Eugenia Zuroski

In its commitment to a revived pursuit of queer horizons in an age of decolonial dreams, this collection of essays is dedicated to longing—not as an object of theory, but as practice. As such, it formally resists conclusion as it is oriented away from and beyond closure. But the con- is very much part of what these pages set in motion: the sense of “being with,” the technique of collecting together. In the collective’s final pages, then, this coda asks how we might practice coming together in an opening rather than an enclosure; how we might collect our energies around indeterminate desires rather than shared objects of pursuit; how we might move together in an undoing, rather than a doing, of something.

The thread that holds this collection together might be this question: How can those of us practicing eighteenth-century studies long together? This is perhaps the quintessential eighteenth-century studies question two decades into the twenty-first century, when multiple generations of scholars have come to take for granted that the century in which we specialize is notoriously “long.” The eighteenth century has been long for so long, one might say, that its length has lost its charm, which in the context of academic fields means that the coherence of its explanatory power is failing.

Is the eighteenth century that we study too long? Has it gone on quite long enough already? Or does it invite us to reconsider how to long through and beyond it? In On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart focuses on the state of longing to ask: “How can we describe something? What relation does the description bear to ideology and the very invention of that ‘something’?”¹ In the detailed study of modern subject formation that this question engenders, Stewart shows descriptive narrative to be a particular concern of European imperial powers of the long eighteenth century, in their various quests for the semantic closures that would make newly “discovered” worlds make sense, and place the colonial subject in meaningful relation to these “new” worlds, through logics of measurement, aesthetic judgment, commercial circulation, and property. Colonial descriptive narrative is a technique, in other words, for yielding both the “something” that promises to satisfy longing and the “someone” defined by such longing. It doesn’t extinguish desire but maps it onto identifiable, enclosed territories that can be assessed, governed, disciplined, and accounted for—that can tell you what something, or someone, is.

The call back to eighteenth-century studies’ queer horizons is a call away from the territorializing projects of the eighteenth century, and back to the indeterminate coordinates of longing as a utopian, not imperial, practice. In “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing” (1964), Bloch and Adorno think together about the tension between utopian longing and the forms of cultural and technological invention that are generated historically in the social pursuit of utopian futures. When the moderator opens the discussion by asking about the “depreciation” of the concept of utopia in their own historical moment, Adorno answers by invoking a fairy tale:

I would like to remind us that numerous so-called utopian dreams—for example, television, the possibility of traveling to other planets, moving faster than sound—have been fulfilled. However, insofar as these dreams have been realized, they all operate as though the best thing about them had been forgotten—one is not happy about them. As they have been realized, the dreams themselves have assumed a peculiar character of sobriety, of the spirit of positivism, of boredom. What I mean by this is that it is not simply a matter of presupposing that what really is has limitations as opposed to that which has infinitely imaginable possibilities. Rather, I mean something concrete, namely, that one sees oneself almost always deceived: the fulfillment of the wishes takes something away from the substance of the wishes, as in the fairy tale where the farmer is granted three wishes and, I believe, he wishes his wife to have a sausage on her nose and then must use the second wish to have the sausage removed from her nose.²

I take Adorno’s theoretical point here—that as a principle of social and especially of technological progress, utopian thinking must habitually disavow its own utopian longing as a way of committing to each new reality that is brought into being. These ideological commitments to the reality of the present are wedded to registers of minor aesthetics and low affect (in this case, “sobriety,” “positivism,” “boredom”) that, as Sianne Ngai has argued, rehearse the fundamental social relations of late capitalism as a matter of just how things are.³ The substance of the utopian dream, in other words, is the audacity to dream at all. One simply cannot hope for what has already arrived, and one must acknowledge the arrival by pretending the magical thinking of hope has nothing to do with it.

I return to this passage again and again, not to revive my understanding of the politics of dreams but to think about the sausage. Why does the farmer wish to have a sausage on his wife’s nose? One explanation, supported by his “having to” use the second wish to undo the first, is that he is simply testing the wish-granting technology—a sausage suddenly appearing on his wife’s nose being the most outlandish, least possible thing he can think of in the moment. Another is that he is simply hungry—too hungry to “think straight,” as it were. As Adorno and Bloch both acknowledge in their conversation, wishes are forms of desire and are therefore categorically erotic, even if—perhaps especially if—they cannot be narratively “accounted for.” What we do know is that under some confluence of pressures and imaginings, the wish that leaps first to the farmer’s expression is for his wife to have an edible phallus on her face. In the way of fairy tales, which is also the way of dreams, the farmer’s inarticulable longing takes the comedically absurd form of a literal “longing” in the elongation of his wife’s nose. That this particular wish’s fulfillment mandates its immediate reversal tells a story not merely about utopia’s tense relationship with the real, but specifically about queer desire’s radical capacity to shock its own dreamers—the way it can make one feel “deceived” by one’s own wishes in the moment of their expression—and its profound incapacity to settle for what is shown to be possible.

I was introduced to the concept of the “queer horizon,” like so many of us, by José Esteban Muñoz, with whom Jeremy and Shelby opened, and whose appearance has been peppered throughout, this collection. We conclude with it here—as queer bookends might. In “Queerness as Horizon,” Muñoz insists that queerness is a site of collective hope on the order of utopia, that “Queerness is utopian, and there is something queer about the utopian.”⁴ To embrace it as such is to understand, and to accept, that queer exists somewhere beyond the possibility of embrace—that it is never the here and now, but the “then and there” of Muñoz’s title, or, both more and less precisely, the “not-quite-conscious” theorized by Bloch in The Principle of Hope. This is not to say that queerness and utopia never find material form, but rather, that understood as two aspects of the same phenomenon, queer/utopia names a refusal to stop dreaming at the moment of fulfillment.

In his conversation with Adorno, Bloch too locates the “richly prospective doubt [of the satisfactions of the present] and the decisive incentive toward utopia” in the two-word sentence by Brecht, “Something’s missing”: “What is this something? If it is not allowed to be cast in a picture, then I shall portray it as in the process of being (seiend). But one should not be allowed to eliminate it as if it really did not exist so that one could say the following about it: ‘It’s about the sausage.’ ”⁵ In the margin of my copy of “Something’s Missing,” my notation of this passage consists of a bunch of excited scrawls and exclamation marks around “the sausage,” followed by a somewhat more subdued, “Wait, what sausage??” Bloch clarifies as he goes on, invoking “the old peasant saying, there is no dance before the meal. People must first fill their stomachs, and then they can dance … only when all the guests have sat down at the table can the Messiah, can Christ come.”⁶ His point, as I understand it, is that “the sausage” (whichever sausage) is necessary but only because people have to eat, have to survive, in order to make themselves available to the miracle of utopia, the not-yet-here, the not-(about)-sausage. “It’s about the sausage” is the mantra of pragmatism, “something’s missing” the plaint of the utopian. And yet, in the tale of the farmer and his wife, the sausage is the something that is missing, except for the brief, miraculous moment when it is not. And the sausage is the thing that is eliminated in the farmer’s immediate disavowal of queer desire made manifest. Utopia, then, both is and is not about the sausage. The sausage itself is not about the sausage. Because in queer/utopia, a sausage is never just a sausage.

Read as a fable of queer/utopian yearning, the tale of the sausage is not only about the (unrealized) possibility of owning one’s most outlandish desires but also about the importance, in the process of such forthright yearning, of taking responsibility for the things one actually does in the messy material pursuit of the missing thing. Rather than be allowed to wish it away, what if the farmer had to deal with the sausage, had to reckon with the conflagration of desires and impulses that brought the sausage about, and, most importantly, had to address the consequences of the sausage’s manifestation for the person most directly affected by it, his wife?

Bloch offers a brief history of Euro-Western utopian projects that clarifies why any present commitment to queer/utopian futurity must similarly grapple, earnestly and intensely, with the imperial history of utopian ventures past: “At the very beginning, Thomas More designated utopia as a place, an island in the distant South Seas. This designation underwent changes later so that it left space and entered time. Indeed, the utopians, especially those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, transposed the wishland more into the future. In other words, there is a transformation of the topos from space into time.”⁷ This philosophical transformation does not belong merely to a “history of ideas” but to the history of European empire. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transposition of utopian imaginings from geographical space to historical time corresponds to the actual expansion of colonial occupations into the “distant South Seas” and myriad other global sites fantasized by European cultures as versions of heaven on earth. More’s elaborate pun in the term utopia, whose Greek etymology refers both to “good place” and “no place,” registers the fundamental tension between utopian longing and geographic settling, a tension that impels the voracious colonial appetites of the long eighteenth century.⁸ Like the sausage on the farmer’s wife’s nose, perhaps, the realities of colonial occupation didn’t correspond to the utopian yearnings that motivated the grand project of imperial expansion. By relocating the dreams of empire from space to time, colonial cultures were able to embrace occupation as a pragmatic reality—“how things are” and what “must be done” to keep them that way—while projecting their utopian desires into the future, where they cannot be reached by journey but only by settlement: the dedicated, which is to say violent, development of the here and now into something else.

As this collection shows, any present commitment to queer horizons and the utopian longings that move us toward them must therefore begin with an unsettling. This is distinctively, though not exclusively, a project for eighteenth-century studies, because eighteenth-century culture is where the utopian dreams of European global expansion turned starkly into the establishment of settler colonial nation-states upon mythologies of economic and historical necessity (later “manifest destiny”), not the extravagant urges of utopian hope. As each of the essays gathered here reveals in its own way, the queerness of empire’s utopian urges doesn’t disappear in the projects of colonization and settlement, but is dispersed into various explanatory and descriptive narratives that wrangle indeterminate longing into specific subjectivities animated by specific affordances within specific political orders. These specificities are the eighteenth century’s ideological enclosures of meaning, the empire’s “somethings” drawn in detail and arranged meticulously to make a colonized world make sense. And, for this reason, they are what anticolonial eighteenth-century studies must reopen and unmap in the revitalization of queer hope. “Hope,” Bloch says toward the end of his conversation with Adorno, “is not confidence. If it could not be disappointed, it would not be hope.… Otherwise, it would be cast in a picture. It would let itself be bargained down. It would capitulate and say, that is what I had hoped for.”⁹ Hope, in other words, remains unsettled because it does not settle. To unsettle the orders of sexuality that take shape through the eighteenth century’s colonizing projects is to say: This is not what we hoped for, this is not who we hope to be.

The queer horizons toward which this collection orients itself are focal points that reopen the possibility of being outside of or beyond colonization. (Re)turning to the queer horizon in the wake of European empire is a commitment, or a compulsion, to want more and to want otherwise, without disavowing that which one once wanted and now no longer wants, and without promising not to want differently going forward. As Jeremy and Shelby write in the introduction, the directionality indicated by queer horizons is, by Enlightenment measures of space and time, baffling: “A queer horizon can be behind, besides, adjacent, and in front of us. Other queer directions and prepositions abound. We seek them out here. A queer horizon does not exist in a single temporality. It is not linear. It is not hierarchical. It is not an ontology. It defers stable signification.” A queer horizon prompts us to move in convoluted, seemingly contradictory ways because moving toward it entails revisiting where one has been, how one has come, what has been done, and what needs undoing. There is no “ground to cover,” but there is immense work to be done, which this collection concludes with by way of invitation. As the poet Canisia Lubrin writes in “Dream #29” of The Dyzgraph*st, the queer dream of undoing empire is located in

these hours where finally

we demand

the fucked-with be unfucked-with¹⁰

A dedicated longing away from imperial worldmaking leads us simultaneously backward and forward, in time and in space, along laborious dreamways of unfucking-up every territory—material, conceptual, embodied, and subjective—conscripted into empire’s self-narrative. We are being prompted, here, to—finally—unfulfill each colonial wish as we go long, together.

NOTES

1. 1. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), ix.

2. 2. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Boston: MIT Press, 1988), 1.

3. 3. Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

4. 4. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 26.

5. 5. Bloch, The Utopian Function, 15.

6. 6. Bloch, The Utopian Function, 15.

7. 7. Bloch, The Utopian Function, 3.

8. 8. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who called my attention to More’s pun and observed that “More’s Utopia registers the settler desire to move into territories where things are supposedly better than they are ‘here’ … this becomes one of the settler justifications for colonialism. How, then, would queer longing unsettle this colonialist impulse?” Let’s find out!

9. 9. Bloch, The Utopian Function, 16.

10. 10. Canisia Lubrin, The Dyzgraph*st (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2020), 82.