1
Love at Last Sight
Wondering as to the nature of “aura,” Walter Benjamin once scribbled the following observation on an Acqua S. Pellegrino notepad:
The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen [glances up] answers with a glance. To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means becoming aware of its ability [to pitch] to respond to a glance. This ability is full of poetry.1
From a distant perspective this object has its own aura; although it is mechanically reproduced in a published collection of materials from Benjamin’s archive, this passage appears closer in this form to its so-called authentic origin, shedding the layers of mediation which characterize its more familiar disseminations in the complete, published essays where it reappears.2 It is all the more evocative for the tangible sense of place it suggests. The S. Pellegrino tagline at the bottom of the paper—“La Migliore Da Tavola” (The best table water)—recalls the kind of notepaper you might expect to find on a hotel bar or café table in the inside-outside of a Paris arcade, say, a place where you are “one who is seen,” where you might answer the looks of passing strangers “with a glance” and afterwards jot down the experience. It is possible to glean from this fragment, then, the very milieu of cruising—a scene of looking, watching, and subsequently, of writing. The aura is one of the most ubiquitous of Benjamin’s concepts, referred to frequently both in his own work and in Benjamin scholarship, but its usage in this note is distinctive. Here, the aura is inflected, implicitly and first-personally, with the imagined experiences of its author, lent an urban and interpersonal resonance that refers back to the analogy around which this coinage functions.
As Benjamin writes in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” the “experience of aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to relationships between humans and inanimate or natural objects.”3 Analogies provide optics, and this transposition lights upon the way that aura is, in Miriam Bratu Hansen’s words, “not an inherent property of persons or objects but pertains to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision” that “enables the manifestation of the gaze, inevitably refracted and disjunctive, and shapes its potential meanings.”4 Reciprocated glances in “human relationships” act, for Benjamin, as a particular “structure of vision” vis-à-vis singular artworks, a means of conceptualizing aura (which is predominantly used for describing a feature of aesthetics) in terms of an interpersonal animism that is endangered by reproduction. Yet this note, in its suggestion of a scene of writing that might also be a scene of watching, highlights the term’s applicability not only to an object/beholder relation, but the reciprocated human glance per se. To consider this juncture in Benjamin’s analogy, across which the “aura” might travel from describing an artwork back to describing a person, is thus also to consider its possible other variants—artworks which contain persons, or the contexts in which persons might themselves resemble artworks, torn between the static and the animate.
The three-line fragment at the top of the note—“Eyes staring at one’s back / Meeting of glances / Glance up, answering a glance”—narrates an exchange of looks and is lineated like verse, bringing to mind an accompanying inversion: if the “ability” of aura is full of poetry, might “poetry” also be “full of” this ability? In the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin posits the eponymous subject as the consummate lyric poet of the city, a writer alive to the contingencies of the crowd and the phantasmagoria of urban experience, which can both intensify and threaten this capacity to respond to a glance. Baudelaire’s sonnet “À une passante” renders the auratic exchange as a scene of heartbreak, one where modern love meets the shock of the urban glance at the threshold between the singular and the repetitious:
La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.
Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,
Une femme passa, d’une main fastueuse
Soulevant, balançant le feston et l’ourlet;
Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.
Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,
Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l’ouragan,
La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.
Un éclair . . . puis la nuit! —Fugitive beauté
Dont le regard m’a fait soudainement renaître,
Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l’éternité?
Ailleurs, bien loin d’ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!
Car j’ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,
ô toi que j’eusse aimé, ô toi qui le savais!
[All around me the deafening street was wailing.
Tall, slim, in the garbs of mourning—a sorrow majestic—
A woman passed, with refulgent hand
Lifting, swinging her flounce and hem.
Agile and noble, her limbs of a statue.
Me—I drank, tensed up like a madman,
From her eyes, the pallid sky that gives rise to tempests,
The softness that grips, the pleasure that kills.
A flash . . . then night! —O brief beauty
Whose glance suddenly rebirthed me,
Shall I only see you again in eternity?
Away, far away from here! Too late! Perhaps never?
For I don’t know where you flee to, you don’t know where I go,
O you who I might have loved, O you who knew it!]5
This poem stages the apprehension of another person’s aura, which is to say the woman’s disturbing ability to glance back, her agency, signaled by the fact, as Mark W. Turner writes, that “she, too, reads the street visually.”6 This ability in turn marks her out; Janet Wolff writes “we may also ask whether a ‘respectable’ woman in 1850s would have met the gaze of a strange man.”7 Whether a widow, as her attire suggests, or a prostitute, as her look back could imply, the passante’s “regard” (glance) is significant for the poet. A glance is optical, meaning to “cast a momentary look,” but it can also mean to “strike obliquely,” perhaps not unlike the “plaisir qui tue” (pleasure that kills), as though the meeting of glances is an exchange of some violence. The “éclair” (flash) of the third stanza corroborates this—one is, after all, said to be “struck” by lightning or an assailant—and also gestures to another possible meaning. In translating Benjamin into English, Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have elsewhere opted for “glance” as a translation of the German word Blick, which, they explain, “in earlier usage meant ‘a flashing,’ ‘a lighting up,’ ‘a shining.’”8 Blick is also the term Benjamin uses to describe the aura in the German text of his Baudelaire essay.9 For both Baudelaire and Benjamin, this flash can signal aura’s undoing. Eduardo Cadava notes that “Benjamin’s vocabulary of lightning helps register what comes to pass in the opening and closing of vision,” often the “irruption of events or images, and even the passage into night” (as in Baudelaire’s sonnet, “Un éclair . . . puis la nuit!”) Frequently too it is posited as necessary for creation, being “the movement of writing and inscription,” but also destructive: “What is illumined or lighted by the punctual intensity of this or that strike of lightning, however—the emergence of an image, for example—can at the same time be burned, incinerated, consumed in flames.”10
Baudelaire’s poem gives voice to this burning out in its mournful “O”s, for no sooner has the poet seen this passing woman than she vanishes in this flash, a lighting up that eschews the epiphanic or celestial associations of light. A proximate analogy is the flash of the camera, which registers the fleeting urban encounter as though it were as transient as a snapshot. Timothy Raser describes this poem as displaying the “urge to capture the passing moment, for fear of losing it forever,” in a manner that is “inextricably bound into modernity and photography.”11 Baudelaire’s on-the-record conception of photography in “The Salon of 1859,” in which he lambasts the camera for the threat it poses to the imaginary capacities of art, indeed emphasizes its “true duty” to preserve “precious things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory.” But Baudelaire had in mind “tumbling ruins” and fragile “manuscripts,” not passing women whose forms dissolve in crowds.12 “À une passante” may court the photographic in several ways, but not without presenting a certain experiential tension between the live, passing nature of momentary urban encounters on the one hand, and the more fixed, reflective forms of attention denoted by photographic “archives” of memories on the other. Benjamin navigates this by reconceptualizing the live-ness of the metropolis and the reproductive capacities of photography as mutually informing and ambivalent symbols of progress in the midst of modernity. For Benjamin the camera acts as a mechanism of mass reproduction threatening the auratic phenomenon of the singular glance, for that which “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” divorced from an originating “tradition” or “unique existence”; thus instead taking dispersed form in a “plurality of copies.”13 In other words, in a construction which exemplifies the way this essay seems peculiarly double-minded about its own position: “from a photographic negative [ . . . ] one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.”14
In this regard Benjamin synthesizes strands of Baudelaire’s thoughts intended as resolutions of one another, and suggests the ability to reproduce is photography’s greatest threat to the realm of art, where Baudelaire sees that ability as grounds for its relegation from that realm. In his essay on the poet, Benjamin conceives of this diminishment as homologous with the impact of the metropolis upon the consciousness whereby Erfahrung—the terrain of a preconscious, personal, Proustian form of memory—is usurped by Erlebnis, an exterior world of sensation whose relentlessness precludes access to such memory.15 Dianne Chisholm expands upon Benjamin’s identifications in the Baudelaire essay of the “sexual shock that can beset a lonely man” and the “love which only a city dweller experiences,” suggesting that for Benjamin “love in the big city is inextricably bound to commodity traffic,” and that encounters with strangers culminate only in “but fleeting consummation” before they pass on, “destined for mass circulation and repeated exchange.”16 This flash of apprehension in “À une passante” thus resembles the alienating multiplications of both the urban crowd and the camera, swallowing the image of the passing woman not into a void of disappearance but the chaos of “mass circulation.”
In translating the poem, another kind of reproduction, Clive Scott makes literal work of this loss by transforming it from a sonnet to a villanelle. This transformation “made necessary” the “projection of the encounter, not, as in the sonnet, as a unique and once-and-for-all event, but as something repeated, habitual, as a kind of Muybridgean cinematic sequence, a series of frames slightly differentiated from each other, where the repetition itself takes the woman away, confirms her in an otherness.”17 This otherness is not to be confused, however, with singularity: however unique your encounter with this woman may seem, it is likely being repeated somewhere else, around the corner, only moments later, which the mind’s eye can replicate as if part of a Muybridgean projection. Reading Benjamin’s “aura” into Baudelaire’s sonnet exposes the way in which the “wellspring of poetry” is, for Baudelaire, thwarted by the city. Benjamin’s text has become a crucial companion to this poem, a poem whose “importance,” Scott writes, is “owed substantially to its appearance in Benjamin,” and he seeks to “incorporate this cultural fact” in his translation.18 He does this by paraphrasing in the final line Benjamin’s oft-cited observation, which first appeared in a 1938 essay on Baudelaire and later in “On Some Motifs,” that this is a poem of “love” not at “first sight,” but “last sight.”19
The “rue assourdissante” (deafening street) emerges from Benjamin’s analysis as a compositional setting that is not apprehended per se, but as a perceptual field already mediated and mediatized, like the “Muybridgean cinematic sequence” that Scott draws out in his translation work. Philip Auslander locates, in Benjamin’s statement about photographic negatives and their copies, an “ontology” that the category of liveness paradoxically shares, for the live can contain its own capacities for repetition just as “photographic media” can partake of the “ontology of disappearance” and “provide an experience of evanescence.”20 In this light, the gaze’s mediation through the camera is thus already immanent in the urban environment, as a “structure of vision” and way of being in the city that ever awaits passing objects for perceptual consummation. Susan Sontag writes that photography “first comes into its own as an extension of the eye of the middle-class flâneur, whose sensibility was so accurately charted by Baudelaire” and of whom the photographer is an “armed version [ . . . ] reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes.”21
As neat as this description is, of a direct parallel between the photographer and the walker, and of cruising and composition, the connection it suggests is predicated upon a shared sense of voyeuristic detachment that is sweepingly attributed to both urban walking and photography, as though the peripatetic flâneur might in turn also prove to be an analog for the scopophilic “male gaze” famously identified by Laura Mulvey in narrative cinema.22 While the nature of the gaze in urban walking can seem forensic and nonparticipatory, insofar as it might often be structured, as in photographic media, around “gazing at other people’s realities” (as Sontag puts it), this doesn’t quite tell the whole story.23 The “voluptuous extremes” of the “rue assourdissante” in Baudelaire’s sonnet are not experienced by the poet with “detachment” or “professionalism,” nor is the passing woman apprehended by him in the way that “a detective apprehends a criminal.”24 The power relation suggested by those descriptions, conferring the photographer-walker with a perceptual sovereignty, is upended by the starkly emotive texture of Baudelaire’s poem, its affect based upon what cannot be possessed or even fully seen in this “urban inferno.”
That Baudelaire’s poem seems unable to take pleasure in its own voyeurism, which is to say unable to mobilize a nonparticipatory “look” whereby the gazing subject is immune from shock or injury, in turn poses questions as to what it might mean for looking to constitute a form of ethical practice. How might looking, in other words, as an optical relation between subject and object, be recuperated as an exchange in which the former does not subsume the latter? The work of Kaja Silverman is instructive in this regard. Her study The Threshold of the Visible World theorizes the potentiality of a responsible mode of looking. In such a mode, the “subject’s frame of reference” would not “triumph [ . . . ] over that of the external image, whether it derive from an artistic representation or a human being”; such a mode of looking would succeed in neither appropriating nor diminishing the object-as-other at the moment of apprehension.25 Silverman identifies in Benjamin’s numerous accounts of the “aura” a dual process of “investiture” (Belehnung). On the one hand, to “invest the other with the ability to return our look is seemingly to accept the other as an other, or [ . . . ] to concede that he or she is also a subject”; on the other, it is a process of exaltation that entails the “radical idealization of the other,” and “his or her elevation to the status not only of the beloved, but of the very cause of desire” (95). As an essentially intersubjective operation, auratic desire involves a negotiation of the distance-within-closeness that Benjamin identifies as a condition of aura’s legibility, one that constructs “an identificatory relation between the viewer and the auratic object” and requires “the object’s insertion into a representational network sufficiently complex to ‘light’ it up in new ways, and so to solicit the spectators’ imaginary relation to what would otherwise remain merely alien” (99). If “À une passante” does not, for reasons that will become clear, quite realize the project of ethical or productive looking that Silverman espouses, this reading of Benjamin nonetheless brings a new valence to the way in which the poem “light[s]” up its object. This illumination is an act of reciprocity between subject and other. It is not only a conferral upon the other, but is rather akin to “the brilliant luminescence with which certain insects adorn themselves to attract those of the same species,” an analogy of light that Proust’s narrator uses to describe the “solitary” gay cruiser on a train platform, searching for the reciprocated gaze of one who also “speak[s] the unusual tongue.”26
Baudelaire’s “flash” can thus be considered not merely as an estranging instrument of the urban, nor as the mechanical intervention of the voyeuristic photographer, but rather as a different kind of light-source, akin to the light in whose glare the poet negotiates his complex relation to the “alien” apparition who passes him, and which illuminates the instant of her “insertion into a representational network.” A more fertile analogy, then, would read the photographic resonance of the poem’s earlier section less as an invitation to collapse the figures of “photographer” and “stroller” into one, as though the perceptions of each are acts of detached or voyeuristically empowered authorship, than to consider its mediatized field of vision as itself being in some sense photographic, this encounter as of a photograph.27 The flash does not preserve the passing woman but causes her to disappear and thus returns to the semantic plenitude of the “glance,” which illuminates and wounds with a “punctual intensity.” She may already be an image circulating in a chain of reproductions, her gestures merely adjuncts of commodity traffic’s pageantry, but the passing woman also somehow retains an aura under threat, and retains that ability to send a glance back and wound her beholder with the “plaisir qui tue,” a phrase cognizant of its own fatalistic impossibility. Roland Barthes’s oft-cited coinage of the photographic punctum offers one way of accounting for the pain inflicted by the passing woman. The punctum is a conceptual sibling to the aura—for James Elkins, both of these concepts allow their authors to bring “something ineffable, private, or even sublime” into the orbit of their critical arguments—but it foregrounds wounding over exaltation.28 What is wounding, in fact, is precisely this sense of the ineffable:
I decided then to take as a guide for my new analysis the attraction I felt for certain photographs. For of this attraction, at least, I was certain. What to call it? Fascination? [ . . . ] What it produces in me is the very opposite of hebetude; something more like an internal agitation, an excitement, a certain labor too, the pressure of the unspeakable which wants to be spoken.29
Baudelaire’s poem buckles under a similar pressure of beholding, a knife-edge between excitement and bafflement that agitates between exact sensations—the “douceur qui fascine” (the softness that grips)—and the frustrations of not knowing—“j’ignore où tu fuis” (I don’t know where you flee to). What fascinates, for Barthes and for Baudelaire, is not only the expressive reticence which demands of the beholder a “certain labor” of absorption, but the very contingency of its arrival. This attraction is reserved only for “certain” photographs or women in the street, who may appear as if from nowhere and seem, as with the aura, to be close and distant simultaneously. Baudelaire’s “rue assourdissante” is Barthes’s “glum desert,” the field of perception in which “suddenly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation” (20).
The speaker of Baudelaire’s poem is more like the beholder of a photograph than its creator. He does not author this passing woman into being but feels singular in his relation to her, and thus takes on the imaginative work that would make her more tangibly “exist” through an “animation.” She passes, apprehended already in motion, and yet still seems curiously still, with “sa jambe de statue” (her limbs of a statue). The frustration which here fuels desire gravitates around observing a form of life somehow frozen. She is confined by a frame, or the intransigence of statuary, and is conceived of as an abstraction, animate only in the sense that she moves. Barthes famously develops his theory of attraction with recourse to the “two elements” of photography “whose co-presence” establish that attraction (25), the studium along with the punctum. The former describes the visual textures that viewers of photography are accustomed to look for as subjects of a shared culture and a given field of information. The latter is not so volitional, and “it is not I who seek it out [ . . . ] it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (26), an “accident that pricks me” (27) which is not necessarily tempered or restrained by this intertexture. The punctum cannot be intended by the creator of the appearance from which it arises but must be an “accident,” seeming to strike by chance, like the sudden emergence of a singular glance from within a crowd. To imagine the vantage of “À une passante” as photographic is to observe in the transition from its first to second line a transition from the studium, the thematic of the city for which the deafening street stands, to the punctum effect of the passing woman’s emergence, a tableau parisien made woundingly intimate. In the poem’s affective universe this urban encounter is both uniquely irrevocable and infinitely repeatable, neither first nor last in a “plurality of copies.” Barthes’s punctum lights upon the way the aura might survive reproduction; how a person, like a photograph, a form which “mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (4), might continue to glance back, and puncture in the process.
What are the implications of these “wounds” in relation to Silverman’s call for a look that does not “effect” the “destruction” of its object?30 On the surface, at least, it appears to be the looking subject who incurs such destruction at the hands of the punctum. Yet, as Silverman writes in a later chapter, while “Camera Lucida dramatizes the possibility of apprehending the image-repertoire from an unexpected vantage point,” it ultimately neglects to perform any “realignment of self and other,” such that “Barthes’s own sovereignty vis-à-vis the object remains unquestioned” (184–85). Because the punctum derives from the viewing subject’s own “memories” it can all too easily fall into solipsism; “something inaccessible to any other viewer” that ultimately “attests to the unquestioned primacy of the moi” (184). (Recent critiques of Camera Lucida have further illuminated the vexed politics of this “primacy of the moi,” including its racial implications, and I will address these issues later in this chapter.) And even though Baudelaire’s poem exalts its object and registers the shock of the “prick” at the moment when the relationship between self and other threatens to be rearranged, “À une passante” ultimately gives voice only to a solipsistic crisis of looking, not its possibilities, and it cannot help but fetishize the more vulnerable figure of the passing woman in the process. I read Silverman’s notion of “productive looking”—the “constant conscious reworking of the terms under which we unconsciously look at the objects that people our visual landscape” (184)—as a formulation at once utopic and urgent. To conceive of these reformulated acts of looking as utopic does not mean that they are always experienced joyfully, nor that they do not disturb, but it does suggest that they are felt as generative in the ways that Baudelaire’s encounter does not. If the “aura” and the punctum offer suggestive ways of reading “À une passante,” they nonetheless resonate with regards to this poem as melancholic structures of vision, voiced by a speaker absorbed in an everyday lyric tragedy, licking his wounds.
Indeed, facing “À une passante” itself can induce a sense of déjà vu not dissimilar to the one at its heart, where over-familiarity and strangeness are caught in a bind between the passé and unheimlich. Albert Thibaudet, writing in 1924, even suggests that for the Parisian city dweller, who may experience “ces regards” (these looks) as many as “dix fois” (ten times) on a given day, “le grand alexandrine” (the great alexandrine) of Baudelaire’s poem would rise palliatively in the memory to “remplir” (fill) the void that gapes between urban strangers.31 This notion, of a city poem folded into the life of that city and the minds of its inhabitants, where the intertexture of its rhythmic qualities provides a soundtrack and salve to the kind of ubiquitous experience it describes, might also find a contemporary equivalent in the pop song, heard through headphones and seeming to address the stranger one passes while listening: hello, is it me you’re looking for? Like such songs, Baudelaire’s sonnet has acquired the air of cliché, a literary earworm whose cultural catchiness is unshakable but which risks being worn out itself. It foregrounds iconic characters of urban experience—the flâneur watching, the mysterious stranger passing—and gives voice to the exhaustion of their failure to be reconciled. Further multiplications abound: not only does the figure of the “passante” seem to recur numerous times in Les Fleurs du Mal, as Susan Blood observes, but Benjamin’s account of this poem, by now a canonical “cultural fact,” has been much enfolded and anthologized.32 Nonetheless, “À une passante” retains a particular power to pierce the surface of time and reception not only because of the mnemonics of its alexandrines (as Thibaudet describes) but because it endures as a wellspring, a consummate example of poetry’s “ability” to witness a glance, and to register the relation of desire to urban modernity.
In beginning with this poem alongside Benjamin, Barthes, and Silverman, I have sought to reintroduce it in relation to this book’s central concern, which is to say the way that poems of the city, poems whose contingent and momentary desires gravitate around interpersonal encounters, are informed by the lives and deaths of images. Both aura and punctum are ways of seeing that are neither wholly active nor passive, describing effects done unto a beholder by works which nonetheless depend upon that beholder’s “attraction” for their vitality. In this vein, it is the realm of the aesthetic—and in reflective encounters with artworks—where the renegotiation of self and other can be pondered and performed, and where the limit-points of the punctum and the aura illuminate the stakes of looking. How “realizable,” Silverman writes, is “such a renegotiation in everyday life?”33 The problematic associations that mediate our encounters with others, which Silverman describes in terms of Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “screen,” are often products of the unconscious, but draw upon culturally recognized or shareable data. As such, these associations are often immediate or automatic, and thus hard to unpick “through a simple act of will,” for no “look can extricate itself in any absolute way from the snares of the self” (173), although the space given to such extrication is no doubt different in the halls of a museum than in the more hectic space of the streets. This imperative to “entertain an ethical relation with a particular other” thus has less “to do with our immediate, largely involuntary reactions to him or her than with how we subsequently reinscribe those reactions at the level of consciousness” (173). Such reinscription can here refer not only to an act of consciousness but of composition, and so it is within a poetry of the everyday that the tensions between the immediate and the composed, or the spontaneous and the written, might come into fruitful play and offer potential remappings of desire. All of which is to suggest that to find such a remapping, we must look toward a radically different figuration from that of Baudelaire’s poem.
A New York Minute
It is by way of a seemingly random cameo appearance in another Walter Benjamin essay, named fortuitously after New York’s “Central Park,” that the cruising literature I am concerned with comes into view. Baudelaire’s sonnet may offer a canonical instance of the “love which only a city dweller experiences,” but it is also suggestive as a text that throws counterexamples into relief:
That Baudelaire was hostile to progress was the indispensable condition for his ability to master Paris in his verse. Compared to his poetry of the big city, later work of this type is marked by weakness, not least where it sees the city as the throne of progress. But: Walt Whitman??34
Baudelaire and Whitman are strange bedfellows, as is suggested by Benjamin’s double question mark. Among a number of available ways for approaching a comparison between them, which could include Whitman’s popularity in France, having been translated into French by poets like Jules Laforgue, Benjamin frames it here in terms of respective notions of the city as a “throne of progress.”35 Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire’s hostility is a contestable one, but I understand “À une passante” as one instance of it (rather than a representative example of Baudelaire’s thoughts about “the city”), providing as it does a reference point and a critique of the kind of fleeting urban intimacy that Whitman frames altogether differently. This is the kind of intimacy that might seem unthinkable without the formulation of modern urban space as Whitman recognized and experienced it, insofar as the metropolis spatializes and reinterprets intimacy by enforcing proximity between strangers. Urban spatial relations, Anthony Vidler writes, after Georg Simmel, offer “important indications of social processes, of the interaction between human beings conceived of and experienced as space-filling.”36 It is the space between Baudelaire and the passing woman that offers a conceptualization of the poet’s estrangement, an exemplary condition of modern city-dwelling, so what distinguishes Whitman’s sense of the urban from that expressed in Baudelaire’s poem, then, can be framed in terms of his differing reconciliation of this proximity.
Whitman’s poem “To a Stranger” (LG, 109), whose title alone recalls that of “À une passante,” is an example of such reconciliation. Mark W. Turner makes an explicit comparison between these poems in his study of cruising and describes “To a Stranger” as “the poem” from “Whitman’s oeuvre” that “we ought to compare with Baudelaire,” both as a companion piece and a counterexample.37 One immediate difference between them is the object of Whitman’s address, for in being directed toward “a Stranger” it leaves room for the sense of that term not merely as the immediate figure before the poet but the stranger as a figure more broadly, one who in Simmel’s words contains “the nearness and remoteness of every human relation,” for “strangeness means that he who also is far is actually near.”38 The poem reads:
Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I
look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
(it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,
All is recall’d as we flit by each other, fluid, affection-
ate, chaste, matured,
You grew up with me, were a boy with me, or a girl
with me,
I ate with you, and slept with you—your body has
become not yours only, nor left my body mine
only,
You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as
we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands,
in return,
I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when
I sit alone, or wake at night alone,
I am to wait—I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
While “To a Stranger” is a short poem, it unfolds like many of its longer counterparts over the course of just one sentence, and thus enacts a tense relation between line and syntax wherein the caesuras and typeset breaks that divide Whitman’s long lines are merged into the poem’s presentation as one coherent temporal unit. The relation between line and sentence in Whitman’s poem illustrates a continuous now, a time that comes into being incipiently. This incipience is made up of a number of temporal constructions, like the present participles “passing,” “seeking,” and the odd combination of the present tense with an infinitive, “I am to wait” and “I am to see,” as if the being of “I am” is bound up with futurity. This containment is distinct from the fragmentary finesse of Baudelaire’s rimes riches, which involve a phonetic back and forth between both whole lines and hemistiches, akin to the poet’s distressed look here and there for the vanished passing woman.
These sonic differences embody these poems’ divergent senses of time. Where Baudelaire ends his encounter in the impossible past subjunctive mood, Whitman apprehends his stranger in relation to an idyllic past, this moment part of a fluid temporality: “I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you.” The word “surely” at once destabilizes this line and also provides the poet with a foothold felt as a kink in the language, a self-reassurance, and a way of expressing a chronological impossibility (this person has only just been encountered) that nevertheless feels intimately possible in this moment. This sense of an almost-congruity between past and present resembles Benjamin’s suggestion that “it is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”39 The moment of Whitman’s poem is not merely a now, but a present tense experienced alongside a sensation of false memory which is felt “as of a dream,” at once like something dreamt seemingly out of nowhere and something that “comes to me” in the way a dream might upon waking. Benjamin’s suggestion that an auratic object’s “glance is dreaming, draws us after its dream” as a kind of distance,40 appears here as an erotic closeness, neither body belonging to “yours” or “mine” only, and this “sexual shock” will be harnessed, will become a moment preserved through recollections to come: “I am to think of you when I sit alone.” William White’s collection of Whitman’s Daybooks and Notebooks corroborates the importance of such solitary moments of recollection for the poet, filled with entries like “driver [ . . . ] big, young, blonde,” and “little black-eyed Post boy at ferry,” entries which read like they could be rehearsals for poems of preservation.41 The now of “To a Stranger,” framed around the impulse to record and recollect, is thus legible as a now in relation to a past and a future, such that this encounter emerges as a temporally multiple form of love at neither “first” nor “last” sight. The end of Baudelaire’s poem, on the other hand, looks ahead only to a future of repetitious mourning, rounded out by its grieving “O”s. Whitman’s coda, on the other hand, suggests a beginning, and strikes a note so definite as to sound almost threatening; “I am to see to it that I do not lose you,” a sentiment that would not sound out of place if uttered by such urban figures as the detective or the stalker.
Thus if Baudelaire’s enmity toward progress is “the condition” of his “ability to master Paris in his verse,” as Benjamin writes, Whitman’s view to the contrary might then be thought of as the condition for his own negotiation of urban and poetic time, his way of animating a passing tableau and making it “exist,” through his attraction, beyond its transient parameters. The punctum as a summit of feeling depends in Barthes’s writing upon the nonintentional; Whitman’s stranger, too, must “not know how longingly I look upon you,” a phrase locked in a semantic bind of cause and effect, for it is precisely this not-knowing that creates longing, that pricks. Whitman’s ability to shape the meanings of his encounter is thus a particular “structure of vision,” where such meanings are legible when situated within a temporal mélange that exceeds the empirical unfolding of the now and thus obscures its ending. The oddness of the poem’s final line narrates this purposiveness acoustically, and registers sonically the poet’s clasp of control over this encounter, giving it a “seeing to,” and thus also reminds us how this dreamt “life of joy” is too a form of seeing, a poetic sequence that tangibly courts the visual. At the moment of apprehension the poem performs a juncture between the static and the moving, as if the opening apostrophe to the “Passing stranger!” is also a kind of verbal halting, freezing the object of perception in time such that the poet can “look upon” it and, as above, introduce other time zones into the momentary.
As Anne Dufourmantelle writes, regarding the temporality of risk, cameras “produce suspense in the form of still images. Their function: the pause.”42 To be in suspense is to assess the risk of engaging with a stranger whose character is unknown; to conceive of this process as photographic is to witness its actualization. Mary Ann Doane describes the “conceptualization of the instantaneous photograph as point” as a site of possibility; it “allows for thinking the image as a critical specification of time” and “entails a halting of time; the image is perpetually ‘on the verge’ of completion.”43 This poem’s slowing-down suggests a reaching toward a sense of “completion,” in which “You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh as / we pass—you take of my beard, breast, hands, / in return,” that is felt as a tension between word and image. This sequence of body parts, which again plays out monosyllabically, seeks to approximate the trajectory of this gaze with recourse to order, traveling downwards from “eyes” to “flesh” (which here perhaps reads not as synecdoche for the body itself but as a description of the muscular regions of arm and chest), and from “beard” down to “hands,” as though inscribing in textual form the act of looking someone “up and down.” (And this is a look which does not only scrutinize or take “pleasure of” but might also in the process offer out an erotic or flirtatious signal.) Yet, like the earlier “surely,” the clarification that this glance occurs “as we pass” places a kink in the sequence. It introduces a caveat in which the directionality of the poet’s list of body parts rubs against the simultaneity suggested in “as,” which is to say that we look at the same time as we pass. When passing a person “in the flesh,” after all, we are not granted the same attentive time in which we look “upon” a still subject or a portrait.
This moment seems thus curiously torn between the ekphrastic and the immediate, both conferring a chronology to the erotic gaze while at the same time scrambling it. It conveys in miniature the way the static might still involve forms of movement, the way that the tableau of a body which the poet seeks to arrest involves the passing of eyes across its surface and the perception of details in a manner akin to montage, just as that body itself passes by toward the threshold of the next, yet-to-be-seen frame. To preserve the pleasure of a passing gaze, then, involves that same temporal intervention by which the ostensible present tense is made unstable, both frozen and flowing, giving way to a porosity with past feelings and future perceptions. This catalog of passing body parts comports itself as occurring in the external and reciprocal realm of optical perception between persons. But what, as far as it can be made separable, about the more interior lyric echo chamber in which images “come to me as of a dream”? The dream-like succession of Whitman bears evident parallels to cinema, and while his relation to photography and portraiture is well documented, the sense of his work as proto-cinematic is less frequently touched upon. Robert Richardson makes the bold claim that “Walt Whitman’s remarkable achievement, for example, has had at least as great an impact on film form as it has had on modern poetic practice,” while Barry K. Grant observes such an impact in the work of a particular early filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein, who referred to “Walt Whitman’s huge montage conception” in his own writing.44 Richardson writes of Whitman’s emphasis of “something other than order” as being akin to the way “montage was later to work in film [ . . . ] a technique of simply aligning images in such a way as to create a logic of images themselves,” and Whitman filled his “poetry with long catalogues of particular things, people, and places, in much the manner in which any good documentary film builds itself up from details,” and this act is the remit “simply [of] one who bears witness to things.”45
This account of poetic montage speaks to the well-known, expansive catalogs found throughout Leaves of Grass, lists that assume the gaze of a speaker looking upon the exterior world of streets and landscapes and corroborate Whitman’s own analogy that “in these Leaves everything is literally photographed. Nothing is poetized, no divergence, not a step.”46 And yet conceiving of this documentarian impulse as a form of bearing witness seems more closely related to the “evidentiary or indexical relation to what we take to be the ‘real’” that Benjamin assigns to photography, whereas “cinematic pleasure is intimately tied,” Silverman writes, “to its capacity to posit a world apart from and discontinuous with the one we inhabit, but capable of preempting the latter within the domain of the present.”47 While Whitman, historically speaking, can only anticipate the auratic setting of the movie theater, a setting that Silverman cites as key to “cinematic pleasure,” it is worth noting that the cinematic quality of his work cannot be accounted for merely as an extension of photomontage’s “indexical” function. Indeed, Whitman’s proto-cinematic representations of looking and passing are intimately linked with the mysterious pleasures of the “world apart” that moving images offer.
This “world apart” also operates not only according to the spatial distances that separate viewer and screen, but the temporal distance between apprehension and recollection. The perception of a desired stranger as existing in a “world apart” thus anticipates their transformation into memory while also accounting for the otherworldly frame through which they are perceived. It is in this vein that the perceptual “world apart” which comes to light in Whitman’s episode of urban desire has parallels with pornography, the actualization of sexual fantasy. In turn, it is then no surprise that the particular form of glancing performed in this moment is not only, to return to Benjamin’s words, full of poetry, but a quasi-masturbatory mode of recollection in tranquility. The speaker of “To a Stranger” vows “to think of you when I sit alone or / wake at night alone.” Invoked as a means of not losing the desired addressee, this recollection is cast here not only as an act of writing, a recollection made possible by the composition of a poem that “bears witness” to the original encounter, but also as an act of private imagining at bedtime. This moment thus also suggests, in its temporal variety, that the activity of creation has already taken place, and it is in the midst of such an act that the passing stranger is activated as a renewable source of pleasure. In other words, the stranger enters, at the moment of passing, into the erotic archive of the observer’s mind; more colloquially, his “spank bank.” The act of erotic creation, of reconstructing through images the “life of joy” that takes place “somewhere” other than the scene of passing, is also temporally coexistent with that scene, as if preempting recollection. The poem’s parallels, in this regard, with the technique of montage have less to do with documentary than with daydreaming, and the poem takes the external world of the street not as its object of representation but as the occasion for writing into being another world, an alternate sequence infused with desire and reiterability. This other world constitutes a response both to the potential loneliness of urban life and to a more essential solitude taken as a condition of desire itself. Self-pleasure thus arrives to fill in the gap between the known and the ineffable. It provides, as it were, a mode of company. And yet the urban erotic scheme that “To a Stranger” sketches is not merely a product of the solipsistic “love which only a city dweller experiences” as broadly conceived by Benjamin. What Whitman lights upon in this poem is a way of harnessing pleasurable looking that has a queer history all its own.
Queer Eyes
“To a Stranger” provides one optic upon Benjamin’s elusive distinction between Whitman and Baudelaire. Though its urban setting is implicit, and is not framed directly as a “throne of progress,” Whitman’s poem recuperates pleasure from the “love which only a city dweller experiences”; glimpses, even, at a utopic horizon. Another, quite obvious distinction between the poems is the question of gender—although “To a Stranger” again only implies a furtive same-sex desire, Baudelaire’s poetic-photographic composite frames a resolutely heterosexual encounter that cannot help but recall the dangers posed to women in urban spaces and, concurrently, the scopophilic wielding of the “male gaze” against women’s bodies within visual culture. It is no accident that “À une passante” is a common locus for a number of feminist critics, such as Janet Wolff and Deborah L. Parsons, for whom it throws into relief the historical status of women walking the streets.48 (The differing stakes for women cruising are something I address in the book’s coda.) If it is therefore self-evident that questions of danger and pleasure apply differently to gay male cruising, Leo Bersani suggests that there are still greater distinctions to be drawn between heterosexual and homosexual desire which, I argue, also map on to the differences between Baudelaire and Whitman’s texts. He writes:
And it is in defining erotic desire as epistemological catastrophe that Proust himself becomes a novelist of heterosexual—or, at least, heteroized—love. [ . . . ] In its somber glamorizing of a desire grounded in the irreducible opposition between an empty subject and objects of desire that might but won’t reveal and return the subject to himself, Proust masochistically celebrates difference as the very condition of desire, thus renouncing the privilege his homosexuality might have afforded him of recognizing, and loving, himself in an hospitably familiar otherness.49
Although these descriptions of an “epistemological catastrophe” and an “irreducible opposition” are particular to Proust, they might also describe the founding pathos of “À une passante,” a poem whose speaker is unable to find himself in another. Whitman’s poem, on the other hand, exemplifies a love born of sameness, one that allows the poet to love “himself in a hospitably familiar otherness.”
In this same essay on cruising and sociability, Bersani finds in Freud a surprising formulation: “at the very origin of psychoanalysis” can be found “the outline of a conceptualizing of queer desire as somehow exempt from the destructive sociality of straight desire” (50). Because the so-called perversion of homosexuality eschews the Oedipal conflicts upon which heterosexual desire is predicated, the “psychoanalytically defined homosexual [ . . . ] wanders in the world—cruises in the world, we might almost say—in search of objects that will give him back to himself as a loved and cared for subject,” and “homosexual desire for others is, in this account, motivated by the wish to treat oneself lovingly,” to encounter new love objects “without introjecting them” (55). In “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Foucault on the other hand remains more suspicious of the notion that the cruising is what distinguishes homosexual and heterosexual desire:
One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a reassuring canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie.[ . . . ]50
We might wonder who the “others” Foucault refers to are, and whether he is gesturing here to a “neat” image of cruising that plays to the straight outsider’s gaze and “glamorizes,” to return to Muñoz’s phrase, its ontology. Tom Roach names this model of queer, Foucauldian friendship “shared estrangement,” the practice of a radically “impersonal relationality,” and although Bersani differs from Foucault in arguing that “there is indeed something unique to queer desire and sexual behavior that lends itself” to this relationality, where Foucault moves away, as here, from the scene of desire, the “two thinkers share the belief that queer practices and communities are privileged sites for instantiating a post-identitarian politics.”51
Bersani and Foucault’s accounts of cruising suggest that it is a cultural and theoretical battleground, a queer search for the self, on the one hand, or for relation, on the other, that incorporates nostalgia, “concessions,” “canon[s] of beauty” and the vexed question of a possible camaraderie. The cruising texts I examine in this book attest to the simultaneity of these things; Whitman’s poem, for example, in its avowed and fulfilled quest for the “he I was seeking,” frames the act of “seducing each other with a look” as an act with the potential for “affection, tenderness, friendship” and so on. For a less sincere portrait of the look’s potentiality, we can look to Frank O’Hara, whose ethos concerning the actual process of cruising was often parodic. He once wrote facetiously to friend John Ashbery about a December 1963 feature in the New York Times which covered the State Liquor Authority’s closure of two gay drinking establishments, and gravely addressed an increase in overt homosexuality in the city. He was particularly struck by journalist Robert C. Doty’s observation in the piece that some “homosexuals claim infallibility in identifying others of their kind ‘by the eyes—there’s a look that lingers a fraction of a second too long.’”52 This pseudo-anthropological interest in the private and furtive culture of an increasingly visible minority anticipated the controversial 1970 book Tearoom Trade, in which sociologist Laud Humphreys went undercover in cruising spaces. His resulting study offers an inventory of cruising and behavioral norms in public bathrooms, a space where the “eyes [ . . . ] come into play.”53 Diagnostic and voyeuristic as both Doty’s exposé and Humphreys’s study are, they nonetheless attest accurately to the crucial role played by eyes in cruising’s language, not only as the medium of observation, but as the instrument of a particular kind of glance.
This glance of cruising is itself a site of identification, and not only of “identify[ing]” other “homosexuals.” In his similarly acerbic early poem “Homosexuality,” O’Hara identifies the “act of taking off our masks” as if “we’d been pierced by a glance!” (CP, 181–82). O’Hara treats the notion of the piercing glance incredulously and makes light of the hackneyed Freudian association between the eye and the penis, which Otto Fenichel describes as a scopophilic “matter of course” where the “eye fixed in a stare stands for the penis in erection”; a prick.54 But the poem nonetheless sustains the reading that this multiply penetrating glance might be interpellative; that it might prompt both veracity and silence, as if theatrically revealing the gay men behind the masks while compelling them to keep their “mouths shut.” It is somewhat typical of O’Hara’s poetry to invoke the political only to sidestep it, and this poem neither beams with gay pride nor enshrines public sex as a celebratory act of openness. As Turner writes, this poem “is in part a jab at queeny homosexuals, but it is also the work of a keen cruiser who knows the various scenes well.”55 And it still pursues, if glancingly, the connection between cruising and selfhood, the candid act of self-reflection while “tallying up the merits” of the city’s latrines, from “14th Street” to “53rd” (CP, 182).
While the poem warns us against taking it too seriously, yoking wonder with the dirty public restrooms where the consummation of cruising encounters often takes place, this moment reflects suggestively on the way such encounters allow one to be seen (without a mask) and thus to see oneself as if from without (in a bathroom mirror, perhaps). This is an identity observed multiply through public bathrooms that have the characteristics of persons, sometimes “drunk” (14th Street) and other times “at rest” (53rd). These latrine self-portraits suggest a picture of cruising as a process of moving between sites without a clear endpoint that enables cruisers to observe their own absorption in the act. The homosexual subject identified by Bersani, on the other hand, arrogates the desired objects he encounters not quite as mirror-images, as in O’Hara’s latrine tableaux, but as a series of “always, however minutely, inaccurate replications” that render “the search for the self out there [ . . . ] beneficently fruitless.”56 This admission of the unrealizable coexists with the “danger” that cruising may nonetheless lead to an approximation of that original desire to refind the self, and poses the “danger” that “promiscuity may stop” and “our connection” to others may end up “degenerating” into a relationship. Worse, cruising is at risk of recuperation by accepted ethical categories of relation; if it “make[s] us feel as, perhaps even more, worthy than a comfortably monogamous straight couple” it becomes “even less interesting than marriage.”57 We must then be compelled, Bersani argues, to “specify the ways” in which “outrageous practices [ . . . ] may or may not require us to elaborate new ethical vocabularies.”
Bersani’s account of cruising as a “training in impersonal intimacy” draws upon Simmel’s notion of “sociability” to reconstruct a “new” kind of orientation vis-à-vis “otherness.”58 In this regard, as a forum of objects and others, this articulation of cruising intersects with the phenomenological, and calls to mind Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that queerness might be thought of as “a matter of how one approaches the object that slips away—as a way of inhabiting the world at the point in which things fleet.”59 The fleeting traffic of cruising bodies becomes, for Bersani, an “exceptional experience of the infinite distance that separates us from all otherness,” because
in cruising—at least in ideal cruising—we leave our selves behind. The gay bathhouse is especially favorable to ideal cruising because, in addition to the opportunity anonymous sex offers its practitioners of shedding much of the personality that individuates them psychologically, the common bathhouse uniform—a towel—communicates very little (although there are of course ways of wearing a towel . . .) about our social personality (economic privilege, class status, taste).60
It is curious to encounter Bersani’s description here of the bathhouse as a site of “ideal cruising,” or as a place where selves might be left behind, given that he famously de-idealized that same space in his classic 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Here, in “Sociability and Cruising,” the ideal form of the bathhouse offers an “intimacy between bodies no longer embellished or impoverished, protected or exposed.”61 Is this the same space as that “ruthlessly ranked, hierarchized and competitive” space identified in the earlier essay, where “looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be”?62 Although Bersani is discussing a historical, pre-HIV/AIDS iteration of the bathhouse in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” he is also putting paid to the wider notion that sex between men is somehow latently democratic or utopic, a fallacy which relies upon the figure of collective nudity in the bathhouse to venture such a claim. Bersani’s work on cruising and sociability is compelling and theoretically rich, but this reevaluation of nudity as a social “shedding”—rather than as one among many forms of erotic performance—both jars with his earlier text and draws attention to the ways in which his more recent work is curiously mute about the parameters of non-“ideal” cruising, which is not only a psychic or libidinal exchange. Cruising, in other words, with clothes on.
While Bersani’s insights are instructive, his more recent essay seems wedded to a theoretical endeavor that renders the space of consummation—i.e., the bathhouse—as cruising’s ground zero, such that the nature of the interaction between object and other is forced to the background. In the chapters ahead, I favor the street as the consummate, if not “ideal,” site of gay cruising, precisely because, unlike the latrine or the darkroom, it does not necessarily denote consummation, orgasm, or even hooking up, though I do also look at other important cruising locales such as the bar, subway, and piers. The “intimacy with an unknown body” that reveals an infinite “distance at the very moment we appear to be crossing an uncrossable interval” need not only refer to touching flesh, but to the field of cruising on the street, too, where potentially infinite looks are exchanged, perhaps precariously, in the glare of the public.63 I seek to build upon Turner’s observation that “we need not get trapped in the assumption that the visual encounters of urban modernity are necessarily alienating, that the act of the looking is always already inscribed by the script of the city,” for the “cruiser’s intention is to find in the passing glances in the streets that person whose gaze returns and validates his own.”64 The optical intimacy of looking offers its own ways of idealizing or reimagining desire, and negotiates states of closeness and distance through the act of reading another person. In some of the texts I discuss, in particular those by Wojnarowicz, the look precipitates a narrative drive toward sexual consummation, in public or private. In others, the moment of optical contact between strangers is the event itself. What is being offered in the following chapters is primarily an account of looking, and of the relation between its theory and practice, but this look in all of its complexity—its seeming ability to freeze time, to forge momentary kinships—cannot be abstracted from the activity in which it may comprise the first step. I will thus use “looking” and “cruising” as distinct but mutually informing terms—a look can easily become a cruise, and a cruise just a look.
Looking, I argue, is a way of wresting intimacy from the transient, a process that operates at an optical and, in turn, a visual level. By optical I mean the relations of sight between strangers; by visual, I mean the image that is created out of such an encounter, an aestheticization through writing that is tethered to the referential field of visual culture. There is an experiential friction here, between the analogous capacity of visual technologies to frame and capture and the liveness of street encounters, but I am suggesting that it is precisely this invocation of the visual that breathes life and longevity into optical exchanges that might otherwise be merely passing or transient. The transport of these encounters into the realm of memory is neither straightforwardly chronological nor performed merely in the act of writing, but through their very conceptualization as images within that writing. This form of photographic attention may indeed offer a solution to Bersani’s anxiety that the “promiscuity may stop.” As Michael Snediker writes, while “cruising, for some, is teleologically inextricable from the hook-up that follows, for many, cruising’s pleasures are the pleasures of the cruising scene itself.”65 Conceived of apart from the constraints of consummation, which is to say the constraint that the cruise must always have a happy ending (as it were), cruising’s look can perform the imaginative work of projecting multiple endings with multiple partners, can invest each optical encounter with an eventfulness.
As the photographs by Gupta, Fischer, and Baltrop have illustrated, this imaginative projection of a stranger’s story, the imagined past that is made legible in the immediate present and determines a possible future, takes place at the level of the studium. In this regard, the look of cruising, as Fischer reminds us, has a semiotic dimension; as Wayne Koestenbaum writes, the travel between “studium and punctum” has “an underground affinity with cruising,” which is not only “a sexual readiness” but akin to a “readerly readiness—a willingness to pick up codes.”66 Whitman, for example, was writing in a period long before the everyday semiotics of sex between men were as codified as they became in the early twentieth century, and long before the camera was anything like a handheld or peripatetic technology. Yet he often frames his accounts of desire between men, as well as his poetic project writ large, in terms of the “roughs,” including the sailors and stevedores he would pick up on the Brooklyn waterfront. As Hugh Ryan writes in his recent history of queer Brooklyn, “the pulsing heart of this new American city was the Fulton Ferry landing,” which “provided an endless chance to marvel at the greatness of young men.”67 Whitman’s work, Ryan continues, offers “tantalizing codes” as to “the existence of a subculture of working-class white men who loved other men. Many of these were laborers that he (Whitman) met while walking along the docks, or taking the ferry, or going for a bracing swim in the ocean.”68 Indeed, as I will explore in the next chapter, Whitman himself sought to approximate the demeanor of the “roughs” in the frontispiece portrait of the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.
Frank O’Hara was similarly interested in rough trade. His love of Hollywood extended not only to the camp appropriation of female starlets, but to the eroticization of figures like Marlon Brando, whose cultural presence was a reproducible and prototypical iteration of the kind of rough and rebellious masculinity that held currency in gay cruising, and O’Hara writes about encountering Brando-types on the streets of New York. David Wojnarowicz’s erotic fantasies of working-class masculinity are also structured around real figures, and passing men are recast through the bohemian renegade theater of French cultural forebears. His writing frequently frames strangers who look like Jean Genet or are “handsome like some face in old boxer photographs, a cross between an aging boxer and Mayakovsky” (CK, 13–14), and his photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York features his friends as models roaming the erotic wastelands of the city’s derelict piers and wearing a mask of the French poet’s face. These examples, which will be developed in the subsequent chapters on these authors, point on the one hand to a deft mining of culture on the part of gay men, and on the other to a fetish for a certain kind of masculinity that is coded as white and working class. It is through the studium of encounters, then, the studied stylishness performed by the subjects of Gupta and Fischer’s cruising portraits, that potentially transient encounters are recuperated, reinterpreted, and preserved as images. Indeed, the frisson of encounters inscribed in these cruising texts seems to derive from the rendering of the field of cruising as an array of semiotic surfaces and types; of objects that nonetheless retain some agency in their exchange with the cruising subject.
Yet the fact that the semiotic seems inextricably linked with the perceptual economy of cruising does not mean it is unproblematic, and the rendering of walking bodies as so many erotic objects also has troubling implications. There is firstly the matter of what is at play, ideologically, in the prevalence or predominance of certain types. Bersani, for one, in his critique of the exclusionary spaces of gay cruising in “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” expresses suspicions about the supposed efficacy of the “gay-macho style,” and suggests that it is less a “subversive” parody of masculinity, as it is intended to be, than something that may in fact express “complicities with a brutal and misogynous ideal of masculinity.”69 Even leaving this criticism of a particular gay sartorial “look” aside, there are larger implications of the cruiser’s tendency to make a fetish of type. If, to return to Silverman, no “look can extricate itself in any absolute way from the snares of the self,” then what are the “projections” that occur “over and over again, in an almost mechanical manner, when we look at certain racially, sexually, and economically marked bodies?”70 In chapter 3, I argue that Langston Hughes’s work, as well as its excavation by Julien’s Looking for Langston, speaks precisely to the fetishistic optical violence that is routinely done unto the Black male body.
Even the metaphors of violence that are often applied to acts of looking, like Baudelaire’s wounding glance or Barthes’s punctum, bear troubling histories when wielded irresponsibly. Recent work by Jonathan Beller has argued that Barthes’s formulation of the studium and punctum as “programs of apprehension” cannot be disentangled from questions of race, in that images of slaves and racial others are “the rhetorical figures, the discursive, and arguably material media for the derivation of the supposedly ontological character of a visual technology” throughout Camera Lucida.71 Barthes deploys images of slavery as exemplary of the “prick of the Real” while disavowing their semiotic content, thus making slavery supplementary to the photograph, and in this regard Beller’s critique recalls Silverman’s claim that “figures depicted in the photograph serve only to activate” the author’s “own memories, and so are stripped of all historical specificity.”72 But it is also, Beller argues, that Barthes’s own description of the pain of photography “precisely echoes—albeit in apparent ignorance—Frantz Fanon’s description” of “coming under the white gaze.”73
To think of the wounding nature of photography, then, is also to recognize that “the mortification of the flesh before the lens and the mortification of the flesh under a white gaze [ . . . ] are not merely analogous but are mutually constituting.”74 Although, as Beller concludes, the recognition “that contemporary visuality is bound up with racism and slavery [ . . . ] does not amount to reparations,” it places vital pressure on the metaphors of wounding that Barthes uses in Camera Lucida, and serves to expose its author’s blind spots.75 Indeed “visuality” as we know it, writes Nicholas Mirzoeff, referring to the “totality” of visualizations as comprising “information, images and ideas,” had its first domain in “the slave plantation, monitored by the surveillance of the overseer.”76 There are parallels here with Silverman’s reading of Franz Fanon in relation to the Lacanian screen, and the image of the plantation recalls Fanon’s discovery of “my blackness, my ethnic characteristics” as mediated by “slave-ships.”77 Mirzoeff, in a manner akin to Silverman’s discussion of relations with others, posits the “right to look” as an ethical response to the oppressive field of visuality. The right to look begins “at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love,” and it “must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails.” This look “claims autonomy, not individualism or voyeurism”; it “is common, it may be the common, even communist,” for “there is an exchange, but no creation of a surplus.”78
To what extent might this “right to look” be exercised within the optical mechanism of cruising? The “look” of cruising not only entertains a “surplus” of meaning; it positively eroticizes the “second longer” stare and draws upon a resolutely semiotic vocabulary. Cruising’s look does not efface the Lacanian screen as much as use it as an arras to hide behind, at the expense of those for whom looking is experienced as a violence on a daily basis. Analogies of wounding thus figure, ambivalently, in the optical capacities for voyeurism, objectification, and violence at play in cruising encounters. Indeed, the resonance of what I term a wounding intimacy is present throughout the cruising texts I discuss in the chapters ahead, less in opposition to the utopic dimension of looking than as part of a tense simultaneity with it. Part of the frisson of gay male cruising is the risk of danger, but the language of piercing and wounding found in the work of these writers—from O’Hara’s more whimsical “as if we’d been pierced by a glance!” to Wojnarowicz’s recurring reference to the “wounding nature of a neck [ . . . ] seen among the crowds”—suggests the latent presence of a more profound sense of violence, a violence which poses an even greater threat to gendered and racialized bodies.79 It is in Whitman, however, as I will explore in the next chapter, that we can see most clearly cruising’s multiple dimensions—the utopic and the wounding—which is to say that “To a Stranger” tells only part of the story.