Prelude: Ethics

In the mid-1980s, in the first rush of the urban homosexual AIDS crises in North America and England, Derek Jarman made The Angelic Conversation, a film involving Shakespeare’s sonnets. The film opens with the first two lines of sonnet 151 in white letters on a black ground:

Love is too young to know what conscience is:
Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?

Now, as contemporary scholarly editions of the Sonnets will note,¹ the whole of sonnet 151, one of the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s sonnets, is likely a play on a proverb: Penis erectus non habet conscientiam (“an erect penis has no conscienceâ€?). The first two lines open that play in two senses of “conscienceâ€? — conscience as ethical sensibility (Cupid is too young for this) and conscience as joint, shared knowledge (in this context, carnal knowledge, knowledge “born of loveâ€?). Sonnet 151’s subject, then, is variously the prick of conscience.² And these lines set the problem for Jarman’s film.

“Conscience� traditionally names whatever it is that equips properly attentive people to do their part in the daily production and reproduction of excellent modes of social life. When “conscience� likewise names homosexually inflected carnal knowledge (as, Jarman’s film insists, it will for his audience), we have to alter our understanding of the reproduction of sound social life accordingly. The collectives that form at sites of erotically charged homosexual congress are not, in any ordinary sense, communities. The cast — the particular groupings of participants — changes, for one thing. For another, there is no reason to expect in advance that a group forming itself erotically on one occasion will share in feeding, clothing, and sheltering its members over time. Instead, various participants might wander in and out of domestic life with other members indifferently; stable duos might host temporary guests; solitary youth might move from place to place never intending to enter into durable domestic arrangements. Worse, there is no reason to expect in advance that the regular participants — those who can be found, reliably, at this or that place, from one week to the next — will have anything much in common beyond their interest in erotic exchange, either at the outset or afterward. In short, the kinds of institutional affiliations that are crucial to normal, North Atlantic heterosexual coupling (and its characteristic modes of intimacy) are not the substance of temporary, urban sexual collectives. The need to secure this form of social life, then, has to be theorized without the usual props of joint economic venture, shared domestic circumstances, or even shared “culture� (in many traditional senses of that term).