Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  For all the work she cites being done, the hope looks rather slim.

  The penultimate paragraph in this penultimate section is, however, both the most personal and the most hopeful:

  I am conscious of the odd perspective provided by my historical position—a Ph.D. in biology for an Irish Catholic girl was made possible by Sputnik’s impact on U.S. national science education policy. I have a body and mind as much constructed by the post-World War II arms race and cold war as by the women’s movements. There are more grounds for hope by focusing on the contradictory effects of politics designed to produce loyal American technocrats, which as well produced large numbers of dissidents, rather than by focusing on the present defeats. (p. 91)

  Here is Haraway’s “utopian moment,” if you like. And it is deeply suggestive about much of what she has been doing in this essay: she cites forces in the “organic/technological” oppositional battery that are assumed to produce evils (e.g., “loyal American technocrats”) and shows how, instead and to everyone’s surprise, they produce good (e.g., a radical feminist scholar). I can remember one of the first times I encountered this particular rhetorical strategy and how impressed with it I was: in that case, it was an explanation of the uprisings in Vietnam that led to the war—astonishingly, the technophile explicator explained, the major cause for the rebellion was the importation of Western television into Southeast Asia. Knowing that the country was a political powder keg, Western capitalists introduced TV (so ran his tale) to calm the populace and distract them. Nothing even vaguely controversial was ever shown. The entire broadcast fare was American soap operas—bland enough, it was assumed, to lull anyone into general boob-tubery. What capitalism had not counted on, however, was the backgrounds and sets to these mindless domestic sagas, filled with home appliances, flocked wallpaper, fine china, and cut crystal. Tiny villages, their entire populations sitting about before the one or two TVs in the town, had their noses rubbed in the Western way of life for a couple of hours each morning at McLuhanesque intensities—and lo and behold there was an uprising and, a little later, a full-scale war.

  But there is something missing from this picture, however technologically informed it is. And that is reading, aggression, critique—interpretive work, if you will.

  Someone had to turn off the television and think hard about what she’d just seen—and had to talk, if not write, about it.

  As much of a materialist as I am, I find the assumption that critique can be taken as a given, that it simply and uncritically falls out of the technology, a suspect if not an outright dangerous notion, a notion in which something crucial and distorting is always left out. Modesty perhaps prompts Haraway to leave it out of her own account. Nevertheless and once again: metaphors are not radical in themselves, whether they are delivered by TV soap operas, science education programs, science fiction tales, or socialist feminist manifestos. Critique—critical work—is created and constituted by people, by individuals, by individuals speaking and writing to others, by people who are always in specific situations that are tensional as well as technological.

  But—and this is Haraway’s point in her concluding paragraph to this section—we do not need a totality, a total unity, a monovocalic feminism (or, presumably, a monolithic socialism) in order to work, to get at least some of the necessary work done: “We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialistic one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradictions. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos.”

  The last and longest section of Haraway’s manifesto (before the Acknowledgments and References) is “Cyborgs: A Myth of Political Identity”—a “myth about identity and boundaries.” Here Haraway surveys a range of marginal texts, science fiction and poetry. She notes that three radical feminist poets and writers, Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde (who is black), and Adrienne Rich, “insist on the organic, opposing it to the technological.” But she is ready to justify this in light of a general world view in which capitalism is seen, in world terms, as controlling the general mode of production—while socialism is reread to encompass anything at all that is oppositional to the general mode. (Thus Griffin’s, Lorde’s, and Rich’s antitechnology stances might be seen as part of a general oppositional activity.) There is something terribly seductive about this position—and yet there is also much about it of the exhausted collapse into a kind of intellectual pathway of least resistance.

  Why, I’ve wondered for a good dozen years now, shouldn’t socialism be the world mode with, now and again, moments of capitalism arising (or even being encouraged) temporarily to combat local socialist breakdowns?

  At any rate, in Haraway’s reading of science fiction writers, I feel more conviction. In her survey Haraway shows a (at least to me) comforting sensitivity to the importance of writing in marginal literatures and paraliteratures. She explains:

  Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a- time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other. . . . Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs [she continues a page later], etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animals and machines. These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of “Western” identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind. . . . [And, still further on, she declares gloriously:] cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a “Western” commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by “Western” technology, by writing. (pp. 93–96)

  It is shortly after this that we encounter Haraway’s reading of Helva’s story with which we began:

  Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang explored the consciousness of a cyborg, hybrid of girl’s brain and complex machinery, formed after the birth of a severely handicapped child. Gender, sexuality, embodiment, still: all were reconstituted in the story. Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? From the seventeenth century till now, machines could be animated—given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechanized—reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. (p. 97)

  This becomes the entrance point in her consideration of a range of other science fiction texts, most importantly Joanna Russ’s The Adventures of Alyx and The Female Man, most generously a work of my own, followed by discussions of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed and Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal and its rich world of “protean transformation and connection.”

  The conclusion of her conclusion is a meditation on monsters. “There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies,” (p. 99) Haraway writes. True. But I hope in the central work of this consideration I’ve suggested some of the things we may remain blind to in their friendship if we do not consider what may be missing from them as enemies. In the midst of this monstrous meditation, there is an oddly satisfactory challenge to the notion of the everyday—of “dailiness”—as wom
en’s traditional preserve. And it is here that Haraway manifests—I almost want to say, at last—the bipolar meaning of “construct” I read into her text so long ago, to recomplicate that reading (if we choose to work at it) even further: “There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction” (p. 100, italics mine: my gift to Haraway, her gift to me). Cyborgs, she goes on to say, are not about rebirth, with its originary, Edenic presuppositions, but about regeneration—with its ever-present possibility of partiality, deformation, monstrosity.

  Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: (1) the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; (2) taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti- science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts. (p. 100)

  Yes—if we’re willing to work at reading, to read at work. But cyborg imagery will not do the work, will not promote the necessary analytic vigilance, for us. And it is work that Haraway appeals to in her final cadences: “This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia . . . It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, spaces, stories.” (p. 101) In this power, in this building, in this destroying, is there pleasure? Haraway’s last sentence: “Though both are bound in a spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” (p. 101)

  Doesn’t a preference sign, at some level, pleasure?

  Here something is missing.

  As I conclude this minimal bit of work—of interpretive vigilance, of hermeneutic violence, of pleasure, of aggression—my eye lifts from the text and again strays, glances about, snags a moment at a horizon, a boundary that does not so much contain a self, an identity, a unity, a center and origin which gazes out and defines that horizon as the horizon is defined by it; rather that horizon suggests a plurality of possible positions within it, positions which allow a number of events to transpire, move near, pass through, impinge on each other, take off from one another, some of which events are that an eye looks, a voice speaks, a hand writes. When I try to articulate the positions from which I write, as a male, as a black male, as a gay black male, as a gay black male whose work is the writing of para- literary fictions, of which this, as you read it, may be one—it seems only reasonable someone else might protest: “Who else would cite, would mark, would take on and torture so this particular text?”

  The question, then, is: How has Haraway’s text survived my violence?

  (I call that violence ‘aggressive,’ but is it oppositional? Blind, yes. Ignorant, probably. But how is that aggression positioned?)

  In this consideration I have cut her text up, cut bits of it out, compressed, paraphrased, brought together dispersed bits, constrained and contorted her argument . . . to what ends?

  Clearly, there is no survival here unless the reader turn to Haraway’s manifesto, to do her or his own work, which alone can restructure mine.

  From a position, with its rigors as well as its accidentals, I read. I write. I work.

  From another position, it would seem that something is missing. . .

  Thus I pass a text—a simulation of an interpretation—from one position to another, from this borrowed position it would be so inadequate to call mine (alone) to one that it is too suspicious to call yours (alone), as it was passed on to me, as it will pass on from you.

  Perhaps this is only a simulation of a passage.

  By reading, do we halt it?

  By reading, do we move it along? Do we move along it?

  But, now, we’d best let Helva have back her screw and get on with her work.

  Pace, and good luck, Ms. Haraway, with yours.

  —New York/Amherst

  1985–1988

  Aversion/Perversion/Diversion

  After an introduction by George Cunningham, this talk was delivered at Scott Hall, Rutgers University, 8:00 p.m., Friday night, on November 1, 1991, at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies.

  Aversion, perversion, diversion—the topics of my talk—present us at the outset with their intensely overlapping euphony, their entwined etymologies—sharing much with the Latin “proversus,” source of “prose,” “verse,” “verb,” and “proverb.” Certainly they start with the suggestion of three very inter-confused topics. Nor is that confusion allayed by my further explaining that my talk tonight will be about neither “inversion” nor “reversion”—that is, it will not be about “homosexuality,” female or male, considered as some notion either of the masculine or of the feminine inverted, negated, turned inside out or upside down to produce the “lesbian” or the “gay male,” a production presumably re- coupable by the simplest uncritical reversion to its former state—no matter how violent the effort needed, a violence too often justified by the very simplicity of the move.

  But whatever confusions I bring you this evening, I shall assume that basically you have asked me here as a storyteller. So let me say that, true to my triplet topics—aversion, perversion, and diversion—the tales I shall tell are tales that trouble me. Something about them makes me want either to turn away from them, or to turn their telling away from the pattern the tale made when it was presented to me.

  There is, of course, a tale I would very much like to tell. The protagonist of that story is without sex. He or she is wholly constituted by gender—female, male, gay male, lesbian. What’s more, our protagonist is unaware of any contradictions in the constitutive process, so that his or her blissfully smooth, seamless self may be called “natural,” “unalienated,” “happy”—or what-you-will.

  Our hero—for certainly she must be a hero—never does anything that is ego-distonic, that does not please her. All her actions—purposeful, habitual, gratuitous—are ego-tonic. They feel good.

  The only unpleasant things that befall her inevitably originate outside the self. Whether she is defeated by them or triumphant over them, their external origin is a knowledge she is secure in. I hope we can all recognize in the basic situation here the story of that most glorious political comedy that we have yet been able to erect in the name of liberation.

  I adore it as much as anyone.

  But it worries me; for while it can make me thrill, rejoice, and wildly applaud, it never makes me weep—other than in joy . . . and from what I know of the world, that is something to worry about. That is why I’m worried.

  There was a movie theater in New York once, called the Cameo, whose screen provender was heterosexual commercial porn, whose clientele was overwhelmingly male, and whose management encouraged a high level of homosexual activities in its corridors, stairwells, side seats, and—to a lesser extent—its bathrooms; and, in its upper balcony, a somewhat lower level of drug commerce and use.

  Of the many hundreds of men with whom I had sex there over more than a decade, from a dozen or so regulars with whom I had a settled and comfortable routine to a cavalcade of one-, two-, or three-time-en-counters, a number stand out. One such was a young man, white, with dark hair, of about twenty-five, who usually wore a suit jacket—in a population largely black and Hispanic and usually in jeans and sport shirts. Sitting on the right-hand side of the theater, a seat apart, we had exchanged some five or ten minutes of furtive eye contact, when he motioned me to sit beside him.

  As we began to touch each other, he leaned toward me to whisper, in a light, working-class accent associated with the outlying boroughs of the city, “You know, I’ve never done anything like this before. All the other sex I’ve ever had has been with women. But somebody told me about this place. So I just thought . . .” He shrugged. And we continued, easily enough considering his virgin status, to some satisfaction for us both.

  Three months later
, visiting the theater once more, after a stroll down one aisle and up the other, I noticed the same young man, again sitting off on the side. Recalling our last encounter, I slid in immediately to sit a seat away from him, smiled, and said softly, “Hi!” This time, he motioned me to the next seat right away, grinning and saying hello. As we began to touch each other, again he bent forward to explain: “You know, I’ve never done this before—with a man, I mean. I’ve had sex with women, sure. But this is my first time doing it with a guy . . .”

  I thought better of contradicting him. We went on as before—with the same results.

  Some months later, when I met him there again, he actually began talking to me by saying, “Hello! Good to see you. How’ve you been?” quite ready to acknowledge that we knew each other. But when, in a moment, we started to touch, again he whispered: “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever done this—with a man, I mean . . .”

  What troubles me in the memory of these encounters is, of course, how much of myself I can see in this fellow. His litany, like some glorious stutter, recalls Freud’s dictum: repetition is desire.

  But I have no way, at this date, to ascertain whether he experienced that desire as sexual predilection or as social fear. Was his endlessly renewed homosexual virginity (with its corresponding claim of heterosexual experience) part of the person he felt he must be to be sexually attractive? Or was that portable closet, that he was perpetually just stepping out of, merely some silly and encumbering excuse that could have been dispensed with by the proper enlightenment—the simple revelation that, other than himself, no one at the Cameo he was likely to run into really cared.

  The fact that the latter represents, however, a certain level of common sense is what suggests that the fantasy itself might be part of the sexual order of his desire. But the social marginality of the situation, and the extreme behavioral range in that margin—for the breadth of human experience generally remaining outside one sub-language or another is far greater than what, from time to time, over-spills into the centers of articulation—militates for a social interpretation.