Longer Views (3 page)

If any single idea can be said to fuel the fires of all these essays, it is the Foucauldian notion of discourse—the notion of the socially sanctioned systems of perception and practice that hold us all in their thrall, the “structuring and structurating” forces which keep myths alive and preserve the status quo
¹³
—forces which can only be countered by a “violent rhetorical shift” somewhere in the discursive space (RS 235). And herein lies the relevance, the urgency of these essays. As intellectual entertainments, they make great demands on the reader—and offer unprecedented rewards. But they are more than just entertainments: they are radical rhetorical interventions in the discourse of
reading itself. And their radicalism resides precisely in their acknowledgment of the existence of the radical reader: the reader who thinks, who writes, who intervenes.

In the discussion to follow, I shall very briefly review some concepts from Delany's earlier nonfiction works about the language of science fiction which have a bearing on the analyses Delany carries out here. I will then try to suggest how the formal strategies Delany deploys in these essays both illuminate and are illuminated by the formal strategies of his fiction, as well as how they reflect the theoretical framework which surrounds and informs so much of Delany's recent fiction and nonfiction. If (to paraphrase Delany) my informal, idiosyncratic, and indeed fragmentary remarks initiate dialogue, so much the better; if they close dialogue off, so much the worse. I hope only to provide a provisional analytical frame to assist the radical reader in her further explorations of the rich and complex universes of discourse which these essays both describe and generate.

Science fiction, like the essay, is a form which, in its more popular incarnations, has often tended toward the didactic, in the mode of the aphoristic. Robert Heinlein and Frank Herbert, to name two examples, have actually published the “collected sayings” of their best-known fictive protagonists, Lazarus Long and Paul Atreides. Ursula Le Guin's fiction also leans toward aphorism, her essays doubly so; the list could go on. In his earlier critical work, Delany has discussed in some detail the problem of didacticism in Heinlein and Le Guin specifically and in science fiction and literature in general. (The long interpolated monologues in Return to Nevèrÿon could be read as attempts to suggest some aesthetic solutions to the problem.) Paradoxically, however, Delany has also argued that despite its flirtation with the authoritarian mode, science fiction may still be
the
privileged genre for writing against what constitutes a significant aspect of today's status quo.

To understand Delany's argument we need to recall Barthes's assertion that conservative discourse tends to de-historicize phenomena which are historically specific. In the rhetoric of this discourse, “things lose the memory that they once were made” (M 142). Both the aphoristic style and the spectacle work to reinforce this confounding of the historical and the natural. In viewing spectacle, “all that is left for one to do is to enjoy this beautiful object without wondering where it comes from” (M 151). Likewise, the aphorism is “no longer directed towards
a world to be made; it must overlay one which is already made, bury the traces of this production under a self-evident appearance of eternity” (M 155). Delany argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure. In this way the rhetoric of sf differs fundamentally from the rhetoric of “literature,” the conventions and tropes of which are organized around an entirely different focus:

Despite the many meaningful differences in the ways of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized—now, today—by a priority of the subject, i.e., of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories' many, many differing expectations . . .

Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, i.e., the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the subject excited, impinged on, contoured and constituted by the object?
¹⁴

The point is not merely that sf tends to be “about” the object in the sense of taking the object as its main topic of interest; it is, rather, that all of the conventions, tropes, and reading protocols that mark science fiction as science fiction are organized around a revelation of the object and its constituting context. And herein lies the potentially radical force of the genre:

. . . even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, “. . . the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,” begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change—and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase . . . (SW 188)

By this rhetorical model, we can see that even the most conservatively inclined science fiction, if it is in any way sophisticated
as
science fiction, must keep a certain margin of imaginative space open for an apprehension of the historicity of objects, landscapes, and social institutions. By this model we can also see that science fiction differs from the essay in
at least one of the same ways that it differs from literary fiction: for like literary fiction, the essay is rhetorically oriented toward a revelation of the subject, toward the presentation of a “spectacle of a single consciousness trying to make sense of the chaos.” The problem for both literary fiction and the essay is that the “chaos” of the modern world originates primarily as a chaos of the object, not the subject (SW 158)—which renders these forms, at least vis-à-vis the manifold problems of the object, conservative by default.

Bearing in mind the notion of science fiction as object-critique, we can begin to see why a radical practitioner of the genre such as Delany might take an interest in such recondite analytical practices as Marxian critique, deconstructive criticism, and discourse analysis. All offer sophisticated ways of considering the relations of objects, texts, and social practices to their ideological, linguistic, and socio-historical surrounds, and all are in one way or another committed to the exploration of the
social
constitution of the individual subject, that is, “those aspects of the self that are closer to the object.” All, in sum, are ways of breaking myths—ways of scrutinizing things which may seem eternal, totalized, and systemic, and questioning their totality, interrogating their system-aticity.

The obstacle to such analysis, on the one hand, is the pervasive influence of the discursive surround, the interpretive context “by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed” (RS 235). Only vigilant analytical attention can tease out the myths that discourse has embedded in any given text, precisely because discourse determines the attentional norm:

For what discourse does above all things is to assign import. Discourse, remember, is what allows us to make sense of what we see, and hear, and experience . . . Discourse is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral—what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke. It tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. (RS 239)

The possibility of such analysis, on the other hand, resides in language's tendency towards “unlimited semiosis”—the tendency of linguistic signs and sign-arrangements to carry connotations in excess of the normative meanings to which the discourse is perpetually working to restrict them. Deconstruction and discourse analysis exploit this inherent richness of language by evoking those meanings which the given discourse has systematically relegated to the margins of consideration, thus problematizing the meanings which would at first seem
unproblematically and eternally lodged in the discourse's rhetorical center. Characterized in this way, theory begins to look like more than just a range of analytical methodologies to be applied
to
a science fiction text, or a set of rhetorical tools to apply
within
a science fiction text, but rather like a case of convergent evolution with science fiction in general. If we view them both as ways of reading and writing the silences of objects, texts, and discursive landscapes, then theory and science fiction begin to look like two very closely related modes of inquiry.

The term “unlimited semiosis” comes from the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, but the idea as Delany deploys it comes from the post-structuralist critique of the Western discourse of the sign. In that discourse, the relation between linguistic signifier and nonlinguistic (“objective”) signified is presumed to be clear, direct, and unproblematic; by extension, texts are presumed to have clearly delineated, finite, and masterable meanings derivable from their concatenation of signs. In post-structuralist discourse, on the other hand, linguistic signifiers do not point towards a transparently clear objective reality (what Derrida calls the “transcendental signified”), but rather towards one another in a dynamic interrelational process occurring within a larger linguistic/discursive system (“The signified,” explains Delany, “is therefore always a web of signifiers”
¹⁵
).

By this argument, a “theme”—conceived in traditional discourse as an object-like “thing” which one “finds” in a given text—is actually an artifact of a readerly predisposition to order textual signs in a certain way. It marks a preconception, an effect of discourse; it has, in Delany's words, “the same political structure as a prejudice.”
¹⁶
In order to get around such prejudicial reading, Delany argues, we have to stop seeing the text as a linguistic construct with object-like, synchronic referents or themes hovering “behind” it, to be systematically uncovered in a hermeneutical reading process, and start seeing the text as “a space of discourse—the space in which, at various points and along various loci, discourses (of whatever rhetorical expressions the reader is led to make) may be organized in relation to one another” (AS 174). That is, we must see the text as a contestatory site where various discursive relations are transformed by the reader in an ongoing, diachronic process of reconceptualization and revision.

(It should be noted here that Delany, like certain post-structuralists, has observed in Barthes a tendency to discuss texts in thematic terms: “Even the plural text of Barthes is a synchronic plurality” (SW 205). Delany's answer to Barthes can be found in
The American Shore
, which formally resembles Barthes's
S/Z
but differs from it theoretically in many significant respects. More on this ambiguity in Barthes's work later.)

The diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading has the obvious virtue of being empirically more compelling than the synchronic-thematic model: it describes a situation that
feels
more like what we do when we read and write. It also has the more subtle virtue of reminding us that discourses are not monolithic structures, despite their pervasive and seemingly systemic influence; it shows, rather, that they arise from and are subject to the rhetorical interventions of the conscientious writer and the sensitive reader. In other words, it reminds us (to paraphrase ethnographer Stephen Tyler) that discourse can always be relativized to rhetoric.
¹⁷

For a gay black man such as Delany—or for anyone of whatever social position committed to a critique of or intervention in a status quo which seems to derive much of its strength from a whole series of discursive and coercive exclusions and oppressions—the recognition of the relativization of discourse to rhetoric is a tremendously empowering political truth. It is empowering in one sense because it reminds us that the pretense to universal authority which Barthes has shown to be the hallmark of the rhetoric of the status quo is just that, a pretense: every utterance, no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position. It is empowering in another sense because it places the power to revise a discourse back into our hands, with whatever personal or collective energy we can bring to our revisionary project:

Discourse says, “You are.”

Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, “I am not.” (AS 172)

Delany's own creative output can be read as a rigorous analysis of the implications of this freedom, as well as an exercising—through the production of radical paraliterary works—of this same freedom. It remains for us to look at the fallout of this prior creative work in the essays to follow.

The moment we turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, “Shadows,” was actually the first essay to be published, and is itself a preface to “Shadow and Ash,” one of the essays in the collection “proper.” Do we
prioritize chronology of publication, then, and read “Shadows” before the rest? (But then we would also want to read “Reading at Work” before “Wagner/Artaud” . . .) Do we wait until we are about to commence “Shadow and Ash,” and then read “Shadows” as a preface to that essay only? Or do we hold to the reading protocol that says an Appendix is only a marginal supplement to a main text—and defer reading “Shadows” until the very end, if we read it at all?