Criticism Volume 52 Issue 2 Honoring Eve: A Special Issue on the Work of Article 22 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

2010 Queer Marx John Andrews CUNY Graduate Center

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Recommended Citation Andrews, John (2010) "Queer Marx," Criticism: Vol. 52: Iss. 2, Article 22. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol52/iss2/22 Queer Marx In the introduction to his collection of essays For Marx (1965), Louis John Andrews Althusser tells us that one of Marx- ian philosophy’s unique assets—and one of its ongoing challenges—is The Reification of Desire: Toward its ability to account for itself, “to a Queer Marxism by Kevin Floyd. take itself as its own object.”1 Cer- Minneapolis: University of Minne- tainly, Marxism’s historical reflex- sota Press, 2009. Pp. 304, 4 black- ivity has propelled its enduring and-white photos. $75.00 cloth, power to describe and explain the $25.00 paper. fallouts and reinventions of capi- talism. Yet this power has in recent decades been eclipsed by critiques of its tendency to reduce all of social relations to relations of economic production, relegating particularities such as race or sex “in the final instance” (asA lthusser might say) to class. One of the most trenchant of these critiques has come from queer theory, a field whose own critical efficacy has also been called into question in recent years. The wholesale “queering” of any fixed epistemological category alongside the “homonormaliza- tion” of LGBT politics prompted the editors of a special volume of Social Text to ask “What’s Queer about Queer Studies Now?”2 The issue of Marxism’s and queer theo- ry’s ongoing critical power—and their seeming incommensurabil- ity—sets the backdrop for Kevin Floyd’s ambitious and careful book The Reification of Desire. A pri- mary aim of the book is to demon- strate how these two theoretical projects’ weaknesses can reinvigo- rate one another—particularly at a moment in history when the social

Criticism, Spring 2010, Vol. 52, No. 2, pp. 343–347. ISSN: 0011-1589. 343 © 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201-1309. 344 JOHN ANDREWS differentiation entailed by global in elaborating some of the material capitalism has increasingly tended bases often ignored by the field, in to deradicalize politics, including particular here the entrance of queer politics. Fordism in the twentieth century Floyd’s approach, however, is and the transition to post-Fordism. explicitly Marxian, and he seems to The book as a whole or totality devote more adroit care in address- (reification’s dialectical other) suc- ing this potentially skeptical audi- ceeds because of the openings gen- ence than a queer one. To this end, erated by juxtaposing these two his guide (and sometimes object of critical knowledges and reversing critique) is Georg Lukács, a theo- (or, more nearly, “queering”) their rist who reminds us that Marxian reifying tendencies: for Marxism orthodoxy refers not necessarily to by concretizing subjectivity, sexu- the content but to the method of ality in particular; for queer theory, critique; that is, fidelity to the dia- by expanding the scope of its criti- lectic. And, indeed, the structure cal tools to include dialectical ma- of The Reification of Desire mirrors terialism. that of Lukács’s chapter on reifica- The individual chapters in The tion in History and Class Conscious- Reification of Desire offer many (of- ness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics ten incisive) insights. Chapter 1 on (1923), moving from the objective “Disciplined Bodies” examines the to the subjective moment of reifi- reifying consequences of the ex- cation at different points in twenti- propriation of scientific knowledge eth-century history. Importantly, from bodies at a point in the early Floyd recognizes that reification as twentieth century when capital is a concept is one most susceptible to increasingly “freed” from labor, reification itself simply because the and the market becomes oriented ever-commodifying world tends to toward service and consumption. dehistoricize human experience For example, by regimenting the and knowledge by proliferating time and space of production, the equivalences via market exchange. logics of Taylorism sought to max- In this sense, reification is concep- imize output and cheapen labor; tually always-already reified. By concomitantly the emergent sci- bringing in a queer critique, Floyd ence of psychoanalysis regimented aims to salvage reification from its the time and space of therapeutic passive, contemplative usage by services, deploying sexuality— demonstrating how “the merely especially male sexuality—to be cultural” in all its particularities reproductively active and unwaste- can engender active, conscious ful. For Floyd, these two epistemo- subjectivities—that is, the precon- logical innovations operated in dition for praxis. Along the way, tandem to institute differentiations Floyd complicates queer histories that would not only organize social ON FLOYD’s REIFICATION OF DESIRE 345 life in the first half of the twentieth prevailed in the United States be- century (work/leisure; production/ came a primary reference both for consumption; private/public), but the Cold War state that viewed ho- also establish sexual subjectivities mosexuals as a threat to national in terms of gendered objects of security and for burgeoning homo- desire. Thus, the appearance of phile movements that saw psycho- “heterosexual” and “homosexual” analysis as a barrier to their as discrete categories is the reifica- assimilationist politics. As Floyd tion of desire itself, one that always details in chapter 3, the universal- reconstitutes the gender epistemol- ization and minoritization of ho- ogy that mediates it. Chapter 2 mosexuality by the state and by concretizes this argument by show- homophile movements respectively ing how the shift from an emphasis resurfaced in Marxian thought of on production to one of consump- the time, most importantly in the tion coincided with the introduc- work of Herbert Marcuse. For tion of “masculinity” (rather than Floyd, Marcuse’s Eros and Civiliza- manhood) as a performative ideal. tion (1955) was unique not only be- As represented by Esquire maga- cause it represented a radical, zine or the works of Hemingway, historical reading of Freud but masculinity Floyd argues becomes more importantly here because it a sort of embodied knowledge introduced a qualitative compo- within the now-sedimented prac- nent into the analysis of reifica- tices of Taylorism and Fordism: as tion—that is, the erotic—which something to be consumed by and presents a libratory potential within taught to a labor force with in- the reifying process: the passive in- creasing leisure time, but also used strumentalization of the body for in the shop or factory as an instru- pleasure. Yet less than ten years mental performance, thereby eas- later in One-Dimensional Man ing the smooth accumulation of (1964), Marcuse pointedly cri- capital. As Floyd puts it, “[The] tiqued instrumental rationality’s masculinized body becomes a sub- saturation of mass society; and, in ject of technical knowledge pre- particular, his discussion of “re- cisely in becoming subject to pressive desublimation” revoked technical knowledge” (109, em- the libratory potential of the erotic phasis in the original). Thus, Floyd that he had previously articulated. in this chapter succeeds in adding a This contradiction is particularly necessary historical component to pronounced considering that a Judith Butler’s theory of gender radical gay liberation movement performance. had begun to emerge by the early By the middle of the twentieth 1960s. For Floyd this disconnect is century, the conservative medical- symptomatic of Marcuse’s inability ized version of psychoanalysis that in the earlier work to move beyond 346 JOHN ANDREWS thinking of the erotic as merely ob- 2 and 4). A tension arises between jective in or for the body; in other these two mediators and the his- words, to deal with sexual subjec- torical and theoretical work that tivity as such. Chapter 4 brings us the book as a whole is attempting. to the late 1960s, when the Fordist For example, if masculinity medi- organization of coordinated pro- ated changing relations of produc- duction and standardized con- tion and emergent sexual identities, sumption began to break down, then a discussion of femininity and including the rigorous heterosex- feminism also seems necessary es- ual masculinity it necessitated and pecially when we consider the im- engendered. In analysis of erotic portance of women’s labor (both in images of hypermasculinized men the factory and in the home), as in Physique Pictorial magazine well as the primary influence of and the deterritorialization of the feminist thought on queer theory cowboy in James Leo Herlihy’s itself. Similarly, if psychoanalysis Midnight Cowboy (1965), Floyd facilitated the configuration of or- contends that the devaluations of ganized work and private con- labor, commodities, and ultimate- sumption, and the cohesion of ly the Fordist regime itself was sexual subjectivities and gendered concomitant with the “collective sex objects, then a discussion of the homosexualizing of masculinity” racialisms of Freud’s metapsychol- (171), a kind of devaluation of the ogy or of the vexed relationship gender norms that mediated the psychoanalysis has had with its fe- sexual categories of heterosexual male subjects might complicate the and homosexual. whiteness and male-centrism pre- Some common threads connect supposed in much of Marxian and these first chapters. Floyd insists queer thought. These problems do that sexuality must be viewed as not necessarily weaken the book intimately intertwined with other but more than anything open new social and historical developments avenues for ongoing inquiry within in the twentieth century, an entan- this exciting theoretical project. glement that operates in numer- One of the tendencies of capital- ous, disparate fields. Because of ism in its epistemological claims to this, the reification of desire at any universalism is to dehistoricize hu- point in history takes different man experience and social relation- forms vis-à-vis the totality of social ships. The imperative for Marxian relations. Implicit in Floyd’s analy- analysis to “always historicize” sis are what Lukács calls categories presents a paradox of historicizing of mediation that dialectically link the now, where new social forma- reification and totality. Here, these tions are in the making and old are psychoanalysis (in chapters 1 ones linger. (This may have been and 3) and masculinity (in chapters what Jacques Derrida meant when ON FLOYD’s REIFICATION OF DESIRE 347 he invokes Shakespeare in Spectres for including me in their meeting of Marx (1994) that “time is out of for The Reification of Desire. joint.”) It is no wonder then that Floyd’s final chapter “Notes on a John Andrews is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the CUNY Queer Horizon”—an analysis of Graduate Center. His dissertation project the simultaneous social disintegra- examines the interplay between affect, tion and homonormalization for subjectivity, and economic crisis in the period of American neoliberalism. He has published queers precipitated by neoliberal most recently in the journals Women and governance—brings us just short Performance and Social Text. of the present. Here, Floyd reads David Wojnarowicz’s memoir Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Notes Disintegration (1991) as performing a refusal of both of these injunc- 1. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben tions made by capital. At this point, Brewster (London: Verso, 2005). some readers of the book may be 2. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer left wondering where this leaves about Queer Studies Now?” Social Text us, what new tools has this theo- 23, no. 4 (2005): 84–85. retical experiment supplied? More 3. althusser, For Marx, 113. than anything, Floyd has ener- gized the concept of reification— rescuing it from its own reification by demonstrating that Lukács’s project is in fact (as Fredric Jameson contends) an unfinished one. Through his rigorous analysis of the reification of desire, Floyd shows us that a critical appropria- tion of “reification” needs to be contextualized historically and alongside multiple subjectivities. This may be an important lesson for many Marxists who insist that social relations are reducible “in the last instance” to the objective relations of production. But even Althusser tells us—and Kevin Floyd so aptly demonstrates—that the “lonely hour of the ‘last in- stance’ never comes.”3 Special thanks to the Washing- ton, DC, Queer Reading Group