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The principal political achievement to date of the currently predominant postmodern idealist form of queer theory has been to provide the theoretical authorization and ideological justification for a ludic anarchist form of queer practice which seeks to resist, disrupt, and subvert cognitively conceptual forms of knowledge by deploying the sensual/sexual body as the privileged site/instrument for the development of an alternative form of knowledge derived from a post-positivistic, post-textualistic revalorization of sensual/sexual experience (and by "ludic anarchist" I mean those contemporary varieties of anarchist praxis which seek to resist, disrupt, and subvert through an emphasis upon and a cultivation of what Derrida describes as the "playful," Bakhtin as the "carnivalesque," and Sloterdijk as the "kynical"). Postmodern idealist queer theory contends that the cognitively conceptual form tends to be biased towards representation of "(hetero)normal" at the expense of "(homo)abnormal" content, and, therefore, because of this perception of an intrinsic alliance between cognitively conceptual form and heteronormal content, postmodern idealist queer theory seizes not simply upon "the body," but rather upon the queer body as its privileged site/instrument of resistance, disruption, and subversion. According to postmodern idealist queer theory, it is the queer body which is peculiarly capable of realizing the ludic anarchist agenda of resistance to, and disruption and subversion of the (hetero)normal by creating a scandalous public spectacle in its playful performance of the giving and receiving of sensual and erotic pleasures of the kinds and in the forms and to the degrees which the hegemonic (the "straight") culture defines as "perverse."

It may seem strange that I describe a position which advocates such a "return to the body" to be idealist, and, in fact, many adherents of this and of similar kinds of (postmodern) positions claim to be materialists. And yet, I conceive of this as an idealist position because it addresses an abstract and idealized body, a body which is understood in effect as outside of history and society. The dominant currents within contemporary queer theory characteristically address a hyper-individualized and hyper-naturalized body, or, more precisely, the post-textualist body of a hyper-individualized and a hyper-naturalized "experience," a body which evades determination by social forces, escapes location within social relations, eludes regulation by social institutions, and exceeds the constraints of social discourses and social ideologies employed to make sense of and to orient interaction with both one’s own historically and socially real-concrete body and with the historically and socially real-concrete bodies of other historical-social subjects. In other words, postmodern idealist queer theory celebrates a Deleuzian "body without organs" that is conceived to be displaced across the simulacrally post-spatial fissures of a porn-o/u-topically post-text/sex-ual virtual reality.

The principal problem with this "return to experience" in both queer, and other contemporary post-textualist versions of (ludic) postmodern theory is that "experience" is—still—neither auto-intelligible nor an immediate source of knowledge about itself. To experience an event is simply to have lived through it, and, more precisely, to have been directly, personally involved in, affected by, or engaged with what one lived through as it happened. What an experience is understood to mean depends upon what frames of intelligibility are brought to bear to make sense of the experience, and different frames of intelligibility will lead to different interpretations and evaluations of what this experience was all about. The meaning of experience is in fact a critical site of ideological conflict and struggle, as different ways of making sense of a single experience will lead to different ways of making use of this experience in support of different ends and interests. To think that experience itself produces the consciousness which makes sense of itself is to suffer an empiricist illusion which is in fact worse than illusion: it is to accept the—still—dominant—liberal humanist—ideological understanding of "the individual" as independent of the shaping influences of social forces, as an autonomously self-determining agent of her own destiny who simply thinks and feels as she, this sovereign and transcendent subject, wills and/or chooses. Within bourgeois society, only the bourgeoisie maintains the material prerequisites to even approach such a position. Whenever others accept the illusion that they are as free as the bourgeoisie, they of course are gravely mistaken—and, what’s worse, are unable to inquire critically into the interests at stake in the production of both their seeming "freedom" and their real "unfreedom" because they do not even recognize this gap between appearance and reality.

In capitalist society, the capitalist class owns the means of production of making sense as well as the means of production of making goods and thereby exercises a dominant influence over what ways of making sense are allowed to circulate within capitalist society and how so. Proletarians and other oppressed social groups are as subject to capitalist domination over how they make sense of their experience of oppression as they are subject to capitalist domination at the direct site of their oppression in their practical activity as agents of social production and as facilitators of the reproduction of the necessary preconditions for this social production. Misunderstanding experience as a direct source of knowledge about itself serves the interests of capitalist domination by rendering invisible the ways in which knowledge of experience is mediated by means of frames of intelligibility that do not arise out of experience but rather have been produced and disseminated so as to seem like they do, to seem like what simply "comes naturally" and thereby seems merely to reflect "common sense." Yet common sense represents the leading edge of the dominant ideology, and contrary to how it may appear to work, always represents existing reality—including the existing reality of inequality and injustice—in ways which support the reproduction and maintenance of that reality by rendering all efforts at fundamental transformation seemingly inconceivable, undesirable, and/or impossible.

Ludic anarchist queer practice strives to "deconstruct the straight" by revealing how queer the straight ultimately is—how much the straight depends upon not recognizing its own queerity in order to remain straight. The goal of this kind of queer practice becomes to "queer the straight" by showing the straight—always and already—to be just another kind of "odd" condition, and yet a "lesser" kind, because the straight is that which fails to face up to its queerity. This is furthermore understood to be definitive of the straight: the necessary precondition for any pretension to "straightness" is the development and dissemination of the "convenient myth" that sexualities are discretely distinct, clearly divisible between dominant and subordinant, and "majority" and "minority" (and between "normal" and "abnormal," and "natural" and "unnatural"). "Queering the straight" therefore means disrupting and subverting the straight by showing the straight that its standards of what constitute divisions between straight and queer are arbitrary, and thus, in fact, themselves "queer." Ludic anarchist queer practice thus demonstrates that straight standards are designed to protect the straight from its own queerity and yet cannot ultimately succeed in doing this, because the queer always remains proximate within the straight—akin, according to leading queer theorist Jonathan Dollimore, to the "privative" "absent presence" of evil in the Augustinian conception of the perverse.

Postmodern idealist queer theory advocates exposing this situation for what it is, making visible the dependence of the straight upon the queer—both the queer "inside" which the straight fears to accept and yet cannot ever entirely evade or escape, and the queer "outside" which defines the ultimate horizon of the conceivably possible within the realm of sexual relations and practices. As a result, the difference between "living queer" and "living straight" becomes something akin to the difference between authentic versus inauthentic forms of existence: the "authentic" queer does not live in "bad faith," but instead accepts the fact that she is queer and cannot help but be queer, and therefore defiantly revels in being just as queer as she possibly can be. The straight is the "false queer" who "inauthentically" lives in "bad faith," pretending that it is possible to maintain and conform to stable (and, as such, incontestable and unalterable) standards of "normal" and "natural" sexual identity and behavior.

Postmodern idealist queer theory proposes further that queers can force straights to leave queers alone, to let queers live as they want and choose, because the straight world will find that it is less dangerous to itself to do so: otherwise the queer world will use its insidiously perverse power to "queer the straight," by revealing the queer everywhere supposedly concealed within and as such fundamental—in repressed and sublimated form—to the (illusion of an) effectively stable functioning and secure self-reproduction of this straight world. The straight world thus supposedly both always and everywhere needs and fears the queer at the same time that its apparent dominance over the queer can be shown to be illusory; the very vexedness of this dominance supposedly reveals the extent to which the ultimate real power actually belongs to the queer: the straight supposedly only secures its illusory pretense of dominance over the queer because the queer chooses to consent to what is actually only a "masquerade" of domination and subordination.

Unfortunately, however, it is postmodern idealist queer theory which operates according to a fundamentally inadequate—and indeed inaccurate—premise in advocating this kind of "radical" form of ludic anarchist queer practice. Any project concerned with "queering the straight" can only hope to succeed, if it begins from within today’s heterosexist and homophobic late capitalist society and culture, as the result of extensive, painstaking, and extremely difficult work, for a yet very considerable time to come, to make this happen. The continuing—and, in fact, in many instances, continuously expanding—need for gays and lesbians to engage in extensive efforts of organization and mobilization to fight against straight oppression and for queer liberation clearly indicates that "the straight" is at present in no way significantly "queer" or "queered," and certainly is not "always already" in any significant way "queer." At the very least, even if "the straight" "is" always and already in some sense "queer," "the straight" itself is yet by no means either accepting of this "fact" or willing to accept the further "case" that "the queerity" of both queer and straight means that straight and queer "are" equal, and, as such, should be recognized and treated as equal, as enjoying equal right of access and equal opportunity to exercise the general resources, powers, and capacities of straight society and culture.

What’s more, a queer practice which makes the playfully deconstructive performance of "pleasure" a principal instrument of "radical" action can make only a limited and transient contribution to queer liberation and beyond this to general sexual emancipation. The problem is not that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of pleasure, and, in fact, it is certainly true that one of the goals of any kind of radically emancipatory politics must be to work towards the creation of the conditions which will make possible both a quantitative increase in the extent and degree and a qualitative advance in the kind and the power of those pleasures, certainly including sensual and erotic pleasures, that future society will make available—and equitably to all. Yet neither the performative display nor the indulgent pursuit of sensual and erotic pleasures conventionally ascribed as abnormal, unnatural, bizarre, strange, unusual, extreme, and perverse can do very much, in and of itself, to change the highly restricted and extremely unequal access to and exercise of means of pleasure that continues to prevail within fin-de-siecle late capitalism—nor can it overcome the still very powerful and pervasive denigration of homoerotic and homosexual pleasure(s) (as abnormal, unnatural, bizarre, strange, unusual, extreme, and perverse).

When Lee Edelman advocates for a (radical) queer politics that would embrace a "passive agency, an agency that acknowledges its inescapable participation in the production of social effects while acknowledging its inability to control the effects in whose production it thereby figures," an agency whose foremost commitment is towards steadily striving to keep open space for "the unexpected," for "a zone of possibilities in which the embodiment of the subject might be experienced otherwise" ("The Mirror and the Tank: ‘AIDS’, Subjectivity, and the Rhetoric of Activism" 30-31), it is necessary, therefore, to read this as in fact symptomatic of a failure of radicalism on the part of contemporary ("radical") queer theory. Not only does Edelman fail to explain how such a nebulous agency might in actual practice work, including to advance even the most basic queer interests of queer survival and queer perdurability, but he must also immediately confront a significant danger in embracing this kind of queerity: as Edelman himself puts it, this mode of queer politics "may reflect a certain bourgeois aspiration to be always au courant" in its conception of "queer" "as the endlessly mutating token of nonassimilation (and hence as the utopian badge of a would-be ‘authentic’ position of resistance)," and this poses "the risk, to be sure, of producing a version of identity politics as postmodern commodity fetishism" (31). What Edelman and many other, similar queer theoretical celebrants of the "potency" of the "queer-erotic" as a resistant/ disruptive/subversive force do not recognize, however, is that the risk of "producing a version of identity politics as postmodern commodity fetishism" is not simply a free-floating "risk," but a real—and even increasingly predominant—tendency within contemporary queer practice. Queer pursuit of a "cultural politics of subversion" in the interest of promoting the "unexpected" and the "undecidable" takes place on the real terrain of political possibilities as they are defined and delimited within the real historical conjuncture of contemporary late capitalism; in such a setting, queer praxis already has frequently confused "liberation" from a "liberal" politics based upon fixity of identity with a "radical" politics based upon a fluidity of identity which changes in relation to various styles of display and various brands of consumption. In this regard, much of the supposed "radicality" of queer politics is just as "liberal" as that which it ostensibly opposes, insofar as this "radical" praxis not only naively and in effect complacently supports the reproduction and maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, but also follows the characteristic pattern of liberal thinking: positing a homogeneous relation (of subversion) between an abstract(ed) subject (queer performance of deconstruction of the straight) and an abstract(ed) object (the stability of subjective identity within heteronormal culture).

Unlike postmodern idealist queer theory, an historical materialist queer theory envisions "queerity" as neither simply an "odd" kind of knowledge about what it "feels" like to participate within "odd" forms of (social-)sexual existence nor as a kind of knowledge which is "at odds" with the (hetero)normal simply because of its empathetic understanding and, even further than this, its celebratory valorization of this "lived experience" of (social-)sexual "oddity." On the contrary, an historical materialist queer theory is an "odd" form of knowledge about "odd" forms of (social-)sexual existence which is at "odds" with the (hetero-)normal because it is able precisely to explain the actual historical and material conditions of possibility, forces of generation, ends advanced, and interests served by demarcations of what forms of (social-)sexual existence are "odd" and what are not, when, where, how, and how far so within (and across/between) historically and materially concrete social totalities. It is on the basis of this kind of (odd) knowledge that historical materialist queer theory authorizes a revolutionary socialist queer practice.

As a contribution towards the eventual realization of these revolutionary ends, what direction might an historical materialist queer theory pursue in the immediately foreseeable future? Any legitimately historical materialist queer theory will be principally concerned to explain the formation and constitution of different modes of queerity as these take shape along and across multiple axes of queerity within and between concrete social formations by explaining how these modes of queerity operate, through what forms, in what kinds of relations, and as part of what kinds of systems and processes. Therefore, future historical materialist queer theory will certainly be concerned to assist in understanding the conditions which make possible, the forces which give rise to, the ends which are advanced by, and the interests which are served through heterosexist repression of homosexuality and homophobic oppression of gays and lesbians in fin-de-siecle late capitalism. This future historical materialist queer theory will likewise certainly be concerned to assist in understanding what can and should be done effectively to fight back against and successfully to overcome this repression and oppression, in particular by critically assessing the strengths and weaknesses of current forms of gay and lesbian resistance and opposition to heterosexism and homophobia. And yet, historical materialist queer theory must also, as historical materialist theory, always be concerned with more than this as well: it must be concerned with a critical evaluation of the contribution that the currently predominant—and especially the currently predominant forms of "radical"—gay and lesbian resistance and opposition to heterosexism and homophobia are making and potentially can make towards general sexual emancipation through general social transformation. Today this means assessing the contribution ludic anarchist queer practice is making and can make towards the revolutionary socialist transformation of capitalism into communism.

In contrast with a ludic anarchist queer practice, the ultimate telos of a revolutionary socialist queer practice is the destruction and supersession of straight sexual culture in its entirety, and this ultimate telos conditions short-term and medium-term struggle against straight oppression. A revolutionary socialist queer liberation movement aspires to assume the role of a vanguard within a vanguard—i.e. it aspires to serve as a vanguard in the transformation of relations, practices, institutions, and discourses of sexual intimacy and desire as a relatively autonomous and yet vitally constituent part of the revolutionary socialist transformation of the whole of capitalism, capitalist society, and capitalist culture into a whole new communism, communist society, and communist culture.

Communism is the telos of a vast and complete transformation and supersession of capitalist society, a telos realizable only on a global scale and only after many complex and difficult stages of transition—many which cannot be anticipated, at least not fully. Yet communism is also the end result of human labor—of a tremendous amount of accumulated and coordinated human labor, expended by vast numbers of people over vast distances of time and space. Of course, it is impossible to build communism unless the objective preconditions for its construction are available within capitalism, and these include not only the exhaustion and crisis of capitalism, but also the emergence, from within capitalism, of objective tendencies towards a communist form of organization of human society, including the objective socialization and even globalization of production and the increasing necessity in contemporary late capitalism of extensive intra-firm planning and even inter-firm programming of production. In addition, however, to objective preconditions, it is also necessary that subjective means be available to take advantage of these objective preconditions to transform this objective material into communism rather than an alternative post-capitalist future. This means that the creation of communism requires the anticipation of what communism can and should be like and of how communist society can and should work, the establishment as a goal the realization of this possibility in actuality, and the design of a plan by which to work with materials available from within capitalist society to realize this goal. All of this is as necessary in the construction of communism as the raw materials and supplies from which communism will be built; the tools and equipment which will be used in building it; the information, knowledge, ability, skill, and technique necessary to enable the proper and effective use of these tools and equipment; and the organization, energy, effort, and execution necessary actually to carry out the process from beginning to end. In other words, the "subjective factor" in the construction of communism includes not only organization, mobilization, education, and consciousness, but also vision and imagination, planning and strategy—it requires that communism be seen as not merely "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things." Instead, communism must be seen as a, but not the only, real possibility for a future supersession of the capitalist present—and a possibility which can become an actuality only through extensive, deliberate, conscious, and extremely difficult work expended to make this happen, to transform this possibility into actuality. Communism must therefore be conceived of as a concrete utopia, and, in fact, as the concrete utopia of the world proletariat in (late) capitalism.

Thus socialist transformation of capitalism into communism must proceed beyond proletarian seizure of the capitalist state and proletarian expropriation of capitalist control of social production in order for the transition from capitalism to communism to succeed, and thus also requires the revolutionary transformation and transcendence of capitalist modes of subjectivity such that the realization of communism will depend upon the invention of a radically new kind of human being. This new communist human being will be of a kind that would seem to us, if we could encounter such a being, as intrinsically both masculine and feminine, as seemingly both a man and a woman, and because of this, this new kind of human being will be in fact really neither masculine nor feminine, neither man nor woman but instead something new, something of a character that will have superseded the usefulness—in fact the meaningfulness— of such divisions and demarcations. In fact, this new communist human being would probably not seem in all respects equally masculine and feminine to us, equally a man and a woman, but instead would more likely seem, at least in the area of close interpersonal relations, relations of sexual intimacy and desire, to be more feminine than masculine, and to be more "like a woman" than "like a man." In addition, not only would this future communist human being seem to be what we would describe as "bisexual," but also this new communist human being would likely seem to us, in general, to be far more queer than straight, and especially in the way that this communist human being engaged in relations of camaraderie, solidarity, friendship, and love.

In order to prevent such an anticipation of a prospective future communist human being from seeming a mere fantastic indulgence—and at best a far distant future possibility—it is necessary to begin to struggle towards the accomplishment of this end by working with the materials at hand in present late capitalist society. We can struggle forward not only through disruption and subversion of capitalist hegemony, but also by means of the development of counterfactual models and anticipatory prototypes, albeit always necessarily partial and limited, of proto-communist sexual subjectivities and proto-communist relations, practices, institutions, and discourses of intimacy and desire. This means that a revolutionary socialist queer (sub)culture should refuse consignment to queer ghettos (whether these ghettoes are discrete geographic locations or whether they are discrete kinds of institutional positions in discrete kinds of cultural practices in discrete areas of social activity) and strive instead to prepare the conditions of possibility and to provide the forces of generation for the eventual emergence of a proto-communist queer sexual (sub)culture which could supersede straight sexual culture as the dominant sexual culture within socialist and communist society. Of course, disruption and subversion remain preeminent concerns for radical queer praxis under conditions of straight hegemony, and yet it is still possible (and indeed necessary) to begin to prepare the way forward—and in doing so to contribute to the compulsion for so moving forward—towards the future point in which it will be necessary to remake the dominant sexual culture and to produce new modes of subjectivity adequate for an emancipated sexual culture within an emancipated society.

It is at the eventual point of revolutionary socialist transition from capitalism to communism that real progress towards the ultimate elimination of the need for recognition of division between queer and straight will depend first upon queer temporarily supplanting straight as both the dominant mode of sexual subjectivity and as the dominant form of sexual culture. In this regard, it is possible to imagine that the prospective place of queerity in the revolutionary socialist transition to communism will be analogous to that of the dictatorship of the proletariat in which the proletariat must first become the dominant class in order to establish the basis upon which the proletariat can lead the movement of revolutionary social transformation that will gradually altogether eliminate the interests invested in and the needs dependent upon the maintenance of class divisions. As with the revolutionary socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, a revolutionary socialist queer liberation movement can only fully emancipate queers by contributing towards setting in motion the processes of broader social transformation that will lead to the elimination of the very basis—the real objective interests at stake—for continuing to divide and rank categories of human begins according to differences of gender and sexual orientation.