Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence 9781531502720

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1 Huddle
2 Commune
3 Groupuscule
4 Ensemble
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index

Citation preview

GROU P WO RKS

Group Works ART, PO LITICS, AN D CO LLE CTIVE AM B IVALEN CE

Ethan Philbrick

Fordham University Press

New York 2023

Copyright © 2023 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or thirdparty Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 25 24 23 First edition

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Contents

Introduction 1. Huddle

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2. Commune

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3. Groupuscule 4. Ensemble

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Afterword

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Acknowledgments Notes

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Index

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GROU P WO RKS

Introduction

Growing up, my mom had two sayings that have become something like the moral refrains of our relationship: “judgment and posture” and “good people do bad things in groups.” The first, “judgment and posture,” was pretty straightforward—a reminder that she would call out as I left the house, a supportive command for clarity and uprightness as I made my way through the world. I’ve come to think of it as one of my first lessons in the field I was eventually to do my graduate studies in: performance studies. My mom subtly taught me about techniques of the body and the performance of everyday life while also helping me understand that judgment and decision-making were not abstract cognitive pursuits but also bodily processes of posture and positioning. The second of my mom’s phrases, “good people do bad things in groups,” is a statement and a sentiment with a long intellectual and political history. In Europe, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the group circulated as a dangerously passionate and irrational crowd, 1

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a monstrous conglomeration that induced a loss of selfboundedness, a mad mass in which ethical codes and individuating capacities disappeared into a swirl of collective suggestibility. The French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895, describing the group as a troubling relational formation in which even the most educated individuals lose their critical faculties in the swirl of group suggestibility. In 1921, Sigmund Freud penned Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, describing the group as an unsettling collective psychic situation in which “a number of individuals . . . have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal.”1 Both Le Bon and Freud were suspicious of the group, associating libidinally and affectively charged gatherings with the individual’s loss of moral, ethical, and critical faculties. The mad-bad group became a figure through which to shore up an ideology of the individual as the appropriate unit for human rationality, agency, and goodness. As one might expect, the mad-bad group was also racialized, gendered, and classed. These cautionary discourses around the group were articulated in moments of class anxiety about the organizational capacity of the industrial proletariat, imperialist worry about the apparent engroupment of colonial subjects, and patriarchal concern about the inappropriate grouping capacities of feminine subjects. While my mom’s utterance might have had a long history of racist, sexist, and classist anxiety, she stepped into this discursive inheritance not to voice an anxiety about an unruly, uprising crowd but in an attempt to counsel my twelve-yearold proto-gay self as I navigated middle school when, unbeknownst to her, a group of boys was harassing me every day during and after school. I was having an acute experience of the violent masculinist group—getting pressed into corners and swallowed up in injurious huddles of thrashing bodies

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and lacerating words—and she would call out as I went to school, “Remember, good people do bad things in groups!” She was worried that I might fall prey to group suggestibility and be bad toward someone else, unaware that I was in the midst of an injurious group formation myself. Under these conditions, I experienced her utterance as confusingly caring. It became a call for a prophylactic forgiveness of the boys amidst their violence, a displacement of persondirected rage for an abstract sense of their impersonal badness, an urge to imagine the potential good of the individual within a moment of collective violence. It also became a call to engage in something like structural analysis: to recognize the ways in which the middle school boys were participating in toxic structures of masculinity, a common ideological inheritance that was injuring us all—a more abstract sense of the bad group, a system of domination that preceded us, and we were all ensnared in it. In many ways, I’ve come to think of this book about art, politics, and the group as one big, circuitous, and indirect attempt to move through and disentangle my mom’s refrain. When I began work on this project, I was a graduate student in New York City in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street’s general assemblies in Zuccotti Park. I had a desire for collectivity that was filled with the promise of Occupy’s novel group formations. Yet, simultaneously, much of my work outside research and artmaking was increasingly becoming a scene of neoliberal group exploitation—brainstorming co-working sessions and team-building training sessions followed by collaboratively authored reports. With this ambivalence in mind, I began to think about group formation not in order to flip the terms of my mom’s phrase and argue for the goodness of the group,2 moving from the phobic figure of the mad-bad group to a normative figure of the rational-good group, but to meditate on the ambivalence of

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the group by performing a historiographic archaeology of group aesthetics and politics in the neoliberal era. To do this, I turned to artists in Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s that were engaging with the small group as a material and medium for artistic and political experimentation and put them in conversation with more recent group works. I was curious about how the group surfaced in art and politics beyond images of the bad or the good and focused on the 1960s and 1970s because the decades hold such a central position in the current political and artistic imaginary—circulating as a kind of temporal image of social fecundity and political resistance while also marked by neoliberal reactionism and the transition into the neoliberal epoch. I wanted to see if the shifts and impasses surrounding the figure of the group in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s might have something to say about the shifts and impasses in group formation I was experiencing in New York in the present. I also wanted to add some more cross-generational refrains to my existing maternal transmissions about the group and see what they would do to my desire for collectivity. I wanted to investigate the intensities of group experience and yet upend what I thought I already knew, asking questions about group formation under neoliberalism to get at a broader set of questions about the relationship between the individual and the collective, politics and art, the past and the present. As I began my inquiry, I was especially taken with individual artists in the 1960s and 1970s who worked with an impulse to collectivize in their work but were just off-track from the artists and collectives often centrally included in historiographies of the post–World War II New York avant-garde.3 The artists I was drawn to didn’t necessarily attempt to form solid artist collectives or embark on successful collaborations. Instead, they were solitary figures that circulated an ambivalent urge to experiment with group formation. They didn’t

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approach the group as good or bad, but as a medium through which to explore the political frustrations and aesthetic possibilities of their time. Eventually, I landed on four group works by four individual artists working in four different mediums in the 1960s and 1970s that have become the center point of each chapter that follows: Simone Forti’s dance construction, Huddle (1961); Samuel R. Delany’s memoir of communal living, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1969/78); Lizzie Borden’s experimental documentary of feminist collectivity, Regrouping (1976); and Julius Eastman’s insurgent piece of chamber music for four pianos, Gay Guerrilla (1979). These works were all created in the years surrounding the transition into the neoliberal era. For the feminist social theorist Lisa Duggan, neoliberalism names the pro-business anxious response to the redistributive social movements and progressive internationalism of the 1950s and 1960s.4 It is a set of economic policies and political ideologies that cohered in the early 1970s—and were consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s—that emphasized governmental deregulation and privatization, valued individual responsibility and competition, and supported the free mobility of capital globally while repressing the mobility of laboring bodies. As the lead-up and context to the emergence of the neoliberal ethos, the 1960s and 1970s were a time when inherited categories of life in common were in flux, and collective forms of resistance and refusal gathered around categories of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and class in novel ways (i.e., “the New Left,” “third worldism,” “the women’s liberation movement,” “the Black Power movement,” “the gay liberation movement”). During that period, neoliberalism came into focus as a new configuration of domination in a defensive response to these attempts to redistribute the world. As scholars such as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, neoliberalism, as

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a political and economic logic, attempted to absorb the resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s by presenting its own forms of decentralized, nonhierarchical sociality, shifting the terms of economic exploitation toward group experience (i.e., co-working, brainstorming, team-building) while simultaneously fragmenting inherited collective forms of resistance such as the political party and the labor union.5 The neoliberal era is a regime of networked governance and management in which racialized capitalism spreads imperialistically under the guise of freedom and global connectivity while bringing a rise in inequality and heightened isolation everywhere it touches. The small group emerged for artists such as Forti, Delany, Borden, and Eastman in this fractured scene as an ambivalent figure and material. It was not a stable, idealizable entity. Instead, it was a kind of doing with the difficulties, impossibilities, and blockages of collectivity. The small group arose as larger collective forms broke down. As a medium, the small group seemed to offer these artists a way to negotiate and contest the shifting terms of life in common as the neoliberal era emerged. Since the 1960s and 1970s, the small group has remained an especially charged social form for both the dissemination of neoliberal worldviews and the contestation of their principles and practices. Now, twenty years into the twenty-first century, I wanted to put the group works of the 1960s and 1970s in conversation with group works from today—not only to disentangle my mom’s phrase but also to think about how the group has functioned as material for artists within the context of neoliberalism’s emergence and how it continues to function now as the neoliberal world order both intensifies and fractures with the rise of global fascism and technocapitalism heralded by figures such as Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos. To do this, I have placed the works of Forti,

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Delany, Borden, and Eastman alongside a series of recent group experiments: Forti’s Huddle is put into relation with contemporary reperformances of Forti’s score and huddling as a feminist political tactic; Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast speaks to performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s 2017 communal musical adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 text, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions; Borden’s Regrouping sits alongside visual artist Sharon Hayes’s 2014 piece on Manhattan’s Pier 54 Women of the World Unite! they said; and Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is paired with contemporary projects that take up his legacy by artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden. In what follows, I spend each chapter attuning myself to the disruptions, incursions, and evasions of these group works from then and now. I write alongside them—amplifying and extending the forms, concepts, and impasses they elaborate and work out—in an attempt to extract the mutating terms of gathering and assembling in the 1960s and 1970s and consider what they might have to offer our present moment. Over the past few years of research and writing, my mother’s refrain “good people do bad things in groups” has turned into something like: What kind of a good-bad thing is a group to do? When do we do things in groups, and why? How do we group, and how does the how matter? To give a sense of my points of departure for investigating these questions, I offer three short essays on the group tuned to three different registers—group theory, group politics, and group art—before turning to archival traces of one visionary small group from the 1970s, the Combahee River Collective, and the resonance of their work in Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. I hope these mini-essays and initial case study will provide a sense of what is to come and set up some of the stakes for the chapters that follow.

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Group Theory A group is always a regrouping and rearticulation of a prior engroupment. It is not some scene of newfound collectivity suddenly made by otherwise isolated, solitary individuals. There is no individual before the group. Said another way, we are always already engrouped. A group is not a gathering of discrete possessive individuals in search of cohesion, merger, and unity; it is an articulation of a dynamic process of relational reconfiguration in which already fundamentally entangled subjects engage in shifting scenes of differentiation. It is not a putting together of separate entities but a scene of already ontologically inseparable beings rearticulating their relations. Within this prior engroupment, the term “group” names a multifarious desire or need to gather in a new, small way. Groups, when announced as such, tend to be beyond the grouping of a family (bigger and less Oedipal) but before the grouping of an institution (smaller and less ossified). They are gatherings that are initiated, not inherited. Groups are what happen when established forms of collective life break down. They are somewhere between four and twelve. In the lexicon of French sociologist Bruno Latour, groups are tumultuous scenes of already ongoing group formation and deformation. For Latour, this means that groups are performatively defined relational processes rather than ostensively defined things. Latour writes, “Social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition—like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger—but only of a performative definition. They are made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist.”6 Groups are not things with already determined essences, but clamorous relational processes that exist only through their own contestation and negotiation—“on-going

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process[es] made up of uncertain, fragile, controversial, and ever-shifting ties.”7 Building on the structure of J. L. Austin’s theory of performativity in which linguistic utterances do not necessarily only describe preexisting things in the world but also enact their own force and world-shaping capacities, groups do not preexist in the scene of their enactment but are incessantly constituted and reconstituted through the terms and procedures of their gathering. For the feminist theorist Teresa Brennan, group formation precedes the formation of the individual. By attuning her readers to the movements and jumps of affects, kinesthetic rhythms, and bodily sensations between social subjects, Brennan argues, “We are not self-contained in terms of our energies. There is no secure distinction between the ‘individual’ and the ‘environment.’ ”8 Brennan provides an account of the human subject as permeable, always already engrouped, and constituted beyond its apparent bounds. Brennan’s theory of the engrouped subject rests on a robust account of the transmission of hormonal, sensorial, and physiological shifts between the mother and infant within subject formation, a transmission that patriarchal ideologies routinely erase.9 While my mom articulated an anxiety about the engroupment of the subject, Brennan’s work opens up an alternative maternal conceptual space that challenges inherited theoretical divisions between the individual, group, and environment. Within these conditions of mutual transmission between uncontained subjects, Brennan writes that the “mystery really is how a person maintains a distinct identity.”10 It is an account that is attuned to how subjects are unbounded, beyond themselves, shaped by the atmosphere of a room, and tuned into the emotional pitch of a group. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion developed a concept of valency to account for the foundational group-i-ness of the

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human subject. Bion describes valency as a “readiness to combine on levels that can hardly be called mental at all but are characterized by behavior in the human being that is more analogous to tropism in plants than to purposive behavior.”11 Valency marks the unconscious tightening within the beside-ness of bodies; whether gregarious, erotic, or aggressive, it is a relational disposition toward grouping that precedes the subject’s self-definition. In his clinical practice, Bion approached neuroses of the subject as problems of the group, not the individual. Bion describes his clinical methodology in Experiences in Groups as an approach to group therapy in which the study of the group itself—especially its tensions and difficulties—becomes the task of therapy. Bion’s analytic role was to resist calling the group to order and to induce group disorganization and tension by persistently frustrating and disappointing expectations to become the leader who was responsible for the course of treatment. By being difficult in this way, Bion would help form groups marked by resentment, anxiety, inaction, uncertainty, and extremely tenuous communication. These were what Bion referred to as basic groups (as opposed to more organized formations called working groups that had achieved the capacity to collaborate through set procedures and agendas). The discontented emotional states, tense atmospheres, and blocked activity of basic groups allowed Bion to offer interpretations of the unconscious group mentalities and basic assumptions at play in the group. For Bion, the group was the condition of being for a subject and, as such, also the scene of the subject’s frustration. His approach to group therapy was to induce scenarios for already engrouped subjects desiring collective coherence around a leader to experience their own persistent collective incoherence. By coming into relation with group theorists such as Latour, Brennan, and Bion, the group comes into view not

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as a self-evident entity but as an ambivalent assembly of permeable group-beings gathered in ways that exceed their conscious maneuvering to experience the impossibility of complete merger even within conditions of ontological permeability. Groups are relational processes that are less about procedures, organizational schemas, decision-making, and other idealized modes of coordinated behavior, and more about tumultuous transmissions of affect, unconscious desires, and inarticulate valencies. Both atomistic individuality and complete group coherence are noxious fantasies. Groups are regroupings of the already engrouped. Groups never mean just one thing. They are an encounter with the continued uncertainty of what it means to be both a subject and a collective.

Group Politics The political party is assumed to be the relational form through which modern collective action takes place. The party is big and lasts a long time. It is organized and plans decisively. It is the how of political change. It is a means to overthrow the order of things. However, for some political theorists, in the wake of the neoliberal reactions to the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, the party is no longer suited to enact political change. Within this supposed exhaustion of the party form, micro-relational forms such as the groupuscule and the activist collective have become more attractive political tactics. For example, Alain Badiou argues that the task of resistance movements has become to affirm what he calls a “politics ‘without party.’ ”12 For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, the party, as a traditional organizational form based on “unity, central leadership, and hierarchy,” has become neither “desirable nor effective.”13 On the other hand, political theorists such as Jodi Dean argue

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against these invocations of the small, provisional, and decentralized political group. For scholars like Dean, a turn to micro-organizational forms should give us pause. According to Dean, political formations that challenge the large-scale cohesion of the party become complicit with late capital’s individualist ideologies and fall prey to neoliberalism’s absorption of decentralized networks as a social form. Dean writes, “micro-politics, identity politics, anarchism, [. . .] seem more compelling (they would definitely be easier) than the sustained work of party building because they affirm the dominant ideology of singularity, newness, and now.”14 While I agree with Dean that large-scale political mobilization is necessary for addressing the antagonisms of our world and I share her reticence over valorizations of postparty politics that seem to echo neoliberalism’s networked logics, I also view the small group as a form of political activity that, while not necessarily doing the sustained work of party building, continues to keep the promise of collectivity open even when larger scale collective activity feels blocked. For example, while some scholars mourn the emergence of political formations organized around race, gender, and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s as fatally fracturing larger scenes of party-based collective resistance, and in doing so, characterize “identity politics” as a small-scale politics of the assimilative individual solely seeking rights and inclusion within the State, what these accounts fail to acknowledge are the ways in which much of the organizing around antagonisms of gender, race, and sexuality has taken the form of radical political collectives, both in the 1960s and 1970s and now. These accounts are unable to see that while these groups might experiment with small-scale collectivizing practices, they are often also fundamentally invested in a larger political mobilization based on coalitionality and solidarity. Although single-issue identity political articulations might

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have eventually been absorbed within the rise of neoliberal diversity management and conservative multiculturalism of the 1980s and 1990s, many activist groups articulating identity antagonisms in the 1960s and 1970s and now are not individualistic apolitical micro-attempts. Instead, they are experimental political assemblies around the entanglement of gender, race, and sexuality with historical structures such as capitalism and imperialism. For example, political groups such as the Combahee River Collective and W.I.T.C.H. in the 1960s and 1970s were small-scale group experiments in the name of identity antagonisms that exceeded capture within individual identity categories or rights-based state discourses. They were small, nonhierarchical groups, but they were not necessarily at odds with larger forms of political mobilization such as the party or union. Small groups forming around the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in the 1960s and 1970s and today have not only enacted a turn to the myopia of the individual. They have also been scenes for tumultuous group work that explore the ambivalence of how we gather and keep the possibility of large-scale mobilization open. For example, the queer theorist and performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz turns to a manifesto written by a small activist group of queers of color in New York City called Third World Gay Revolution in 1971 to develop a sense of this more politically expansive relation to the small group and the politics of race, gender, and sexuality.15 The text by Third World Gay Revolution that Muñoz reads is entitled “What We Want, What We Believe” and outlines a set of revolutionary desires—“the abolition of capital punishment, the abolishment of institutional religion, and the end of the bourgeois family.” It culminates in the demand, “We want a new society—a revolutionary socialist society.”16 As is clear, Third World Gay Revolution did not necessarily

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oppose the possibility of a larger socialist party politics, and Muñoz pauses with the peculiar performativity of the third person plural pronoun in his reading of the manifesto to draw this out. He writes, The use of the “we” in this manifesto can be mistakenly read as the “we” implicit in the identity politics that emerged after the Third World Gay Revolution group. Such a reading would miss the point. [. . .] The “we” is not content to describe who the collective is but more nearly describes what the collective and the larger social order could be, what it should be. The particularities that are listed—“race, sex, age or sexual preferences”—are not things in and of themselves that format this “we”; indeed the statement’s “we” is “regardless” of these markers, which is not to say that it is beyond such distinctions or due to these differences but, instead, that it is beside them.17 For Muñoz, this “we” marks this group of activists gathering around identity antagonisms. Yet it is not a politics of identity that succumbs to categorical capture or individualism. The “we” marks a not-yet actualized assembly beyond what already is; it is a performative utterance that does more than it describes, opening up a field of potentiality “in which multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity.”18 This “belonging in collectivity” is not preformatted or predetermined. In the language of performance theorist Joshua Chambers-Letson, it is “a kind of provisional ‘we’ at difference with itself from the inside out.”19 It is not a gathering of the same. It is not a solipsistic and individualist ideology of identity. It is a grouping that performs a not-yet-answered call to assemble in response to shared yet distinct historical antagonisms. With Muñoz’s reading of the Third World Gay Revolu-

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tion’s manifesto in mind, we can begin to approach political gatherings that experiment in the formation of a smaller provisional “we” under neoliberalism as not necessarily aimed at creating a new political party but still assembling concretely and critically, holding open the desire for collectivity while also articulating what forces and relations block and frustrate that desire. Political groups such as these know that the small and brief are part of the big and long. They know that we have to keep gathering even after the event of the crowd and that the overthrow also happens in the everyday. They know that collective action is about the party, but it is also about parties—which is to say, political solidarity is also about flirting, frustration, gossip, boredom, surprise, and sex. They know that groups run the risk of succumbing to the absorptive pull of networked neoliberal relations but that the terms of how we gather and how we relate are still the ground of politics.

Group Art For some artists and art critics, collectively authored or ensemblically-oriented artworks are always already liberatory because of their resistance to individualizing neoliberal logics. Yet this evaluation of group art operates through a celebratory fetish of the group that forgets the collaborative and collective nature of most single-authored works and puts all the determining weight of the politics of art on its conditions of production without considering the content of the work or the politics of circulation. In addition, accounts of collectivizing artworks that assume a radical political valence to collectivizing processes themselves fail to contend with the degree to which, as I have already alluded, since the 1960s and 1970s neoliberal capitalism has come to increasingly function by putting our capacity to form groups to work, as

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political theorists such as Paolo Virno have argued so persuasively.20 Artistic groups and collectives are not delivered outside of structures of domination and exploitation solely because of their group-i-ness, and any easy resolution of the binary between the individual and the collective does not offer a precise enough account of how the group has come to function as a form of both resistance and containment. I approach group art not as an intervention in itself but as an opportunity to think through the ambivalent politics of group formation in the 1960s, 1970s, and today. I look to group works by artists such as Forti, Delany, Borden, and Eastman because they give us something other than a celebratory fetish of the group. Forti’s Huddle is a tense and shifting group formation—constantly changing and rearticulating itself through internal differentiations, microantagonisms, and leave-takings. Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast is the story of a short-lived communal attempt on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, told years after it disbanded. Borden’s Regrouping is a voyeuristic and self-reflexive film exploring a feminist collective’s anxieties about the limitations of its group being. Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is a dissonant assembly around the disjunctive entanglements of racial antagonism, sexual desire, and political militancy. I approach all four of these group works as projects that are not invested in affirmative images of an idealizable group. They are not utopian blueprints or scenes of political redemption. Nor are they a departure from the domain of art to create radical institutions or organizations. These group works by Forti, Delany, Borden, and Eastman (as well as the more recent works by myself, Bassichis, Hayes, and McClodden) all take place in relation to forms of neoliberal containment and dominant institutional contexts (for example, Forti’s work was recently collected by the Museum of Modern Art and Eastman’s work is being retroactively installed into the canon of twentieth-

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century music). They are complex aesthetic articulations within compromised political situations, both symptom and possible treatment, both sustaining and frustrating. One of the primary sets of antagonisms that these group works articulate is the politics of race, gender, and sexuality. Often art associated with so-called identity politics is understood as manifesting only through individualizing genres and representational forms such as the solo performance, the portrait, or the first-person narrative. In addition, art historical discussions of collectivism and art often overlook group works aimed at rearticulating race, gender, and sexuality. For example, in her critical history of participatory art, Claire Bishop looks past anything that might cohere around the sign of “identity politics” because of the ways in which identity political claims and forms have been folded into regimes of neoliberal surveillance and control. Yet, by eschewing the politics of identity in general rather than offering a more specific critical account of its deployment within regimes of neoliberal governmentality, Bishop risks participating in an oft-repeated historical misrecognition that positions antagonisms of race, gender, and sexuality as secondary or peripheral in relation to the “real” antagonisms of class and nation. In doing so, works such as Bishop’s miss an opportunity to account for the ways in which capitalist systems and imperialism have been produced and continue to be reproduced through hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality, and the neoliberal world system is crucially and constitutively racialized and gendered.21 This means that artworks like the ones I am discussing here—articulations of the group that manifest race, gender, and sexuality as collectivizing scenes that don’t add up to a stable representation— fall doubly out of the art historical narrative on the politics of identity and art. While group works such as those by Forti, Delany, Borden,

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and Eastman might run the risk of being absorbed within neoliberalism’s forms of relational containment, they are also an opportunity to think in new ways about the relationship between group formation, aesthetic practice, and political articulation. In this way, Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence is invested in the generativity of ambivalence. This is a book of criticism that is interested in excavating unidealizable attempts to make a more ideal world, in making space for what the social theorist Lauren Berlant calls the “incommensurate wants” that circulate simultaneously within scenes of artmaking and political experimentation.22 In the chapters that follow, I gather these examples together to love them without idealization, to point to them and say, “Look, how interesting,” as I amplify the concepts and questions that I see as already being posed by their forms and contexts. I often end chapters with hopeful articulations, but this is a critical hope, which as José Esteban Muñoz and Ernst Bloch have taught us, is another name for staying in the scene of an attempt marked by ongoing disappointment. It started to rain as I rode my bike to the Lesbian Herstory Archive for the first time in the fall of 2015. The archive is housed in a brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. A spacious living quarters filled with the texts and ephemera of more than fifty years of lesbian feminist organizing and worldmaking, books are everywhere, file cabinets filled with photos, and there is a homey, informal order to everything. If the existence of an archive is often associated with the establishment of authority and the law, the Lesbian Herstory Archive is a counter-archive meant to be reinhabited, a shared home for a history of resistance commonly held. I was waterlogged and eager as I locked my bike before entering the brownstone.

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I went to the archive to engage with the papers of Barbara Smith, the Black lesbian feminist organizer and theorist who edited Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave. She also served as co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. I went to look at Smith’s papers because I hoped to catch a glimpse of the group work of the Combahee River Collective (CRC) stashed within its folders. The CRC was a group of Black lesbian feminists that started meeting in Boston in 1974. The collective began as a study and writing group and eventually harnessed their assembled energies for direct response actions around violence and State negligence toward Black women. The collective approached the Black feminist struggle as a capacious analytic and practice that challenged multiple and interlocking assemblages of oppression by gathering multiple distinct vectors of power relations and considering where they touched, bonded, linked, or fused. They were a small group of Black feminists addressing the specific political situation of Black women as a crucial part of the project of the socialist revolution. The CRC documents within Smith’s papers include folders filled with manuscript drafts, correspondence, and notes about the collective’s now much-anthologized collective statement from 1977. There were also papers from workshops about racism that the collective led for white feminists and folders of ephemera from rural retreats for Black feminists in the late 1970s.23 During my first visit to the archive, I opened one folder from Smith’s papers and a small pile of clippings fell to the ground—little slivers of heavy paper, each with a letter on it, and two slightly larger cutouts of silk-screened illustrations of Black women (see Figure 1). Behind the clippings was a yellow pamphlet: “ELEVEN BLACK WOMEN: WHY DID THEY DIE?”24 The pamphlet was a call for action in

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Figure 1. A folder of clippings from the Barbara Smith Papers, Lesbian Herstory Archive. Photo by the author.

response to the intensification of deadly violence against Black women in Boston in the late 1970s and the State’s criminal lack of action in response to that violence. As I picked up the clippings from the floor, it became clear that the fragments of paper had once been assembled to print the leaflet’s cover page. This archival-aesthetic form—a pile of cut-up pieces, a loose assemblage of scraps of paper, a cacophonous, fragmented, and disassembled whole—began to resonate with my thinking about the archive of 1960s and

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1970s group works more generally. This archival assemblage of remains from the critical and creative work that the CRC performed together, an inquisitive demand to confront and contest anti-Black and misogynist violence (“ELEVEN BLACK WOMEN: WHY DID THEY DIE?”), was waiting in the counter-archive, cut up and disassembled, ready for recombination and rearticulation. One recent artistic work that recombined and rearticulated the statements and demands of the CRC is the filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. Installed as a looping video in an exhibit of Smith’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020 called Mutualities, the twenty-minute film was projected onto a wall in a gallery room that had been transformed into a black box with two disco balls set up along an interior wall. One smaller disco ball was rotating quickly on a record player, splaying fragmented light throughout the room as if an invitation to listen to the diffusion of light, while another big disco ball spun slowly on a stand as if a globe, a reflective world revolving as the film played on. These disco balls, a kind of sculptural film of their own spreading light in motion throughout the room, made the museum space feel like a space to gather in, indexing the bar and the club. Yet when I visited Smith’s exhibit in the fall of 2020, it was my first time in a museum since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, with two masks on my face and hand sanitizer in my pocket. Only six people were allowed into the room at a time. We could assemble but only as a small group and with the knowledge of our mutual communicability keeping us at a distance. Again, the small group emerged as an ambivalent relational form during a crisis. Conviviality could be implied but not inhabited. Sojourner is a film about Black feminist collectivity and enacts Black feminist collectivity. It brings together the words of a cross-generational group of Black feminist figures—

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Sojourner Truth, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Alice Coltrane, and the members of the CRC—and in the process, remixes nineteenth-century, 1970s, and contemporary Black feminisms. Many of the shots are of groups of women of color gathering, assembling, and acting in conjunction with each other. Sometimes the women carry large orange banners containing poetic fragments of Alice Coltrane texts. Sometimes they sit alongside each other, and sometimes Smith’s camera captures an open space that doesn’t have anyone in it but seems ready for an assembly to come. About halfway through the film, the shots become of a group of women wandering, assembling, disassembling, and reassembling around the Noah Purifoy Foundation’s grounds in Joshua Tree, California. Purifoy’s sculptures, installations, and architectural spaces are constructed out of discarded materials. They are assemblages of ruins from previous structures, implying a world that persists after the end of something. This last Joshua Tree portion of Smith’s film is primarily a portrait of a collective of women listening to excerpts from the CRC’s 1977 “The Combahee River Collective Statement” from an analog boom box with its antenna extended as if the CRC’s words were floating on the airwaves and this group was tuning in (see Figure 2). As they listen to the transmission, the group engages in subtle actions together— greeting, embracing, holding hands, posing, sitting, leaning, and walking—assembling loosely within the syntax of the CRC’s collectively authored work. The film treats the CRC’s group work not as a position to represent but as a sound to gather within. The 1977 statement is a sonic surround to keep showing up in, even inside a burnt-out world. Toward the end of the film, the group makes itself into a procession, slowly walking toward the desert sunset, boom box antenna still tuned to the transmissions of the not-yet-over past (see Figure 3). Smith’s film mines the counter-archive

Figure 2. An assembly listening to the Combahee River Collective from an analog boom box within one of Noah Purifoy’s rooms without a roof, constructed from the detritus of other rooms, as the sun sets behind them. Still from Cauleen Smith’s Sojourner (2018). Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 3: A spaced-out procession listens to an analogue boom box while walking slowly toward a sunset. Still from Cauleen Smith’s Sojourner (2018), courtesy of the artist.

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to recombine the textual remains of the CRC’s group work and represent Black feminism not as a politics of the individual but as an ongoing, morphing assembly making a world after a world. The group works discussed in the following chapters are not projects that illuminate or instantiate a “good group” or a “bad group” but instead throw the question of the group into being and give a sense of how artists have responded to shifting terms of collective life. Like Smith’s film, they are occasions to wonder about a different and still unextinguished insurgent energy within the now often coercive impulse to operate as group-beings. If, as Paolo Virno argues, exploitation under neoliberalism is a scene in which one’s foundational relations with others, one’s ability to cooperate, to speak, to appear before others, have been alienated and put to work, then revisiting these experiments to put group formation to work otherwise during the period of neoliberalism’s emergence might offer alternative forms and sensibilities to resist the ways that “work consists of developing, refining, and intensifying cooperation itself” today.25 Thinking alongside these works offers provisional glimpses of tactics for gathering in new ways, even as our connectivity has become a scene of exploitation. They are opportunities to ask ourselves: What kind of a good-bad thing is a group to do? When do we do things in groups, and why? How do we group, and how does the how matter?

1

Huddle

Huddles are a relational form of disorderly proximity. They are provisional conglomerations thrown together at a remove and secretive gatherings held quickly in order to plan. In a North American football huddle, the majoritarian public sphere’s most visible form of huddling, a team circles up, crouching all on the same level, hands on knees, faces turning toward each other, back bodies facing out toward the opposing surround, shoulders touching, and heads leaning in as close as possible. Football huddles occur in the break between plays. They are an interval in which to plan out of earshot of opponents. In 1961, the choreographer Simone Forti created a sculptural movement score called Huddle that recomposed huddling as a social form, displacing football’s militarized, masculinist, and nationalist overtones for an open-ended experiment with the politics of alternative relational formations (see Figure 4). Forti’s Huddle instructs six to eight dancers to press closely into each other and create an ephemeral collective body while taking turns splitting from the group to slowly climb 25

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Figure 4. Participants learning Huddle during Simone Forti’s “Body Mind World” workshop as Forti looks on. Danspace Project, St. Marks Church, New York, December 14, 2016. Photo by Ian Douglas.

over the collective structure before rejoining the group shape. The score asks a group to become a team gathered in closeness, yet there is no opposing team to tackle. The group presses together not to plan an attack but to implicitly and wordlessly plan another way to be together. They become a tangle of arms and legs, elbows nudging into fleshy sides, feet finding leverage in the crease of a hip socket, fingers clasping a shoulder as a knee drags across a moving mound of backs, a shifting shape wordlessly pushing together and pulling apart. Forti’s Huddle is a small group finding new ways to gather, continuing to internally differentiate and mutate along the way.1 Huddle is part of a series of works called Dance Constructions, which consist of sculptural objects and instructions for playful and contemplative encounters between small

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groups of bodies. First performed in New York City at the Reuben Gallery in 1960 and then again at Yoko Ono’s loft in 1961, the pieces work with everyday sculptural materials— plywood and knotted rope—and everyday movement repertoires: walking, running, standing, huddling, and climbing. In addition to Huddle, Dance Constructions comprises Seesaw, a large wooden seesaw that two dancers use to explore surprising shifts in weight sharing; Roller Boxes, two or three plywood boxes fitted with wheels, which dancers sit in as they sing a tone while other dancers pull the boxes around the space with abandon; Hangers, a series of thick loops of rope draped from the ceiling that a group of dancers stands in, about a foot above the ground, one dancer per rope, slightly spaced out from each other; and Slant Board, a wooden board placed at a 45-degree angle to the wall with knotted ropes attached that dancers climb, hang off, and rest on. Taken together, the Dance Constructions are improvisational exercises for inducing surprising corporeal engagements and indeterminate social encounters among small groups of bodies, objects, and spaces. Out of all of Forti’s Dance Constructions, I have always been especially drawn to Huddle. It stood out to me first as an image. Its entwined mess of bodies strikes me as something like a kinesthetic figure for small-group political practices. It is a score that asks a group to make a provisional, leaderless collective that is constantly differentiating and entangling itself while also fragmenting. Unlike scenes of group formation that are about merging, cohesion, or the desire for a static collective frame, I see Huddle—and perhaps huddling more generally—as indexing an impulse to create small nonhierarchical assemblies that split off from inherited collective forms and disassemble just as readily as they assemble. When thinking alongside Huddle, I let myself move fast

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and loose between artistic and political realms—viewing art and politics as isomorphic terrains for negotiating life in common. I take Huddle here both as a political metaphor—a figure for theories of political action—and also, moving beyond Forti’s frame, as a political practice—an experiment in small-scale associational life. In what follows, dancing is like political action and political action is like dancing, but also dance is an experimental realm of political practice in which movement scores are laboratories to explore how an ideal society might gather on a small scale. The impulse to move from a choreographic score toward a theory of politics (and back again) when thinking about experimental dance in the 1960s is broadly shared—from Sally Banes’s framing of the Judson Church cohort in Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964, to Cynthia Novak’s discussion of contact improvisation and liberatory ideals of a more horizontal society in Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture to Danielle Goldman’s discussion of race, gender, resistance, and improvisation in American civil rights movements and experimental performance in I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom. As Randy Martin argues in Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics, the resonance between theories of mobilization in dance and politics offers us an opportunity to “explore not simply the politics of dance but also what dance has to offer politics.”2 For Martin, politics marks the realm of contest over what forces can and cannot be mobilized, the relationship between change and control, the limits of motion and forcefulness, or, in a beautiful turn of phrase, “the contest over what difference difference can make.”3 The leftist political movements of the 1960s—which experimental dance-makers such as Forti were often either embedded in or adjacent to—were not only interested in

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making demands within inherited forms of political action but also invested in attempting to throw into question what counted as politics and what counted as action. For dancers invested in radical politics, dance became an experimental modality for wondering what difference difference can make. Dance was often, at least in aim, an attempt to corporeally experiment with new political forms, to invent and practice modalities of bodily resistance, to activate alternative scores for shared life. With this in mind, I encounter Forti’s Huddle as an experiment with a not-quite articulable small-scale political practice.

Huddling in Political Theory’s Image Repertoire First, a perhaps strange detour: Abraham Bosse’s 1651 engraving of the body of the sovereign State for the first edition of English political theorist Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan.4 Bosse’s frontispiece—a constitutive figure of modern political thought and a central image through which the modern State has imagined itself—is an image of the body politic as a composite body (see Figure 5). The representation, one of the most durable images of modern political theory, is a giant man looming over a countryside with a town in the foreground, long hair and a crown on his head, a staff in one hand, a symbol of authority and control; a sword in the other, an instrument of violence and coercion. His torso is made up of a mass of entwined subjects. The figure belies how state formation has always been a question of tumultuous corporeality. The State is a masculine body whose flesh is a concatenation of bodies, a multitude of subjects becoming one in the body of the ruler. More importantly, the bodies that make up the collective flesh of the sovereign State are all turned in toward the center of the State’s body,

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Figure 5. The original frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). Engraving by Abraham Bosse.

becoming an anonymous crowd of faceless subjects forming a nondifferentiated supportive structure for the sovereign’s head and arms (see Figure 6). Within the work that this figure announces, Hobbes elaborates many of the fundamental deceptions of Western liberalism. My aim here is not to rehearse the history of Western liberal thought and its critique from the feminist and anti-imperialist left. But, said quickly, Hobbes’s theory of the modern political society as a social body founded on a consensual social contract has served as an ideological smokescreen covering a political modernity that was founded upon violent expropriation and exploitation, genocidal imperialism, and chattel slavery.5 Bosse’s representation of the body

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Figure 6. Detail of Bosse’s Leviathan engraving (1651).

politic as an anonymous mass of bodies topped with the head of a ruler gives a glimpse of the covert violence of liberal State formation hidden within the language of a social contract and consensual bond. The implicit account of the modern State that follows from this image is a State constituted not by consensual contracts made between equal political subjects but by a unilateral sovereign authority that is made up of an undifferentiated mass of crushing, bonded togetherness. It is the image of a political community that belies the violence of modern State formation and figures the structures of domination and extinguishing associations that haunt liberal political theory.6 Now, Forti’s Huddle. As I have already alluded to, I like to regard Huddle as a figure for small-group political practices and, as such, an alternative image through which to imagine what might constitute a body politic. Huddle, like Bosse’s representation, is about a pressing together of bodies, a

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Figure 7. Simone Forti’s Huddle, performed by students at Loeb Student Center, New York University, May 4, 1969. Photograph by Peter Moore, © Northwestern University. Peter Moore Photography Archive, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library.

squeezed togetherness that looks potentially hazardous and painful as legs wrap around heads and pelvises crawl across backs (see Figure 7). Yet, in moving from the figurative repertoire of Hobbes’s seventeenth-century frontispiece as an image of political community (and the political imaginary born in its wake) to this image of Forti’s Huddle, we move from a large unified collective body anonymously gathered into the organized sovereign body of the State to a small collective body that has lost its head, limbs, and objects of authority and never assembles into a coherent body, instead constantly internally differentiating, assembling, and disassembling. Forti’s score for Huddle reads as follows:

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“Huddle” requires six or seven people standing very close together, facing each other. They form a huddle by bending forwards, knees a little bent, arms around each other’s shoulders and waists, meshing as a strong structure. One person detaches and begins to climb up the outside of the huddle, perhaps placing a foot on someone’s thigh, a hand in the crook of someone’s neck, and another hand on someone’s arm. He pulls himself up, calmly moves across the top of the huddle, and down the other side. He remains closely identified with the mass, resuming a place in the huddle. Immediately, someone else is climbing. It is not necessary to know who is to climb next. Sometimes two are climbing at once. That’s O.K. And sometimes sounds of laughter come from the huddle. The duration should be adequate for the viewers to observe it, walk around it, get a feel of it in its behavior. Ten minutes is good. The piece has also been formed in such a way that, as it ended, each of the performers found six other people from the audience to get a second-generation huddle going, until six were happening simultaneously.7 It is an ephemeral structure that meshes, detaches, and sometimes laughs. “Ten minutes is good,” and then it fragments and multiplies. When Huddle disassembles or falls apart, it doesn’t end but instead sparks other Huddles. Its recombinatory energy remains open and active. There is never a stable shape, never an order to who is on top and who is below, and no decisions are made in advance. There is a climbing up and down that leaves no easy relation between horizontality and verticality; sometimes bodies are over, sometimes bodies are under. If Huddle is a body politic and this body politic has a leader, it is Forti’s score, and yet, this

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is a different sort of leader—a loose procedure and an open text, multiply interpretable, promiscuously transmitted. As a counterweight to the violent inheritance of modern political thought’s image repertoire, Huddle is an alternative image of a body politic—bodies differentiating from each other and internally differentiating into parts, continually finding new relational forms. It is an image of a charged and tensile entanglement, a self-generative shifting, an affiliating splitting that continues to reassemble. Forti’s work, alongside the work of many of her collaborators in the Downtown scene in the early sixties, is often framed as a rehearsal for the radical political formations that emerged later in the decade. For example, in discussing the social contexts of the Judson Dance Theatre, where Forti found an artistic home between 1962 and 1964, curator and writer Thomas (T.) Jean Lax notes that while the politics of the work created at Judson were not always explicitly articulated, the work can be read retrospectively as emanating a kind of preemptive glow of the social movements the artists would eventually become involved with a few years later.8 By approaching huddling as a political practice and the huddle as a figure for politics, the corporeal recombinatory turbulence of Forti’s Huddle resonates as a rehearsal for political huddles to come. For example, in April of 1968, student activists huddled within Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall to protest the university’s relationship to the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and its long-standing racist expropriation of Harlem. The huddling occupation began as a collaboration between Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Columbia Student Afro-American Society (SAS) to resist the institution’s imperialist practices near and afar, but eventually it fractured into two autonomous actions: Members of SAS felt that student representatives of SDS were not able to understand the longue durée of Colum-

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Figure 8. Student occupation of Hamilton Hall, Columbia University, April 1968, Don Hogan Charles, New York Times/Redux.

bia’s institutionalized racism and called for the separation of their actions.9 The following image of the action, taken by Don Hogan Charles, the first Black staff photographer for the New York Times, depicts a group of students attempting to reconstitute what counts as a body politic and experiment with a huddling political action during a moment of political upheaval (see Figure 8). It is an image of a group of students coming together not to be anonymously gathered into the sovereign body of the State but instead to nonsovereignly form themselves into an assembly that is open to the possibility of a necessary fragmentation. It is an image of a moment in which a choreography of huddling—a hurried and messy conglomeration of bodies, a pressing in close together to share information and plan—was used to create a counter–body politic that disarticulated and disrupted the assumed image of the State’s body politic.

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In 1974, Forti published Handbook in Motion, an intermedial memoir consisting of essays about Forti’s experience in countercultural attempts and experimental artmaking between 1959 and 1970. The memoir is woven together from scores, photographic documentation of performances, drawings, poetic fragments, and handwritten journal entries. There are image-fragments of prose spaced across otherwise blank pages (“I saw a man in pajamas walk up to a tree, stop, regard it, and change his posture”10), line drawings of vibrating figures moving in space (a body kicking a foot up, a group of eyes moving in a circle), photos of dance constructions being performed in the ’60s (performers wearing everyday clothes, high-waisted pants, T-shirts, audiences sitting on the floor), essays about Forti’s time at Woodstock (“it seemed like a tuning, a finding of certain forces, an overlapping of the body into a certain boundingness which matter can get into”11), accounts of Forti’s time studying with Anna Halprin (“I think that if Anna gave us an aesthetic point of judgment, it was that there should be a live kinaesthetic awareness in the mover”12), instructions for performances from her time in New York (“one man is told that he must lie on the floor during the entire piece, another is told that he must tie the first man to the wall”13), and theoretical musings about her scores (“the predominant time sense is a kind of ongoingness,” “it was simply a mechanism of intelligence that I found existing in my body”14). Forti’s score for Huddle is published in Handbook in Motion alongside a photo of Huddle in performance (by Peter Moore; see Figure 7). Within this image, individual bodies assemble and, in doing so, fragment into parts—a hand, another hand, a head, a mass of hair, a bent leg, a wrist, discarded shoes—as if in the process of making each of their bodies a part of a collective body, each body disarticulates into a collection of body parts. In making a new provisional whole, a previous one becomes an assemblage of parts ready to recombine. Preemptively

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echoing the student activists at Columbia University who gathered together, split apart, and regathered in protest, Forti’s Huddle is a composite body separating as it gathers, creating a turbulent social form.

Huddling in 2016 Since Forti’s dance constructions first took shape in 1961 and the huddles of 1968 split off from the national body politic, neoliberal policy makers and post-Fordist managers have done their best to absorb and co-opt headless and nonhierarchical social forms. Work has, for many, become a series of horizontal brainstorming sessions, and self-organized flexible networks have become sites of social control. In addition, dominant institutions have attempted to absorb the huddles of the 1960s into their historical narratives, containing the disruptive energies of their initial articulation by including them in their canons and retrospectives. For instance, in the twenty-first century, Forti’s scores are no longer found only in counterinstitutional lofts and communes but have begun to circulate with more and more frequency within major cultural institutions, culminating in 2016 when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City acquired Forti’s Dance Constructions fifty-five years after their initial performance. Yet, even within this context of absorptive acquisition, the tumultuous sociality of huddling exceeds its capture in management manuals, and Forti’s open-ended scores and loosely determined structures resist their institutional containment. To be collected, Forti’s scores need to be taught and transmitted, activated and performed, enacting a dispossessive force that challenges museological paradigms of preservation and possession.15 On the occasion of their acquisition, MoMA could not just acquire a series of objects; instead they had to collaborate with Danspace in New York City on

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a weeklong research residency to explore how these intermedial and interdisciplinary pieces might be collected by a museum. I participated in a workshop that was part of this residency in which Forti taught a group the score for Huddle. It was a workshop aimed at MoMA acquiring the score, but it also made the impossibility of this venture clear: Throughout the afternoon, MoMA had acquired nothing, but each participant had acquired a new small group practice. There were about twenty of us participating—artists, writers, dancers—and ten or so people watching from the edges of the room. Forti had beautiful white hair and a sometimes slight, sometimes pronounced tremor—waves gently rocking her body, hands shaking, head nodding, her face soft, clear, and calm amidst the oscillations. Forti discussed Huddle as a kinetic sculpture—a visual form to be walked around and viewed—but unlike a traditional sculpture, it must be taught. It must be transmitted, not transported. Participants gathered in a circle and began to warm up by following Forti’s lead. As we mirrored her hands slowly circling in the air in front of her body, Forti said, “I have Parkinson’s and I shake, but I’m OK.” The nondramatic communication of her neurodegenerative disorder and the vulnerability of aging were already asking the participants to consider the uneven differences between bodily conditions. We moved our hands up to the sky and out to the horizon, let our breath make a noise that moved throughout our body, and improvised as if the floor were made of clay, carving out marks and impressions with each gesture. As a writer and musician in a room full of dancers, I felt awkward, a body out of place. We might have been doing pedestrian movements, but for the dancers that had come to Forti’s workshop, pedestrian movement vocabularies came with their own trained capacity to seem untrained in their execution. Before we learned Huddle, Forti led us through another

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score called Scramble (1970). She told us she liked to start with it because it’s usually when “a group starts to become a group.” The score is sparse and simple: “Move around the room; if you see a space between people, move through it, everybody at the same time.” The group moved, through and around each other, weaving and winding, scrambling relations. It was like a busy sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, except a group of pedestrians forwent being on their way somewhere else to be in another way with each other. The group swirled in a chaotic eddy of relational movement, and I kept wanting to get away, spinning out toward the corners of the room, finding some space for myself, breaking out from what felt like a subtly coercive centripetal pull toward the center of the room. As discussed in the previous section, group formation is often imagined as a coming together in some kind of sovereign unity, a collective of subjects going toward each other, becoming close, and forming bonds of proximity. Forti had framed Scramble as a score through which a group becomes a group. Yet, in this scene of group work, we didn’t have to go toward each other to compose a group. Instead, we went toward the mobile space that separated us; we formed a group by traversing the space that opened up between bodies or hanging out on our own in the corners of the room. Forti’s score was a moment of composing a collective body that was less a moment of merger or union and much more a process of differentiation, individuation, and spacing. When we began to learn Huddle, there was an expectation in the room that the score would be built slowly and that we would be properly trained with a lot of guidance and advice about pushing into each other and climbing each other’s bodies. But after a few quick warm-up activities about weight shifting and weight sharing, Forti asked what seven dancers wanted to be the first Huddle and said, “OK, make

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a mountain, push into each other, and then one at a time, climb over. Don’t be precious or too careful, but slower is better. Go.” A group began, at first hesitantly, pushing in, finding a tensile entanglement of limbs and heads (see Figure 4). The sparseness of Forti’s instructions led to a productively leaderless fumbling, a spontaneous coadjustment of bodies trying to do something without knowledge or plan or leadership. Forti participated in the first group, climbing over the writhing mound of bodies, the other participants standing by to spot her aging yet agile body. After she had traversed the mass of bodies, she stepped out and offered the group, “Climb each other like rocks, and even while you’re detaching and going over, maintain an affinity with the group.” To be inside Huddle is like being inside a wordless microbody politic where no one is calling the shots: It isn’t a comfortable or affirmative experience of group being; it is painful and tumultuous, bodies pressed into each other, arms and legs awkwardly and tightly interlaced, braced for weight sharing. When each member of the huddle breaks from the mass and begins to climb, other bodies become ledges and footholds to be stepped on, an irregular and subtly shifting slop of matter to awkwardly pull yourself over, a jittery and precarious mass on which to reorient yourself. When it becomes time to lower yourself down and rejoin the collective form, the group adjusts its entanglement without anyone deciding to and weaves you back in, another body detaching from the assemblage and beginning to climb. It can be an uncomfortable form to be involved in, a rather agonistic kind of collective affinity. It is a score that asks a group to gather and break up, to experiment with detaching, separating, and individuating. From within the score, the moment that stands out for each body is the moment of differentiation, the micro-event of breaking off from the group,

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a splitting while remaining connected—leaving, climbing, maintaining a relation within detachment, finding a singular shape before coming back down and rejoining. Huddle feels to me like a tense and shifting political formation, a rehearsal for a kind of tumultuous tactile collective negotiation that is constantly changing and rearticulating itself through internal differentiations, micro-antagonisms, and leave-takings. The work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon might prove helpful for elaborating a sense of the disarticulating conjunctiveness of a huddling body politic. For Simondon, matter is a question of becoming rather than being, and ontology is the study of active processes of relational ontogenesis between entities and environments rather than a study of the fixed properties of beings. Simondon writes that the question of what a thing is is primarily a question about the thing’s principle of individuation, the thing’s style of individuating in relation to other entities and environments. This means that for Simondon, relations are not a coming together of discrete entities but an already underway connectivity that is an occasion for a new individuation. Simondon writes, “Consider every true relation as having the status of being, and as developing itself within a new individuation. [. . .] Participation, for the individual, is the fact of being an element in a greater individuation.”16 For Simondon, no being exists before or is separate from its relations, and moments of collectivity and assembly are not moments of merger and nondifferentiation but rather conditions for a heightened relational individuation. Simondon’s account of relational ontogenesis and individuation helps elaborate a sense of how collectivity within political and artistic mobilization is an assembling of already entangled beings that is about differentiation and a heightened relational individuation rather than merger and unification.

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As the Italian Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno writes in a summary of Simondon’s work: The collective, the collective experience, the life of the group, is not, as we usually believe, the sphere within which the salient traits of a singular individual diminish or disappear; on the contrary, it is the terrain of a new and more radical individuation. By participating in a collective, the subject, far from surrendering the most unique individual traits, has the opportunity to individuate, [. . . W]ithin the collective we endeavor to refine our singularity.17 Groups are not just an experience of loss of distinctiveness; they are occasions for a co-permeability that becomes a process of articulation of difference and individuation. Huddle, with Simondon in mind, feels like an experimental political gathering not aimed at a loss of distinctiveness within a unified body but instead at a productively incoherent intensity of collective differentiation. Forti discussed developing Huddle as a movement score and a visual form that emerged out of a two-pronged desire— on the one hand, to do something tactile with other bodies amidst the dizzying flightiness of New York’s built environment and the rapid political changes of the 1960s, and on the other hand, to “experience the solidity of matter” while breaking up with her then-husband, minimalist sculptor Robert Morris.18 Forti’s verbal instructions for the score asked a small group to become rocks and clay and build a mountain for each other to climb. Forti asked subjects to render themselves matter, to experiment with a kind of relational inhumanity in order to find new modes of relationality. Huddle is an invitation for a group to become inhuman to find other ways to inhabit human relations.19

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When she described practicing the score, Forti talked about how the group’s “heads are always in the way,” and she means it both literally and figuratively. As the group comes together to create an assemblage of bodies, their heads push into each other awkwardly and compete for limited space in the middle of the shape. In Huddle, the head— the bodily signifier of subjectivity, knowledge, sovereignty, and control—blocks the bodily potential for assembling into a collective structure. Heads are what get in the way of a body becoming matter, of an animal becoming a mountain. Huddle is doubly an experiment in headlessness—a movement score for composing an assemblage of bodies trying to get their heads out of the way—and a score for composing a collective body that is a morphing tangle of limbs without a head. It is an experiment in becoming a body without a head so as to create a headless collective body. Huddle creates an encounter with entangled horizontality that is not just another scene of neoliberal cooperative team-building but an invitation for a group to become an internally differentiating headless mountain.

Huddling Again Three weeks after Donald Trump was sworn into office as the president of the United States in 2017, I gathered a group of friends to reperform Huddle at my apartment. Ever since Trump’s white supremacist, xenophobic, and greedmongering administration had begun its rise to power and the ongoing violence of American political life felt so newly intensified, many of my friends were showing up at protests and actions with more and more frequency. New articulations of forceful resistance movements were emerging in relation to the Trump regime, building on the already strong

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coalitional work of women of color organizers in the #BlackLivesMatter, anti-Islamophobia, and pro-immigration movements. I framed the reperformance of Huddle at my apartment as an opportunity to come together and engage in some collective inquiry in the midst of these more public acts of resistance. On the day of Trump’s inauguration, I traveled to Washington, DC, with some friends to protest and participate in the Women’s March scheduled for the next day. While the Women’s March threatened to take shape as a single-issue liberal feminist reinvestment in the cruel optimism of representative politics under a ghostly image of a defeated Hillary Clinton, I had seen that radical feminist activists and scholars such as Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour were scheduled to speak at the rally, and I was curious how the unruliness of the crowd might spill into a more politically complicated event. As we drove through Delaware on the way down to DC, we tuned into public radio from the car to listen to the inauguration ceremony live. The connection was weak, and salsa music or another broadcast of the event that was five seconds behind would interfere with the transmission intermittently. Trump spoke about coming together and the need to “heal our divisions.”20 His vision of gathering to overcome difference through a return to a phantasmic original sameness is a white supremacist and misogynist fantasy with a long history. It is a vision of unity as an idealized image that covers its desire to eradicate and dominate any marker of difference. It is an American echo of Hobbes and Bosse’s image of the sovereign—a mass of bodies brought together in an undifferentiated body of patriarchal authority. And it is not solely a Trumpism but also a founding fantasy of liberal and neoliberal discourse (as its continued presence with the Biden regime’s rhetorical ticks evidences). I wanted to reperform Huddle with my friends in 2017 to excavate these

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various coming-togethers. Perhaps a score-sculpture from 1961 would offer us new tools for feeling our way through the political challenges of the present.21 We gathered in the apartment I was subletting on a Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t realized it was Super Bowl Sunday until people were already milling around my kitchen table and the puns began to circulate about the ironic synchronicity between the Huddle we were about to perform and the various huddles that would be performed in a stadium in Texas that evening. There were nine of us: Allison, Amelia, Ari B., Ari R., Kim, Kyle, Ned, Sean, and myself. I made pancakes for us, read everyone the description of Huddle from Forti’s Handbook in Motion, and then gave them the instructions that Forti had given us at the workshop in December: “OK, make a mountain, push into each other, and then one at a time, climb over. Don’t be precious or too careful, but slower is better. Go.” It was awkward and slow, and it was humorous for us to be pushing ourselves together, climbing, not talking. We performed the score three times—once as Forti had transmitted it to the workshop I attended at Danspace, and then twice more with slight sonic variations that I provided: First, I instructed each performer to buzz like a bee as they enacted the score, and second, I asked the group, myself included, to continue the buzzing drone when part of the collective mass but added that each performer should attempt to vocally differentiate oneself as one climbed and traversed the collective formation. Immediately after we disentangled from the huddle, we talked about language. It was a score that didn’t involve any talking, but we talked about talking, about not talking. Ned wondered about the communicability within the score. Where was the desire for language in the tangling of bodies? Was it in the touch, the grab, the pressing? Was it in the moment of laughter, grunt, or moan? It was a score with

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no conversation, no real eye contact, and no facial engagements. Our heads pressing together and bodies interlaced, the collective contact of the score was dark and cacophonous. There was a novelty to this direct head-to-head contact as we tried to get our heads out of the way, rubbing our skulls rather than looking at each other’s faces. Amelia said, “I lost track of my arms and legs,” noting the disorienting confusion of the bodily entanglement. Ari R. asserted, “I just loved touching people,” and Ned responded, “I hated it,” the two of them exposing how bodily proximity is a space of both pleasure and violence, play and control. We talked about the moment of differentiation, of splitting off from the group, deciding to climb, whether it came from a place of desire and experimentation or a guilty obligation to the instructions. Kyle said that as he began to climb, he was convinced that the amorphous tangle of bodies was not structurally sound. He was aware of his sharpest parts, of the pain and injury his body would cause, of the possibility that his weight might break the formation, wanting to take care while also completing the task. Kyle also talked about being on the inside of the collective shape and feeling the weight that was being borne by someone else in the structure through the increase in tension in a hand or an arm as the person climbed over. He described Huddle as a situation of injury and care, concern and responsibility, worrying about the best way to do this semi-injurious task together. After Kyle spoke, Kim offered, “At its more pleasurable moments, it was a moment of collective massage and support: kneading and needing.” The score made clear how the politics of compulsory able-bodiedness circulated unevenly throughout the room. Lifting oneself onto and across a group of people and supporting the weight of other people’s bodies brought up the

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question of what was possible and not possible for each body; it was a question of the political distribution of the material world. Ari R. talked about how he had just wanted to go for it, climb the huddle as soon as he could, see what he could do with it, see if he could break it or push the collective shape past its limits, while Ari B. said that the score had felt impossible, that they couldn’t imagine doing this score and not worrying about whether they were too heavy or too weak, not light enough or not strong enough. Huddle was an occasion to articulate and negotiate the gendered antagonisms that structure the distribution of bodily capacities. Our Huddle was an internally uneven political terrain, and as a small group political practice, it provided an occasion to renegotiate and redistribute the terms and distributions of this terrain. Kim talked about the vocal component of huddles in sports: a coming together before the action, sharing a secret plan that the mass outside cannot hear, a prelude, preparation, or planning for an action or attack. In Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten outline a differentiation between “planning” and “policy.” Moten and Harney describe planning as being “practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, inanimative and improvisatory. [. . . It is] an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions [. . . ,] a common experiment launched from any kitchen, any back porch, any basement, any hall, any park bench, any improvised party, every night.”22 Kim was talking about Forti’s Huddle as a technology of planning—a huddling up together at a remove from or beneath politics so as to prepare for the political potentiality of something that was not quite articulated yet, an assembling of differentiating forces so as to prepare for an indeterminate or not yet known common experiment.

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In sports, the aftermath of the huddle is a play and then the possibility of another huddle. Huddles produce more huddles. Huddle produces more Huddle. The day after we reperformed Forti’s Huddle in my living room, I got a Facebook invite from a friend asking me to an event called “Huddle!” The cover photo for the event read (see Figure 9), “First, we marched. Now we HUDDLE. Gather your community & plan what’s next.”23 The evening was part of the 10 Actions, 100 Days initiative sponsored by the organizers of the DC Women’s March to keep the collective momentum generated by the march moving and accumulating. Huddling was presented by the organizers of the Women’s March as something to do in the aftermath of a collective protest, a small gathering to remediate that collective energy. The Women’s March website defined a huddle as “a small group of people holding an informal conversation.” They encouraged anyone to host or attend a huddle in the first ten days of February, hoping that a decentralized network of micro-gatherings and meetings might lead toward a profusion of local and national feminist actions against the Trump regime and the broader violence of the American State.24 While not necessarily aimed at founding an explicit mass political organization or party, the huddles hoped to provide the relational tools through which to keep the desire for a collectivity that springs from a moment of mass feminist protest alive. Because I was visiting my partner’s family for the week, I would miss the New York “huddle” and I attended one in a coffee shop in New Bedford, Massachusetts, instead. Similar to my political ambivalence leading up to the Women’s March, I had reservations about attending the huddle and had already worked out a critique of the event: It would be a neoliberal gathering of single-issue white feminist activists who wouldn’t be addressing histories of racism and exploit-

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Fig. 9: The banner graphic from the Women’s March website for “Action #2: Huddle”

ative economic structures within feminist movement building, and the discourse of community in the promotional materials meant that it would be a sentimental occasion that would do little more than provide the vague good feeling of “coming together.” Yet the huddle in New Bedford was unrulier than my anticipatory critiques had surmised. The New Bedford huddle exceeded that sovereign image of the Women’s March. It was an intergenerational gathering of ten people with a range of gendered and racial presentations. Almost no one at the huddle knew each other beforehand. We sat in a semicircle at the coffee shop as the facilitator who created the New Bedford huddle event page on the Women’s March website led the group through the agenda provided by the Women’s March organizers: “Let’s envision four years in the future, if our movement has won.” There was a generatively varied range of responses: from radical visions of a world with wages for housework and reproductive labor to a call for more women-identified people to run for elected office to the imagining of a world founded upon the

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openly speculative questions “How do we care for our common world?” and “How do we live in common?” From the vantage point of writing this chapter five years later, it’s hard to say what either of these 2017 huddles did, but at the same time, a story of their absorption and containment is not the entire story. Forti’s Huddle offers a way to practice cacophony and leaderlessness while coming together and finding provisional modalities of support and entwinement. It is a huddling together that falls apart to spawn more huddles. It is a score that doesn’t attempt to last but is infinitely repeatable. The New Bedford Women’s March huddle was an assembly in the name of feminist critique that took place in the afterlife of a large-scale political event. It was not aimed at unity or the creation of a stable collective subject, but it was still aimed at creating a collective formation. It gathered feminists together to come into contact with critical differences and share interests in the name of a potential world in common that exceeded capture within neoliberalism’s diminishing logics.

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commune (v): to talk together, converse with someone; to communicate; to confer, consult. In 1976, French semiotician and cultural theorist Roland Barthes delivered a lecture called How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces at the Collège de France. The course revolved around a monastic vision of communal living, a vision that Barthes positioned for the class as his own personally held fantasy of Living-Together. Barthes described the scene as a spacious co-dwelling with a small group that allowed for the surprising encounters of proximity and togetherness while offering the possibility of distance so that each subject could inhabit their own idiosyncratic rhythm. Barthes developed a concept of idiorrhythmy to describe this relational dynamic. For Barthes, idiorrhythmy was a modality of being-with in which each subject was attuned to their own rhythm as the irregular flow of their distinctive form, coming in and out of relation with each other without having to align or reduce them51

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selves to an enforced collective rhythm. Barthes wrote that his fantasy of Living-Together was “something like solitude with regular interruptions: the paradox, the contradiction, the aporia of bringing distances together—the utopia of a socialism of distance.”1 Throughout the course, Barthes delivered a series of mini-lectures around concepts associated with attempts at experimental sociality (Room, Rule, Distance, Proxemics, Utopia, etc.). Referring to these lectures as a “digressive” practice of “opening up a dossier” around a particular thought or image, Barthes assembled a wideranging collection of literary, sociological, and practical texts to traverse within each lecture (for example, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the handbooks of the Greek monasteries at Mount Athos, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Andre Gide’s The Confined Woman of Poitiers, and Wilfred Bion’s Experiences in Groups). He described his scholarly technique as one of paideia rather than method, delimiting method as a manner of proceeding toward a goal while describing paideia as a practice of “stumbling among snatches, between the bounds of different fields of knowledge, flavors.”2 In How to Live Together, Barthes stumbled along the paths of these texts while attuning himself to his own communal fantasy, fleshing out concepts as he went. I will follow Barthes’s lead by tracing my own meandering attachments to scenes of Living-Together, particularly communal attempts to dwell together otherwise in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. I am curious about communal attempts not to outline an exhaustive history of the communal movement or make an argument about the nature of the communal imaginary but to, like Barthes, “stumbl[e] among snatches” and elaborate a series of conceptual digressions around the promise of communal experimentation. My textual resource for these digressions consists primarily of the work of the Black and queer speculative fiction au-

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thor, theorist, and memoirist Samuel R. Delany, specifically his 1979 memoir of living in a commune in the East Village, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love. Heavenly Breakfast was a commune and band that came together in an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village during the winter of 1967. Heavenly Breakfast, the memoir, tells the story of the communal attempt more than ten years after its dissolution. The text is a brief and fragmented remembering of a short-lived collective formation. Delany does not claim representative authority for his account, writing in the introduction that it is “a text with a peculiarly precarious relation to reality.”3 Composed with the aid of a series of journals that he kept while he was a part of the commune, Delany frames the account as one full of writerly distortions, absences, condensations, and substitutions. It is a literary scene of living together that is permeated by the distance of dissolution and the passage of time. The history of the commune in the American political imagination is a long one. The commune seems to emerge as a relational form during times of heightened upheaval, with two major sequences of communal experimentation occurring over the past two hundred years—one during the years of reconstruction following the Civil War and another during the 1960s and 1970s. In 1869, John Humphrey Noyes claimed in History of American Socialism that nineteenthcentury American communal experiments were primarily engaged in “the enlargement of home—the extension of family union beyond the little man-and-wife circle to large corporations.”4 For Charles Nordhoff, writing in 1874 in The Communistic Societies of the United States, American communes were a viable alternative to the alienated life of a wage laborer within industrial society, offering a possible means for an exodus “by which the dissatisfied laborer may, if he chooses, better his condition.”5 A hundred years later,

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the commune form reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s as a way to live otherwise during the tumult of the post–World War II era. Benjamin Zablocki, an American sociologist who performed a longitudinal study of 125 communes in the United States from 1965 to 1975, positioned communes in the postwar United States as part of a broader worldwide youth movement marked by “the withdrawal from conventional forms of social participation.”6 Across these two American historical sequences separated by a hundred years, Noyes, Nordhoff, and Zablocki show how the commune—a group of subjects dwelling in close proximity and experimenting with noncapitalist relationships to property, labor, and social life—opens up a wide terrain within the American political imaginary of leave-taking and life beyond the possessive individual, the enclosed domestic space of the family, the alienation of work, and institutionally codified forms of coercive social participation. They also show, in what they don’t mention, how communal experiments in American contexts often emerged for white Americans as a kind of looking elsewhere during a moment of heightened struggles for racial justice. For example, both historical flash points mentioned previously—the 1870s and the 1960s and 1970s—were moments of revolutionary activity for Black liberation and a reckoning with the constitutive anti-Blackness of the United States. Yet these scholarly accounts of the commune make no mention of racial antagonisms. Following this, the primary image of the commune that we inherit is a group of white, heterosexual young people living off the grid, farming, having a lot of sex with each other, and unwittingly reproducing white settler colonialist relations to rural geographies and heteronormative family structures under a different name. Delany’s account of Heavenly Breakfast provides a communal sensibility that cuts across these inherited images

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of the communal impulse. It was a small group of people of different yet not quite strongly articulated orientations and identities showing up in an apartment in Manhattan's East Village to form a band and find another way to live together—playing music all day, selling drugs, coming and going, getting sick and having sex, writing in the corner, falling asleep in a collective bed. It is an account that resonates alongside an alternative lineage of communal projects: the ongoing and unannounced work of living together under precarious conditions,7 the communal attempts of sexual dissidents and gender outlaws,8 and the insurgent enclaves of revolutionary activists.9 For queer theorist and performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o, Delany’s account of Heavenly Breakfast is an example of a Black queer ecological imagination that destabilizes the “appropriative white vision of the return to nature.”10 For Nyong’o, Heavenly Breakfast provides an occasion to read race queerly within countercultural discourses. Heavenly Breakfast didn’t look for an elsewhere to settle—whether an urban or rural elsewhere—instead dwelling experimentally within the cracks of where everyone was already showing up. It was not about setting up a commune as an intentional community or project, but rather an already ongoingness, an already underway practice of getting by together. Heavenly Breakfast is a collection of brief numbered chapters—slices of action, interrupted scenes, and quick observations. The fragmentary chapters bump against each other without transition, with different textual moments separated by section breaks that introduce gaps and pauses within their encounter on the page. At one point, Delany is in the middle of describing that “the kitchen was for visitors, cooking, eating, bathing, rehearsing—” when he trails off into a section break.11 The next chapter begins with “memory interrupts,” and Delany tells of the time when one res-

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ident of Heavenly Breakfast, Snipper, got severely ill, and then everyone “got the clap”; the experience of communal living became the experience of shared illness.12 Rather than narrate the linear story of a group that came together and then dispersed or provide a clear image or figure of the commune, Delany interrupts his narrative drive so that the commune is always interrupting itself and spreading out on the page, ending, dispersing, and beginning again, and the reader is left to wander ambiently through the fragments. I write alongside Delany’s account of Heavenly Breakfast to develop a series of alternative communal concepts around questions of institutionality and radicality, extensivity and ephemerality, collectivism and individualism, order and disorder, and utopianism and pragmatism. I pay specific attention to how identity antagonisms surface in the tumultuous group work of the commune and how even as these collective attempts disband and disperse, the communing of the commune continues in the scattered dissemination of writing.

Commune-ity The commune is often seen as the most concrete instantiation of community: a small group of people literalizing their togetherness, co-presence, and belonging; a miniature society recovering a close shared-ness lost with capitalism and industrialization; an assembly overcoming the alienation of modernity. In accounts where the commune becomes the affirmative image of an intentional community, communitarian discourses often also become their own covert hierarchizing and exclusionary regimes organized along axes of gender, race, and sexuality. The commune as community can easily become the gated community. Critical theorist Miranda Joseph has diagnosed this discursive process as “the

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romance of community,” marking the ways in which an idealized notion of community often brings discourses of a contained and managed homogeneity under the guise of affirmative group belonging.13 The work of French post-structuralist philosophers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot provides a helpful elaboration of the limits of communitarian thought and a language through which to think the communal attempt beyond ideologies of community. For both Nancy (The Inoperative Community, 1981) and Blanchot (The Unavowable Community, 1983, written in response to Nancy’s work), the concept of community must be remade at its very limits if it is to be of any conceptual and political use for minoritarian subjects. It might even be said that the critique of Western metaphysics associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction (and extended in figures such as Nancy and Blanchot) is an elaborate philosophical critique of the concept of community. Deconstruction argues that Western philosophy has emphasized the desire for immediate access to meaning and thus built a metaphysics around the privileging of presence over absence predicated on a mythic image of a “community immediately present to itself, without difference [or overcoming difference], a community of speech where all the members are within earshot.”14 For Derrida, this image of the community present to itself—the community of identity, the community of closeness and immediacy, the community of the living word, the community of the face-to-face—is a noxious delusion. Derrida writes that this image of a community of immediate presences “would be as respectable as respect itself if it did not live on a delusion and a nonrespect for its condition of origin, if it did not dream in speech of a presence denied to writing, denied by writing.”15 Nancy argues that this mythic “community has not taken place” and “society was not built on the ruins of

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a community”16; rather, what we have is an ontological and social situation that is fundamentally about a kind of writing, or a doing with absence, within conditions of finitude and difference. While evocations of community participating in this communitarian imaginary typically call for (or mourn the loss of) a world based on communion or a coming-together of subjects in closeness to form a completed whole around an essence or identity, Nancy and Blanchot associate the political implications of this dream of communal fusion as most nearly in line with a fascist impulse—what Nancy calls, within a twentieth-century European context, the “fanaticized mass” founded upon the “piling up of exterminated bodies” of Nazi ideologies of community.17 In 1978, the year before Heavenly Breakfast was published, 909 members of the People’s Temple Agricultural Project in Guyana committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid at the urging of their leader Reverend Jim Jones. The People’s Temple, often referred to as “Jonestown,” was a three-year-old agricultural, religious commune practicing “apostolic Socialism” that had settled in Guyana after being persecuted in the United States. The act of settlement followed by mass death, which came on the brink of US troops arriving at Jonestown after reports from members’ families that members were being held there against their will, was referred to by Jones as a gesture of revolutionary suicide. The event became known in the world press as the “Jonestown Massacre.” Photographs of the commune members’ bodies splayed out on the ground, such as the image by Tim Chapman included in this text (see Figure 10), circulated for weeks. The event became a fraught flash point in collective anxieties about cults, control, loss of agency, and communal experience.

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Figure 10. Jonestown and the orgy of death, 1978, Guyana. Photo by Tim Chapman. Courtesy of Getty Images.

Jonestown was a negative image of the actualized communal attempt.18 It became a symbol of the deathly commune. The commune that is completely successful in bringing people close together is the commune of the mass grave, a post–World War II image of absolute closeness. In Being Singular Plural, Nancy argues that the negative image of community—the community imaginary of fascism—is the unitary community. Nancy writes, “Within unitary community there is nothing but death, and not the sort of death found in the cemetery, which is a place of spacing or distinctness, but the death found in the ashes of crematorium ovens or in the accumulations of charnel-houses.”19 The piles of bodies strewn across the ground at Jonestown were a negative image of the unitary community, with no spacing or distinctness, a community of deathly oneness and merger. Jonestown provided an image of the commune as a mass gravesite—a horizontality of non-differentiation and

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disfigurement, a loss of self into a collective entanglement. Jonestown became a horrifying image of a completely successful communion—the commune as a death camp. Instead of looking to rescue or repeat these exterminating communitarian logics, Nancy and Blanchot develop a concept of community that takes as its irrevocable conditions of possibility the finitude and difference, incoherence and incompletion of being. That is not to say that they call for a renewed individualism. Rather, it is a sense of being-with as an always incomplete, presupposition-less, and essence-less sharing or communicating across the constitutive limits and divisions of being. In Derrida’s parlance, what is shared is not a sensible plentitude, essence, or fusing closeness but an arche-writing, a doing with absence and difference, a movement of traces, differance. Nancy writes that the sense of community and life in common that might be reconstructed and drawn out of this thinking is not the community of shared essence but instead “the activity of sharing, the dynamic, if you will, of a passage through singular ruptures.”20 For Blanchot, it is more simply a “solitude lived in common.”21 This image of collective formations as processes of sharing across the rupture of difference and finitude leaves room for antagonism and idiorrhythmy. It is a group work of encountering other subjects across the gulfs and breaches of being and history. It is an account of gathering in common-ness that is also an account of dissemination, dislocation, and dispersion. Nancy writes: to reach one another—in passing to the limit—is not to commune, which is to accede to another total body where everyone melts together. But to reach one another, to touch one another, is to touch the

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limit where being itself, where being-in-common conceals us one from the other, and, in concealing us, in withdrawing us from the other before the other, exposes us to him or her.22 To gather together, to reach, to touch, to expose, to communicate are modalities of making passages within untranscend-able conditions of difference and absence—a kind of writing-together. Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast is both a document of and a doing with this sort of communal writing. It is a text about writing within a space of collective dislocation as much as it is about anything else. The reader is met at the opening of Delany’s telling with a flatly descriptive scene of Heavenly Breakfast’s spatiality rather than an orgiastic narrative of merging collective bodies. Delany writes, “four rooms on the second floor of a Lower East Side tenement: bathtub in the kitchen; two pantry-sized rooms railroading off that; and a fifteen-by-twenty back room, largest in the apartment.”23 Rather than provide a scene of collective entwinement, Delany writes the collective as an open space of inhabitation—a dispersed field for subjects to take space with and from each other, encountering each other in an ambient poetics of difference. It is an account of how inhabitants moved around and away from each other just as much as toward each other. In Heavenly Breakfast, Delany is engaged in something more like dwelling-writing than community-building. In Nancy’s words, Delany is engaged in writing a communal attempt that is not necessarily about communion but is something like a “literary communism,” or as Nancy would say, a writing across the “communionless communism of singular beings.”24

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Non-Project Both Nancy and Blanchot worked closely with Georges Bataille, the theorist of eroticism, mysticism, and limit experiences, who had a penchant for collective rituals and clandestine occultist groups. In Bataille’s writings on extreme bodily states that he referred to as “inner experience,” he outlined that the kinds of collective practices he was interested in were in “opposition to the idea of the project.”25 Bataille’s realm of the non-project is a non-instrumentalized realm of experience, a being and doing not reduced to its ends or products. For Nancy and Blanchot, the term “désoeuvrement” becomes a key concept for rethinking how to act in conjunction with others beyond the regime of the project. Désoeuvrement gets translated into English variously as “inoperativity,” “worklessness,” “unworking,” or a “withdrawal from work.”26 For Nancy and Blanchot, experiments with living together otherwise cannot arise from the domain of work—they are not work camps. Nor are they start-ups. Rather, they are the refusal of the “making operational” of the world.27 Nancy writes, “[It] is not a project of fusion, or in some general way a productive or operative project—nor is it a project at all.”28 Instead, collective modes of remaking the world involve an unworking, a before or beyond of work, a positive and active withdrawal from regimes of labor based on production and completion. This sense of unworking is more nearly a sharing, a composing, a writing, a performance, an experiment without ends, or, as Nancy writes, a communication in which “communication is the unworking of work.”29 In Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast, the commune was never put to work. Instead, it was a place for literary, musical, and sexual experimentation. According to Delany, Heavenly Breakfast “was a time measured by music, defined by music’s making.”30 The commune was a band,

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and the communal experiment was not a time measured by the workday but by the aimless exploration of sonic relationality. Heavenly Breakfast, the band, was process-focused, playing together all the time but never quite cohering into an act and disbanding before they toured or published. The other activity that marked the unworking of time at Heavenly Breakfast was sex. Delany writes, “Sex, for all practical purposes, was perpetual, seldom private, and polymorphous, if not perverse.”31 The perpetual sex of Heavenly Breakfast was an ongoing experiment rather than a way to get off, an unsure relational activity rather than an articulated orientation. The one moment of collective sexual activity Delany described closely in the account is a story about an acid trip that eventually led toward a climaxless threesome between two men and one woman—one person realized they were too high to come and wanted to look at something green, another was hungry, and the other wanted more but was fine with it dissipating. Delany writes the scene as three bodies moving matter-of-factly in and eventually out of the circle of each other’s incoherent desires. It is a loose and flat modality of sex writing that focuses just as much on the spaces, statements, events, and gestures surrounding sex as on the sexual acts. Delany writes the everyday sex of Heavenly Breakfast as a mode of aimless inhabitation, not necessarily an articulation of the truth of who you are or even a mode of doing something but instead a mode of not doing anything else, a way to flee work and action, a variety of lounging, an unworking the day away. In an extended reading of a passage from Marx in The Creation of the World or Globalization, Nancy develops another sense of the kind of worldmaking (mondalisation) or practice of dwelling, inhabiting, and unworking that a noncapitalist world might be. He arrives at notions of true or free value and true or free production through a concept of

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enjoyment in Marx’s description of a communist revolution in The German Ideology—the potentiality for the enjoyment of all by all, in all and through all, an enjoyment of the world beyond the exploitative and appropriative regimes of the human under capitalism. Nancy writes, “Enjoyment—in whatever way one wants to understand it, and whether one stresses a sexual connotation [jouissance . . .] or by stressing the Spinozist’s joy, or mystical ‘union’ (are these two senses that different? It is not certain . . .)—enjoyment, therefore, is what (if it ‘is’ and if it is ‘something’) maintains itself beyond either having or being.”32 He goes on, “Enjoyment would be shared appropriation—or appropriating sharing—of what cannot be accumulated or what is not equivalent, that is, of value itself (or of meaning) in the singularity of its creation.”33 For Nancy, enjoyment is a mode of practice that reads as somewhere between sex and art, a “work beyond the work, as well as a work working and opening beyond any meaning that is either given or to be given.”34 Delany’s scene of aimless and category-less sex in a communal space in which time is measured by music—sex beyond reproduction, music-making as a modality of dwelling, play without ends—is a scene of Nancy-ian enjoyment. Heavenly Breakfast was a commune experiment enacted through the désoeuvrement of mondalisation—the worldmaking unworking of enjoyment, sex, and performance.

Family In 1969, activist photographer Bob Fitch took a series of photos of communal attempts in California. One photo (see Figure 11) shows the artist Bill Wheeler, his wife, Gay, and their child and dog sitting in the grassy dirt in front of their living structure at the Sonoma County commune called Wheeler’s Ranch. It is an image of a commune as a family

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Figure 11. The commune as white pastoral family. Gay and Bill Wheeler with child and dog in front of their communal home at Wheeler Ranch, 1969. Photo by Bob Fitch, Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

portrait: hair, shirts, and skirts flowing; surrounded by green and open land; a white nuclear family starting a new life as if from scratch. It is an image of pastoral familial whiteness that indexes how the communal impulse of the 1960s was often a white, heteronormative, ecological imaginary where rural topographies became a blank elsewhere to settle and return to a mythical time before history. It was a political impulse with a paradoxical relationship to indigeneity: appropriative—calling themselves tribes, living in provisional structures based on skewed understandings of indigenous American architecture—while also repeating a settler colonialist relation to the American pastoral landscape that denied proceeding indigenous relations to the land and figured rural America as a blank elsewhere always already open for

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the taking. These communal attempts unwittingly repeated the American expansionist imaginary by engaging in a romantic image of a small group of people, figured as a family, beginning again, an expropriative reproductive fantasy. In these projects, the commune became something like a disavowed familial colony. While many communal attempts, such as Wheeler’s Ranch, reproduced and reinscribed the white settler family, Heavenly Breakfast took shape, not in an imagined empty pastoral elsewhere but where it was already going on—namely, East Second Street in Manhattan’s East Village. In addition, Heavenly Breakfast challenged the gendered divisions of labor of their domestic scene and redistributed what counts as reproductive labor. These spatial orientations and domestic interventions constitute the politics of the communal attempt. The commune displaces the location of the politics. Rather than approaching a traditionally masculinized sense of the polis and the public sphere as the site of political contestation, the commune brings the sphere of political intervention into the nonrepresentative realm of the domestic and posits the feminized, everyday reproductive relations of caring, dwelling, and living as its political terrain. Delany frames the politics of Heavenly Breakfast as a highly political departure from politics. Delany argues within the account that “all political action within a given political system perpetuates that system if only because that system has defined which actions are and which actions are not political,”35 and in doing so, justifies the everyday life of Heavenly Breakfast as a political intervention in itself. The communal attempt vacates political systems of representation for micro-practices of experimental co-dwelling that don’t appear to be in themselves political so as to reinvent politics. The inhabitants of Heavenly Breakfast weren’t in-

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vested in making claims within the public sphere but rather in remaking the divisions and hierarchies that structure domestic life. The communal attempt displaced the realm of struggle from representative politics to reproductive politics, from the constitution of the public sphere to infrastructural relations in space. For feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici, the reproduction of life is the ground zero for revolutionary practice. Federici cites Friedrich Engels in arguing that “the determining force in history is the production and reproduction of immediate life”36 and that the social world of capitalism’s mode of production was founded not just upon the exploitation of the wage laborer but, more importantly, upon the unpaid and invisible domestic labor of women and enslaved people in reproducing immediate life. Writing within the radical feminist movements of the 1970s, Federici writes, “The family is essentially the institutionalization of our unwaged labor, of our wageless dependence on men and, consequently, the institutionalization of an unequal division of power that has disciplined us as well as men.”37 In 1972, Federici launched the Wages for Housework Campaign to “expose the fact that housework is already money for capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking.”38 Cooking, smiling, and fucking—the unpaid affective and care labor reproducing domestic life—are the terrain of communal experimentation. Or, in other words, the commune—in its feminist and queer potential—is an opportunity to redistribute the unequal division of power within cooking, smiling, and fucking. It is an opportunity to experiment with what Federici calls “ ‘commoning’ practices,” or “new collective forms of reproduction, confronting the divisions that have been planted among us.”39 Federici’s “commoning” practices are in many ways what scholars

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such as Kathi Weeks and Sophie Lewis call a feminist politics of “family abolition.”40 For these scholars, abolishing the family is not a call to take away systems of support and love but a practice of critiquing the family as the social form through which capitalist economies are reproduced and an attempt to imagine alternative kinship formations. In this way, the feminist movement, as an everyday practice of family abolition, has always been a kind of implicit communal movement beyond and below the avowed communal projects of explicit communal movements. Feminism, as such, is an ongoing commune that doesn’t have to announce itself as a project, experimenting with a diffuse network of feminist communes embedded in the folds of social worlds, disrupting the distribution of the domestic. For queer theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz, family abolition and the commoning practices of redistributing domestic labor not only disrupt gendered divisions and hierarchies but also offer a queer challenge to regimes of life organized around an imperative to reproduce. Muñoz writes that “reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality” only promises one kind of a future: “the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction.”41 For Muñoz, part of the political work of queer social and aesthetic experiments is to offer a means to imagine and practice a kind of nonreproductive and nonfamilial futurity. Muñoz figures queerness as a family abolitionist commoning practice of living into the future by reproducing deviant forms of nonreproductive inhabitation. Heavenly Breakfast was investing in the realm of reproductive labor—cooking, smiling, and fucking—but it did not aim to reproduce itself into the reproductive future of the family. It did not aim to settle and grow elsewhere, instead experimenting with how to be where it already was differently.

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Alter-Institutionality There is a contradiction in the heart of the desire to form a commune. The communal impulse is an impulse to depart from the inherited institutions of modernity and this departure is achieved by the formation of an institutional apparatus. Furthermore, this counterinstitutional institution of the commune is not just any kind of institutional apparatus; it is akin to what sociologist Erving Goffman might have called a “total institution” in his analysis of psychiatric care facilities—a space where sleep, play, and work overlap and commingle. The commune is a place removed from society, an entirely encompassing institution.42 Toward the end of Heavenly Breakfast, Delany riffs on this contradiction by jokingly describing the communal attempt with the following comparison: “without any of their disadvantages, it combines the best points of a jail, a mental hospital, a brothel.”43 For Delany, the commune is a doing otherwise with the contradiction between counterinstitutions and institutions, an alter-institutionality, a felicitous combination of jail, mental hospital, and brothel but without the drawbacks of coercion, control, or exploitation. The commune, in this case, becomes the institutional impulse gone on an alternative track—a set of infrastructural potentialities around proximity, madness, and sex. One of the political and conceptual impasses that contemporary thinkers of the 1960s and 1970s often face is the apparent institutionalization of anti-institutionality since the 1970s. Radical movements articulating identity antagonisms have been met with new technologies of containment and control. For example, the university has done its best to absorb resistant knowledge formations such as Black Studies and Queer Studies, and the museum folds disruptive prac-

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tices such as performance art and institutional critique into its value matrix. Sociologist Roderick Ferguson builds on the work of Lisa Duggan and Stuart Hall to gather the political ideologies and modalities of institutional absorption of this era under the heading of neoliberalism, defining neoliberalism as the “forcible curtailment of liberal, left-liberal, and leftist social movements of the 1960s and 1970s . . . a component of those historic processes that attempt to ‘get hold of and neutralize difference.’ ”44 For Ferguson, these neoliberal processes of getting hold of, neutralizing, curtailing, cooling off, and absorbing once insurgent forms of difference occur through what he calls a will to institutionality—a will toward being recognized, legitimized, affirmed by, and incorporated within modernity’s institutions.45 But what about forms of collective experimentation that are simultaneously proximate to modernity’s institutions—such as Delany’s characterization of Heavenly Breakfast—but not necessarily participating in a will to institutional recognition or incorporation? Communal attempts such as Heavenly Breakfast play with the desire to institutionalize while letting themselves resist collective coherence and moving to a more cacophonous collective rhythm before fading away. Art theorist Gerald Raunig’s work on contemporary modalities of artistic institutional critique might provide some helpful terminology for considering Heavenly Breakfast’s mode of alter-institutionality. Raunig writes about artistic practices of institutional critique that, rather than bask in the complicitous defeat of the total encroachment of coercive institutions or celebrate a supposedly radical outside to dominant institutionality, practice what he calls “instituent practices.” Building on the work of philosophers Paolo Virno and Gilles Deleuze, Raunig theorizes these critical practices and leftist strategies not as counterinstitutions but as temporary infrastructures for exodus and immanent flight. As Raunig

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writes, “Instituent practices thwart the logics of institutionalization; they invent new forms of instituting and continuously link these instituting events. [They do] not oppose the institution, but [they do] flee from institutionalization and structuralization.”46 Instituent practices are enactments that gather and collectivize (for instance, a loose and rotating commune-band in a second-floor apartment in Manhattan’s East Village) while evading capture and containment within regimes of governmentality and control (a commune-band that never calls itself to order and dissipates or mutates before it has the chance). Heavenly Breakfast, as Delany describes it, was not an attempt to found a counterinstitution with a disavowed will to institutionality but instead a provisional terrain for experimenting with instituent practices.

Dis-Organization In one of Peter Simon’s photographs of a rural commune (see Figure 12), a group of communards gathers in two concentric circles to dance. Arms outstretched and hands clasped, they all face the same direction as they move. They are in step and in line, forming two uninterrupted and symmetrical chains in an open field. It is an image of togetherness, a scene of the collective as a choreography of closeness, a performance of the commune as an in-sync, univocal circle. The commune as a circle is a closed enclosure with clear insides and outsides, a gathering of co-presence that demands organized participation, or as Barthes might have said during his How to Live Together lectures, a loss of idiorrhythmy. Barthes urged those attending his lecture to consider how communal socialities based on rituals of shared rhythm and enforced proximity become their own sites of coercive management in which one dominant rhythm or meter is implicitly enforced. The commune-as-circle ran the

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Figure 12. May Day at Packer Corners commune: a group holding hands and dancing. Photo by Peter Simon; May 1, 1969; Peter Simon Collection, PH 009, Special Collections and University Archives, UMass Amherst Libraries.

risk of becoming a space of imposed collective alignment, a prescribed collective rhythm. Delany’s account of Heavenly Breakfast is full of spacedout togetherness and ambient meanderings. Rather than a circle of togetherness present to itself, Heavenly Breakfast is spatially dispersed and incoherent. Even when narrating a band rehearsal, a modality of togetherness that could easily become a story about finding a common and unifying pulse, the sense of rhythmic togetherness provided by Delany is much more turbulent and aleatory. The co-dwelling subjects of Heavenly Breakfast maintain their distance and idiosyncratic rhythm even while making rhythms together and experimenting with different ways of living beyond regimes of private property and bourgeois individualism. This dis-

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tance becomes the conditions of possibility for the articulation of internal differences and politics. Heavenly Breakfast is a scene of a collective drifting in and out of togetherness at their own pace, a cacophonous coming in and out of proximity and distance amidst articulations of difference and antagonism. Delany writes that, at Heavenly Breakfast, “we never had anything even resembling an organizational meeting. If you wanted something done, you did it; if you wanted people to do something, you asked them.”47 While a certain image of the commune from the 1960s persists as an “intentional community” that was a perhaps messy but essentially orderdriven collective experiment marked by group meetings, chore wheels, and circle dances, at Heavenly Breakfast, “there was no permanent, externally agreed-on social organizational structure.”48 At one point in the memoir, Delany recounts visiting another commune called January House, where they had planned meetings, voted on collective decisions, and ate at a large dining room table every night. Delany reports that upon leaving the encounter, he argued to members of Heavenly Breakfast that this level of organization made January House a different kind of collective attempt than what they were engaged in: “It’s not a commune! . . . It’s a cooperative. Or a collective, maybe. But it’s not a commune.”49 For Delany, the promise of the commune as an alter-institutional form was its disorderly informality. In counter-distinction to January House, Delany writes lovingly about his encounters with the Place. The Place was a basement in the East Village with some mattresses on the floor and no locks on the door. Delany writes about the Place as a spot where people showed up, stayed for a while, and then fell out. There were no meetings, and no one had a real sense of who was there and when. It was referred to as a “rat

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pit” by members of January House, but Delany talks only fondly of its drifting disorganization.50 It circulates throughout the text as a kind of ideal. The political theorist of the Black radical tradition Cedric Robinson makes a case for the political and figurative importance of disorderly collective formations such as the Place. In Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (which Fred Moten has characterized as an “amazing and beautiful ode to disorder”51), Robinson launches an attack on what he terms “the political paradigm” based on an epistemology that—buttressed by a mythos of “leadership”— privileges order, rationality, and coherency. To move beyond this “episteme which presupposes that political society is order,”52 Robinson argues that the task at hand is to “abuse the political consciousness.”53 In order to issue this abuse, Robinson turns to anthropological accounts of anarchistic modes of social organization, specifically amongst societies of the African continent, to consider an alternative Black anarchist epistemological paradigm that has not been fashioned in relation to an image of Western state authority and order. In this account of anarchism, Robinson develops a counterweight to Western political logic and calls his Africanist political paradigm a “principle of incompleteness.” Robinson defines this anarchistic principle ontologically as “the absence of discrete organistic integrity,” arguing that if elaborated, it has the ability to “bring to human society a paradigm subversive to political authority as the archetypical resolution [and] prescription of order.”54 Delany’s entwined accounts of Heavenly Breakfast and the Place enact their own literary principle of incompleteness and the promise of a non-coercive gathering beyond order. The incompleteness and disorder in Heavenly Breakfast also operated on the level of the sign. In Heavenly Breakfast, Delany outlines how the collective formation of the com-

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mune never cohered into a unified grammatical form. The commune never came together into a representable “we,” and Delany writes that this was a matter of syntax: “living as constantly close as one does in a communal situation, almost all exchanges are between ‘I’ and ‘you.’ ‘We’ was a term ‘we’ at the Breakfast, at any rate, only used with visitors.”55 Heavenly Breakfast never experienced itself as a “we” unless under the reductive pressure of accounting for itself to an outsider. Otherwise, it was a disorderly assemblage of I’s and you’s living in proximity. Delany describes the web of I’s and you’s of the communal situation as primarily haptic. Delany writes, “When you and I live so closely that touch and smell are suddenly half of what we communicate, new laws govern the interchanges.”56 Heavenly Breakfast was not an image of a circle cohering around a category of sexual or racial difference but a nonrepresentational, incoherent, and disorderly haptic entanglement of different I’s and you’s. For Delany, part of what makes a commune a commune is that it can never quite be seen as if from above or cohere into a representable collective entity. Instead, it is a disorderly proximity of different bodies that must be ambiently felt out and moved through.

Disbanding Heavenly Breakfast broke up. Refusing inherited regimes of social organization and collective coherence, it was breaking up even as it was coming together. It was a gathering that was already scattered. It was a band that was disbanding— even in becoming a band. Delany’s subtitle to his account of Heavenly Breakfast, “An Essay on the Winter of Love,” evokes a sense of arduous after-ness: what comes after the Summer of Love, a cold spell after the event of warmness that must be endured, a chilly ongoingness after an

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easy season of hot excitement. Delany writes in his introduction that glimmering sunny images of the Summer of Love, which he describes as being something like “a barefoot adolescent of aspecific gender, standing in Golden Gate Park and holding a flower, wearing not much and that mostly handmade,” were fixed in their place by a “darker politics” that the summer images could never account for— the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the horrors of Jonestown, Black students occupying the halls of Columbia.57 Delany’s wintery writing on Heavenly Breakfast was “a frame away” from, and a season after, this glittering image. It provided an account of a collective experiment that, while not necessarily about the events of this antagonistic political surround, was chillier and not invested in reproducing an image of warm affirmation. Delany’s evocation of the communal attempt as a loving in winter evokes José Esteban Muñoz’s elaboration of the aesthetic and political promise of queerness as a kind of critical utopianism. Building on the work of the Frankfurt School Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Muñoz argued that the utopian impulse of queer art and politics is not about an optimistic fantasy but “an idealist mode of critique that reminds us that there is something missing, that the present and presence (and its opposite number, absence) is [sic] not enough.”58 For Muñoz and Bloch, utopian impulses are not a facile wish for unambivalent affirmation, but a not necessarily pleasant dialectic between hope and disappointment. The utopian impulse is primarily a critical dissatisfaction with the world as given. In a conversation about the utopian function of art with his good friend Theodor Adorno, Bloch argued: Hope is the opposite of security. It is the opposite of naïve optimism. The category of danger is always

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within it. This hope is not confidence [. . .]. Hope is critical and can be disappointed. However, hope still nails a flag on the mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not accepted, even when this decline is still very strong. Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers, and it is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible.59 For Bloch, utopian hope is an act of refusal that is both negative and speculative. It is a moment of saying no to the violence of the present in hopes of another way, and yet it is full of danger, disappointment, impossibility, and bad feelings. Heavenly Breakfast’s attempt to keep making another way of living together possible, even after the rosy image of the Summer of Love left the frame, was a critical utopian gesture. It was an impulse to experiment in hoping and loving otherwise within the disappointments of winter. It was a banding together within a moment of disbanding, a band playing its own disbanding. The music of an already disbanding band might be a mode of what Derrida would call arche-writing—a doing with absence and difference, the movement of traces, differance. The commune was a kind of writing and dwelling within wintery dispersal and this meant that the event of the commune’s literal dispersal, the moment of their breakup, was less of an ending and more of a remediation. In providing an account of the commune as a zone of improvised relationality within after-ness, Delany also resists the narrative impulse to provide a linear account of Heavenly Breakfast as a collective subject that once was and then came to a complete end. The communal attempt of Heavenly Breakfast remains incomplete—fragmenting, drifting—so that even

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the commune’s short-lived impermanence is not a closure to mourn but a continuing incompletion to be written through. Toward the end of the account, Delany reports matter-of-factly, “at March-end, Heavenly Breakfast, rock band and commune, disbanded.”60 After coming together in November, Heavenly Breakfast only lasted for what seemed to be five months. Yet, for Delany, this impermanence is not necessarily a sign of its failure. What never quite fully was also never quite fully ceases to be. Delany writes, “Maybe an essential part of communes is their impermanence. Maybe communes just break up . . . maybe it’s the compulsive desire for things to be permanent that’s neurotic.”61 Delany marks the disbanding of the commune as a resistance to the neurotic attachment to the reproductive fantasy of permanence. Delany’s postmortem narrative of Heavenly Breakfast, written ten years after the disbanding, is not a melancholic epitaph of the death of an attempt. Instead, it is a fragmentary writing after the group that is a continuation of an already ongoing practice of writing and playing within after-ness that was underway within the wintery collective attempt. The literary theorist Kristen Ross, in her work on the Paris Commune, offers a frame through which to understand the kind of textual afterlife that Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast invokes. For Ross, there are modalities of writing that take place within and after events such as a communal attempt that become “a kind of afterlife that does not exactly come after but in my view is part and parcel of the event itself.”62 Ross continues, “The French word survie evokes this nicely: a life beyond life. Not the memory of the event or its legacy, although some form of these are [sic] surely already in the making, but its prolongation, every bit as vital to the event’s logic as the initial acts of insurrection.”63 Delany’s postmortem text can be read not only as a memorial, a com-

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memoration, or a narrative capture of a group that once was but also as a potential prolongation of a group that was already operating within an atmosphere of after-ness. It circulates a textual life beyond life, a remediating extension of the after-event of Heavenly Breakfast. Ross later refers to these modalities of writing the commune as a “continuation of combat by other means.”64 Delany’s practice of communal writing is an “other means” by which to keep the everyday combat of the collective attempt open even within its dispersal.

Between Revolutions The commune is currently being rearticulated as a political and aesthetic strategy. In The Coming Insurrection, one of the most broadly circulated manifestos of the contemporary Euro-American Left, the anonymous French anarchist collective the Invisible Committee calls for “a density of communes that will displace the institutions of society.”65 They define a commune as a small assemblage of subjects, with “no leader, no demands, no organization,”66 that practices alternative forms of dwelling together as an insurgent departure from contemporary conditions of stultification and exploitation. For the Invisible Committee, communes are necessarily small in scale, arguing that they “must be extended while making sure they do not exceed a certain size, beyond which they lose touch with themselves and give rise, almost without fail, to a dominant caste.”67 They argue that any kind of large-scale revolutionary practice to come will not be in the form of a unified political party but instead “nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties.”68 For groups such as the Invisible Committee, the commune—a small group experimenting with alternative modalities of reproducing

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collective life—has re-emerged as a political category within a broader crisis of political categories and modalities of collective action. Or in the words of Kristin Ross, the commune has made a reentrance “into the figurability of the present.”69 The commune, as a figure and social formation, seems to once again be utterable, once again figurable, its forms and concepts resonating anew. In the fall of 2017, the artist Morgan Bassichis staged a musical adaptation of Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s legendary 1977 fable-manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions at Manhattan’s New Museum. Like Heavenly Breakfast, The Faggots and Their Friends is a textual afterlife of a communal attempt, composed in the context of Lavender Hill, a queer commune formed in 1973 outside of Ithaca, New York, and circulating well beyond the commune’s disbanding. Bassichis’s musical reimagined and recalled the text in the New Museum’s Sky Room as part of the show Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, curated by Johanna Burton and Sara O’Keeffe. For its three performances, Bassichis and their collaborators, TM Davy, DonChristian Jones, and Michi and Una Osato, assembled audiences early for a potluck before performing on a plush set of psychedelic curtains and pillows by Anna Betbeze. The New Museum performance eventually led to reperformances at venues such as the New York Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum, and the queer sex party Inferno, as well as a reissuing of Mitchell and Asta’s text from Nightboat Books with an introduction by Bassichis and a preface from the filmmaker and activist Tourmaline. Mitchell and Asta’s text is a series of narrative fragments and illustrations (see Figure 13) about an unruly assembly of faggots, queens, fairies, women who love women, and friends, all attempting to survive and thrive in an oppressive and doomed world ruled by men called Ramrod. More of an explicitly fictional parable than Delany’s Heavenly Break-

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Figure 13. An illustration by Ned Asta, from The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta. © 1977 by Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta. Reprinted with permission of Nightboat Books.

fast, it is a story about how to live together, how to take care of each other, how to put on shows, how to make scenes, how to fuck, and how to make the best out of State abandonment. Occasionally the narrative strands are punctuated by aphorisms that lean toward the analytical and theoretical: “the fairies know that the earth will not tolerate the men much longer,”70 “we gotta keep each other alive any way we can ‘cause nobody else is goin’ do it.”71 It is a text that emanates from and articulates communal practice. It both documents and inspires the ongoing everyday collective processes that happen before, after, around, under, and between the events of revolution. On one level, Bassichis’s performance of Mitchell’s text at

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the New Museum seemed to pose the question: To what extent can the alter-institutionality of a commune occupy the institutional enclosure of the museum? While the answer to this question is most likely that it can’t (after all, museums tend to make it difficult to take drugs, have sex, or sleep when you’re in them), what I found most interesting about Bassichis’s performance was that this question didn’t seem to be its primary concern. While there was a pre-show potluck, a pillow-lined stage, and plenty of collective sing-alongs, the primary offering of the performance was not about instantiating a commune in the room but something closer to reading together. This act of reading the commune alongside one another transposed the question of the commune out of the key of political failure and neoliberal absorption and into the key of unfinished impulses and narrative possibility. Bassichis and their collaborators transformed Mitchell’s language into sung refrains, repeating and resonating the text with us to transmit and teach it (see Figure 14). Between musical numbers, performers circulated a copy of the text amongst the audience and had us read passages out loud. The performance was not about making a commune in the present but instead about intoning a collective incantation that was both of the past and the future. It was a reperformance of something that had disbanded but was also still yet to come, a reading together to imagine alternative collective formations together. In their introduction to the reprint of The Faggots and Their Friends, Bassichis frames the text as a kind of prophetic care package, a missive sent from the past for a future we still need. For Bassichis, part of why the text speaks to the future is because Lavender Hill, the commune that birthed the text, is ontologically and historically unstable. Bassichis writes, “People often ask me if Lavender Hill still exists, and I have a hard time answering yes or no. Maybe? Some-

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Figure 14. Una Osato, Michi Osato, Morgan Bassichis, TM Davy, and DonChristian Jones (from left to right) and audience members in The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions: The Musical, December 17, 2017, The New Museum. Photo by Chloe Foussianes.

times?”72 Lavender Hill, as a place, is not necessarily still happening, but Lavender Hill, like Heavenly Breakfast before it, persists as writing, as a series of signs and aspirations ready to assemble into a novel refrain. In the language of Kristen Ross, these texts and performances allow communal attempts such as Heavenly Breakfast and Lavender Hill to survie even within their disbanding. They keep the attempt open as a collection of unextinguished aspirations available for continued use between the revolutions and during the winter of love.

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The articulation of radical feminism in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought not only a rush of antipatriarchal texts, ideological critiques, and political actions but also a proliferation of group procedures, relational forms, and experimental modalities of associational life. Scenes of feminist group work from the radical feminist movement— such as the photographs of consciousness-raising meetings captured by feminist photographers like Mary Ellen Mark and Bettye Lane (see Figure 15)—show dynamic processoriented forms, tight gatherings of bodies that operated somewhere in between group therapy, co-education, collaborative artmaking, and collective political action. They were opportunities for feminists to assemble together and develop political critiques, to confront and be confronted by what was shared and not shared, to take account of who was there and not there.1 As an example of this feminist group work, Pamela Allen tells the story in Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation of a groupuscule called Sudso84

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Figure 15. A feminist consciousness-raising meeting, New York, 1972. Photo by Bettye Lane, Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

floppen that began in 1968. Sudsofloppen’s meetings operated through a four-step group process: opening up, sharing, analyzing, and abstracting. Allen discusses the radical feminist movement as a practice of the small group, an active movement between the concrete and the abstract, the personal and political, the specific and the general, the group and the world. For Allen, radical feminism was about a relational praxis of the small group rather than an alreadyknown identification. The feminist small group was a “free space” for the weaving of collective thought, not an already determined collective entity.2 Similarly, New York Radical Women—a feminist collective that frequently met in Manhattan from 1969 to 1971—approached collective process as the primary practice of the feminist movement. A pam-

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phlet produced by the collective outlined consciousnessraising groups as the how of radical feminism, defining a consciousness-raising group as a “free space to talk about yourself” that met at a different home each week and ideally consisted of eight to twelve members. These meetings were about a gathering together and co-sharing of language organized by the following procedures and guidelines: “Select a Topic, Go around in a circle, Always speak personally, specifically and from your experience, Don’t interrupt, Never challenge anyone else’s experience, Try not to give advice.”3 The New York Radical Women meetings were aimed at being nonaggressive—no interruption, no challenging—and yet didn’t necessarily aim at a collective agreement or an assumption of shared-ness—speak personally and specifically, no giving advice. Feminist experiments in anti-patriarchal group-being approached feminism, at least in aim, to be a dynamic collective process rather than an identitarian position. Groups such as Sudsofloppen and New York Radical Women, rather than being collectives gathered around an assumed coherence, desired to constitute themselves around the constitutive problems of their own collective existence. These feminist groupuscules—provisional and dynamic configurations of bodies, signs, and forces—could never be fully reduced into a single collective subject. Yet the history of the radical feminist movement is not necessarily the history of an open-ended relational practice without an assumed coherent subject. Radical feminist collectives and consciousness-raising groups often became tacitly and yet forcefully white-dominated spaces that assumed a common experience of womanhood under patriarchy in which gender was the sole, or at least determining, social antagonism. Feminist groups made up of primarily white women—such as the group in the photograph by Bettye Lane (see Figure

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15)—often falsely universalized from white experiences of patriarchy and created a sense of collective coherence that elided the experiences of women of color and left unacknowledged the group’s own inability to consider the mutual entanglement of race and gender as systems of domination. It often fell upon women of color to name the denials of difference and divisions that existed within white-dominated consciousness-raising meetings and other feminist collective processes. As the Chicana feminist artists, activists, and scholars Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa wrote in their introduction to the first edition of This Bridge Called My Back, they were partially compelled to gather the texts by women of color feminists included in the collection—its own kind of textual feminist group work—because they wanted “to express to all women—especially to white middle-class women—the experiences which divide us as feminists; we want to examine incidents of intolerance, prejudice and denial of differences within the feminist movement.”4 White feminist collective processes that denied difference and implicitly assembled around a presumed collective coherence reproduced conditions of domination that rendered women of color outside the category of woman. In the preface to Bridge, author and activist Toni Cade Bambara argued that the collection grew out of the need to “protest, complain or explain to white feminist would-be allies that there are other ties and visions that bind, prior allegiances and priorities that supersede their invitations to coalesce on their terms.”5 In “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” first published by the Boston-based Black lesbian socialist feminist Combahee River Collective in 1977, they assert that part of the genesis of their collective formation was in relation to the “racism and elitism within the movement itself.”6 Third World feminists and feminists of color such as

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Moraga, Anzaldúa, Bambara, and the women of the Combahee River Collective, in rearticulating the internal divisions within feminism—as well as the multiplicity of ties, bindings, allegiances, and priorities that move through antipatriarchal collective articulations—asserted feminist collective praxis as an ongoing conflictual act of assembling around gender, race, and sexuality as cuts that bind.7 Accounts of the internal antagonisms within feminist collectivity produced by women of color often get packaged together as part of a critique of so-called white feminism. While the work of women of color feminists often critiques the neoliberal absorption of feminist politics and the reduction of anti-patriarchal activism into a single axis of social antagonism, to reductively position the interventions of women of color feminists as solely a correction to white feminism is both historically inaccurate and politically suspect. As critical theorists and historians such as Sarah Haley, Margaret Jacobs, and Kyla Schuller have shown, the history of white feminism is not just the history of an unfortunate oversight or an exclusionary meeting that needs women of color to be added to it in order to rectify it. Instead, it is a sexualized and classed technology of white supremacy built around a figure of the white woman that has often been deployed to discipline women of color and intensify systems of domination (even if under the auspices of care and concern).8 Instead of critiquing the exclusions of white feminist formations so as to simply add women of color to their seemingly coherent relational forms or letting the responsibility fall solely upon women of color to critique the implicit reproduction of systems of domination operating within white feminisms, I am interested in critiquing white feminism from within its relational forms and exploring how white radical feminist collectivity in the 1960s and 1970s was never the stable social formation it seems to have aspired to be. Instead, it was a tumultuous assembly that was productively buckling under

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the force of its own internal antagonisms even in its initial gestures and gatherings. To do this, I turn to cinema produced within whitedominated feminist organizing spaces in New York City in the 1970s to consider the politics and aesthetics of these feminist relational forms. I analyze the filmmaker Lizzie Borden’s 1976 film Regrouping to consider how white feminist experimental cinema rearticulated the politics of representation and feminist collective practice. I read Borden’s film as an internal critique of a white feminist politics and aesthetics based on maintaining a coherent and unified category of woman. Borden’s film instead initiates a nonrepresentative relational assembling and disassembling within the messy entanglement of discourses of gender, race, and sexuality. Regrouping is an experimental documentary about the formation and deformation of a group of white feminists.9 It is a voyeuristic and self-reflexive filmic exploration of a group’s anxieties about their own group-being. The film never coheres into a stable representation of the group, instead persistently fragmenting into a disjunctive series of cinematic assemblages as if from the weight of its own internal incoherence. There are out-of-sync visual and sonic elements, discontinuous cuts, and overlapping and conflicting voice-overs of the women discussing the anxieties around membership with the group: Who is in and who is out? Is it a group held together by common experience or a provisional gathering around a common political aim? Building on my work on the small group huddling in Simone Forti’s movement scores and the dispersing communal formations of Samuel Delany in the previous chapter, this chapter narrates the unsettled feminist huddling that takes place within and around Borden’s film as a feminist cinematic assemblage in order to think in new ways about questions of coherence and representation in feminist politics and aesthetics. One of the aims of this chapter is to help us think about

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how the concepts and forms that can be gleaned from Borden’s film might allow us to reconsider how we narrate feminist history. Feminist political movements of the twentieth century are sometimes narrated as a succession of waves, in which the white-dominated feminist milieu of the so-called second wave of the 1960s and 1970s was eventually superseded and replaced by a multicultural or anti-racist third wave. Rather than replicate these linear historical narratives of progression or succession, I am interested in excavating Borden’s film for a critical unraveling of the so-called second wave from within the second wave’s founding articulations. Succession, progression, and wave-based modes of feminist historiography erase the already existing women of color feminist collectivities at the time of the second wave and the already existing collective fragmentations and constitutive impossibilities within single-issue white feminism. Borden’s film provides an occasion to consider the antagonisms that constitute the affiliations of feminist group work. It is an opportunity to rearticulate and reimagine another kind of feminist assembly, another kind of feminist regrouping. In the final moments of the chapter, I move from Borden’s film to an engagement with the visual artist Sharon Hayes’s 2014 piece in collaboration with photographer Liz Ligon, Women of the World Unite! they said to continue imagining a feminist politics that refuses a coherent subject of representation and instead poses feminist unity as a constitutive problem to continuously reassemble around.

Feminist Cinematic Assemblages In his writing on cinema, Gilles Deleuze cuts and splices the philosophical work of Henri Bergson and Charles Pierce with twentieth-century filmmaking to “isolate certain cinematographic concepts.”10 For Deleuze, filmmakers are thinkers,

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and filmmaking is an experimental terrain for rethinking the world. His account of cinema is a nonrepresentational account of representation in which an image is a kind of entity in the world, an imaging, a slicing of the movement of matter, not just a static representation of an elsewhere world referent. For Deleuze, the manipulation of movement, image, sound, and time of filmmaking is an act of world-slicing and worldmaking. For film theorist Kara Keeling, Deleuze’s account of cinema’s world-slicing power means that cinematic regimes of the image “designate a condition of existence” in themselves.11 Keeling writes that cinema does not just represent the world in a realm unto itself; cinema calls forth modes of cognition and perception that “work to order, orchestrate, produce, and reproduce social reality and sociality.”12 Cinematic regimes contribute to determining what feels perceptible and imperceptible, seen and unseen, thought and unthought within our social worlds. In Witch’s Flight, Keeling’s study of the figure of the Black femme in twentieth-century film history and its role in the formation and disruption of gendered and racialized cinematic assemblages, Keeling turns to Deleuze to consider how cinematic processes reproduce inherited structures of domination while also containing the potentiality to disrupt this structuration and disarticulate the narrative cohesion of the world as given. In his texts on cinema, Deleuze differentiates between two regimes of cinematic images: the movement-image and the time-image. For Deleuze, films that participate in regimes of the movement-image align with classical or mainstream cinematic tendencies toward narrative coherence through the presentation of seamless flows of images. These works shore up the world as it already is, reproducing clichéd image-worlds and reinforcing already given sensorymotor habits of seeing, hearing, and feeling. In counter-

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distinction to the regime of the movement-image, Deleuze looks to post–World War II experimental film to identify cinematic tactics that he associates with the time-image. Deleuze reads the fragmented cuts, disjunctive scenes, and out-of-sync elements of these films as tactics that throw the movement-image into crisis and destabilize the narrative totality of classical cinema. In disrupting regimes of sequential time and narrative linearity, these experimental films break through given representational systems and expose irrational disunities and errant intervals in time. As Theresa L. Geller writes, the political promise of the time-image for Deleuze is its “power to ‘de-form’ a phantasmatic representational system,” and this power “lies in the ability to expose the intervals that disrupt the otherwise uninterrupted system.”13 Similarly, for Keeling, the power of the time-image as a concept is that it names political-aesthetic cinematic experiences in which “sensory perception is wrenched from a habituated motor response to create a new perception.”14 The cinematic disruption of narrative flow and sequential time results in the creation of new arrangements of sense, image, and force rather than cohesive figures or narratological structures, or, in other words, novel cinematic assemblages.15 Assemblage is the term that English translators of Deleuze have used to approximate the French term agencement, a sign that not only signifies a group or assembly of persons or things but also resonates with terms that imply a kind of provisional order or pattern such as arrangement, composition, configuration, or layout. It is a term that cuts across binaries of structure and structurelessness, order and disorder, by articulating the unfixed movements and indeterminate capacities of emergent orders and relational patterns of things, bodies, statements, acts, and gestures. Theories of agencement approach the world as a mobile pattern of relations or compositional arrangement rather than a series of discrete

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entities.16 Deleuze’s account of cinema is not about representation, narrative, and subjects but about sensory-motor regimes and mobile configurations of bodies and forces. It is an account of cinematic assemblages. The discontinuous cuts and irrational intervals of post–World War II avantgarde filmmaking can split apart the seeming seamlessness of regimes of the image that reproduce ossified structures of domination and regimes of stratification and control. For Deleuze, the disruptive force of the time-images of avantgarde cinema is that they have the ability to disarticulate the world of discrete subjects, identities, and stories and open up alternative constellations of force. Deleuzian theories of assemblage have also been engaged by feminist theorists to eschew regimes of representative politics centered on a politics of the subject. For these feminist theorists, a politics organized around an image of the subject runs the risk of producing a feminism that relies on a unitary figure of woman and only accounts for gender as a single and isolated antagonism. Rather than theorize a feminist politics based on a coherent subject, story, or figure of woman, Deleuzian feminist theories of assemblage look to cacophonous relational formations of multiple and shifting antagonisms and emergent political configurations beyond given regimes of categorization. The theorist Jasbir Puar calls for a turn to assemblage in feminist theorizing so that feminist politics can account for multiple vectors of difference and distribution without appealing to identitarian and demographic categories given by systems of domination. For Puar, interventions into white-dominated feminist theory that call for the addition of race into analyses of gender through identitarian logics run the risk of reproducing ideologies in which an analysis of race is added as a guilty afterthought to analyses of gender as if to check a demographic box.17 Rather than reproduce these logics, Puar turns to

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theories of assemblage to consider feminist political formations that address the mutual entanglement of racialization, sexuality, and gender through complex and mobile arrangements of bodies, forces, and signs beyond given categories. Feminism without a collective subject is a call to regroup within multiple streams of historical violence, a repetitive experiment with reproducing a different organization of life, a redistribution of political relations, a re-agencement. I turn to Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping to elaborate a constellation of cinematic concepts that hover around and within this sense of feminist assemblages—both cinematic and political. Borden’s film contains a dense weave of concepts within its frames and cuts. It is a film that addresses antagonisms within affiliation and the incoherence of feminist assemblages. It is my hope that the cinematic concepts of Borden’s film might offer a different image of thought for thinking about the politics of feminist collectivity and history.

Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping Regrouping is a film about, and surrounded by, feminist conflict.18 Initially screened for a few nights at New York City’s Anthology Film Archive in 1976 and then at the Edinburgh Film Festival the same year, Borden elected to take the film out of circulation for forty years amidst complaints of misrepresentation from members of the feminist collective that the film follows. In 2016, Borden responded to renewed interest in the film by screening it in a series of one-night showings at Anthology Film Archive, University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, and the 2016 Edinburgh Film Festival.19 I had the chance to see the film at the two East Coast US screenings.20 Part of my initial interest in the film was its contested circulation. Rather than circulating as an affirmative image of feminist

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collectivity or posing feminist collective authorship as an idealized ethical modality, the collaboration of Regrouping was messy and ambivalent. I went to the film expecting to see a lot of footage of meetings—feminist groups huddled together in rooms having heated debates about structures of oppression and potential political actions. Meetings are thought to be the genre of gathering in which a group practices itself into being: Want to form a group? Hold a meeting. Want to get something done with others? Hold a meeting. They are the explicit event of group formation, the doing of group-ness, a zone of collective preparation and planning, a knitting together of collective force so as to act together.21 Meetings can be thought of as almost literal feminist assemblages—unfixed and shifting, internally cacophonous and provisional gatherings around various antagonisms. But because the members of the group in Regrouping didn’t let Borden film their meetings, she could not include any footage of the group’s meetings and could never capture the group as a figure in the film. Talking about the film, Borden narrates this relation to the original group as collaborative perversity. In a talkback after the 2016 screening of the film at Anthology Film Archive, Borden said, “I was being perverse. They wanted pretty pictures, so I used all the out-of-focus footage, all the wobbly incomplete shots.”22 The film about a feminist group could not represent the group as an image of an affirmative meeting or gathering, so it approached feminist collectivity as an always-elsewhere, incomplete, out-of-focus, and wobbly cinematic assemblage. The film begins with an opening title frame that consists of a textual statement about the conditions for making the film. The frame describes how Regrouping came out of an initial agreement between Borden and the group to collaborate on a film about the feminist group’s process and how

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this process ended up falling apart. As a result, the group became the raw material of the film, and the film became a manipulation by Borden of this raw material. Already in this first title frame, the promise of collective authorship as a feminist ideal posed a constitutive disappointment for feminist experimental filmmaking. Perhaps even more interestingly, the term Borden uses to signify the initial agreement of the film in the textual statement is “collusion.” Collusion typically means a secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others. In this way, Borden marks the scene of feminist collaboration with a sense of the negativity secreted within an agreement or contract. She presents even the initial, seemingly affirmative coming together with fractures of a possible conspiracy and deception. Borden’s tactic of approaching collective authorship as an act of collusion presents feminist collaboration not as a coherent affirmative project around an assumed shared-ness but as a potentially traitorous project, as something that might involve working with the outside rather than gathering around a sense of a coherent collective subject of feminism. Shortly after the textual statement, there is a shot of the group inside an expensive car, driving and talking about income inequality and unemployment. In the next shot, the group is in a diner with a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The camera is pointed at the mirror, and we can see Borden in it, the group at the booth below her, looking up at the camera, at the mirror, at each other—eating, talking, smiling, gazing off distractedly. The viewer doesn’t gain direct visual access to the group’s conviviality but sees a reflection, a camera, and a filmmaker instead. An off-screen voice-over comes in, “The small group is important.” This is followed by a voice-over list of reasons the group comes together: “personal problems become common problems”; “feelings of

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comradeship”; “the beginnings of sisterhood”; “we’re not activists, we just support each other.” The voice-overs often overlap or interrupt each other. Sometimes two or three voices are speaking at once, perhaps one in the shot and then two about something obliquely related or critiquing what is being said or done within that shot. Any clear shot of the group or sense of collective narrative dissolves into the cacophony of conflicting voices. They are talking about the film from after it was shot, critiquing what is going on in the frame, folding a forensic evaluation of the film into the time of the visual frame. The recursivity of the voice-overs and the disjunction between the sonic and visual elements present the feminist group as an assemblage of multiple and conflicting moments in time—a kind of sonically rendered Deleuzian time-image—opening toward its own becoming and unbecoming. At one point, a voice-over says, “We argue,” and footage of an out-of-focus sexual encounter between two women begins. These are partial shots, no faces. As the sexual entanglement continues, there is a double voice-over—one voice talking about anxieties around lesbian sexuality within the group, the other discussing the difficulties of being a group without a leader: “our abstractions become generalizations”; “our problems become personal problems.” Another voiceover comes in, listing things that led to the dissolution of the group, “we had assumed there’d be no conflict,” and as one woman reaches her fingers into the other woman, “we began to drift apart.” Sex in the film is a haptic coming together. Yet it also coincides with the voicing of what separates and splits, of the drifting apart of the group. Just after this scene, there is an un-contextualized or otherwise unincorporated scene of a lone woman from the group unraveling a long fire hose in an empty street at night. It is an indeterminately meaningful gesture—a functional object that has been rolled into circu-

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lar proximity, being unraveled and unfurled for use beyond its typical use; a woman repurposing an object to draw a line on the ground; a group member re-demarcating a space and reconfiguring a relation between body, object, and space. In public conversations following the 2016 screenings of Regrouping, Borden described her filmmaking process as a “desire to penetrate the mysteries of the group that just became more and more opaque.”23 This opacity and elusiveness meant that the film “became a movie about the movie and was no longer the group’s movie,” and Borden’s cinematic methods became increasingly voyeuristic as the group frustrated her filmic desire.24 There are long shots in a women’s locker room of women showering and drying themselves off. There are shots from across the street of the women in the group showing up at their house. In these long surveillance-like shots, Borden’s camera is looking from the outside, apparently denied access to a more intimate frame. The group circulates impenetrably within the film as an elusive object, a collective formation impossible to represent, always fragmenting and opaquely elsewhere (see Figure 16). In presenting white feminist collective practice as an ambivalent process that is persistently receding from and frustrating figuration as a collective, the cinematic concepts embedded within Borden’s film resonate with many concerns and terms circulating within movement texts from both the New Left and radical feminist movements. One way to think about the shapes and stakes of the worlds that are made within Borden’s Regrouping is through the phrase “prefigurative politics,” a concept developed by social movement theorist and historian of the New Left Wini Breines. For Breines, the New Left of the mid- to late 1960s was an anti-authoritarian movement located at the radical nexus of student, anti-war, and civil rights movements whose primary characteristic was its own resistance to attempts to organize it. These features

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Figure 16. Three members of a feminist groupuscule recline on a large blanket in a field; one member points at Borden and her camera. Film still, Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping (1976). Courtesy of the artist.

of the New Left have often been thought of as apolitical or expressive rather than properly political by political theorists, but Breines develops the term “prefigurative politics” to understand them as the “healthy and vital heart of the New Left.”25 Breines understands prefigurative politics in dialectical relationship to what she calls “strategic politics,” political articulations or formations that aim to achieve structural changes in existing political orders by being figurable or legible within given political schemas. For Breines, prefigurative politics is local, spontaneous, choreographic, and nonrepresentative, a political improvisation from below that is invested in decentralization and spontaneity and identifies itself as anti-bureaucratic and anti-organizational. Within Breines’s lexicon, anti-organizational marks “a wari-

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ness of hierarchy and centralized organization,”26 an emphasis on movement over organization, a penchant for the small group, radical cell, and “spontaneous assembly” over forms of centralized organization.27 For Breines, the aim of prefigurative politics is “to create and sustain within the lived practice of the movement, relationships and political forms that ‘refigure[]’ and embod[y] the desired society.”28 Rather than only being invested in the goal of being figurable within politics as given and seeking representation and legibility in existing state institutions, prefigurative politics are “a politics of process and means” that aim to create a world while risking disorganization and ephemerality.29 Brienes’s use of the term “prefigurative” to describe anti-organizational and nonrepresentative forms of political gathering implies an aesthetic sensibility that eschews the realm of the figurative for a lived collective practice that exists before or below figure-ground distinctions. The disjunctive time-images of Borden’s film are cinematic iterations of a prefigurative experiment. While the film doesn’t add up to a figure of the group, it also makes clear how the prefigurative is not a pure realm of chaotic formlessness but a relational assemblage with its own provisional forms, distributions, striations, hierarchies, and antagonisms. A central text for considering the debates surrounding the circulation of prefigurative politics within the radical feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s is Jo Freeman’s essay, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” In it, Freeman argues that the women’s liberation struggle adopted “leaderless, structureless groups as the main—if not sole—organizational form of the movement.” Yet Freeman remains cautious and skeptical about the liberatory potential of prefigurative political forms.30 For Freeman, the informality, looseness, and so-called structurelessness of prefigurative political groupuscules—such as consciousness-raising groups

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and nonhierarchical anarcho-feminist collectives—blocked the formation of a powerful feminist movement. Freeman writes, “Unstructured groups may be very effective in getting women to talk about their lives; they aren’t very good for getting things done.”31 While there is room to push on the stability of Freeman’s binary opposition between talking and doing, Freeman argues that “structureless” prefigurative groups don’t just fail to get things done; they are essentially impossible because there are always implicit structures at work. For Freeman, the ideal of collective structurelessness functions primarily as a form of disavowal. Freeman writes, “Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. . . . This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an ‘objective’ news story, ‘value-free’ social science, or a ‘free economy.’ ”32 For Freeman, the idea of structurelessness within feminist prefigurative politics only prevents the formation of formal and explicit structures and does not prevent the formation of informal structures and hierarchies. These implicit structures can be just as noxious in creating microrelations of domination. In the face of this, Freeman proposes explicitly structured forms for feminist prefigurative collectives—provisional organizational strategies and collective arrangements for mobile and open sharing of authority, or, in other words, feminist assemblages. Borden’s Regrouping provides a cinematic portrayal of white feminist group formation and collective practice that resonates in the conceptual-political space between Breines’s work on prefigurative politics and Freeman’s work on the potential for implicit systems of domination to be carried within prefigurative political forms. Taken together, Borden, Breines, and Freeman offer a conceptual terrain upon which to think about feminist collective practice as an experiment with associational life that never aims toward representative

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coherence and instead remains committed to the internal unraveling of microrelations of domination within their collective forms. Feminist prefigurative politics is not necessarily a question of pure collective structurelessness. Instead, it tends to trouble the assumed relationship between structure, order, and representation within the feminist movement by experimenting with various unstable structures and incoherent forms within political assemblages of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Regrouping is a film about a group of white feminists engaged in nonrepresentational and prefigurative politics that never adds up to a clear cinematic representation of white feminism or a figure of the political group. Borden’s critical relationship to the group she is filming undoes assumed coherent forms of identitarian feminist politics and presents feminist assemblages not as a shared political figure but as a cacophony of everyday gestures viewed from afar, an ambivalent scene of collusion, a melee of conflicting voice-overs, and an unsettled reconfiguration of objects, bodies, and spaces. The film is an internally fracturing feminist assemblage without a coherent collective subject, a filmic elaboration of internal disagreement as a feminist practice of making shared life otherwise. It does not propose a generalizable collective subject of feminism, and it does not universalize the politics of gender from an implicitly white position. Instead, it shows a group of white feminists fracturing around the question of who is inside and outside of their own grouping. Alice Echol’s Daring to Be Bad, a cornerstone of radical feminist historiography, is a helpful intertext here to make the political stakes of this regrouping more explicit. In Daring to Be Bad, Echols includes a meeting transcript from the 1968 Sandy Springs Conference as an appendix to the volume that shows how the question of race, if not necessarily always addressed directly, was a founding anxiety of

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white-dominated radical feminist organizing. The appendix is a verbatim transcription of a meeting, the only such transcript included in the book. While it is a peripheral textual moment, as the only record of a collective of voices, it carries a different kind of textual weight, as if promising more direct access to the historical past. Echols describes the meeting as a gathering of white feminists focused on having a “discussion on black women and women’s liberation.”33 The following is an excerpt from the discussion: A: I think the reason we don’t want to do this is that we are afraid to deal with black women . . . I have problems dealing with black people; I think everyone in this room does . . . B: That’s another problem. A: That’s not another problem if we are talking about building a women’s liberation movement in this country. It’s very much our problem, and it’s our problem because we are racists. [. . .] C: But I’m saying that when you get Black and white together, all kinds of other sparks fly. We don’t really need that right now. It will reemphasize all kinds of hang-ups. Don’t you believe they would caucus. Wouldn’t you?34 The meeting stretches on and trails off without coming to a decision, full of disagreement and interruption—“problems,” “that’s another problem,” “that’s not another problem,” “sparks,” “all kinds of hang-ups,” and the threat of the splinter “caucus”—spinning out without ever being able to come to a conclusive end.35 What separates and what connects? What were the insides and the outsides of the feminist collective? Is a feminist collective based on common identification or a series of distinct but shared political desires? The transcript is politically and aesthetically reso-

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nant with Borden’s filmic assemblages—a seeming homogeneity full of cuts, interrupting voice-overs, and internal critiques; a collective incoherence circulating around the anxious thought of the exterior; a fecund and necessary dissolution. What Echols’s appendix demonstrates is that white feminists worrying about whiteness was not an afterthought to radical feminist assemblages but a constitutive activity of their assembling. Both the transcript and Borden’s film show white feminism not as a stable political formation but as a turbulent prefigurative assemblage actively forming and deforming around who was and who was not folded within the inside of their collective formations. They demonstrate how white-dominated feminist groups were already performing their own internal disunity as they gathered around the mutual entanglement of race, gender, sexuality, and class— already calling to regroup. As mentioned earlier, Borden showed the subjects of her film an early draft of it and audio-recorded their critical feedback, eventually editing those critiques into the final version of Regrouping. In the final film, there are long shots of driving across bridges and through tunnels—infrastructural metaphors of connection between separate entities—while the group’s audio-recorded critiques talk back to Borden from within the film, “You didn’t show that we were connected!” The film turns on itself and becomes a film about the group’s critical response to it. There is no continuity, just cacophonous and conflictual unravelings around the question of the group and the question of feminist politics. In discussing the film, Borden talks about developing a critical relation to the homogeneity of the group in Regrouping —“everything was so narcissistic, so white.”36 Borden critiques the group’s homogeneity as a gathering held together by a friendship grounded in resemblance, and she aimed to make a film that broke apart the stultifying eli-

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sions of this unified image. Borden was critical of the group, the group was critical of Borden, and the film became a series of cacophonous cinematic assemblages around the impossibility of single-issue or white-dominated feminist politics, a prefigurative working through of the internal rifts and fractures of a not-yet determined feminist politics. As the film comes to a close, the group offers a series of “we” statements in a voice-over about the dissolution of the group: “more and more intimacy didn’t lead anywhere”; “every meeting was a traumatic experience”; “we were intimidated by the myth of unity.” As the list goes on, the negativity of the group’s dissolution begins to read as not just negative, and the fragmentation and dissolution of the assemblage are presented as potentially generative—“we feel that dissolution is necessary.” Regrouping is a frustrating portrayal of collective frustration—the falling apart of a group and a film—and yet the “re-” of regrouping is the dawning of hope within falling apart, fragmentation, and frustration. When an assemblage coheres around a shared identitarian image buttressed by a myth of unity, the dissolution of the assemblage is its condition of possibility. Toward the end of the film, footage of a group of women dancing in an open room appears (see Figure 17), each woman in a bubble of space to herself, exploring rhythm and her limbs as voice-overs discuss how the original group eventually came back together on different terms: “we no longer need consensus”; “we no longer need to be agreeable”; “we have lifted the veil of sisterhood.” Regrouping ends with voice-overs that are hopeful about the radical potential of gathering in small groups: “being in groups has revolutionary consequences”; “we need to develop a sense of lateral relations.” Even with this hopeful tone, the women from the original group did not want to be associated with the film after its first screening in 1976. Because of this, the last shot is a title frame, “REGROUP-

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Figure 17. A feminist groupuscule dances in an open studio. Film still, Lizzie Borden Regrouping (1976). Courtesy of the artist.

ING,” and then there is a brief flash of a credits frame with the names of people who appeared in the film that gets immediately cut off before any words are discernable. As the screen goes black, a voice-over conversation continues. The last words of the film are as follows: Voice 1: “I’ve come so far, but I’m in the middle of nowhere.” Voice 2: “But I don’t agree with you.” Borden’s discontinuous cuts, disjunctive montages, outof-focus shots, performative gestures, and overlapping voiceovers assemble to frustrate and unravel coherent images of feminist politics. This unraveling of feminist filmic figuration is not posed as a demobilizing force but instead as a necessary prefigurative practice and a messy provisional structure so that feminist political assemblages might continue to

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reactivate and rearticulate themselves. Regrouping is an assembling, disassembling, and reassembling to disagree and yet keep moving together.

Regrouping Feminist History: Sharon Hayes’s Women of the World Unite, they said In 2014, the multimedia artist Sharon Hayes asked a group of seven friends and friends of friends to come to Manhattan’s Pier 54 to write the sentence “Women of the World Unite! they said” in large letters with chalk while the photographer Liz Ligon took photographs of the action from a helicopter circling above (see Figure 18). The piece was created as a part of a series of projects initiated by Cecilia Alemani called Pier 54, which was posed as a feminist critical response to Willoughby Sharp’s Pier 18 project from 1971. In Pier 18, Sharp invited twenty-seven artists to create work on an abandoned pier and every single artist identified as a man. In Pier 54, Alemani assembled a group of artists that all identified as women as a historical corrective to the patriarchal exclusions of Sharp’s original exhibition. In addition to responding to the politics of Pier 18, Hayes’s piece was also in response to another early 1970s action on the New York waterfront. On August 26, 1970, a group of radical feminists unfurled a massive banner on the platform of the Statue of Liberty that read “Women of the World Unite!” as part of a protest and strike organized by Betty Friedan and the National Organization for Women held on the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that granted women citizens in the United States the right to vote (see Figure 19).37 The 1970 banner, in quoting the final line of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto and yet substituting the collective subject of “women” for “proletarians,” was a collective call for a global

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Figure 18. Sharon Hayes, Women of the World Unite! they said, 2014. Photo by Liz Ligon. Copyright 2014 Sharon Hayes, Liz Ligon, and Friends of the High Line. Commissioned and produced by Friends of the High Line.

anti-patriarchal revolution within a broader day of more liberal feminist actions encouraging inclusion, constitutional reform, and political representation. Hayes’s citation and reiteration of the action in 2014—with the addition of the past tense “said” and the collective, gender-neutral “they”— poses the question of unity and the coherence of the collective subject of feminism as an open problem that resonates across moments of feminist history. Unlike the 1970 banner, written at a large scale and installed on the monument so that it could be read by as many people as possible for as long as possible, Hayes’s collective utterance is written ephemerally in chalk on the pier itself, rendering it a provisional statement only legible from the impossible vantage point of a helicopter above. By requiring a typically unoccupiable bird’s-eye view for legibility of a

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Figure 19. Radical feminists installing a banner reading “Women of the World Unite!” on Manhattan’s Statue of Liberty, August 26, 1970. Photo courtesy of Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo.

call for unity, Hayes brings our attention to the text not just as a statement but also as a collective action, a fleeting doing together with others that rain and wind will eventually erase and that exists primarily in a state beyond any one subject’s capacity to read it. Hayes narrates her relation to the 2014 work and the original 1970 banner as follows: I was intrigued by the question of how one shouts in text. I was engaged by the ambition and impossibility of the demand that is being made. And I was moved by the complexities that trans politics brings to the political identification with a term like “women.”38

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Hayes is quoting and repeating this demand for feminist unity to draw out its impossibilities and complexities. She frames the piece in relation to the pressure trans politics puts on the assumed coherence of the collective subject of feminism. In doing so, she orients the piece critically toward how calls for feminist unity have often become a smokescreen for trans-exclusion and transphobia. In dwelling on these impossibilities and complexities, the piece also points toward other vectors of difference within feminist assemblages— such as nationality, class position, and racialization—that make any call for unity more complicated and helps us think differently, alongside Echols’s appendix and Borden’s film, about the supposed cohesion of second-wave feminism. The piece’s chalk tracings illuminate the demand for unity as an ambivalent and unfulfilled wish, always open to misfiring and being mistaken as an effacing call for homogeneity. In discussing the history and circulation of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, the literary theorist Martin Puchner turns toward J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances to understand the impatient relationship between words and action in a phrase like “Women of the world unite!” and in the genre of the manifesto more generally. For J. L. Austin, performative utterances are speech acts that do not just describe something in the world; they also enact something in their enunciation (a classic example of this for Austin is the “I do” of the marriage ceremony). Performative utterances occur in highly conventional settings within specific structures of authority (e.g., in the case of “I do,” two people with a marriage license in a wedding ceremony with a representative of the State’s authority presiding), and, as such, they are often prone to misfire, failure, and misappropriation (e.g., someone says “I do” but they don’t mean it or they are in a play, or someone says “I do” but the marriage license was never signed or the representative of the State’s

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authority isn’t present, etc.). Performative utterances only do what they say if the person doing the saying has the authority to do so. Yet subjects without conventional authority might theatrically misappropriate that authority and go on saying and doing the speech act anyway. For Puchner, a manifesto is a performative text that does just this. It makes demands it doesn’t have the authority to make by pretending it already has that authority. As such, it is a genre that creates its audience. It assembles a collective subject that does not yet exist in its own act of enunciation. In the case of the sentence from Marx and Engels that the group of radical feminists adapted in 1970 and Hayes quoted in 2014, Puchner writes: [. . . T]he last rallying cry, ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ participates in this act of poesis and creation, for it means that only once the proletarians of all countries are united will they have reached the full self-consciousness of themselves as the proletariat. The last sentence, like all those of the Manifesto, is thus addressed to a recipient who does not yet fully exist. It performatively creates its addressee as agent.39 Translating Puchner’s work on the performativity of Marx and Engels to the feminist speech act of the 1970 banner and Hayes’s piece, the collective subject of “woman,” like the “proletarian,” is not something that is being described. Rather, it is something not yet formed that is being enacted (or at least attempted). The performative demand to unite, then and now, is not already a unified entity but a cacophonous and not yet realized desire to assemble. In this way, Hayes’s work resonates with Borden’s film as an articulation of a feminist politics that critiques feminisms grounded upon homogeneity or resemblance and instead proposes feminism as an ongoing attempt to articulate social antagonisms and gather anew.

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In early December 2016, Borden and I got together to have a conversation about Regrouping. Trump had been elected president a month before, and Borden mentioned that she was angrier than she had been in a while but had at least felt a bit hopeful participating in protests with friends over the past few weeks. We talked about the modes of resistance that we imagined becoming necessary under a Trump regime, and she described a scheme of focused, small-scale collective efforts, people coming together around the antagonisms that hailed them, organizing around the political fights that they could “stand standing behind for a long time.”40 As our conversation turned toward Regrouping, Borden mentioned offhand that one of the original group members—who picketed the premiere of the film at Film Anthology in 1976—had all the outtake footage. She told me that as a response to the group’s critique of her film, she had invited group members to make a counter-film, to speak back to her film cinematically. The tumultuous and incoherent regrouping that goes on within and around Borden’s film, as well as Hayes’s repetition of the misfiring call for unity, suggests an approach to feminist history not as a series of political progressions and failures (or openings and closings, or waves and crashes, or correctives and absorptions) around an identity category or representational claim but instead as an unfinished and ongoing relational process, a shifting political assemblage around bodily configurations of gender, sexuality, race, and class, and a shared attempt to reproduce a different configuration of the world.

4

Ensemble

There is grainy video documentation of the composer, pianist, and singer Julius Eastman performing in a 1974 performance of John Cage’s Song Books (1970) by the S.E.M. Ensemble. The group is strewn around the stage and the space is scattered with objects, props, instruments, machines, microphones, amplifiers, music stands, scores, and humans. Bodies of performers are dispersed and doing their own tasks, apparently unaware of one another, yet their sounds overlap and bleed into each other. At one point, Eastman hops around the stage as another ensemble member stands in a long trench coat and picks his ear. Another performer seems to be carefully reading musical notation while occasionally plucking out notes on a metal saw. Absurd tasks are done seriously, and serious tasks are done absurdly. Eventually, Eastman begins moving into the audience by repeatedly throwing his body down as if falling onto the audience members. People do their best to catch him as he falls and try to rise to the task of being his spontaneous support structure, but his body proves unruly and Eastman falls to the ground 113

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most of the time. There is an uneasy laughter in response to his bodily and social abandon. Eastman is the only Black performer in the ensemble and seemingly the only Black person in the room. He is also the only performer in the ensemble creating a disruption between performer and audience, suddenly implicating the audience in their passivity and forcing them to become co-performers, to actively negotiate the politics of their bodily relations to each other. Eastman disorganizes the group relations in the room, disrupting who is with whom, who watches whom, and who supports whom. Born in Harlem in 1940, Eastman trained classically in piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. After graduating in 1966, he joined Creative Associates at SUNY Buffalo in 1968, one of the hotbeds for the new music scene in the United States under the direction of Lukas Foss, and he began to perform frequently and compose theatrical, electroacoustic, improvisation-heavy chamber music works with the S.E.M. Ensemble (see Figure 20 for an image of Eastman from this time). In 1973, Eastman rose to national prominence as a performer for his virtuosic vocal performance on a Grammy-nominated recording of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King. That same year, he premiered a minimalist chamber composition with S.E.M. Ensemble entitled Stay On It, which prefigured many of the encounters between minimalism and popular music that took hold later in the decade. In 1976, he relocated to New York City, where he traversed the downtown, uptown, disco, and new music scenes— performing with composer-choreographer Meredith Monk, collaborating with cellist and disco producer-songwriter Arthur Russell, appearing frequently at the performance and new music venue The Kitchen, and playing in jazz combos with his guitarist brother Gerry Eastman. Eastman also

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115 Figure 20. Julius Eastman composing, 1969. Photo by Donald W. Burkhardt.

became deeply enmeshed in the Manhattan queer scene during this time, with reports that he sometimes went by the nickname “Mr. Mineshaft” (after the gay leather bar and sex club on Little West 12th Street).1 Throughout his career, Eastman theorized his compositional practice as operating under an “organic principle,” meaning that his pieces took on a structural logic of accumulation.2 In many of Eastman’s compositions, musical phrases never simply replace other musical phrases as the piece unfurled in time. Instead, phrases and motifs persist dissonantly even as new material is introduced on top of and

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around them. The past of Eastman’s pieces piles up even as new sounds are introduced. No musical material ever disappears; it is only buried. By calling his compositional technique “organic,” Eastman evokes life cycles, chemical transformations, and the ecological returns of rotting matter. Yet Eastman’s compositions also sound like history to me: slow and heavy, repetitive yet morphing as they accumulate. Melody and harmony become texture in Eastman’s gradually mutating blocks of sound. The formal procedures that undergird Eastman’s compositions are audible—an additive structure slowly being built and breaking down simultaneously under its own weight, older material sonically covered over by the accretion of new material. Eastman created musically violent structures that resonated critically with the structural violence he navigated throughout his life. By 1979, Eastman was touring his formally insurgent works across the United States and Europe, often challenging the division of labor between the composer and the performer by performing his own works and putting his body on the line in an overwhelmingly white and straight new music scene. But by the early 1980s, his trajectory of increasing institutional success despite the institutions’ whiteness and heteronormativity seemed to spin out of control. In 1983, he was evicted from his apartment, many of his scores were destroyed in the process, and a hoped-for faculty position at Cornell failed to materialize. Here is where things get blurry in the written accounts of Eastman’s life. Eastman all but disappeared from the white-dominated downtown music scene for the next seven years. He reportedly developed an intimate relationship with harder drugs, bounced between residing in Tompkins Square Park and shelters in Buffalo, and eventually died in a hospital in Buffalo in 1990 of uncertain causes—perhaps due to complications related to AIDS, perhaps not. What is known by musicologists and music historians is that it took eight months for news of his death

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to reach colleagues in the Manhattan music world through an obituary in the Village Voice written by music critic and composer Kyle Gann. It was not until 2005, under the archival efforts of composer and performer Mary Jane Leach, that the first full-length recording of Eastman’s music became commercially available. Leach released a three-album set called Unjust Malaise, which included live recordings of six works written and performed between 1973 and 1980.3 While narrative accounts of Eastman’s life become increasingly unclear toward these final years, they also pick up a frightening speed: The last seven years of his life pass by with the violent momentum of a downfall that is all too familiar in the history of Black queer lives. This historiographic speed characterizes yet another premature death of a queer Black man living under the weight of everyday violence in an anti-Black and homophobic world. In her recently published biography of Eastman, Renée Levine Packer writes that “any sequential accounting of [Eastman’s] daily life” once he moved to the East Village in the late 1970s is “an iffy proposition. Accounts vary, and timelines do not mesh.”4 To a reader of queer history, this kind of iffiness or unmeshing of the sequential historical record is all too familiar, insofar as it comprises the marks of a life lived otherwise, the disjointed traces that have slipped through the archival erasure that greets subjects who stay out too late, who don’t have a stable home in a world that is not built for them, and who refuse the false promises of institutional recognition and security. Eastman’s biographical blurriness is also the blur of anti-Blackness, or as Eastman’s brother Gerry puts it, “Julius’s lifelong battle with white people in power”5 and the capacity of white people in power to overlook, block, and erase. Falling out of the historical record can also be an act of refusal of that record’s coercive and constrictive whiteness and heteronormativity. After Eastman moved to New York, he survived consis-

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tently on the edge of homelessness—facing sudden eviction and displacement, living at his brother’s or lover’s apartments, and bouncing between shelters and parks. Even before he was forcibly dispossessed by the state, as his boyfriend, R. Nemo Hill, has explained, he was politically and erotically interested in living a life beyond regimes of possession. Hill recounts that Eastman was “transgressing some sort of bourgeois status. . . . He didn’t care for his possessions. He would never lock the door—even after he was robbed by one of the homeless people he brought around.”6 As neoliberal regimes came to power in the late 1970s and early 1980s and as structures of public support and nonnormative urban life worlds were dismantled and displaced, Eastman lived through these dispossessive regimes by living a life already divested of possession. In what follows, part of what I’m interested in paying attention to is the relationship between Eastman’s desire to live beyond possessive individualism while also being subject to the violence of late capitalist dispossession and how we might be able to continue hearing this doubly dispossessive movement in both his music, with its pounding accumulations, and the narrative of his life, with its violent expulsions and archival erasures. Currently, critics and artists are building upon the work of musician-scholars such as Leach and Packer in an attempt to rescue Eastman from this historiographic undertow and retroactively install him in the canon of American experimental music. For example, a New York Times profile of Eastman’s work from 2016 argued that Eastman should be thought of as a central figure in the otherwise white canon of musical minimalists John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young.7 Eastman is being reincluded in accounts of experimental music as a corrective to his historiographic erasure, as a reinstated internal outlier: someone who was shaping and constituting the field of min-

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imalist practice but was always rendered exterior to this field on account of his unruly formal and political experimentation as well as his Blackness and queerness. For some, this retroactive addition is a potentially liberatory corrective. For others, this historical rescue mission runs the risk of erasing the structural erasure that Eastman experienced, as if music historians could furnish an account of Eastman that might belatedly save the New York new music scene from its participation in the structures of anti-Blackness and homophobia that made it unsupportive and unlivable for Eastman during his lifetime. In addition to addressing such wishful restitution, scholars such as George E. Lewis have analyzed how the turn to Eastman as a figure for confronting the whiteness of the minimalist music scene and the historical erasure of the Black avant-garde runs the risk of portraying Eastman historiographically as a kind of token “flyboy in the buttermilk.”8 Rather than fetishize Eastman as an outlier within who can be retroactively added to the canon of minimalism or reinstalled into the historical record as if the antagonism of his institutional relations never occurred, I want to write alongside scholars such as Isaac Alexandre Jean-François, Ryan Dohoney, and Ellie M. Hisama and bring attention to the power and significance of Eastman’s compositions while also preserving their broader political antagonisms and historical relations.9 I do this by approaching Eastman not only as a solitary figure, but as an initiator of politically fraught group works. While Eastman, in his compositions and life, often stepped out of inherited relational circuits, he also incessantly returned to the scene of the ensemble. He was a disruptive assembler and an ensemble-maker attuned to the uneven politics of associational life—falling amongst audience members in the performance of Cage’s Song Books and writing agonistic improvisational works for groups. In a printed

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diatribe entitled “The Composer as Weakling,” Eastman argues that the figure of the isolated individual composer is a noxious symptom of modernity. For Eastman, the figure of the musician has been split into either the composer or the performer, and this split has meant “the recendence [sic] of the composer from active participation in the musical life of his community, into the role of the unattended queen bee, constantly birthing music in his lonely room.”10 Eastman argues that this division has resulted in the production of composers who are “isolated and torpid [, . . .] self-absorbed [. . . and] ineffectual.”11 In response to this dynamic, Eastman calls for an alternative figure of the composer as a performer embedded in the social world of the music they write, arguing that “the composer must become the total musician” in order to be a “vital part of the musical life of his/her community.”12 I explore the disruptive force of the ensembles Eastman gathered by turning to one of Eastman’s chamber music pieces for a group made up entirely of the same kind of instruments: Gay Guerrilla (performed most frequently by four pianos). Eastman’s compositions, with their often politically contentious titles and dissonant accumulative structures, produce affective intensities and significatory ruptures that intone the politics of race, gender, and sexuality as entangled vectors of affiliation and antagonism. They are both sonically and socially dissonant, resonating with the so-called politics of identity beyond epistemological capture within regimes of representation and state inclusion. I hear Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla as a sonic assembly around the idea of gay militancy that is full of internal variance, interfering vibrations, and generative tensions that will not be resolved. In the only existing recording of Gay Guerrilla from Eastman’s lifetime—a live performance by four pianos played by Eastman, Janet Kattas, Frank Ferko, and Patricia Martin at

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Northwestern University in 1980—the piece starts hesitantly, the four pianists playing with a restrained delicacy, repeating one note over and over, intoning it in different octaves before gradually building a denser chord. They slowly pick up speed and accumulate harmonic weight, passing through assemblages of notes as if the piece was a cloud coming in and out of consistency. A two-note descending gesture is passed around. Eventually, snippets of a melody can be heard getting pounded out through the dense mass. The tune is a quotation of Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” but the quotation of the hymn only begins to come into focus twenty minutes into the piece, played in octaves in a kind of out-of-sync round over a shifting, dissonant drone of galloping chords, only briefly manifesting as a legible melody. Eastman’s group work figures homosexual political collectivity less as a unison rallying cry and more as an internally differentiated assembly, a coming in and out of sync together, coordinated and yet dissonant. In attending to the political and conceptual resonances of Eastman’s mono-instrumental ensemble, I move past considerations of him as an isolated tragic figure and instead consider the unruly force of his musical and extramusical relations. In addition to this listening and critical reckoning, I finish this chapter by turning to recent artistic projects that similarly listen to and reckon with Eastman’s legacy by artists and curators such as Jace Clayton, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. While Eastman is often approached as an exceptional individual who fell out of the archive and needs to be reinstated, these projects take up the social and musical dissonance of Eastman’s ensembles to experiment with the ways in which the traces of his life and work continue to challenge the hierarchies and exclusions that constitute the institutions that attempt to reinstate him into their midst. These contemporary projects, as well as this

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writing, are attempts to turn to Eastman to experiment with the politics of how we collectively listen to history and reconsider the turbulence of our ensemblic relations.

Dissonant Ensembles In contradistinction to what mainstream gay politics has become over the past forty years, Eastman’s relation to gay liberation did not involve seeking state inclusion, recognition, or assimilation for gay subjects. Rather than fight to normalize or gain acceptance for gay desire, Eastman worked to amplify the disturbance gay desire elicits within heteronormativity by using it as a potential launchpad for a broader political militancy. When he introduced Gay Guerrilla at a performance at Northwestern University in 1980, he contextualized the piece and its title by considering what gayness might be able to glean from anti-imperialist struggles: Now the reason I use “gay guerrilla,” g-u-e-r-r-i-l-l-a, that one, is because these names . . . let me put a little sub-system here: these names, either I glorify them, or they glorify me. In the case of “guerrilla,” that glorifies “gay.” That is to say, there aren’t many gay guerrillas. I don’t feel that gay-dom has, does have that strength. Therefore, I use that word in the hopes that they will, you see. At this point, I don’t feel that gay guerrillas can really match Afghani guerrillas or PLO guerrillas, but let us hope in the future they might, you see. . . . So therefore, that is the reason that I use “gay guerrilla,” in hopes that I might be one, if called upon to be one.13 With this title and introductory remarks, Eastman attached his composition to a politics that did not align gayness with

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an easily incorporable acceptance within the world as given but instead positioned it dissonantly alongside global antiimperialist resistance movements.14 Eastman offered this piece as an ode to an anti-imperialist queer militancy to come. The “guerrilla” of the title was aspirational for the “gay”—it “glorified” “gay-dom.” For Eastman, gayness was not just about who you slept with but also named a desire to “match,” or be like, Afghani and Palestinian resistance fighters and study militant tactics alongside global freedom struggles. In addition to the explicit allusion to gayness in the title, I would say that there is also something gay about the music itself, a kind of correspondence between a same-sex sexual gathering and a work for an ensemble of the same kind of instrument, a loose traction between the mono-instrumental and the homo-sexual.15 Yet the four pianos in Gay Guerrilla sound out a homosexual assembly that is not about a univocal sameness but a tumultuous gathering of differences. While musical minimalism’s approach to repetition tends to aim to induce a trancelike meditative state of indefinite sameness (as in many of the works of composers such as Terry Riley and Philip Glass), Gay Guerrilla engages with densely structured improvisations and driving accumulative structures so that the repetition within the piece is always audibly a repetition with difference. As the musicologist Ellie M. Hisama has argued, Eastman’s engagement with free jazz and minimalism meant that he created pieces of new music that evoked Black improvisatory practices within the repetitive forms of minimalist compositions, locating “a margin of freedom within repetition.”16 Gay Guerrilla eschews the smoothness of minimalist composers such as Glass for a denser and tenser collective sound. For a certain strain of queer literary theory written primarily by white gay male critics such as Leo Bersani, the radical-

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ity of gayness is that it is an erotic gathering of samenesses. In a society defined by heterosexual reproductive relations, these accounts argue that it is the failure of homo-ness (to use a neologism found in Bersani’s 1995 monograph Homos) to desire across the cut of sexual difference that offers the potential for a radical redefinition of sociality. For Bersani, homo-ness’s refusal of heterosexuality opens the promise for a world organized around relations of the same that could “free us from an oppressive psychology of desire as lack (a psychology that grounds sociality in trauma and castration)” and “lead us to a salutary devalorizing of difference—or, more exactly, to a notion of difference not as a trauma to be overcome (a view that, among other things, nourishes antagonistic relations between the sexes), but rather as a nonthreatening supplement to sameness.”17 Yet accounts that narrate same-sex erotic relations as relations of sameness often reductively misrecognize sexual difference and the homo/hetero divide as the only axes of difference structuring modern life. They take sex and gender as if they were the only determining vectors of difference and reproduce an image of homo-relations that cannot account for the constitutive entanglement of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is a different sort of homoensemble. It is a gathering around the same kind that is dissonant, both sonically and socially, a generative negation of what white-dominated queer theory has tended to say about groups held together by a common identification. Musical dissonance occurs when combinations of pitches are close but not quite the same. As a sonic phenomenon, that is, dissonance occurs when the vibratory frequencies of two or more tones clash or interfere with each other, often because they are close but not exactly of the same pitch, and their frequencies are out of sync and rub against each other. Moving from a musical concept of dissonance to a social

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concept of dissonance, it might be said that as a political phenomenon, dissonance is an out-of-sync rubbing-together, a friction that occurs when a group of subjects gathers around a shared identity category. Any gathering around categorical sameness is always also a space of differentiation, a tense occasion for contact between subtle and radical differences. Political dissonance occurs because mutual identifications, common social coordinates, and overlapping political demands might be shared, but they are also always enmeshed and entangled with other differentiating vectors and dissonant reverberations. Sharedness is not a space of sameness but a space of the close but not quite; it is a space of dissonance. Within the scene of gay politics, homo-ensembles— that is, groups held together by a common sense of gayness— are not ensembles of sameness or harmony but are instead ensembles of what I call homo-dissonance, a never fully synchronized assemblage of subjects that share an identification and get close—that touch and overlap (sometimes materially and sometimes symbolically)—but are still irreducibly different and singular. Racialization and class antagonism dissonantly move through and shape scenes of gay desire and gathering around gay identity, and the uneven distribution of violence has always been constitutive to any ensemblic gathering around homo-ness. What Bersani calls homo-ness, or “relations of sameness,” is always a question of homo-dissonance, or dissonant relations.18 Gay Guerilla intones a homo-aesthetic that listens for the harsh sounds and beats within homo-relations, a homo-dissonance that figures gay politics as a politics of collective dissonance: fragmenting and diffracting, shattering and shimmering, coming in and out of sync, sounding out a collective disarray. It is a sonic manifestation of the ways that, for Eastman, “gay-dom” was never just about the attraction to the same but also about a dissonant desire for an internationalist, anti-imperialist

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political militancy informed by the unevenly dispossessive force of racial capitalism. To elaborate on this notion of homo-dissonance, I’ll turn briefly to the work of the poet and theorist Fred Moten and his writings about Cecil Taylor, Amiri Baraka, free jazz, sexuality, and the Black avant-garde. Moten approaches Taylor— Black queer free jazz pianist, composer, improviser, performer, and thinker—as a way to meditate on Blackness, out-ness, and experimentation.19 Out-ness for Moten is not, or not only, the out-ness of homosexual identification but is also the “out” of the free jazz player who plays “out” from what is expected, marking an off-ness from inherited regimes of sense, an experimentation with a feel for the outside. The “free” of free jazz becomes a practice of thinking the outside, of thinking inside the outside of what is given as thought, playing within the outside of what is to be played. To make sense of the sonic relations in Taylor’s improvising ensembles, Moten turns to Samuel Delany’s narrative account of 1960s Manhattan group gay sexual cultures in his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water. Moten proposes that there is something to be heard between Taylor’s ensemble music and Delany’s writing about experimentation, race, sexuality, and groups. For Moten, Taylor’s cacophonous and raucous ensemble works can be heard as a kind of intoning of Delany’s account of queer ensemblic sexual spaces of libidinal saturation. Moten produces an encounter between Taylor and Delany, to think about the aesthetics of an “out” ensemble, as if “acting out in groups were another name for the unit, another name for (the) ensemble.”20 Taylor’s ensemblic practice of acting out is “[w]here maladjustment converges with the unassimilable, where communism converges with sexual nonconformity . . . [and] the criminal insanity we call the ongoing resistance to slavery.”21 For Moten, acting out in a racist and homophobic world takes on the

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weight of a necessary criminal insanity. I hear Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla as engaging in a resonant ensemblic work.22 Moments of coordinated action are not necessarily moments of unison, and moments of convergence are not necessarily moments of merger. In fact, upon closer thought, both unison and merger reveal themselves to be misleading abstractions. Unruly singular textures and dissonantly different articulations of the close but never quite the same proliferate within supposed unisons. The collective event of a common or shared category is an always dissonant and differentiating gathering. A scene of apparent coming together and merger is a tumultuous acting out in groups. Eastman’s piece manifests a modality of homo-ness that is never one but instead heavy with a dense enmeshment of dissonant historical and material differences. Gay Guerrilla thus offers an opportunity to consider again how the history of race and gender constitute erotic and political life in multiply entangled ways, to rethink categories of sameness and difference beyond their binaristic opposition, to hear the incoherence of internal differentiation within any provisional coherence around a shared category. Moten writes about Cecil Taylor’s group work as an “ensemble that is structured neither by relation nor singularity but by the internal differentiation. . . . [It is] the everything that differentiation allows.”23 I approach Eastman’s work for mono-instrumental ensemble as an opportunity to listen for homo-dissonance and the political fecundity of the internally differentiating ensemble. Gay Guerrilla is a gathering around a sharedness that is also the collective acting out of difference, a dissonant and heavy group work that disrupts inherited narratives about the group work of identification, instead sounding out a collective assembling around the internally differentiating cuts of history. In addition to the sonic and social dissonance circulating

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within Gay Guerrilla, part of the piece’s political force is its proximity to Eastman’s other pieces for instruments of the same kind. The titles of his two other most widely known mono-instrumental ensemble pieces, performed alongside Gay Guerrilla in Eastman’s 1980 residency at Northwestern University, are what art theorist Jennifer Doyle might call “difficult”: Evil N****r and Crazy N****r (1979).24 Taken together, these three titles set up a complex and controversial circuit of unruly meanings between madness, badness, gayness, Blackness, militancy, imperialism, and the afterlives of slavery. The titling conventions of minimalist experimental music in the 1970s often involved evacuating the piece of social signifiers—whether by numbering the work or naming it according to the piece’s instrumentation or key, such as Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians (1974–1976) and Terry Riley’s In C (1964). Counter to this minimalist tendency, Eastman’s titular signifiers are dense with dissonant meanings that ambivalently index the politics of race and sexuality and enact a powerful performative force. They are words that do as much as they describe, enacting a charged chain of affective and linguistic effects. They disallow his pieces from circulating at a remove from historical antagonisms and mark his formalist experiments with the affective and significatory force fields of identity categories and historical violence. They do all this without trying to represent palatable identity categories or provide historical violence with any harmonic closure. As one might imagine, Eastman’s titles are speech acts that elicit multiple contradictory political effects. As discussed in the previous chapter, the meaning and force of performative utterances are determined by context: It matters who does the saying, who does the hearing, and what populates the surround. For example, when the n-word is uttered by white subjects, either maliciously or analytically,

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it calls up the accumulated history of white supremacist violence with lacerating force and might produce a rush of pain, shame, or guilt, depending on the context, tone, and recipient, whereas, when uttered by Black subjects, it might call up the same accumulation of violence or perhaps be subject to a critical resignification or redeployed as a term of affiliation, depending again on the context, tone, and recipient.25 On the occasion of the Northwestern University performance of these pieces in January 1980, an organization of Black student activists called For Members Only protested Eastman’s titles. It was a time of political dissonance within the Black community at Northwestern, with some student activists advocating for greater representation within given institutional structures and other activists calling for more disruptive political tactics. For Members Only, one of the more radical of the Black student organizations on campus, was in the midst of an intense year of political activity when Eastman arrived for his performance.26 They had led various protests and acts of civil disobedience that year to critique institutional structures of white supremacy, and they worried that the use of racial slurs in Eastman’s titles would only corroborate and participate within the broader racist symbolic structure of the elite university. Eastman met with the group upon his arrival on campus, and they collectively reached an agreement that the titles would not be published in the program. Instead, they would be verbally announced, and Eastman would give introductory remarks to contextualize them. Eastman subsequently addressed the political force of the titles with the following obscure statement: . . . Now, there was a little problem with the titles of the pieces. There were some students and one faculty member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory

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in some manner, being that the word “n****r” is in it. . . . Now, the reason I use that particular word, is because, for me, it has, what I call, a “basic-ness” about it. That is to say, I feel that, in any case, the first “n****rs” were of course “field n****rs” and upon that is really the basis of, what I call, the American economic system. . . . And what I mean by “n****rs” is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains [sic] to a basic-ness or fundamentalness and eschews that thing which is superficial and, shall we say, elegant. So, a n****r for me is that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything, you see, and that’s what I, that’s what I mean by “n****r.”27 Eastman argues that his use of the n-word is not a celebratory or militant reappropriation of the slur. Rather, it is an attempt to deploy the word’s accumulated force to call out and draw attention to what is “basic” and “fundamental” to the American economic and political system—namely, chattel slavery. He contextualizes his titles as part of an idiosyncratic attempt to articulate the symbolic and material inheritance of slavery: they evoke the ways in which slavery was constitutive of American capitalist accumulation within the social frame of the concert hall, marking his formal experiments in minimalism with the symbolic weight of the violent expropriation of African people as objects to be possessed and reminding the listener or concertgoer that chattel slavery forms the “ground” from which the figure of the American nation arose. The titles are charged and lacerating signs that cut through the performance of his pieces—signs that move around the room with dense affective and histor-

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ical intensity, sticking heavily and wounding as they go. In doing so, these signs “attain” a critical capacity to articulate the fundamental violence of racial capitalism and the American state. There is something queerly shameful in the intensities of these titles, something improper that causes even audience members who might be sympathetic to Eastman’s radical politics—such as the student activists in For Members Only—to turn away at their dissonant force. His pieces are not called Black Power or Gay Pride, but instead, Evil N****r and Gay Guerrilla. In her writing on queer performativity and shame, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick was interested in rethinking therapeutic, artistic, or political strategies aimed at getting rid of individual or group shame (for example, assimilationist gay movements invested in a notion of pride) and developing a theory of queer performativity as a kind of doing with shame—a metamorphosizing, reframing, and reconfiguring that occurs when the so-called flaming subject dwells within and finds shared meaning and social worlds in the burning flush of shame.28 Eastman’s titles— racialized slurs accompanied by adjectives typically used to mark a human as subhuman (“evil” and “crazy,” signs of madness and excess, negativity and aggression) and associations between gayness and decolonial militancy—disrupt what constitutes an appropriate political evocation of the historical antagonisms of race, gender, and sexuality. His “flaming” titles are naming practices that improperly reactivate the “fundamental” impropriety of the American nation, a disidentificatory performance of toxic tropes. They elaborate a set of formal strategies in which Blackness and queerness are not necessarily identities to be represented or a coherent set of agreed-upon political positions and tactics but are ambivalent zones of aesthetic and political experimentation to rehear the dissonant historicity of bodies.

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In addition to the controversies surrounding the titles of his compositions, the rehearsals for the Northwestern performance were also, by all accounts, socially dissonant. As musicologist Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek has chronicled, Eastman was wary of the pianists, and the pianists were wary of him. For one, he expected his collaborators to sight-read his idiosyncratic approach to musical notation and would not let them take their scores home to practice. HansonDvoracek describes the lead-up to the performance as filled with ugly feelings—an “anxious situation,” a “tense atmosphere,” and a “disaster.”29 Eastman stood both within and outside the ensemble of performers and also both within and outside the Black campus organizing of For Members Only. The social relations within Gay Guerrilla did not play out as a harmonious assemblage of utopic militants or a coherent gathering of aligned political and aesthetic energies. Eastman refused to let his piece circulate affirmatively, even among its performers. He aimed instead to articulate a flaming and dissonant call to assemble around the structural violence that remains fundamental in the present.

Let Sonorities Ring At the end of Eastman’s handwritten score for Crazy N****r, the last of the four piano pieces he performed at Northwestern, he wrote in large cursive across the entire staff, ”Let Sonorities Ring” (see Figure 21).30 After acting out the out ensemble, intoning homo-dissonance—or as Moten might say, reperforming “the criminal insanity we call the ongoing resistance to slavery”31—Eastman instructed his performers to continue in the aftermath, to let their dissonant collective articulation persist even within the absence of another articulation, to continue echoing and reverberating after the ending.

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Figure 21. The last page of the score for Julius Eastman’s Crazy N****r. © 2018 by Music Sales Corporation and Eastman Music Publishing Co. All rights administered by Music Sales Corporation. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.

I encounter this call to “let sonorities ring” as an invitation to reconsider the afterlives of Eastman’s music. How do we let his sonorities ring amid the structural violence and historical erasure that his music has already traversed? How do we let it ring in all its social dissonance and po-

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litical impropriety? How do we let it ring without submitting it to the institutional absorption and the palatability of canonical inclusion that he resisted and refused during his life? There are many artists and cultural producers who are currently negotiating these concerns. Some are doing this through rather expected genres—by re-releasing recordings, transcribing lost scores from recordings, and writing essays and books32—while others are attempting to let Eastman ring out through less predictable forms of reverberation that circulate more dissonantly within institutional formats and historiographic genres. In 2013, for instance, Jace Clayton, a musician and composer also known as DJ /rupture, engaged in a practice of remembering Eastman through recomposing and reinhabiting his accumulative structures. Rather than try to preserve and save Eastman’s music for the archive or tell a consumable historical narrative of Eastman’s life, Clayton performed The Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner at New York’s MoMA PS1 and released an accompanying album, The Julius Eastman Memory Depot. It is a piece for electronics and piano that repeats and re-sounds Eastman, creating a looping sonic landscape saturated with the distance and spaciousness of reverb. Clayton writes of his work: “I interpret the open-ended, irreverent nature of Julius Eastman’s legacy as a call to conversation. [. . .] Reverence can be a form of forgetting.”33 Clayton’s reperformance of Eastman is a practice of warm irreverence, a kind of historical fidelity to Eastman through loving infidelity. In a resonant vein, Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Dustin Hurt curated an exhibit and performance series dedicated to Eastman’s legacy in the spring of 2017 called That Which Is Fundamental. The project was initially a collaboration between the Philadelphia-based contemporary music organization Bowerbird and the visual art gallery Slought Foundation before it was remounted at The Kitchen in

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Manhattan in the winter of 2018. Like Clayton’s Memory Depot, That Which Is Fundamental was invested in actively engaging with the “fragmented nature of [Eastman’s] legacy.”34 Not only an exhibition of archival materials or a series of reperformances of Eastman’s scores to retroactively install him in the canon, McClodden and Hurt’s project approached Eastman as an occasion to experiment with his politically dissonant traces and let his sonorities ring with all of their flaming disruptions. The visual exhibition had two distinct parts: A Recollection and Predicated. A Recollection was a collection of archival objects assembled alongside each other from a range of “informal archivists”—photographs, scores, performance ephemera, and articles exhibited in a room with labels propped up on music stands. A page from a score to an untitled composition from 1970 hung on the wall, and alongside it was a series of photos of Eastman gradually walking into a river fully clothed, arms outstretched, jean jacket floating up as he becomes more submerged. The exhibition eschewed sequential timelines or geographically determined curatorial logics for a more turbulent assembling of objects from different times and places in Eastman’s life, opening up a series of surprising juxtapositions and indeterminate conjunctions. McClodden’s curatorial statement for A Recollection began with the following poetic gesture: Julius Eastman the trickster. Julius Eastman the brother. Julius Eastman the son. Julius Eastman the composer. Julius Eastman the provocateur. Julius Eastman the pianist. Julius Eastman the painter. Julius Eastman the dancer.

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Julius Eastman the vocalist. Julius Eastman the one who got away. Did Julius want us to have a hold on his life, or did he want the residue of his life and work to remain as cunning as he was?35 McClodden’s exhibit let Eastman’s residue maintain its cunning. It let his sonorities ring out dissonantly. In the other part of the exhibit, Predicated., McClodden assembled the work of ten contemporary artists to grapple with the conceptual, political, and aesthetic propositions of Eastman’s life and work. One of the works gathered to resonate with Eastman was Sondra Perry’s looping video projected on a wall entitled “Double Quadruple Etcetera Etcetera I & II.” In it, a Black performer is in the corner of a studio dancing, or perhaps it is better to say thrashing. The movement is perpetual and exceeds gestural organization—a tumultuous falling, an unruly throwing. The body of the performer has been erased by multiple rounds of scrubbing out using the erase tool of a video-editing program. All that remains is the performer’s hair, the rest of the body becoming a ghosted opaque figure, almost as if reflective, a glitching portion of wall in motion. It is a cunning residue, an attention to what is getting away. Within the performance portion of this project, Eastman’s works were not just performed again to install them in the repertory of twentieth-century new music. This happened, but they were also paired with new pieces created by artists working in relation to the political and sonic dissonance of Eastman’s legacy. For example, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste performed his piece Evil N****r: A Dedication/Invocation as part of the series. Toussaint-Baptiste describes the piece as an ambient electronic work that metabolizes and distills Eastman’s original composition (another of Eastman’s mono-

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instrumental pieces). Performed by Toussaint-Baptiste with an array of synthesizers and electronics, the performance condensed Eastman’s four-piano homo-ensemble into the body of one performer proliferating themselves through multiple electronic instruments. Dressed in a black hat and black hooded sweatshirt, Toussaint-Baptiste began the piece with a wafting, uneven loop, a digital drone pulsating. Only Toussaint-Baptiste’s hands operating the knobs and buttons of his instruments were visible for the majority of the performance. Eventually, Toussaint-Baptiste added a jarring, scratching sound, almost like a drilling. It was loud and grating, and some audience members put their fingers in their ears. Every so often Toussaint-Baptiste would turn his back to the audience as if his performance were gathering us to turn away from us, performing a separation that we were all already in, reverberating a cut that was already the ground we were all assembling on. When Toussaint-Baptiste eventually brought in a quotation of Eastman’s primary motif for Evil N****r (D—A—B♭—F—G—A—D), it was a full low synth in octaves, an otherworldly organ, vibrating the whole room as if it were coming from underneath us, rising from that which is fundamental. It was music meant to be felt and not heard, shaking your rib cage, not your eardrums. One night in 2017, the PDF files of the Eastman scores I had on my computer started to glitch (see Figure 22). They have since calmed down and returned to their status as notes, instructions, and time markers on musical staves, but for a few days they were blurred and scarred. I took screenshots of the glitches as if they were evidence of a ghostly refusal of transmission, a desire to slip away, a cunning maneuver to outwit technologies of absorption, a dare from Eastman’s ghost to play something illegible. The horizontality of the musical system became diagonal scratches. The discrete notes became streaks and smudges. This chance moment

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Figure 22. A glitching score by Julius Eastman. Photo by the author.

of technical failure became some kind of figure for the historiographic method I was interested in engaging in: heeding Eastman’s call to let the sonorities ring but letting them continue to act out and disrupt their historiographic containment. The glitch became an image of Eastman’s dissonant ringing, an image to try to keep paying attention to and writing alongside Eastman as he continued to get away. The artistic-historiographic projects from artists and curators such as Clayton, McClodden, Hurt, Perry, and ToussaintBaptiste—irreverent repetitions, cunning residues, erased and yet present figures, body-shaking vibrations—also seem to call out for a methodology of letting the political dissonance of Eastman’s sonorities continue to ring out. They extend the intense, pounding criticality of Eastman’s sound

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and amplify the Blackness and queerness of his ringing. Within the rise of the noxiously amnesiac post-racial diversity management discourses of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the proliferation of new regimes of aspirational homonormativity, these projects repeat the disruption of Eastman’s homo-dissonant ensembles. They intone a world in which gatherings of the same kind are never reduced to a logic of sameness, instead fragmenting and diffracting into out ensembles of dissonant and agonistic generativity.

Afterword

To end in the form of a return, I re-pose my questions from the introduction in response to my mother’s refrain: What kind of a good-bad thing is a group to do? When do we do things in groups, and why? How do we group, and how does the how matter? Groups, the more than one, and collectivity in general are neither good nor bad. This book is written against a phobia of collectivity in which collective experience necessarily means a politically suspect corrosion of the individual. It is also against a romance of the more than one in which there is a tacit assumption that any scene of collectivity is in itself liberatory and ameliorative within the privatization of life under neoliberalism. Group work is an ambivalent scene. Since the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberalization has meant that labor has become more isolating and atomizing, but it has also become a regime of relational optimization where our capacity to relate has itself been exploited. The most noxious political ideologies of our time rest on the idea of individual 141

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responsibility, but they are also rife with the call to gather while overlooking the often deadly antagonisms of racialization, class stratification, and gendered violence in order to form conflict-free groups of unified togetherness. Within these compromising conditions, the group is a scene of contestation over life in common. In the 1960s, 1970s, and today, the group is a relational medium for negotiating historical junctures when the terms of collective life are in flux. It is how we form groups that matters: To what ends and with what means does the group emerge, and in what ways might the means be part of that end? Eschewing typical genres of academic closure, I will end now with a series of scores for collective experimentation. These scores are instructions for assemblies yet to come that loosely synthesize and extend the leaderless huddles, disbanded communes, regrouping groupuscules, and dissonant ensembles of this book. They invite the reader to enact the concepts, forms, and questions discussed here as a way to blur the relationship between a book and a practice, between reading and doing. They ask the reader to collectivize their reading. In a time of devastating disease, climate crisis, heightened racialized violence, and growing inequality, these scores propose small, not-yet-actualized scenes of group work to continue negotiating the antagonisms and affiliations of life in common. Get a group of people together for a meeting but never call it to order.

Write down all the groups that are in your head at this moment.

AFTERWORD

Assemble a group, and then get as far away from each other as possible, but keep each other in mind.

Say something to a group that disassembles a group.

Write after the end of something.

Improperly name the impropriety of a nation.

Create a structureless structure.

Get inoperative together.

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Acknowledgments

A book is a group work masquerading as a solitary project. As such, I have many people to thank for writing this book with me. Tavia Nyong’o: thank you for telling me that any long project happens in a state of abandonment and urging me to stay the course and keep hydrated while offering such precise and generative readings. Barbara Browning, Malik Gaines, Fred Moten, Ann Pellegrini, and Karen Shimakawa: thank you for your inspiring work and feedback on various stages of this writing. Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Jana Corkin, Laura Micciche, and Jonathan Kamholtz: thank you for setting me on this road. José Esteban Muñoz: as I’ve been moving toward finishing this project, I’ve been living very strongly with memories of starting it, and the traces of your critical-creative practice have been with me at every turn. Samara Davis: thank you for writing with me when that felt impossible. Ari Brostoff, Summer Kim Lee, and Lakshmi Padmanabhan: thank you for the pleasures of thinking in common. Kyle Dacuyan, Jacqueline Feldman, Jessica Goldschmidt, Kate Liebman, Halo Rossetti, and Buzz Slutsky: 145

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thank you for the deadlines and the early welcoming eyes. Mariellen Sandford, Sara Ellen Brady, Jonathan Eburne, and Ryan Dahoney: thank you for your engagement with early writing on Forti and Eastman. Richard Morrison: thank you for shepherding this work with insight and care. Max Fox: thank you for being a last-minute clarifying presence. Mildred Sanchez: thank you for the nimble and skilled copyediting. My students: thank you for helping me practice these ideas as I wrote them. Susan Kossouf: thank you for listening in all the ways. Ned Riseley: thank you for your humor, salt, and discernment. Family: thank you for teaching me how to enjoy a sentence by its sound. Lizzie Borden, Samuel Delany, Julius Eastman, Simone Forti, Cauleen Smith, Morgan Bassichis, Sharon Hayes, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Jace Clayton, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste: thank you for the worlds your work makes. Now that I’ve said my thanks, I’m reminded of a lyric by the commune-band Heavenly Breakfast that Samuel R. Delany includes in Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love: If I try to thank you run away— or I will tell you all the little things you didn’t know I knew that you wanted known. It’s a lyric that insinuates an enmeshment in a web of knowing and not knowing the self, the relational ensnarement of gratitude, a closeness that also involves a fleeing. With this lyric in mind, everyone please take flight with my gratitude in hand, and let’s keep saying things we don’t know we want known.

Notes

Introduction

1. Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVIII (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 116. 2. Some contemporary cultural critics have responded to their own desire to challenge the “good people do bad things in groups” sentiment by arguing for the possibility of the “good group” and calling for a reversal of the phrase’s terms (“bad people do good things in groups too!”). A politically contradictory chorus of neoliberal managers, leftist organizers, and art historians of collaborative art all rail against the figure of the mad-bad group and its attendant ideologies of the individual through an invocation of the good group—whether through the co-working brainstorming sessions of the cognitariat hive mind, the collective assemblies of a horizontal activist groupuscule, or the unruly ensembles of a collectively authored artwork. For example, see neoliberal management texts such as The Wisdom of Crowds (2004) by James Surowiecki and Group Creativity: Innovation 147

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through Collaboration (2003) by Paul Paulus and Bernard Nijstad; anticapitalist community organizer Starhawk’s widely circulated Empowerment Manual: A Guide for Collaborative Groups (2011); and works by art historians such as Grant Kester’s The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (2011); and Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices (2007), edited by Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson. 3. Histories of the postwar New York avant-garde include Sally Banes’s Terpsichord in Sneakers, Stefan Brecht’s Queer Theatre, Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, and Fred Moten’s In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. 4. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004). 5. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007). 6. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 34. 7. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 28. In turning to Latour, I am wanting to gesture toward sociology as a field while also going beyond, under, or alongside its disciplinary protocols and thinking about the poetics of relational forms. 8. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 6. 9. For Brennan, accounts of the human that start from the self-contained individual rather than the ontological group-i-ness of the infant-mother relation rely on a misogynistic erasure of maternality that Brennen refers to as the “foundational fantasy of modernity.” Brennan argues that the fantasy of self-containment is a projective maternal fantasy in which the mother becomes the receptacle of bad affects and then is misrecognized as the origin of bad affects, allowing for the illusion of the contained infant as “the true fountain of energy and life.” Brennan writes that “the first rule of foundational thinking is to blame

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the mother,” and it is through this projective blaming that an illusion of impermeable boundaries are formed. The dumping of the negative affects of being onto and into the supposedly passive receptacle of a maternal figure is how “we come to think of ourselves as separate from others.” Out of these defensive projections comes a normative model of the healthy individual as a bounded and private fortress. It is against this model of the purely discrete and untethered individual that Brennan offers her alternative account of psychic life and the maternalinfant environment as “not premised on self-containment” (Transmission of Affect, 13–20). 10. Brennan, Transmission of Affect, 11. 11. W. R. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers (London: Tavistock, 1961) 116. In regards to the origin of the term, Bion writes, “the term ‘valency,’ as used in physics to denote the power of combination of atoms, carries with it the greatest penumbra of suggestiveness useful for my purpose” (Experiences in Groups, 175). 12. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (New York: Verso, 2015), 155. 13. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 166. 14. Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party (New York: Verso, 2016), 21. 15. A key prefiguring text for Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia is This Bridge Called My Back, the collection of multi-genre texts by queer women of color and third world-identified feminists from 1981, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. While the collection is sometimes portrayed as deploying an essentialist political subject of women of color feminism ensnared in reductive identity coordinates, I argue that is much more often performing a similar performative labor to the one Muñoz describes—assembling an incoherent and not already demographically held group around identity antagonisms without attempting to fashion a coherent collective essence. For example, the author, filmmaker, and activist Toni Cade Bambara begins her Foreword to This Bridge Called My Back with a description of “collection of cables, esoesses, conjurations and

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fusile missiles,” a “motive force,” a sense of “gathering-us-in-ness” (This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Women of Radical Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa [New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983], vi). For Bambara, the collective subject of women of color feminism is an impulse toward tumultuous composition—a collecting, conjuring, gathering—not a category of being already in the world and ready to be counted and contained. 16. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 19. 17. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 20. 18. Muñoz, 20. 19. Joshua Chamber-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life. (New York: New York University Press, 2018), xi. 20. For example see works such as Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); and Boltanski and Chiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism. 21. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participation and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). For an account of collectivism in twentieth-century art that considers the politics of race, gender, and sexuality in relation to collective art practices, see the Walker Museum’s Living Catalogue, Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–1980s, edited by Gwyneth Shanks and Allie Tepper and published online in 2020. 22. Lauren Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022), 9. In thinking about the generativity of ambivalence, I am also indebted to Jackie Stacey’s work on the task of criticism as a “working through of ambivalence” in her 2014 essay “Wishing Away Ambivalence,” Feminist Theory 15, no. 1 (2014); and Michael Dango and Tina Post’s work in their 2022 special issue of Post45 entitled, Ambivalent Criticism. Also, as an aside that perhaps points to the

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heart of my inquiry, it makes sense that I begin my account of collective ambivalence with a turn to my mother’s refrains. In psychoanalytic accounts drawn from the work of Melanie Klein, ambivalence marks feeling states and relational modalities drawn from early mother-infant relations that are fundamentally mixed, with both positive and negative charge (love-hate, satisfactionfrustration, affiliation-aggression). See also Michael Dango and Tina Post, “An Introduction to Ambivalent Criticism,” Post45 Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism (October 18, 2022). 23. The collective composed the first version of their Black feminist statement in 1977 and it was first published in Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1981), a volume edited by Zillah R. Eisenstein. The introduction to the statement contains the following: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (“The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 1977). 24. Barbara Smith Papers, Lesbian Herstory Archive, SP Coll 8402, Box 2. 25. Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 62. 1. Huddle

1. All descriptions of Huddle are derived from photographs and text included in Simone Forti’s Handbook in Motion (Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1974) and also my experience performing the score in a workshop lead by Forti at Danspace in December 2016. All unattributed quotes are also from this workshop. Simone Forti, “Simone Forti Movement and Writing Workshops: Body Mind World.” Workshop, Danspace Project, New York, N.Y., December 14–15, 2016. 2. Randy Martin, Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 14.

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3. Martin, Critical Moves, 2. 4. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (New York: Hackett Publishing Company, [1651] 1994). For a clear critical account of Hobbes’s centrality to the disavowed violence of the liberal tradition, see Jeremy Gelbert’s work on “leviathan logic” in Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (London: Pluto Press, 2014). 5. For a clear synthesis of feminist and anti-imperialist critiques of liberal ideologies, see Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015). 6. For a thorough intellectual history and incisive critique of the strange prevalence of bodily metaphors in disembodied masculinist conceptions of the State, law, and politics, see Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, trans. Robert de Lucca and Deanna Shemek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). Cavarero shows that the history of Western philosophical accounts of politics is one in which the body and all things bodily are banished from the realm of the polis as feminine or racially othered—but then paradoxically, the body returns as a kind of monstrous figure for politics in the form of the phantasmatically virile masculine body of the sovereign. 7. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 59. 8. Lax writes that “later, in the mid-1960s and ’70s, many of these figures would associate themselves with the second-wave feminist, anti-Vietnam War, gay and lesbian pride, and Black Power movements.” Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Introduction to Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done, ed. Ana Janevski and Thomas (T.) Jean Lax (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2018), 16. 9. John Kifner, “Columbia’s Radicals of 1968 Hold a Bittersweet Reunion,” New York Times, April 28, 2008, accessed October 3, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/nyregion /28columbia.html. 10. Forti, Handbook in Motion, 9. 11. Forti, 16. 12. Forti, 31. 13. Forti, 66.

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14. Forti, 129, 131. 15. For more on the absorption of dance by museums such as MoMA and the political significance of this absorption, see the special issue of Dance Research Journal entitled “Dance in the Museum,” ed. Mark Franko and André Lepecki, with contributions from Claire Bishop, Boris Charmatz, and Inés Moreno. Mark Franko and André Lepecki, eds., “Dance in the Museum,” Dance Research Journal 46 (2014), 3. 16. Gilbert Simondon, “The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis,” trans. Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7 (2009), 8. 17. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 79. 18. For more on Morris and his relation to minimalism, performance, and politics, see the work of art historians such as Maurice Berger (1997). I am also tempted to peripherally theorize Huddle as an instance of what might be called a feminist divorce aesthetic: a tumultuous group splitting up and breaking off. Maurice Berger, Minimal Politics: Performativity and Minimalism in Recent American Art (Baltimore: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 1997). 19. Forti’s later works build on this engagement with nonhuman movement vocabularies by becoming invested in the movement vocabularies of animals. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Forti turned to interspecies encounters and cross-species bodily resonances by performing extensive research on the gestural life of animals in captivity. Forti’s relation to nonhuman movement was less about mimesis than a kind of energetic inhabitation. Art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson has written that Forti’s nonhuman animal pieces often focused on moments of compulsive pacing, the gestural coping mechanisms of animals in captivity. BryanWilson writes, “Movement is, for the animals as well as for her, a method of control and redirected awareness: ‘at times I’ve escaped an oppressive sense of fragmentation by plunging my consciousness into cyclical momentum.’ ” Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Simone Forti Goes to the Zoo,” October 152 (Spring 2015), 46. 20. Trump (2017). Donald Trump, “The Inaugural Address,”

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accessed September 29, 2018, www.whitehouse.gov/briefings -statements/the-inaugural-address/. 21. Note that while the Museum of Modern Art has acquired Forti’s Dance Constructions and Huddle has legally entered the realm of the museum’s property, the iterability of Forti’s score opens it to a dispossessive tendency, and we enacted the score without the proper institutional permissions. 22. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2013), 73–81. 23. Women’s March 2017, “First we marched, now we huddle,” accessed August 5, 2017, www.womensmarch.com/100/action2/. 24. Women’s March 2017, “First we marched, now we huddle,” accessed August 5, 2017, www.womensmarch.com/100/action2/. 2. Commune

The definition for “commune (v)” in the epigraph is from OED Online, June 2017, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com, accessed August 7, 2017. 1. Roland Barthes, How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 6. 2. Barthes, How to Live Together, 4. 3. Samuel Delany, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (Michigan: Bamberger Books, 1997), 2. 4. John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialism (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870. Reprinted by University of Michigan Library, 2005), 23. 5. Charles Nordhoff, The Communistic Societies of the United States: From Personal Visit and Observation (New York: Dover, 1966), 418. 6. Benjamin Zablocki, Alienation and Charisma: A Study of Contemporary American Communes (New York: Free Press, 1980), 20. 7. See Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013).

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8. See Stephen Vider, “The Ultimate Extension of Gay Community: Communal Living and Gay Liberation in the 1970s,” Gender and History 27, no. 3 (2015); and Gill Valentine, “Making Space: Lesbian Separatist Communities in the United States,” in Paul J. Clike and Jo Little, eds., Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality (London: Routledge, 1997). 9. See Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 10. Tavia Nyong’o, “Back to the Garden: Queer Ecology in Samuel Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast,” American Literary History 24, no. 4 (December 1, 2012): 749. 11. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 13. 12. Delany, 13. 13. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 14. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 130. 15. Derrida, Grammatology, 139. 16. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 11. 17. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 39. 18. Jonestown began to stand in for the countercultural attempt gone wrong in the American media. For more on Jonestown, see the archives of the Jonestown Institute at San Diego State University, http://jonestown.sdsu.edu/ 19. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 154–55. 20. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 35. 21. Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), 21. 22. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 66. 23. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 5. 24. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 72.

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25. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stewart Kendall (New York: State University of New York Press, 2014), 13. 26. Blanchot, Unavowable Community, xxiv. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 31. 27. Nancy, Inoperative Community, 15. 28. Nancy, 15. 29. Nancy, 31. 30. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 107. 31. Delany, 12. 32. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Fraçois Raffoul and David Pettigrew (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 45. 33. Nancy, Creation of the World, 46. 34. Nancy, 54. 35. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 33. 36. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 1. 37. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 33. 38. Federici, 19. 39. Federici, 12. 40. See Sophie Lewis, Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), and Kathi Weeks, “Abolition of the Family: The Most Infamous Feminist Proposal,” Feminist Theory, OnlineFirst, 2021. 41. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 22. 42. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961). 43. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 115. Delany’s joking association here between communes, jails, asylums, and brothels points toward a broader question about the potential role that communes might play in the prison abolition movement. How might the commune become a social form through which to imagine and practice a world without incarceration? 44. Roderick A. Ferguson, “Administering Sexuality; or, The

NOTES TO PAGES 70–79

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Will to Institutionality,” Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008): 162. 45. Ferguson, “Administering Sexuality,” 163. 46. Gerald Raunig, “Preface,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique, ed. Gerald Raunig and Gene Ray (London: Mayfly Books, 2009), xvii. 47. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 15. 48. Delany, 103. 49. Delany, 80. 50. Delany, 83. 51. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Undercommons: Black Study and Fugitive Planning (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2013), 132. 52. Cedric J. Robinson, Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership (New York: State University of New York Press, 1980), 156. 53. Robinson, Terms of Order, 6. 54. Robinson, 199. 55. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 103 56. Delany, 103. 57. Delany, 2. 58. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 100 59. Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays by Ernst Bloch, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 16–17. 60. Delany, Heavenly Breakfast, 102. 61. Delany, 114. 62. Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (New York: Verso, 2015), 6. 63. Ross, Communal Luxury, 6. 64. Ross, 6. 65. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 102. 66. The Invisible Committee, Coming Insurrection, 113.

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67. The Invisible Committee, 188. 68. The Invisible Committee, 117. 69. Ross, Communal Luxury, 2. 70. Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (New York: Nightboat Books, 2019), 53. 71. Mitchell and Asta, Faggots and Their Friends, 36. 72. Morgan Bassichis, Introduction to Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (New York: Nightboat Books, 2019), xxii. 3. Groupuscule

1. For a capacious analysis and history of consciousness-raising as a feminist relational form, see Liz Kinnamon, “Undoing the Property Form: Feminist Consciousness-Raising as a Practice of Freedom,” Middlebury College, April 7, 2022. Accessible online at https://vimeo.com/699111560. 2. Pamela Allen, Free Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation (San Francisco: Times Change Press, 2000). 3. New York Radical Women, “Consciousness Raising Groups Pamphlet,” 1969 at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details /FeministConsciousness-raisingGroupGuideTopics. 4. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Introduction to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), xxiii. 5. Toni Cade Bambara, Foreword to This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), vi. 6. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 16. 7. For a generative analysis of these dynamics both within the textual practices of feminist theorizing and the agonistic group

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work of feminist meetings, see Summer Kim Lee, “In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings,” Post45 Issue 8: Ambivalent Criticism (October 18, 2022). 8. For a more detailed analysis of the imbrication between white feminism and white supremacy, see Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism (New York: Bold Type Books, 2021). 9. Borden is best known amongst feminist academics for the film she made after Regrouping, the 1983 feature film Born in Flames. A collaboratively authored filmic portrayal of intersectional feminist resistance within an alternate world where a successful socialist revolution has failed to address racism and misogyny, Born in Flames spills across a variety of genres and artistic strategies. Part speculative fiction and part documentary with footage of political actions and collective meetings interspersed with more traditionally scripted scenes, it is a film about feminist insurgence but also a documentary of collective insurgence occurring in itself. While Born in Flames has entered what might be thought of as the counter-canon of anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist filmmaking, Regrouping has only been screened a handful of times since it premiered in 1976. Born in Flames is also about scenes of feminist group work—but notable differences between it and Regrouping are that it is more about a relation to fiction and speculation and also that it portrays a coalitional group marked by their internal differentiation rather than a filmic deconstruction of a white feminist collective. 10. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), ix.

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11. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 3. 12. Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 11. 13. Theresa L. Geller, “The Cinematic Relations of Corporeal Feminism,” in Rhizomes 11–12 (Fall 2005–Spring 2006), http:// www.rhizomes.net/issue11/geller.html#_ftnref71. 14. Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 15. 15. Deleuze’s theory of avant-garde cinema and the timeimage might be productively transposed into the non-Deleuzian feminist psychoanalytic lexicon of the feminist film theorist and filmmaker Laura Mulvey. Mulvey writes that the goal of a feminist avant-garde film is “to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without simply rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, and daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire.” The disruption of normal pleasurable expectations in cinema might be productively thought of in tandem with Deleuzian accounts of the timeimage as the opening up of a nonsequential temporal interval in which one’s sensory perception is wrenched from habituated motor responses. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) 835. 16. For a close discussion of how theories of assemblage might be of use for critical accounts of gender, race, and sexuality, see works such as Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; and Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 17. Jasbir K. Puar, “ ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory,” philoSOPHIA 2, no. 1 (2012): 52. 18. Lizzie Borden, Regrouping, Film, 1976, New York.

NOTES TO PAGES 94–95

161

19. Borden reported in a talkback after a screening of Regrouping at New York City’s Anthology Film Archive that she had stored the film in her literal closet from 1976 to 2016. The two scholarly pieces previously written about Regrouping are both reviews of its Edinburgh screenings for Sight and Sound, one by Jonathan Rosenbaum from 1976 and one by Sophie Mayer from 2016. Rosenbaum presents Regrouping as a film that frustrates the desire for narrative resolution and completion, instead presenting experimental feminist filmmaking as an impenetrable unfurling of an ungraspable object (the group). Rosenbaum writes, “Borden’s title refers not only to the social patterning that forms the film’s ostensible (and elusive) subject, but also to its own manner of presentation. Dissolving ‘form’ and ‘content’ into an impenetrable labyrinth of cross-references to an ungraspable subject, a perpetual ‘work-in-progress’ on the spectator that is never resolved or completed, this diabolical hour of film [. . . refers] directly to its own productions and suppressions of meaning.” Sophie Mayer, writing almost exactly forty years after Rosenbaum, contextualizes Regrouping within the feminist counter-cinema work of Yvonne Rainer and Laura Mulvey and feminist performance artists such as Carolee Schneeman and Ana Mendieta. Mayer calls the film a “densely interwoven reflexive portrait of four artists in a women’s group,” and describes the film as “being choral, shifting away from the singular subject towards the ‘ungraspable’ feminist question of how to find common ground between women.” This question that, while “ungraspable,” seems to grasp attempts at feminist chorality is, of course, the question of racialization, difference, and the politics of feminist assemblages. 20. Film Anthology Archives, January 14, 2016; and International House Philadelphia Cinema, December 8, 2016. 21. For more on meetings as an activist genre of gathering, see Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Lee, “In the Same Room, Again.” 22. Lizzie Borden, in discussion, Film Anthology Archives, January 14, 2016.

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23. Lizzie Borden, International House Philadelphia Cinema, “Regrouping,” December 8, 2016. 24. Lizzie Borden, International House Philadelphia Cinema, “Regrouping,” December 8, 2016. 25. Wini Breines, Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962–1986: The Great Refusal (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 6. It should be noted that while Community and Organization focuses on the collective practices of the New Left, Breines’s Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (1992) and The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (2006) are about the feminist movement. 26. Breines, Community and Organization, 6. 27. Breines, 46. 28. Breines, 6. 29. Breines, 43. 30. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” (lecture first delivered in 1970, https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny .htm, 1). 31. Freeman, “Tyranny of Structurelessness,” 6. 32. Freeman, 2. 33. Echols introduces the transcript by clarifying that the meeting was transcribed from a tape that didn’t denote the speakers, but it is clear from the text that none of the speakers are identifying themselves as Black women. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1976 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 368. 34. Echols, Daring to Be Bad, 370–374. 35. This conversation might be helpfully contextualized within the relational genre of “white people talking about race,” a genre of leftist gathering that tends to consist of a swirl of fragilities, anxious projections, and dramatic expressions of complicity that stand in for other forms of action in relation to racial politics and the uneven valuation of lives. It is a relational modality that belies how white-dominated spaces are often predicated on a worrying about their own limits and a guilty desire to transcend themselves.

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36. Lizzie Borden, in conversation with the author, New York City, December 7, 2016. 37. In the summer of 2018, the Statue of Liberty again became a site of feminist contestation when activists associated with the organization Rise and Resist staged a protest at the monument on July 4th to protest the so-called family separation detention and deportation practices of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A group hung a banner from the statue that read “ABOLISH ICE,” and the activist Patricia Okoumou scaled the statue and staged a sit-in amidst the folds of the statue’s robes until authorities forced her down. The Statue of Liberty is a privileged place where ideologies of freedom and the nation are generated, disseminated, and contested. In 2018, as in 1970, it became a site for articulating the contradiction between the material conditions of unfreedom in the United States against the iconography of the United States as the land of the free. 38. Sharon Hayes, Women of the World Unite! they said, http:// shaze.info/work/women-of-the-world-unite-they-said/, accessed March 21, 2021. 39. Martin Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 31. 40. Lizzie Borden, in conversation with the author, New York City, December 7, 2016. 4. Ensemble

1. Mary Jane Leach, “Julius Eastman,” The Julius Eastman Project, http://www.mjleach.com/eastman.htm. 2. Renée Levine Packer, “Introduction: Julius Eastman and His Music,” in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 1. 3. Musicologists, art historians, and cultural critics are writing about Eastman with increasing frequency. The recently edited collection Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, coedited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach, begins

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with a sixty-page biography by Packer that is currently the most complete historiographic account of Eastman’s life. 4. Renée Levine Packer, “Julius Eastman, a Biography,” in Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 52. 5. Packer, “Julius Eastman,” 43. 6. Packer, 55. 7. See Zachary Woolfe, “Minimalist Composer Julius Eastman, Dead for 26 Years, Crashes the Canon,” New York Times, October 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts /music/minimalist-composer-julius-eastman-dead-for-26-years -crashes-the-canon.html. 8. George E. Lewis, Foreword to Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2015), xi. 9. See Isaac Alexandre Jean-François, “Julius Eastman: The Sonority of Blackness Otherwise,” Current Musicology 106 (Spring 2020); Ryan Dohoney, “A Flexible Musical Identity: Julius Eastman in New York City, 1976–1990,” Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music, ed. Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 116–30; Ryan Dohoney, “John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 39–62; and Elle M. Hisama, “ ‘Diving into the Earth’: The Musical Worlds of Julius Eastman,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2015), 260–86. 10. Julius Eastman, “The Composer as Weakling,” in Ear Magazine 5, no. 1 (April–May 1979): 7. 11. Eastman, “Composer as Weakling,” 7. 12. Eastman, 7. 13. Julius Eastman, “Pre-concert spoken introduction at Northwestern University,” Unjust Malaise, New Word Records, 2005, compact disc.

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14. For further examples from Eastman’s biography: his boyfriend, R. Nemo Hill, recounts a story of being brought by him to the 125th Street subway station public restroom during the winter of 1981 to cruise and fuck among the stalls. Nemo writes, “While we were about to engage in a sexual escapade with several other men parked in a line at the urinals, a policeman entered and threatened us with arrest.” According to Nemo, Eastman ignored them and told him not to run, writing that Eastman was persistently fearless in the face of police repression, engaged in a “battle between the law and true authority” of his own desire. R. Nemo Hill, “The Julius Eastman Parables,” in Packer and Leach, Gay Guerrilla, 89. In 1982, Eastman’s voice boomed throughout Arthur Russell’s Dinosaur L disco track “Go Bang.” He sang, “I wanna see all my friends at once. I’d do anything to get the chance to go back. I wanna go bang,” repeating bang over and over as a slow glissando refrain, sliding from the bottom of his range to the top like a slowed-down explosion. “Go Bang” was a popular track in New York’s queer disco clubs that year, Eastman’s voice calling out over and over again to the turbulent collective of the dance floor: go bang, go bang, go bang. Eastman’s call was not for fusion or merger but for a kind of collective explosion, a gathering together and a blowing apart. 15. Other scholars have posed a similar overlap between the mono and the homo in Eastman’s work; for example, see Malik Gaines, “Same Difference,” Art Forum, April 2018, 53–54. 16. Hisama, “Diving into the Earth,” 262. 17. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7. 18. Bersani, Homos. 19. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 20. Moten, In the Break, 162. 21. Moten, 166. 22. While existing within a very different formal relationship to improvisation and composition than Taylor, Eastman crisscrossed the free jazz and contemporary music worlds throughout his

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career—performing with the saxophone player Charles Gayle in Buffalo, forming a free jazz band called Space Perspective, and regularly weaving improvisation into the fabric of his compositions. Packer, “Julius Eastman.” 23. Moten, In the Break, 121. 24. Doyle develops a theory of difficulty to think in slower and more complicated ways about controversial art objects that are often met with polarized and reductive responses, whether celebratory or disgusted. Jennifer Doyle, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013). 25. For this reason, I have chosen not to reproduce Eastman’s titles that involve the n-word in this book. Instead, I use asterisks as a way to point toward the titles’ significatory force while simultaneously not inscribing them from my subject position as a white scholar. For more about the ongoing disruptive political force of Eastman’s titles, see the conversation that emerged following a lecture by Mary Jane Leach at the Obey Convention music festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2019 in which Leach uttered Eastman’s titles. For coverage of the event, see Calum Slingerland’s “OBEY Convention Issues Apology Following Julius Eastman Event” printed online at Exclaim! on June 5, 2019. For Mary Jane Leach’s response to the ensuing controversy, see her essay “How to Talk About History? A Spurned Speaker Wonders How to Handle Incendiary Titles by Composer Julius Eastman,” published online on ARTNews on September 13, 2019. 26. For a detailed history of the organizing efforts of For Members Only and its relation to Eastman’s performance, as well as a broader history of the political dissonance of the 1979–1980 school year at Northwestern, see Andrew Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency at Northwestern University” (master’s thesis, University of Iowa, 2011). 27. Eastman, “Pre-concert spoken introduction.” 28. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).

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29. Hanson-Dvoracek, “Julius Eastman’s 1980 Residency,” 28. 30. Julius Eastman, Crazy N****r, score, 1979, The Julius Eastman Project, http://www.mjleach.com/Eastman%20Scores /Eastman_CrazyN****r.pdf. 31. Moten, In the Break, 166. 32. For example, the record label Frozen Reed’s 2016 rerelease of Eastman’s 1974 chamber work Femenine, the cellist Clarice Jensen’s transcript of the lost score to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, and the musicologist Ryan Dohoney’s scholarship on Eastman. 33. Jace Clayton, Liner notes for The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, New Amsterdam Records, 2013, compact disc. 34. Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, Slought Foundation, https://slought.org/resources/that_which_is _fundamental. 35. Tiona Nekkia McClodden, “A Recollection,” Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental, Slought Foundation, https://slought.org/resources/that_which_is_fundamental.

Index

acquisition, 37–38 acting out, 126–127, 132 after-ness, 75–79 agencement, 92–93 Allen, Pamela, 84–85 ambivalence, 18, 48, 76–77, 95, 98, 110, 128, 131, 141–142, 150n22 anarchism, 74, 101 Anthology Film Archive, 94–95 anti-imperialism, 122–123 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 87, 149n15 arche-writing, 60, 77 Asta, Ned, 80–82 assemblage, 92–94, 101–102 attempt, 53, 78 Austin, J. L., 9, 110–111 Badiou, Alain, 11 Bambara, Toni Cade, 87, 149– 150n15 Banes, Sally, 28 Barthes, Roland, 51–52 Bassichis, Morgan, 7, 80–83 Bataille, Georges, 62

Berlant, Lauren, 18 Bersani, Leo, 124–127 binary oppositions: antagonism/ affiliation, 90, 120, 142; archive/ counter-archive, 18; bad/good, 2–4, 24; collective/individual, 4, 15, 16, 56; concrete/abstract, 85; extensivity/ephemerality, 56; hope/disappointment, 76–77; identity/class politics, 13, 17; institution/counterinstitution, 56, 69; in sync/out of sync, 125; liberatory/repressive, 16; mad/ rational, 2–4; order/disorder, 56, 73–75, 92; personal/political, 85; proximity/distance, 73; short/long, 15; small/big, 15; specific/general, 85; structure/ structureless, 92; talking/ doing, 101, 110–111; utopianism/ pragmatism, 56 Bion, Wilfred, 9–10, 52 Bishop, Claire, 17 Black feminism, 19–24, 87–88 169

170

Blanchot, Maurice, 57, 60, 62 Bloch, Ernst, 18, 76–77 body parts, 36 body politic, 29–35, 40, 152n6 Borden, Lizzie, 5, 16, 89–90, 94–107, 112 Born in Flames, 159n9 Bosse, Abraham, 29–32, 44 Bowerbird, 134 breaking up, 42, 77–78, 153n18 Breines, Wini, 98–101 Brennan, Teresa, 9, 148n9 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 153n19 Buffalo, NY, 116 Cage, John, 113–114, 119 canonicity, 16, 37, 118–119, 134– 136, 159n9 Cavarero, Adriana, 152n6 Chambers-Letson, Joshua, 14 Charles, Don Hogan, 35 cinematic assemblage, 89–94 circle dance, 71–72 Clayton, Jace, 121, 134–135, 138 collaboration, 96 collectivity: belonging in, 14; collective authorship, 96; the desire for, 15; feminist, 16, 84– 112; the phobia of, 141 collusion, 96, 102 Columbia Student AfroAmerican Society, 34–35 Columbia University, 34–35 Combahee River Collective, 7, 13, 19–24, 87, 151n23 Combahee River Collective Statement, 19, 22, 87, 151n23 commoning practices, 67–68 commune, 51–79 communism, 61, 126 The Communist Manifesto, 107–111 The Communistic Societies of the United States, 53

INDEX

community, 56–61; intentional, 73; the romance of, 57; unitary, 59 The Composer as Weakling, 120 composite bodies, 29, 37 consciousness-raising, 84–87, 100–101 conservative multiculturalism, 13 Crazy N****r, 128–133 Creative Associates, 114 critical hope, 18, 76–78, 105 Curtis Institute of Music, 114 Dance Constructions, 26–27 Danspace Projects, 37–38, 45 Daring To Be Bad, 102–104 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 114 Dean, Jodi, 11–12 deconstruction, 57 Delany, Samuel, 5, 16, 53–79, 89, 126 Deleuze, Gilles, 90–94 Derrida, Jacques, 57, 60 desoeuvrement, 62–64 differance, 60, 77 differentiation, 8, 26–27, 33–34, 39–43, 46, 125, 127 disagreement, 102–103, 106 disappointment, 10, 18, 76–77, 96 disbanding, 16, 56, 63, 75–79 disco ball, 21 disorder, 56, 73–75, 99–102 dispersion, 60, 77–78, 89 dispossession, 118 dissolution, 53, 104–105 dissonance, 16, 120, 124–128 diversity management, 13, 139 Dohoney, Ryan, 119 Doyle, Jennifer, 128, 166n24 Duggan, Lisa, 5 East Village, 53, 55, 66, 71, 73, 116–117 Eastman, Gerry, 114, 117 Eastman, Julius, 5, 16, 113–139

INDEX

Echols, Alice, 102–104 Eight Songs for a Mad Kid, 114 Engels, Friedrich, 107–111 engroupment, 8–10 enjoyment, 64 ensemble, 113–139 ephemerality, 56, 100, 108 Evil N****r, 128–131, 136 exodus, 53, 70–71 Experiences in Groups, 10, 52 extensivity, 56 The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, 7, 80–82 family abolition, 53, 68 fascism, 58–59 Federici, Silvia, 67–68 feminism, 67–68, 84–112 Ferguson, Roderick, 70 finitude, 58, 60 For Members Only, 129, 131–132, 166n26 Forti, Simone, 5, 16, 25–29, 31–40, 42–48, 89 fragmentation, 36, 104–105 Free Space, 84–85 Freeman, Jo, 100–102 Freud, Sigmund, 2 frustration, 10, 105 Gay Guerrilla, 5, 16, 120–132 Geller, Theresa L., 92 Glass, Philip, 118, 123 glitch, 136, 138 Goldman, Danielle, 28 group: art, 15–18; group-i-ness, 9, 16, 148n9; group-being, 24; mad-bad, 2–3, 147n2; rationalgood, 4, 147n2; theories of, 8–11; therapy, 10 groupuscule, 84–112 Handbook in Motion, 36 Hangers, 27

171

Hanson-Dvoracek, Andrew, 132, 166n29 hapticality, 75 Hardt, Michael, 11 Harlem, 114 Hayes, Sharon, 7, 90, 107–111 Harney, Stefano, 47 Heavenly Breakfast, 5, 16, 53–79 headlessness, 43 heteronormativity, 54, 65–68, 124–125 Hill, R. Nemo, 118, 164–165n14 Hisama, Ellie M., 119, 123 History of American Socialism, 53 Hobbes, Thomas, 29–32, 44 homo-dissonance, 124–128, 132, 139 How to Live Together, 51–52 Huddle, 5, 16, 25–29, 31–40, 42–48 huddling, 25, 43–50, 89 Hurt, Dustin, 134, 138 identity politics, 12–14, 17, 19, 69, 112, 120, 125, 128, 131, 149n15 idiorrhythmy, 51, 60, 71–72 impermanence, 77–78 incompleteness, 74, 77 individuation, 39–43 inoperativity, 62–64 instituent practices, 70 institutionality, 16, 56, 69–71; alter-institutionality, 69– 71; anti-institutionality, 69; counterinstitutionality, 69; institutional critique, 70; total institution, 69; will to, 70 Invisible Committee, 79 January House, 73 Jean-François, Isaac Alexandre, 119 Jones, Jim, 58–59 Joseph, Miranda, 57 Judson Dance Theatre, 28, 34

172

The Julius Eastman Memory Depot, 124–135 Keeling, Kara, 91–92 kinetic sculpture, 38 The Kitchen, 114, 134 Latour, Bruno, 8 Lavender Hill, 80–83 Lax, Thomas (T.) Jean, 34 Leach, Mary Jane, 117, 166n25 Le Bon, Gustave, 2 leaderlessness, 27, 37, 40, 50, 100–101 leave-taking, 16, 41, 42, 54 Lesbian Herstory Archives, 18–21 The Leviathan, 29–32 Levine Packer, Renée, 117 Lewis, George E., 119 liberalism, 29–32 libidinal saturation, 126 Ligon, Liz, 107 literary communism, 61 living-together, 51–52 manifesto, 110–111 Martin, Randy, 28 Marx, Karl, 107–111 mass grave, 59 maternal refrains, 1–3, 141 Mayer, Sophie, 161n19 McClodden, Tiona Nekkia, 7, 121, 134–136, 138 meetings, 95 merger, 8, 11, 39, 41, 59, 127, 165n14 A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, 121 militancy, 120, 122–124 minimalism, 118–119, 123, 128, 130 Mitchell, Larry, 7, 80–82 mondalisation, 63–64 Monk, Meredith, 114 mono-instrumental ensemble, 121, 123, 127–128

INDEX

Moraga, Cherríe, 87, 149n15 Moten, Fred, 47, 126–127 The Motion of Light in Water, 126 movement-image, 91–92 Mulvey, Laura, 160n15 Muñoz, José Esteban, 13–14, 68, 76 Museum of Modern Art, 37–38 Museum of Modern Art PS1, 134 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 57–64 National Organization for Women, 107 Negri, Antonio, 11 neoliberalism: containment and absorption, 12, 16, 18, 37, 70, 88, 134, 138–139; definitions of, 5–6, 141–142; dispossession, 118; political organization, 11–13 New Museum, 80–82 New York Radical Women, 85–86 nonreproductive futurity, 68 Nordhoff, Charles, 53 Northwestern University, 121–122, 128–129, 132 Novak, Cynthia, 28 Noyes, John Humphrey, 53 Nyong’o, Tavia, 55 Occupy Wall Street, 3 Okoumou, Patricia, 163n37 Ono, Yoko, 27 ontogenesis, 41 ontological permeability, 10, 148n9 order, 56, 74 organic principle, 115–116 organization, 73–75; antiorganization, 99–100; disorganization, 73–75, 100 out-ness, 126–127, 132 paideia, 52 Paris Commune, 78

INDEX

parties: partying, 15; political, 11–15, 79 pastoral, 65 People’s Temple Agricultural Project, 58–59 performance studies, 1 performativity, 8–9, 110–111, 128– 129, 131 Perry, Sondra, 136, 138 perversity, 95 Pier 54, 107–110 The Place, 73–74 planning, 47 political theory, 29–32 post-structuralism, 57 praxis, 85 prefigurative politics, 98–102 project, 62–64 psychoanalysis, 2, 9–10, 148n9, 151n22 Puar, Jasbir, 93–94 Puchner, Martin, 110–111 Purifoy, Noah, 22–23 queer theory, 13–14, 55, 68, 122– 127, 131 Raunig, Gerald, 70 Regrouping, 5, 16, 89–90, 94–107, 112 reproductive labor, 66 Reuben Gallery, 27 revolution, 80–83, 108 Robinson, Cedric, 74 Roller Boxes, 27 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 161n19 Ross, Kristen, 78–80, 83 Russell, Arthur, 114, 165n14 sameness, 124–125 Sandy Springs Conference, 102–104 score, 33, 37–39, 45, 132–133, 137–138, 142–143

173

Scramble, 39 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 131 Seesaw, 27 S. E. M. Ensemble, 113–114 settler colonialism, 54, 65–66 sex, 63–64, 97, 165n14 shame, 131 Simondon, Gilbert, 41–42 sing-alongs, 82 Slant Board, 27 slavery, 31, 126, 128, 130, 132 Slought Foundation, 134 smallness, 15 Smith, Barbara, 19–21 Smith, Cauleen, 7, 21–23 social contract, 31–32 Sojourner, 7, 21–23 Song Books, 113–114, 119 sovereignty, 29–32; nonsovereignty, 35 splintering, 35, 103 State University of New York Buffalo, 114 Statue of Liberty, 107–110, 162– 163n37 Stay On It, 114 structurelessness, 92, 100–102 student activism, 34–35, 129, 131 Students for a Democratic Society, 34–35 Sudsofloppen, 85 Summer of Love, 75–76 Taylor, Cecil, 126–127 teams, 25–26 The Terms of Order, 74 That Which is Fundamental, 134–136 Third World Gay Revolution, 13–14 This Bridge Called My Back, 87, 149n15 time-image, 91–92 tokenism, 119

174

Tompkins Square Park, 116 Toussaint-Baptiste, Jeremy, 121, 136–138 Trump, Donald, 43–44, 112 The Tyranny of Structurelessness, 100–102 unison, 121, 127 unity, 105, 107–111 Unjust Malaise, 117 unworking, 62–64 utopia, 52, 56, 76–78 valency, 10, 149n11 Virno, Paolo, 16, 24, 42

INDEX

Wheeler’s Ranch, 65 Whitney Museum of American Art, 21 whiteness, 65–66, 88, 102–104; white feminism, 86–88, 102– 104; white supremacy, 88, 129 Winter of Love, 75–76 W.I.T.C.H., 13 Women of the World Unite! they said, 7, 90, 107–111 The Women’s March, 44, 48–50 women of color feminism, 87–88, 149n15 Zablocki, Benjamin, 54

waves: feminism, 90, 112 we, 14, 75, 105

Ethan Philbrick is an interdisciplinary artist, cellist, and writer. He has taught at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, and New York University. Recent performance projects include Choral Marx, 10 Meditations in an Emergency, The Gay Divorcees, Mutual Aid among Animals, and Slow Dances.