Do you know how many pounds of sugar cane a good worker can harvest a day?” The query goes unobserved by the guest of honor: as others move on, Stefan remains behind, writing intensively in his notebook, oblivious to the question. Neither he nor we hear the answer; the details regarding the labor originally associated with the nation’s institution of slavery are dismissed as unimportant. For Zweig, the “European myth of fertility … suppress[es] the material realities of labor”; like many of his ilk previously, the newcomer to the colony “assume[s] that one need not labor for sustenance in tropical climates” (DeLoughrey 36). A moment later, Lotte discovers that the sweet commodity has teeth: she accidentally cuts their translator with the cane stalk she has been given to taste.

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Having scored one of their most enduring hits with “Go West,” Pet Shop Boys covered another gay fugue in 1997: “Somewhere” from West Side Story (1957), a song, again, “about promised lands. Like ‘Go West,’ really. The same theme” (Lowe, “Somewhere”). Performed by Tony and Maria, the musical’s star-crossed lovers, the song speaks of the couple’s yearning to transcend the worldly obstacles that stand in the way of their affection (the ethnic conflicts expressed in and perpetuated by gang violence). The centerpiece in a musical originally brought to life by four Jewish, presumably homosexual men,⁸ “Somewhere” has resonated with gay audiences: while attributed to the heterosexual protagonists, it has become a gay anthem for its yearning for another, freer location, “a new amorous world.”⁹ As we learn, “There is a Sondheim cult and most of its members are gay” (Clum 213).

In the opening of their version, Tennant and Lowe sample from the musical’s 1961 screen adaptation the enraged, or anguished, question that Ice (Tucker Smith) asks of his comrades after the violent death of the Jets’ leader, Riff (Russ Tamblyn): “You wanna live in this lousy world?” The distorted line—first speeded up, then slowed down—reminds us of the question (“Do you feel it?”) with which the epilogue of “Go West” fades out. In the longer prologue to the song’s Extended Mix, the question is accompanied by another sample: “When the riots stopped, the drugs started.” This statement comes from Menace II Society, the Hughes Brothers’ 1993 depiction of gang violence in Los Angeles. It is spoken by the film’s protagonist and voiceover narrator—addressing us, as we will discover, posthumously—at the closing of the early sequence in which we see black-and-white news footage of the 1965 riots in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles.

Taking place in the early 1990s, the film is set amidst the aftermath of what is often deemed a failed escape: Los Angeles was one of the urban locales outside the American South into which Black southerners had moved during the “Great Migration” of the first half of the twentieth century. The migrants had sought to flee the racism that federal nonresponsiveness had allowed to fester in the post-Reconstruction South. Yet they often found themselves facing the perhaps more intractable, because more diffuse, Jim-Crowism of the North: the diminished life chances that are the perennial crops of structural racism.

Posters for the original 1957 musical and the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story centralize the theme of escape. We see Maria (Carol Lawrence, replaced in the movie posters by Natalie Wood) leading Tony (Larry Kert, subsequently Richard Beymer) by the hand in a joyous escape toward an unseen destination beyond the image’s frame (fig. 3). Despite the films’ stylistic dissonance, the poster would similarly work for Menace II Society. Like Maria, Caine’s (Tyrin Turner) love interest Ronnie (Jada Pinkett) plans for them to leave Los Angeles for a less blighted location. Her task is to save her man by taming his death-driven desires. The motif is borrowed from a long genealogy of sociological and psychological thought: the female is to exert a civilizing influence on the male’s primitive impulses (Wells 175-79). Like Maria grabbing Tony’s hand, or Ronnie asking Caine to move with her to Atlanta, the woman pulls the man out of the destructive cycle of his primordial passions, onto the track of a more sustainable futurity.

Fig 3. Poster for West Side Story, 1961. Directed by Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Starring Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood. © United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.

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Ice’s question—”You wanna live in this lousy world?”—similarly constitutes the subtext of “Fugitive” (2006), another one of Pet Shop Boys’ fugues. The prelude in the song’s “Richard X Extended Mix”—the version whose subtitle should be “The full horror,” repeating that of “Suburbia’s” 12-inch version (1986)—consists of languid notes, reminiscent of the opening orchestration of the “Somewhere” cover. The aural scene, evoking a sunny Tuesday morning, is suddenly interrupted by the sound of two airplanes, one after the other, passing immediately overhead. The setup suggests that the song’s narrator, hastening toward an imminent event that would mark his and his “brother’s” joint ascension to “Heaven,” is one of the 9/11 hijackers, on their way to Lower Manhattan.

“It’s always forever / in Heaven,” he declares. “We’ll all be together / in Heaven.” The song was originally released as the opening track to the additional disc of the special edition of the album Fundamental (2006), a supplement called Fundamentalism. Concomitantly, the “forever” at stake is the time of the fundamentalist imagination: the telos is a promised land in whose pursuit the narrator is ready to pull the world apart.

The definition of twentieth-century totalitarianism might go as follows: an orientation toward a lost—more precisely, stolen—essence the promise of whose recovery is embodied in a charismatic leader. That the narrator of “Fugitive” occupies the ranks of such seekers is suggested by the fact that, poised for their ascension, the band of brothers is “clean and prepared / to be led / indivisible.” Clean: the collective is purged of contaminating influences. Indivisible: purified sameness enables this familiar aspect of fascism’s iconography, announced in the adoption of the Roman icon of fasces, a collection of tightly bound rods, by the late-nineteenth-century Italian fascisti. Indeed, the title of the song is “Fugitive,” not “Fugitives”; the brothers’ indivisibility must be spoken in the singular. To be led: there is no fascism without a Führer, who exerts the kind of “fascinating” pull that Hitler has often been said to have wielded over Germans. The leader offers a clarity of vision regarding what has been lost; from him, the narrator also learns how the lost can return—can be redeemed—in the imminent future.

This is not an exceptional project. Such fundamentalism marks routine descriptions of “modernity.” As Ghassan Hage asks, “Does not modernity by its very nature stage a nostalgic subject who is forever waiting to overcome a sense of loss and alienation?” (207). Conceptualized in this way, modernity begins to resemble a totalitarian project. Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) that the appeal of twentieth-century totalitarianisms (fascism and Stalinism are her major examples) rests on their offer to rescue the alienated moderns from their “loneliness.” As etymology suggests, fascism would bind the atomized crowd into a body of purpose and unity.¹⁰

Mindful of this history of representations, some have shuddered at the images in “Go West.” In the video, we twice see Tennant and Lowe pointing skyward, first under the mural outside the Moscow Space Museum and then, an image given from two angles, in front of Saint Basil Cathedral (figs. 4 and 5). The gesture accrues dark undertones when it is repeated in the image of a collective hailing by anonymous men (fig. 6). Commentators have seen in the digitally replicated, neatly aligned men—their Gemeinsamkeit—unsettling echoes of homosexuality’s presumed desire for sameness (O’Donovan), which such influential thinkers as Theodor Adorno have connected to the totalitarian demand for uniformity. “Totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together,” writes Adorno. Both are narcissistic conditions, intolerant of difference: like the fascist, the homosexual “negates everything which is not of its own kind” (Minima §24 [46]). The video still of the hailing men could be found among the archival illustrations of the proto-fascist Weimar Freikorps, whose “male fantasies” Klaus Theweleit famously analyzes.

Fig 4. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 5. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Fig 6. “Go West.” Directed by Howard Greenhalgh, YouTube, uploaded by Pet Shop Boys, 22 April 2009.

Along the same lines, Uncyclopedia‘s now deleted entry for “fascism” gives us the following etymology lesson: “From the Latin word ‘fasces,’ meaning ‘a bundle of sticks,’ came the word ‘fascism,’ a collectivist ideology. From that same Latin word came the word ‘faggot,’ a word originally meaning ‘a bundle of sticks,’ but now used to refer to a male homosexual. What does that tell you about fascists?”¹¹ The question is rhetorical: we need no etymological lessons to tell us that fascists are fags; as Adorno, too, argues, their desire for sameness evinces the failure of the individualism that, as we are often told, modernity has augured since the Reformation, its collapse into murderous docility.

________

If totalitarianism offers the dream of indivisibility, Tennant and Lowe, as we have noted, begin their oeuvre with a gesture of division: “Two divided by zero.” The songwriters point out the ambiguity of the song’s title. While the fleeing couple, whether lovers or friends, are “divided by nothing”—a rather “romantic” notion, Tennant says—the phrase simultaneously, when taken as a mathematical formula, tells us something different: “Two divided by zero is infinity, isn’t it?” Lowe adds (“Two”). In this formula, the zero that has vexed Western thought since the ancients produces its seeming dialectical opposite, equally irksome for philosophy. “[T]he mathematical infinite was the fruit of the mathematical nothing,” Brian Rotman tells us: “it is only by virtue of zero that infinity comes to be signifiable in mathematics” (71). The nothing is indistinguishable from an infinity no less frightful for ordered thought. Plotinus’s and George Berkeley’s measured disagreements with the infinite may be but sublimations of a more profound terror that such limitlessness awakens.¹² Among its terrors is its ability to paralyze the subject into an endless waiting: as Maurice Blanchot writes, “one cannot act in the infinite, one cannot accomplish anything in the unlimited” (316).

It is this zero that Lee Edelman proposes fascinates us in various embodiments of what he calls queerness, its “antisocial” force. Mobilizing Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Paul de Man’s account of literary language’s rhetoricity, he argues that being’s groundlessness precipitates, or necessitates the invention of, various figures that personify that which haunts all identities: the “constitutively excluded” impossibility of the zero-void-nothingness. “As the void within every situation that can never be counted or represented within it,” Edelman writes, “the zero maintains the place of queerness as ceaseless negativity” (Bad Education 90), much like, in Lacanian theory, the objet a indicates the void (das Ding) around which human subjects cohere as variously organized symptoms.

Among the names for such negativity we find not only “the queer,” about whom we read in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), but also, per afropessimist thought, “the Black” and, as Edelman further enumerates, “the woman” and “the trans”—”those ‘ones’ made to figure, in any given world, the zero … by literalizing nonbeing, which then, in the form of those ones, can be excluded from reality by excluding them” (Edelman, Bad Education 254). When Edelman speaks of “tropes” or “figures,” he uses the terms in de Man’s sense: always misnaming that which they are presumed to stand for, they infest language with “irony.” Consequently, meaning fails to stabilize itself and, instead, slips our grasp in a series of “misreadings,” an inherent characteristic, for de Man, of the mode of discourse we call literature. If we speak of “the radical threat posed by irony” (Edelman, No Future 24), it is because de Man deems this “threat” not a contingent aspect but constitutive—”at the root”—of language and, as Edelman extrapolates, being.

By turning the nothing into a divisor, Pet Shop Boys offer us what looks like the futural counterpart of the void. If we can speak of “the ironic temporalities at work in Pet Shop Boys” (Wodtke 37), the time of irony is different from that which operates in Edelman: we shift from the pure negativity of the zero to the infinite that the zero produces in dividing being.

Lowe’s point about the theme of infinity in “Two divided by zero” is supplemented—not negated—by Tennant’s observation, of the same song, that the protagonists’ determination to flee is not likely to be translated into a successful arrival in the imagined telos of New York City. The tension implies a corrective to Andrew Sullivan’s characterization of the mood that saturates the PSB oeuvre. To say that, with all the youthful “enthusiasm” he exhibits, the narrator at the same time evinces “a great sense of loss” may not be accurate. What accompanies expressions of futural “enthusiasm” in Pet Shop Boys’ gay fugues is not loss, that familiar alibi of totalitarian thought.¹³ Rather than the sense of alienation voiced in laments for the organic belonging of our happier pasts, we may want to speak of absence, troped in various “catachrestic positivizations” (Edelman, Bad Education 172). While for Edelman such figures are the abjected (the queer, the Black, the woman, the trans), in Pet Shop Boys they are most often actualized as visions of futural enthusiasm. After “Two divided by zero,” infinity’s promise is announced in “Being boring,” where, recalling his fugitive days amidst other queer escapees, the singer posits: “We were never … / worried that / time would come to an end.”¹⁴

________

As is the case with the hopes of escaping from Newcastle to London, the dream of an infinity—a “forever”—informs the fundamentalist flight plan, too. The fugitive is committed to realigning the time that some injustice has pulled out of joint: “We’ll be together / now and forever,” the narrator of “Fugitive” tells his “brother.” The “now” coinciding with a “forever,” we reach a communitarian togetherness, purged of irony. No strange supplements will complicate the triumph of our arrival to the promised land of our Gemeinsamkeit.

If the fugitive deems his existence to be marked by a chronic temporal disjunction, he is suffering from the out-of-jointness that Ernesto Laclau identifies as the ineradicable condition of democratic contestation. In an argument that seemingly agrees with Edelman’s,¹⁵ Laclau proposes that to think the communal entities who are the agents of contestation we must accept as our first principle the never-ending instability—the nonessentiality—of all such formations. The political principle coincides with an ontological operation, one that Laclau evokes with a familiar Shakespearean phrase. “Time being ‘out of joint,’ dislocation corrupting the identity with itself of any present,” he writes, “we have a constitutive anachronism that is at the root of any identity” (69).

In Edelman, this “constitutive anachronism” is symptomized in “irony.” Both thinkers’ accounts echo—the genealogies of their thought stretch to—the Hegelian theory of society’s dialectical tending toward Sittlichkeit, the covenanted “ethical community,” whose coherence is nevertheless destabilized by “the everlasting irony” that is “womankind [Weiblichkeit]” (Hegel, Phenomenology §475 [288]). Those for whom the images of the hailing multitude in “Go West” prompt the specter of fascism attest to the influence of this logic. What commentators see in such bodies of sameness is the exclusion of the destabilizing “irony” that would dissolve the self-same collective toward future-oriented metamorphoses. In such “male fantasies” (Theweleit), no Weiblichkeit infests totalitarian faggotry as its “internal enemy” (Phenomenology §475 [288]); instead, the lonely crowd is bound into the homofascist body.

The promise of fascism is to bring what Hage calls “forever waiting” to an end; the lost thing will have been returned to its rightful place. Edelman calls this the dream of “redemptive collectivism” (Bad Education 172), a togetherness not undermined by infinite irony. At the same time, the redemption, enabled by the coincidence of “now” and “forever,” marks the place of annihilation. While affirming political “messianism,” Laclau insists that “the messianism we are speaking about is one without eschatology, without a pre-given promised land, without determinate content” (74). In welcoming the end to waiting and the eschatological merging of the now and the forever, the fundamentalist fugitive, on the other hand, affirms a pledge to what Leo Bersani, echoed by Edelman, calls “the culture of redemption.” “Fugitive” confirms Bersani’s thesis: the culture of redemption is a culture of death. It is driven toward the death-desiring collapse of the “now” and “forever.”

The disjunction between the now and the forever renders us waiting beings, inhabited by the dreams exemplified by Zweig or Village People or revolutionary Russians. “When all the waiting is over, so will be our lives,” writes Raymond Tallis; “the wait itself [will have been our] portion” (James, “Beast” 540). Pet Shop Boys corroborate this in the funereal “Your funny uncle” when Tennant complements the Revelations’ eschatological litany (Rev. 21.4) by adding to it the phrase “no more waiting”: “No more waiting or crying / These former things have passed away,” he says, bidding his friend the final goodbye.

________

Are we there yet? If so, where have we arrived?

Zweig turns to the idea(l) of Brazil to plug in the “nothing” whose terror awakens him from his comfortable existence in Salzburg. Arriving in the promised land, he is unable to see that what appears to his colonial gaze as an “Edenic garden” is in fact “entangled with the violence of modernity and … the networks of plantation capitalism” (DeLoughrey 44). The revolutionary enthusiasm manifested in Russian history similarly hardens into various ideals whose implosion, as we learn from the interviewees in Svetlana Alexievich’s “oral history” of Russian life from the October Revolution to the 2000s, becomes indisputable by the early 1990s. The escapees in “Fugitive” are on the same track as they reach for a “past-to-come” in their effort to bring the now and the forever together. Each dreamworld will have reached a catastrophic end.

Yet there are other ways of staying awake with nothingness. Anticipatorily countering “Fugitive[‘s]” fundamentalist collapsing of the now and the forever, Pet Shop Boys’ debut album offers us yet another example of the way in which the two can nonfascistically coincide: “Tonight,” we learn, “is forever.”

This declaration, as well as many of lines in the song of that name, might be transposed to the mouth of the fundamentalist. As in “Fugitive,” the event toward which desire tends is both a singular and a futureless “forever”: “It will be like this forever / if we fall in love,” we hear, words that the fugitive might whisper to his copilot. Yet the experience of tonight’s infinitude is affirmed in its potential for repetition, in words we will never hear from the indivisible brothers: “We’re out again, another night / We never have enough.”

Desire’s unquenchability suggests that the speaker belongs amidst modernity’s thrill-seekers, those who escape their lives’ emptiness into the endless accumulation of the “sense experiences” offered by Erlebnisgesellschaft. In Adorno’s words, he is one of capitalism’s bewitched victims, “whirring around in fascination” with consumerist pleasures, an “ecstasy … without content” (“On the Fetish-Character” 292). This analysis is either confirmed or complicated by the song’s linkage to an earlier track on Please. While “Tonight is forever” is listed as the opening song on Side B of the original LP, subsequent compact disc printings of Please indicate that it is in fact preceded by “a hidden track”: the 33-second experimental piece “Opportunities (Reprise).” This title is not given in the original release, nor does the vinyl surface have the sparser grooves that mark a transition from one song to the next. The track reprises elements from the third song on Side A, where we, again, witness an invitation to escape from one wannabe fugitive to another. The singer is determined to get his share in 1980s Britain: “Let’s make lots of money!” he apostrophizes his would-be partner. He is after all the “opportunities” that the decade’s boom years made available to the sufficiently unscrupulous: “Ask yourself this question: / Do you want to be rich?”¹⁶

The Thatcherite dream’s return in the “Reprise” is yet another of the strange supplements that proliferate in the band’s songs. Here, however, the body and the parasite have switched places: rather than an ebullient song extended into a dissonant epilogue, an experimental snippet—a cacophony of traffic noise, cut-up dialogue, and fleeting beats—prefaces the dance track. The narrator of “Opportunities” insists that to ride the yuppie wave the partners have simply to “choose the perfect time”: “Oh, there’s a lot of opportunities / if you know when to take them.” The opening lyrics of “Tonight is forever” might be mistaken for the same narrator’s sentiments:

I may be wrong, I may be right
Money's short and time is tight
Don't even think about those bills
Don't pay the price, we never will

While the words echo the yuppie ruthlessness satirized in “Opportunities,” the song turns into an invitation for a different journey. In something of a negation of “Opportunities,” the narrator of “Tonight is forever” now seems to appeal to his partner with the promise of an escape from the decade’s economic ethos: “I haven’t got a job to pay / but I could stay in bed all day.” If “Opportunities” comments on the callous opportunism of the 1980s, the song’s augmentation with “Tonight is forever” suggests that the monologue of greed is in fact an erotic ploy: the seduction of wealth is but a way to get the apostrophized other to “stay in bed all day” with the speaker. In this, he invites the other to join him in being what he must appear to the Thatcherites: a lost cause.

Distilling the energies expressed in “Opportunities” into their nonessential, purely pleasurable form, “Tonight is forever” invites another look at the dream of endless accumulation. As Karl Marx recognized, capitalism is not anchored in any image of a lost homeland that might be regained. He admired its rapaciousness: it is a force of becoming, relentlessly melting and reconfiguring, unbinding and rebinding, everything, all the time. Yet such revolutionary forces, as he also noted, had been betrayed. The nothing that awoke the world from the “idiocy of rural life” (Marx and Engels 477)—arguably, Marx and Engels etymologically pun on the Heraclitean idios kosmos of solitary dreaming—could not be sustained, any more than the zero that Edelman designates as the constitutive exclusion of any social arrangement. In “Opportunities,” the bourgeoisie’s fetishistic logic is announced in the speaker’s determination to “make lots of money.” While, unlike the dreamer in “Fugitive,” the desire is not for a thing lost, the promised land is nevertheless a consuming object. “Tonight is forever” is an attempt to reimagine the Thatcherite dream by dissolving the ground or essence—the fetish of accumulation—that, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would say, has “territorialized” capitalism’s forces.

________

One unexpected aftereffect of the AIDS epidemic was the acceleration of the gay civil rights movement. The urgent, life-saving agitation by ACT UP and other organizations gave homosexuality a visibility that resulted in the remarkable gains of the subsequent decades. Pet Shop Boys acknowledge this development in the celebratory “Wedding in Berlin” (Hotspot, 2019). “We’re getting married,” the singer declares; “a lot of people do it / don’t matter if they’re straight or gay.” The wait is over: “We’re doing it without delay.” Yet, true to form, they follow this with yet another strange supplement: the song (and, with it, Hotspot) fades out with a distorted sound of church bells. The triumphal story of assimilation and acceptance, exemplified in the project of “marriage equality,” finds itself continued in a life where the sanctifying sound of wedding bells comes to us as if in a muddled nightmare.

Unlike the one in “Go West,” the outro of “Wedding in Berlin” is anticipated in the very beginning of the song, where we already, for a brief moment, hear the distorted chiming. As opposed to the dreams that deviate into the very danceable disappointment of “Go West[‘s]” end, we perhaps should have expected the discord that the project of marriage equality entails. Michael Warner, for one, told us. In The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999), he argued that the project necessarily depends on the assumption of gay people’s full assimilability into extant affective and societal arrangements, as well as the delegitimization of all kinship forms that fall outside their parameters. The trouble with normal is that it requires a punishingly strict criteria of inclusion; no “new amorous worlds” are found on this map. Such projects of normativization result in an impoverished “we” or the kind of “happiness” that is suggested by the same warped church bells heard at the end of “Happy people,” an earlier song on Hotspot, especially if we observe its resonance with Yazoo’s satirical song of the same name from 1983.

Similarly, gay Black artists of the 1980s and 1990s knew that life in the promised land might turn out more complicated. Marlon Riggs suggests as much in his experimental film Tongues Untied (1989). He visualizes his affective fascination with the emergent movement and his subsequent realization of the role in which he, as a Black man, would find himself among his homo-comrades. This is one of the ways in which, to quote Lowe, “in hindsight it wasn’t the utopia they all thought it would be” (“Go West”). As is suggested by the echoes of “manifest destiny” in the Village People song title, the utopian vision was, as all futural orientations are, compromised by unobserved internal dissonances.

Describing Brazil, Zweig, too, offers the standard representation of colonial settlements as “terra incognita” (Brazil 2), the empty slate that, as he writes in The World of Yesterday, “was still waiting for people to come and live in it, make use of it, fill it with their presence” (426). Perhaps such idealization was informed by the propaganda of Getúlio Vargas, the country’s dictatorial president. As Lotte Zweig discovers on the cane field, the utopian image of terra incognita bears a bloody history untold in official chronicles.

________

In March 1991, as the Soviet Union is entering its death throes, Tennant announces to his entourage: “I’m thinking of becoming a communist now. I love lost causes” (Heath 111). As we did to Sullivan’s, we offer a friendly amendment to his pronouncement. The evidence of the oeuvre suggests that at stake is an affirmation not so much of “lost” but “absent causes.” This conceptual shift neither ignores the bereavement evident in the band’s AIDS elegies—most notably, “Your funny uncle,” “It couldn’t happen here,” “Being boring,” and “Go West”—nor pathologizes, as the classic taxonomies of “melancholia” tend to do, one’s refusal to relinquish the love object. (According to the traditional diagnosis, the melancholic, adoring the dead thing, is caught in a fascinated paralysis, a mirror inversion of the consumerist ecstasy Adorno targets.) Rather, “absence” indicates the inability or refusal to suture the temporal gash, the noncoincidence of the now and the forever, in which Laclau identifies the moving force of political contestation. If Laclau’s schema rests on the ontological principle of being’s nonidentity with itself, this nonidentity prevents the redemptive imagination—whose directives, Bersani tells us, organize the most influential modern projects from Marcel Proust to Walter Benjamin—from occupying the pilot’s seat.

“We never have enough,” the narrator of “Tonight is forever” announces to his would-be partner. The line is spoken in the present rather than the future tense. Unlike the futural promise of fundamentalist eschatology (“We’ll be together / now and forever”), the infinity of “never enough” opens in an untimely now, refusing closure’s terror. This piece of pop wisdom is not unique to Tennant and Lowe. Both the Boys and Madonna (“I hope this feeling never ends tonight”) speak of an infinity in the now, “an eternal present in losing oneself in dancing and the music” (Wodtke 33). With this in mind, we can name the two infinities in Pet Shop Boys with some accuracy. In addition to the infinity in which “forever waiting” would come to an end—the “infinity of the lost cause,” observed in “Fugitive”—we have an “infinity of an absent cause.” While in the former mode one absents himself from the unbearable world by closing the temporal gap, in the latter the departure enables the subject’s hovering, in the world but not of the world. These are techniques for one’s nonsuicidal disappearance from this world: into thin air.

Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African-diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the coeditor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). His other publications include essays in PMLA, diacritics, differences, American Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing two book-length studies: “Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin” and “Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.”

Footnotes

1. Apart from the ones discussed in this essay, the following songs in the PSB catalogue explore, in various ways, “escape”: “Bright young things,” “Burning the heather,” “A cloud in a box,” “Dancing in the dusk,” “Dreamland,” “Forever in love,” “Girls don’t cry,” “Hit music,” “In his imagination,” “Into thin air,” “I want a lover,” “London,” “More than a dream,” “A new life,” “New York City boy,” “Nightlife,” “An open mind,” “Saturday night (forever),” “This must be the place I waited years to leave,” “We all feel better in the dark,” and “Wings and faith.”

2. While the most prominent examples of Tennant’s fascination with Russian history are “My October symphony,” which narrates the disorientation caused by the disintegration of the Soviet Union in former ideologists, and the 2005 soundtrack that the band provided to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), examples stretch from the reference, in the final verse of “West End girls,” to Vladimir Lenin’s 1917 return from his exile in Switzerland to Russia to such recent songs as “Living in the past” and “Kaputnik,” written as responses to the Crimean invasion. For more, see Studer; and Smith 321-25.

3. The phrase “promised land” appears in the song’s middle eight (“There where the air is free / we’ll be what we want to be / Now if we make a stand / we’ll find our promised land”), which PSB added to the original: see “Secrets.”

4. We can understand the band’s refusal of a simple cold end by observing what the device has signaled in musical history. A cold end tells us that “someone decided that the song should end right there. That the song should end in that way. No ambiguity. No doubt” (“About Cold Fade”). The corruption of the cold end in “Go West” not only works to sustain such Pet Shop Boys virtues as “ambiguity,” but also problematizes the familiar bête noire of the band: the Rock Authenticity of the 1980s and 1990s, where the gesture signaled bands’ efforts to distinguish themselves from their predecessors in the genres of funk and disco:

As if commenting on this tradition, a cold end in a Pet Shop Boys song is likely to be pushed into something very different from—satirizing the pretensions of—those signaling rock credibility. The best example is the live version of “Jealousy,” sung by Robbie Williams on Concrete (2006), whose arrangement changes the original album version’s fadeout into a bombastic finish worthy of Wagner or Sibelius. “It’s just slightly over-the-top, the end of that song,” Tennant jokes with the audience.

5. See the YouTube videos “Go West vs. Russian National Anthem”; and “Russians Go West.” It is perhaps such associations that have enhanced Tennant and Lowe’s outspoken revulsion at the Ukrainian war: immediately after the Russian invasion began on February 24, 2022, visitors to the band’s website would see the Ukrainian flag on its front page, with a post dated May 18 “look[ing] forward to the day when fascism fails in Russia.”

6. As Smith asks in her close reading of the video for “Go West”:

7. As Hegel declares in Phenomenology of Spirit, “human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds [der zustande gebrachten Gemeinsamkeit des Bewußtsein[e]]” (§69 [43] / 65, brackets in German orig.). For him, Gemeinsamkeit is an Enlightenment achievement, the mode of ethical togetherness he calls Sittlichkeit.

8. The men in question were Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. On the musical’s composition and importance to gay audiences, see Kaiser 89-94.

9. Charles Kaiser writes: “The lyrics of ‘Somewhere’ in particular seemed to speak directly to the gay experience before the age of liberation. In 1966, it was one of the songs chosen for the first mass gay wedding of two hundred couples in San Francisco, presided over by the city’s mayor, Willie Brown” (93).

10. In such collectivities, “difference” is—as Bersani often puts it, precisely our context in mind—”exterminat[ed]” (Is the Rectum 43, 183). Thus, when we hear in “Wiedersehen” of “modernity attacked” with the rise of the Third Reich, the statement’s grammatical status is ambiguous. Most immediately, we perhaps hear in it the passive voice, whose hidden agency belongs to those inspired by, say, Julius Evola’s diagnoses of modernity’s perversity. At the same time, the sentence follows the regular grammatical construction: “modernity” is the subject, “to attack” the verb. This grammar informs the arguments by Adorno (and, later, Giorgio Agamben), for whom the Third Reich is not an aberration but the fulfillment of the Enlightenment spirit.

11. See uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Fascist (last accessed May 7, 2014; spelling and punctuation silently corrected).

12. Arthur Lovejoy writes: “Like most Greek philosophers, [Plotinus] feels an aesthetic aversion to the notion of infinity, which he is unable to distinguish from the indefinite. To say of the sum of things that it is infinite is equivalent to saying that it has no clear-cut arithmetical character at all. Nothing that is perfect, or fully in possession of its own potential being, can lack determinate limits” (66). As Bishop George Berkeley subsequently observes in 1734, the claim that “a finite quantity divided by nothing is infinite” is “shocking to good sense” (79). A. W. Moore tracks the ways in which for numerous thinkers the zero-division—and infinity in general—has meant risking falling into an “abyss of absurdity” (2).

13. The experience of “loss” is characteristic of what Patricia Juliana Smith calls “postimperial” imagination: “The condition of postimperiality is, perforce, one marked by a pervasive sense of loss, particularly a loss of dominance, power, status, and therefore, by extension, masculine prerogative; thus, in effect, it raises anxieties of castration, impotence, and feminization” (323). The convulsions precipitated by such (imagined) losses produce not only what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia” but also, as Weimar Germans knew and twenty-first-century Americans know, a desire for the resuscitation of past greatness.

14. Others, too, have observed the theme of “infinity” in Pet Shop Boys. For two variously slanted discussions, see Balfour; and Wodtke.

15. We detect echoes of Laclau when Edelman writes of “the constant pressure of the zero that procures and undoes every ‘one,’ thus making the zero, in its queerness, in its inaccessibility to sense, the (non)ground of political conflict” (Edelman, Bad Education 95). Yet the difference between the two thinkers concerns their divergent conceptualizations of the radical negativity that operates (in) the system. While Edelman insists on the irredeemability of pure negativity, the theory of radical democracy allows the resolution of contradictions in the dialectical movement. In his previous work, Edelman indicates his disagreement with the dialectical model that informs Laclau’s theory by criticizing Judith Butler’s account of performativity—where abjected modes of being can be rendered symbolically legible through the work of “resignifying”—as “all too familiarly liberal … in its promise to provide the excluded with access to a livable social form” (No Future 103-04). Despite the disagreement, Edelman’s system, precisely in its approximation of the theory of radical democracy, becomes confluent with the account of dialectics that ground Butler’s and Laclau’s work: see Tuhkanen 126-27n.

16. The singer expresses his determination to get onboard the financial programs premised on what we have since called “neoliberalism,” which included Margaret Thatcher’s policy of privatizing most public services. (“They’re buying and selling your history,” as Tennant observes of this scheme in “Shopping” [Actually, 1987]; “… I heard it in the House of Commons / everything’s for sale.”) In the 1980s, this ethos coincided (in ways that became superfluous in subsequent decades) with vicious homophobia, exemplified in the passing of Clause 28 in Britain (in which the band recognized, as they declared in an ad posted in the Independent, the Thatcher government’s “fascism” [qtd. in Hodges 195]) and, in the United States, Ronald Reagan’s studied inaction amidst the AIDS crisis. On PSB and Thatcherism, see also Smith 315-20.

Works Cited

• “About Cold Fade.” Cold Fade: The End of the Song Is Just the Beginning, tumblr, https://coldfade.tumblr.com/aboutcoldfade.
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• –––. “Somewhere.” Sleeve notes, Bilingual / Further listening 1995-1997, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Two divided by zero.” Sleeve notes, Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• Madonna. “Into The Groove.” By Madonna Ciccone and Stephen Bray, produced by Madonna Ciccone and Stephen Bray, Sire/Warner, 1985, 7-inch vinyl.
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• Pet Shop Boys. Actually / Further listening 1987-1988. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Alternative. Parlophone, 1995, two CDs.
• –––. Battleship Potemkin. (As Tennant/Lowe.) Parlophone, 2005, CD.
• –––. Behaviour / Further listening 1990-1991. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Being boring.” Behaviour / Further listening 1990-1991, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Bilingual / Further listening 1995-1997. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Bright young things.” Release / Further listening 2001-2004, Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “Burning the heather.” Hotspot, x2, 2020, two CDs.
• –––. “A cloud in a box.” Say it to me, Parlophone, 2016 CD.
• –––. Concrete. Parlophone, 2006, two CDs.
• –––. “Dancing in the dusk.” Fundamental / Further listening 2005-2007, Parlophone, 2017, two CDs.
• –––. Disco. Parlophone, 1986, CD.
• –––. “Dreamland.” With Years & Years, Hotspot, x2, 2020, two CDs.
• –––. Elysium / Further listening 2011-12. Parlophone, 2017, two CDs.
• –––. “Forever in love.” Very / Further listening 1992-1994, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Fugitive (Richard X Extended Mix).” Fundamental / Fundamentalism, Parlophone, 2006, two CDs.
• –––. Fundamental / Fundamentalism. Parlophone, 2006, two CDs.
• –––. Fundamental / Further listening 2005-2007. Parlophone, 2017, two CDs.
• –––. “Girls don’t cry.” Fundamental / Further listening 2005-2007, Parlophone, 2017, two CDs.
• –––. “Go West (Mings Gone West: 1^st & 2^nd Movement).” Go West: The remixes, Parlophone,
• –––. “Go West.” Very / Further listening 1992-1994, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Happy people.” Hotspot, x2, 2020, two CDs.
• –––. “Hit music.” Actually / Further listening 1987-1988, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Hotspot. x2, 2020, two CDs.
• –––. “In his imagination.” Elysium / Further listening 2011-12, Parlophone, 2017, two CDs.
• –––. “Into thin air.” Super, x2, 2016, CD.
• –––. Introspective / Further listening 1988-1989. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “It couldn’t happen here.” Actually / Further listening 1987-1988, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “I want a lover.” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “I will fall.” Lost, x2, 2023, CD.
• –––. “I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing (Beatmasters 7″).” I wouldn’t normally do this kind of thing, Parlophone, 1994, CD.
• –––. “Jealousy.” Sung by Robbie Williams. Concrete, Parlophone, 2006, two CDs.
• –––. “Kaputnik.” Lost, x2, 2023, CD.
• –––. “King’s Cross.” Actually / Further listening 1987-1988, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Living in the past.” Lost, x2, 2023, CD.
• –––. “London.” Release / Further listening 2001-2004, Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. Lost. x2, 2023, CD.
• –––. “More than a dream.” Yes / Further listening 2008-2010, Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “My October symphony.” Behaviour / Further listening 1990-1991, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “A new life.” Introspective / Further listening 1988-1989, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “New York City boy.” Nightlife / Further listening 1996-2000, Parlophone, 2017, three
• –––. Nightlife / Further listening 1996-2000. Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “Nightlife.” Nightlife / Further listening 1996-2000, Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “No time for tears.” Battleship Potemkin, Parlophone, 2005, CD.
• –––. “An open mind.” Dreamland, Parlophone, 2019, CD.
• –––. “Opportunities (Let’s make lots of money).” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Opportunities (Reprise).” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Please / Further listening 1984-1986. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Release / Further listening 2001-2004. Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “Saturday night (forever).” Bilingual / Further listening 1995-1997, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Somewhere (Extended Mix).” Bilingual / Further listening 1995-1997, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Suburbia (The full horror).” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Super. x2, 2016, CD.
• –––. “This must be the place I waited years to leave.” Behaviour / Further listening 1990-1991, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Tonight is forever.” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “To step aside.” Bilingual / Further listening 1995-1997, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Two divided by zero.” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. Very / Further listening 1992-1994. Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “We all feel better in the dark.” Alternative, Parlophone, 1995, two CDs.
• –––. “Wedding in Berlin.” Hotspot, x2, 2020, two CDs.
• –––. “West End girls.” Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
• –––. “Wiedersehen.” Twenty-something. Parlophone, 2016, CD.
• –––. “Wings and faith.” Yes / Further listening 2008-2010, Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. Yes / Further listening 2008-2010. Parlophone, 2017, three CDs.
• –––. “Your funny uncle.” Introspective / Further listening 1988-1989, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
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• –––. “Two divided by zero.” Sleeve notes, Please / Further listening 1984-1986, Parlophone, 2001, two CDs.
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