Haunted worlds,unknowable futures

In Queer Marxism in Two Chinas, Petrus Liu's ground-breaking work on queer theory and Marxism foregrounded the ways in which ‘queer’ cannot substitute identity categories but ought to be perceived as ‘a material reminder of one's relation to an unequal structure of power’ (Liu, 2015: 40). The book's arguments prompted me to think about ‘queering’ as both a theory and a method to approximate this relation – a form of unsettling connection, a fraught entanglement that hurts, that dispossesses, but also simultaneously gives an affective structure to meaning, partially making sense of the world of not one's making. In this form of ‘queering’ that centres unequal material production and distribution of liveability under late capitalism, there is nothing explicitly ‘queer’ in a popular meaning of the word, nor is it associated with queer objects of study such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’. Queer endeavour, instead, unfolds as a critical inquiry grounded in ‘(un)knowability’ – knowing but not with absolute certainty, admitting that the world is far more complex than we could have ever thought possible (see Lesutis, 2023).

In The Specter of Materialism, Liu continues to address this tension in (un)knowing, presenting queer theory as ‘a way of taking stock of the necessary gap between the horizons of human cognition and the actual diversity of bodies, identities, and sexual practices in human cultures’ (Liu, 2023: 27). Liu approximates this gap through ‘the specter of materialism’. One of the most powerful arguments of the book is that, since queer theory's inception in the early 1990s, it has been haunted by the spectre of historical materialism for it never quite figured out the problem of materiality. As Liu contends, this is so, even if queer theory has inherently materialist underpinnings through its very focus on the body – that is, bodies always mattered to queer theory (e.g. Butler, 1993). By interrogating how social, political, and economic structures discipline the body, queer theory shares a great deal with historical materialism's emphasis on how bodies come to exist under different structural, corporeal, and affective conditions created by capital.

Under capitalism, however, our material and social worlds are not easily distinguishable from one another. As Liu, drawing on Marx, notes, capitalism ‘is not simply an economic order but a kind of haunting, a structure of social relations that is legible only through its traces’ (Liu, 2023: 9). We, as subjects of capital's power, therefore, are haunted by a type of (un)knowability – a knowing that flees our grasp in the world where capital assumes ‘ghostly presence’. We feel and embody its effects and yet struggle to locate its origin. For Liu, to approximate these hauntings, a global queer Marxism – as a framework for understanding the nexus between queerness and material life – does not require foregrounding a specific identity. In the vein of subjectless critique articulated by radical queer theory, The Specter of Materialism does not link Marxism and queer theory through their proper objects of study (class and sexuality) but through their methods and concepts (dialectics and alterity). For Liu, this theoretical move is necessary to unify the most powerful insights from the two traditions – ‘the conception of the self in a sociality of unknowable Others and material circumstances beyond one's control’ (Liu, 2023: 63).

This is a powerful reminder that as subjects we only become legible through relations of alterity, through what is constitutively outside of us, what unsettles the illusion of one's sovereignty, simultaneously interpellating us as subjects into being. In this sense, for any viable intellectual and political project to hold, it needs to engage with this constitutive haunting of the self, the haunting that unfolds through spectral presences and (un)knowabilities. I find this part of Liu's argument, built at the intersection of materialism and linguistic humility, particularly generative in thinking about subjectivity as an effect of ongoing productive failures in how we come to (un)know ourselves, material and social relations that bind us, and relations that alienate us. These productive failures express themselves as methodological impossibilities: what ‘I’ am, when ‘I’ begin, where ‘I’, as a mode of being in the world and of the world, commence and dissolve, are never entirely graspable to a subject (see Lesutis, 2023). This invites us to think about identity labels not as inherent truths but as types of violence – forms of social and material structuration in Liu's words – that we embody unequally in the haunted world that we do not fully know.

Yet, in The Specter of Materialism, there are several hauntings that are felt as spectral presences within the book's main argument itself on the constitutive haunting of the self by unknowable Others. These hauntings concern questions of a politics, a self, and a future. Whilst the book very productively demonstrates the ways in which the spectre of materialism is an inherent part of queer theory, The Specter of Materialism also insists upon the transformative political potential of this provisional iteration of a global queer Marxism. Liu presents this project as ‘an invitation for new ways of imagining queer futures and transformative politics’ (Liu, 2023: 163). Like historical materialism for Marx, for Liu, a global queer materialism offers an optic for interpreting and changing the world ‘in the age of the Beijing Consensus’. This part of the argument, echoing utopian registers common to queer theory, however, is a spectre-like presence of the book. Whilst Liu aims for a new political imaginary, the book does not outline what form such a politics might embody. Based on the subjectless queer critique that the book presents, this type of politics would perhaps do away with the neoliberal ethics of identity politics and the illusion of representation? Or, grounded in Marxism, this politics would perhaps lead to solidarity-based politics of curtailing the mobility of capital and enhancing the freedom of human life?

On the one hand, these queries could be approached as a mere fact that any great book raises questions that need to be answered collectively, and Liu's Specter of Materialism is excellent at that. On the other hand, even if as a prompt towards a politics of a more liveable future, this presents the reader with a paradox: the subjectless critique – that stays true to the radically anticipatory and anti-identitarian orientation of early queer theory – in the end requires a knowable self, a subject, from whose perspective we might imagine a different world, even the very possibility of it. This paradox is apparent throughout the book. Although a global queer Marxism is presented as subjectless, in its more sociologically informed segments, to make its main arguments, the book draws on experiences of several subject groups – such as dagongmei (female migrant labourers in China's export-oriented sunbelt), money boys (rural-to-urban sex workers), and high-suzhi (quality) transnational queers. Simultaneously, however, these accounts appear in passing, requiring further sociological detail, and thus might be read as unsatisfactory by those thinking about concrete praxis and political subjects of a global queer Marxism. Given Liu's disciplinary background, this, however, cannot be a criticism against the book. Nevertheless, time- and space-specific praxes of the lives lived, dispossessed, or imagined otherwise is a spectral presence that needs to be addressed in articulating a global queer Marxism. In other words, to grasp a truly global queer project, we ought to begin imagining what this might entail to those dispossessed, again and again, by global regimes of capital.

Therefore, the crucial task for a global queer Marxism – of situating ‘queer survival and persistence with the contradictions between the mobility of capital and the immobility of labor’ as ‘a primary political and theoretical task’ (Liu, 2023: 161) that Liu presents – remains to be explored and articulated collectively. This project becomes particularly clear in the concluding section. Here, having masterfully outlined the spectral hauntings of capital and its relevance for queer theory, the book makes a leap to ‘an otherwise’. The challenge, however, is that this ‘otherwise’ performed by the subjectless critique also appears phantom-like, unburdened by the detail of concrete praxis. This is significant practically and theoretically. Ethnographic research might indeed highlight that what theorists like Liu understand as violence, as harmful effects of structuration, is not perceived as such by those dispossessed by capital. For them, the desired future is not that of ‘an otherwise’. Instead, it is more of the same but from an inside – real subsumption to social and material forms of intensifying exploitation where those once dispossessed now can benefit from these very social relations that currently render them surplus (e.g. Lesutis, 2022).

On the other hand, the very idea of ‘an otherwise’ might be nothing else but a normative imaginary held by theorists rather than being grounded in a material possibility of actually lived realities. Premature leaps towards ‘an otherwise’ – vivid not only in The Specter of Materialism but in countless critical theory texts that express a compulsion to speak of ‘an otherwise’, however briefly, in the midst of the analysis of the world in ruins (see Dawney and Jellis, 2023) – affirm the idea that a different future and a different world are indeed possible. In doing so, this type of theory, as Colebrook (2021) puts it, ‘saves the world’, avowing the very possibility of the world as a viable category of a politics. However, those made irredeemably surplus to capital's regimes of power know that a liveable world is unattainable to them (e.g. Chandler and Pugh, 2022). They are not lured by its promise. They were never of this world, to begin with. Under these circumstances, there is no future that would furnish possibilities for acts of resignification that subjectless queer theory might promise.

These types of insights, of course, are not exactly new. Similar questions have been raised by queer theory itself, particularly so by influential Edelman's critique of ‘reproductive futurism’, or Berlant's account of ‘cruel optimism’. Reiterating similar concerns, an expanding body of work in critical geographical scholarship has recently begun to explicitly resist the idea of ‘an otherwise’, instead foregrounding ontological instability of the world itself, or that a future is unattainable. Moving away from relational thinking and diverse ontological turns, this scholarship (e.g. Bissel et al., 2021; Kingsbury and Secor, 2021) emphasises ‘the (im)possibility of relations between body and world’ (Dekeyser et al., 2022: 6) – their incompleteness, their brokenness, and the incongruity between one's life and a world not of one's making. There is no promise of ‘an otherwise’, just its multiple enduring absences. Particularly so in the lived spaces of increasing dispossession, extreme precarity, and rising fascism. In the world on fire, figuratively and concretely.

How can a global queer Marxism address these issues of materiality that, increasingly, does not promise any future at all? Times and spaces where ‘an otherwise’ is barely thinkable, where the necessity of social reproduction renders any other concerns of futurity irrelevant. In many ways, this is a paralysing question. Like Liu, many of us helplessly rush to answer this question through a linguistic gesture – ‘an otherwise’ – unable to articulate its content. We might, instead, need to stay with that what haunts us. This is where I find Liu's project most timely, insightful, and generative. In a truly postdisciplinary manner, The Specter of Materialism takes us to the very material and social processes of structuration, to that what hurts us, what we feel in their spectral presence, even if the perceptibility of these hauntings has been overshadowed by neoliberal politics of representation, spectacles of equality, and identity politics. As horizons of more liveable futures continue to diminish, we might not be able to resist an urge to utter a hope of ‘an otherwise’. But this is a temporality that we cannot yet inhabit: ‘a global queer Marxism has yet to be born’ (Liu, 2023: 162), and for that to happen, as Liu reminds us, we need to collectively confront the constitutive hauntings of the present.