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chapter six  Militant Optimism Approaching Humanism The musicking that moves us most will be that which most subtly, comprehensively and powerfully articulates the relationships of our ideal society—which may or may not have any real, or even possible, existence beyond the duration of the performance. The ambivalence of the emotions which such musicking arouses in us, posed between joy and melancholy . . . can be seen as a response to the realization of that fall from perfection which is present as an element of virtually all cultures and religions. The ambivalence re›ects the simultaneous experiencing of the ideal and the impossibility of realizing it. . . . At the same time the musicking can exhilarate us with a vision of that ideal which is not just intimated to us but actually brought into existence for as long as the performance lasts. While it does we can believe in its realizability , and the exhilaration and the joy, outlasting the melancholy, can persist long after the performance is over. This is not surprising, for it con‹rms us in our feelings, which, as Geertz says, we must know before we know what we think, about what are right and true relationships. —Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue Myths are the earliest forms of science. . . . It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood , but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly. —Mary Zimmerman, Metamorphoses 139 I‹nd myself with a keen desire to reclaim a commitment to human commonality . I know that gender, race, sexuality, ability, class, and other vectors of identity remain entrenched as discriminatory benchmarks in public discourse and in the distribution of social and political power. But more and more, I ‹nd myself feeling af‹nity without regard to the speci‹cs of identity. As performance scholars Josh Abrams and Janelle Reinelt have both remarked, the ethical move in current politics and culture seems toward a responsibility to each other as each other, both in our radical differences and in our common capacity to embrace the fullness of our potential humanity.1 The climate after September 11, of distrust and racial pro‹ling, of simplistic and chillingly effective calls to a thoughtless, knee-jerk nationalism, spurs me to claim my place as part of a progressive human community that rejects such radically conservative values and actions. The desire for social change should always strain above material circumstances, should always point us toward an ideal, a utopia imagined as a hopeful possibility that will always place us within its own process of production, a wish that needs to be made again and again. I want to feel myself part of a public that participates in a slow but sure remaking of the world. Activist-scholar Michael Warner says, “Publics, . . . lacking any institutional being, commence with the moment of attention, must continually predicate [or demand or imply] renewed attention, and cease to exist when attention is no longer predicated [or directed].”2 Alarmed at a response to the possibility of terrorism that strips U.S. citizens of our civil liberties and that empowers the government to access personal information to an extent unprecedented in American history, I fear the imposition of a militarized state. Devastated by the Democrats’ loss in the 2004 election, I take solace in the words and actions of people who continue to believe in the possibility of radical political change. Demeaned and demoralized by politicians and pundits who insist that “moral values” drove people to the polls to vote for George W. Bush against John Kerry, I’m buoyed by the determination and activism of other queer social pariahs determined to expose the hypocrisy of those who dismiss our lives as amoral while they turn their backs on U.S. poverty and genocide in the Sudan and support a war in Iraq fought for fabricated reasons. I am drawn to a progressive public that commences , as Warner suggests, with our common attention to the injustices of the moment. Warner says, “The appellative energy of publics”—that is, how they call things into being by virtue of naming them—“makes us 140  Utopia in Performance [18.222.115.179] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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