Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  Most women, certainly, know them.

  For my—or any man’s—argument to be useful, especially to a woman, women must not accept it whole. It must be analyzed, fragmented, sliced open, cut up, cut off, fragments of it recombined with what may at first seem wholly inappropriate technicalities, till all unity is struck from it (the very concept of unity only returns to trouble, to critique, to annoy), resembling rather some junk-lot of deformed monsters, part human, part machine, and then—perhaps—some part of it cut off or up or out for new use, while the rest is simply left missing . . .

  Be assured: the process is painful, angering, violent, troubling to all involved . . .

  Thus, these images of rape, dismemberment, and violence (metaphors that trouble the whole range of our language), are, in this discussion of a feminist paper, a kind of irony, a kind of blasphemy.

  Why and for what reason, unify these images here?

  Is it to reduce—or, indeed, reveal—the terroristic element that hides in the margins of all manifestos and thus invalidates a document consecrated to pleasure, to reveal a certain sadism fundamental to all pleasurable affects?

  Certainly I would hope not.

  What notion of unity, of totality, of power, then, do they disrupt? Once again I quote from the opening section of her manifesto: “This essay is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.”

  Well, if such images as I have called in do, indeed, create confusion between what we would all approach as clearly defined categories of argument, ideology, and allegiance, they certainly don’t bring much pleasure. Don’t they place an intolerable strain on Haraway’s call for negative capability under the rubric of irony? Isn’t the introduction of them, here, to construct something that is the opposite of responsible argument?

  Rather, I would say only this: blasphemy, as it represents just the aporia we have outlined, is—as Haraway has written—serious. And the boundary between the two meanings of construction is, clearly, nowhere near as clear as even a first deconstruction would have had us suppose: it is a truly dangerous one, and must be negotiated with great vigilance.

  It is a boundary line.

  It is an abyss.

  Over it let us place the cyborg.

  II

  . . . But complete theories do not fall from Heaven, and you would have had still greater reason to be so distrustful, had anyone offered you at the beginning of his observations a well-rounded theory without any gaps; such a theory could only be the child of his speculation and not the fruit of unprejudiced investigation of the facts.

  —Sigmund Freud,

  Clark University, 1910

  What renders the cyborg confusing?

  In recent popular imagery, the Good Cyborg is, of course, Luke Skywalker, who, at the moment of his Oedipal shock in The Empire Strikes Back, when his hand is cut off (“I am your father . . .” Darth Vader tells him, in the midst of the agony), takes a ritual plunge of awesome dimensions (into the mythical abyss we wrote of above?), at the end of which, negotiating the whole effect of everything that came before, he is given a mechanical prosthesis: once the imitation skin is closed over the cam-shafts and circuitry, it remains hidden, unmentioned, invisible for the remainder of the trilogy. It is only suggested, at the climax of the final film, in a moment of Oedipal identification, when, after “breaking training” in a paroxysm of rage initiated by the paternal revelation of incest (“She is your sister”), Luke hacks off his father’s hand, to find Vader is already a cyborg of the same order: only wires and metal protrude from the severed wrist.

  (Amidst all this extraordinary narrative closure, isn’t there perhaps something missing?)

  Do we believe, at the trilogy’s end, the astonishing ease with which Luke not only accepts the “incest taboo” but seems to be, if anything, its walking embodiment? (Is there something missing . . .?) For upon learning that Leia is his sister, once his rage at his father is spent and has been replaced by love, he does not just accept the fact that his desire for her cannot be fulfilled: rather, the desire itself seems to vanish—indeed seems never to have existed!

  Isn’t there something left out. . .?

  The quintessentially Evil Cyborg to rage across the country and its giant screens in the year before Haraway’s manifesto appeared was Arnold Schwarzenegger, in The Terminator—certainly his best film. The allegory is a lot more violent, a lot less subtle, than in the Star Wars triptych: The Terminator has crossed time (another of those mythical abysses) in a spectacular leap, leaving him vividly naked, to attack, at the root, the seed of all possible future civilization. Here, the mechanical component begins as hidden, secret, implied within Schwarzenegger’s abundant flesh. But during the film that flesh is punctured, scarred, ripped or cut away—sometimes brutally and dispassionately by Schwarzenegger himself. (The scene in which he fixes the machinery inside his own forearm is a kind of onanistic replay of the scene already cited in the Lucas film.) At the two-thirds point, what remains of the corporeal is incinerated once and for all by a gasoline explosion, and the mechanical, burned free even of tarnish, rises gleaming and clanking to dominate the film’s final third, pursuing the heroine (pregnant with the superman) until she finally crushes him by making him crawl after her between the ominous and claustrophobic plates of a giant metal crusher, managing to throw the switch when she reaches the other side, creating a kind of vagina dynama, dangerous for her but—we all know it, and only wait for visual confirmation—fatal for him . . . making her, at least for a moment, something of a cyborg herself. He is flattened, with his bright claw out, already grasping her ankle in what, moments later, we know would have become a mortal grip.

  But let’s extract the mangled metal from the crusher plates, straighten the crumpled limbs, examine the remains of this gleaming monster. On exhumation, we can see it is basically a metal skeleton. It is clean and efficient (flesh and blood, if anything, only seemed to hamper it, encumber it, make it heavy and slow); and, as we saw, it was desperately strong. Its torso was a polished barrel, most certainly hiding complexities of circuitry, as doubtless did its skull’s tin egg with red lenses. (As with Lucas’s C-3PO, its mother was the Maria robot from Lang’s Metropolis.) But note: its hips are a single bar no thicker than femur or ulna.

  Certainly, there, something is missing . . .

  Such pursuits of beleaguered women in commercial films all have their sexual component, all have their punitive—I hesitate to say “sadistic,” but there, in the hesitation, it has been said, as though it refuses to remain absent from this rhetorical galaxy—reading. Yet, as we have lavished an extra bit of attention to the physical structure of the cyborg in this film, we must pay a bit of extra attention to the narrative in which he has been so violently thrust. Unmarried, his woman adversary has had sex, and is pregnant as proof. (Everywoman, she bears the name of five others in the film—all previously “terminated” by the cyborg.) Are we mired, then, in that rape fantasy comprising the narrative genre running from Clarissa through Tess of the D’Urbervilles to Dressed to Kill that ordains women who do not have sex must be punished for withholding it; and women who choose to have sex with one man must be punished for not having it with another?

  Probably.

  There is confusion in the myth here, though, for Sara manages to escape, to triumph, to kill, to bear a son. Well, at Haraway’s exhortation, let us take pleasure in it and go on with our work.

  Haraway posits the cyborg as a feminist image—or at least an image useful in the pursuit of feminist goals. These two cyborgs, one a secret (and good) cyborg, the other an overt (and evil) cyborg, are both male: neither is mentioned in Haraway’s manifesto. But her own attentions compel me to the following observation.

  One of them—Luke—is such a friend to women (or, rather, to the single woman—Princess Leia—in the foreground story) that most of the audience just doesn’t believe it. Indeed, his friendship to women has much the quality of Lucas’s own th
roughout the trilogy: a kind of on-again-off-again lackluster concern with keeping Leia from becoming too much of a wimp, strongest in the first film, a left-over habit in the second, and simply missing from the third—a “feminist sympathy” that never gets as far as what, after all, must be the most important step: i.e., allowing Leia to know (or talk to, or be friends with, or consider the situation of) any other woman in the universe.

  The other cyborg—the Terminator—is an implacable enemy of woman (and of life and of everything else), but can, thank some Higher Power (all too easy to name in the Wagner/Bergson/Shaw vitalistic tradition that controls the plot of both The Terminator and Star Wars: the Life Force), be vanquished by one.

  Is the key to the cyborg image provided in the observation by historian Louise White in the symposium Women in Science Fiction published in Jeff Smith’s fanzine Khatru in 1975? Writing of Helva, that most famous cyborg in the precincts of written science fiction, White notes that she is “. . . another woman with her cunt cut out.”

  Written between 1961 and 1969, and collected together as The Ship Who Sang (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), the McCaffrey series, which we have already tried to read, tells of a little girl who is born hopelessly deformed. But to save her life, most of her deformed body (including her genitals) is surgically removed and the rest is made the central brain in a complex mechanical body, or “shell,” with many superhuman qualities—magnifying vision is the first one we see at work in the tales—that finally becomes the basis for a spaceship. Helva’s foreground story is her love for her captain, his death, her mourning, her eventual revenge (“The Ship Who Mourned” and “The Ship Who Killed” are, recall, two of the story titles from within the series), and finally her happy repartnering with a new captain.

  But, as White has noted, even in this most heterosexually sobrietous tale—as, hopefully, we have seen by now in all our others, however troubling—there is something missing.

  III

  . . . But what in fact was this appeal from the subject beyond the void of his speech? It was an appeal to the very principle of truth . . . But first and foremost it was the appeal of the void, in the ambiguous gap of an attempted seduction of the other by the means on which the subject has come compliantly to rely, and to which he will commit the monumental construct of his narcissism.

  —Jacques Lacan,

  The Function and Field of Speech

  and Language in Psychoanalysis

  Let us skip over a great deal at this point. Let us leave a gap. Let us allow whatever is missing to remain . . . missing.

  (Let us hope, with the rest of civilization, that the disruptive force of the occlusion does not return to destroy us and/or our argument . . .)

  Castration, Freud tells us, is the way the subject is brought to civilization. Says Lacan, castration is what ushers the subject into the Symbolic Order . . . and claims to be saying more or less the same thing.

  The phallus is, unlike the penis or the clitoris (Lacan goes on to say), manifested only in castration. The phallus is what remains to the Imaginary when the object of desire is veiled, removed, occluded, or snatched violently away from current Symbolically mediated experience. Its Imaginary occultation alone gives it its Symbolic power. And (cutting out a great deal more) we are strongly urged by many Lacanian commentators, many of them women and feminists (from certain rhetorical turns in Haraway’s text, we wonder if she wishes to be counted among their number), to take this as the inarguable reason why civilization is, and must no doubt remain, phallocentric.

  Yet, as a theory, the castration explanation seems somehow incomplete.

  Again something is missing.

  That is to say, the lived experiences of women and men all around us are again and again in excess of the theory.

  Again something returns to trouble.

  The acceptance, the internalization, the sublimation of castration anxiety, be we male or female, is what is supposed to fit us into civilization. And yet, if that is the case, it would seem that none of us—male or female—is ever really castrated enough. Civilization doesn’t seem anywhere near as civilized as we would like it to be. All of us, for better or for worse, can conceive of a better one.

  And as for the one we have, we don’t fit in.

  Or, at least, for most of us, the fit can be described as only more or less comfortable.

  To look at civilization anywhere around us is to criticize it: this civilization, for better or for worse, is just not civilized.

  In brief, all the castration theory seems to cut us down to is the acceptance of phallocentric society. It seems to leave out what rankles and roils and complains and, more or less suppressed, carries on hysterically, like the adult “Dora,” Ida Brauers, inveighing to Dr. Deutch against the strictures of married life, twenty-four years after cutting off, in 1902, her therapy with Freud.

  Perhaps phallocentric civilization has to construct image after image of castration—such as the cyborg.

  But (and this is what I shall keep on looking for in Haraway, after this account is finished) it will also have to construe them: it will have to fix clearly on the missing parts, respond to them as completely as possible, describe them, and analyze them into their constituents, if it is ever to get beyond the desperately efficient self-replicating system by which our civilization, by which castration, repairs itself in the face of almost any wound to it, almost any attempt to cut it down or up.

  For the record, I might as well say it here: I do not believe castration as Freud and Lacan have described it even exists. But I do believe—and I do not know how many times I can write this in a single essay and have it remain coherent—that something is missing.

  This is something I desire—violently—be fixed in my own argument. Yet, moments after the reader’s eye has passed it, it will be gone, its “existence,” around which so much of my desire is organized, remaining only as the flicker of an afterimage, a troubling absence-presence that “is” no longer “there,” like the child’s spool tossed over the edge of the curtained cradle before it is hauled back on the confused and knotted string connecting memory to reality.

  IV

  The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in the process of gap.

  —Jacques Lacan,

  The Field of the Other: Alienation

  The pursuit of the radical metaphor—and the general consensus seems to be that castration (and cyborgs seem to be the figure of castration, the phallus, whether male or female) was once as radical a metaphor as any, though it is not at all one today—is a risky business; and it is arguable (indeed, it is philosophy’s classical argument against metaphor) that there is something inherently reductive and, by extension, conservative, in the very metaphoric process.

  As we prepare to confront our mythical, or metaphoric, cyborg, here is one model of metaphor it may be helpful to bear in mind:

  Object P, with aspects (a, b, c . . . A, B, C . . . (α, β, γ. . .), is compared with object Q, with aspects (1, 2, 3 . . . A, B, C. . . . □, Ο, Δ. . .). The metaphor is logical because aspects (A, B, C . . .) are common to both objects. Logically, the resultant metaphoric system privileges aspects (A, B, C . . .), the aspects common to both objects, and dismisses the combined set of aspects (a, b, c . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . α, β, γ. . . , Ο, Δ . . .). Thus the metaphorical logic is reductive, disjunctive, and conservative in its logical privileging power.

  But this model, at least at this stage of elaboration, leaves out something very important. (. . . there is something missing.) It does not explain the vividness with which, from time to time, metaphors strike us. It suggests, rather, that the experience of newness, liberation, and daring with which so many metaphors register is, at bottom, simply nostalgia, a pure reassurance, the wholly sedimented and completely safe called up in a flash so bright and brief we do not recognize it for what it is.

  I don’t think the suggestion corresponds to the lived experience of metaphor.

  But to construe and c
ritique our model in such a way that it yields something closer to what I believe to be the truth of metaphor, we must leave the logic of metaphor to read its murkier psychology.

  Assume: We are reading.

  As we move along through the text, negotiating a fairly familiar and coherent description of a scene or process, we encounter the mention of object P, whose syntagmatic placement (or paradigmatic displacement) announces it as metaphor. Immediately we are distracted from our familiar scene to consider the play of P’s aspects, among which, for the moment, we are not entirely sure which will be the logically privileged ones.

  With the aspects of P still at play in our mind, we move on through the text, till we encounter mention of another object, Q, which, syntax and expectation tell us, is the metaphor’s referent. Now we are momentarily distracted from the play of P’s aspects by the aspects of Q. But we must not let that first set go. Attention heightens, to hold the play of aspects about both objects—aspects that, indeed, constitute both objects. (It’s important to note here that we have not yet perceived the logic of metaphor. We have perceived, rather, only the collective aspects of P and of Q.) From among the conjoined set of aspects of P and Q, the logic of metaphor must now be built up.

  We set about pairing up aspects, identifying aspects from the metaphor with aspects from its referent, to create the logical link.

  As these pairs (or identities) are located, they are, so to speak, psychologically set aside into that part of the mind reserved for conscious and conscientious systems; but what we are left with in the part of the mind that perceives, that visualizes, that imagines is the heightened image of many of those aspects of both P and Q that are in excess of those identities.