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 modeclass="underline" 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.
III
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?
15
Delany,
16
Delany, “Neither the First Word nor the Last on Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Semiotics, and Deconstruction for SF Readers: An Introduction” [Original title: “Neither the Beginning nor the End…”],
17
Stephen Tyler,