Category: Volume 18 – Number 3 – May 2008

How should we think the analytical purchase of the family of English terms derived from the Latin root fuga? How might we productively pose the anachronistic musical form of contrapuntal theme and variation—the fugue—alongside Hannah Arendt’s figure for “those whom the twentieth century has driven outside the pale of the law” (175)—the refugee—and what Fred Moten has called “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed” (“Uplift” 336)—fugitivity? Edward W. Said’s posthumous On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain might seem an odd entry-point for such questions. While Said offers definitive theorizations of contrapuntalism as method, of exile as both an intellectual and deeply historical position—and On Late Style returns to these notions—one would imagine him to be wary of the ahistorical and smoothly totalizing ways in which Arendt’s notion of the refugee have been taken up in certain strains of recent political theory. Even as On Late Style dwells on the issue of aesthetics and form, the work in the black radical tradition to locate and theorize the aesthetic forms of what Moten calls an “appositional enlightenment” (“Freedom” 274) seems beyond the purview of Said’s periodic treatment of black radicals like C.L.R. James, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon.
 
Nevertheless, Said’s brief and fragmentary book, culled from a series of lectures, essays, and seminar notes begun in the early 1990s, offers a surprisingly generative terrain from which the question of “fuga” emerges in all its contemporary gravity. He had meditated on the problematic of late style for some time; the concept appears in several of his late works, most notably in his December 2001 lecture on Freud and the Non-European. Here Said analyzes Freud’s Moses and Monotheism as a “late” text that refuses claims to “pure” identity categories even as it confronts the horror of Nazi genocide and the erasure of the “non-European” from the history of Palestine. But using “lateness” only as a means of analysis engenders different effects than to make it the object of analysis, as it is in On Late Style. How we should read this late work, and to what end, is far less clear, but this very question potentially makes reading On Late Style more useful. Scholars interested in the articulation of the aesthetic, the political, and the discrepant trajectories of modernity should read this work with ears wide open.
 
“Fuga” helps us approach On Late Style in precisely the way Said might want: as a counterpoint both to his other late works and to the broader landscape of contemporary imperial culture in which it appears. In the book’s foreword, Mariam Said recalls her husband’s simultaneous attempts at the end of his life to complete three quite discrete projects. “Today I will write the acknowledgements and preface to Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” Said informed her with renowned will one Friday morning several weeks before his death, referencing his argument for the ethical importance of secular humanist practice in a post-9/11 United States; “The introduction to [a collection of journalistic essays entitled] From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map I’ll finish by Sunday. And next week I’ll concentrate on completing Late Style, which will be finished in December” (vii). Given the contours of Said’s immense critical output, we should not be surprised when, in his battle with debilitating leukemia, this final burst of contrapuntal productivity takes the form of a vigorously political counterpoint: to escalating U.S. military designs in the Arab World, to the Bush Administration’s not-so-tacit support of intensified apartheid policies in Israel/Palestine, to the popularized racist figure of the dehumanized Arab, and to the full frontal attack on the intellectual class meant to silence the critique of such dire conditions.
 
Reading On Late Style contrapuntally also suggests a longer, if more obscured, genealogy of Said’s engagement with the specific problematic of lateness. As he routinely described his own intellectual trajectory, the U.S. response to the June 1967 War compelled Said to begin “to think and write contrapuntally,” triggering an intellectual practice traversing the linkages between his work as a literary scholar and as a representative of and for Palestine (“Between Worlds” 562). Said’s commitment to reconsider, revise, and even depart from his own interventions laudably refuses smooth simplifications. On Late Style’s own fugal dynamic lingers at mezzopiano, staying quietly close to what he would call in another context a “kind of exfoliating structure of variation” drawn from the musical performances of classical pianist Glenn Gould (“Interview” 3). What might it sound like if we turned up the volume on Said’s engagement with Gould and other “classics”? What hisses, pops, and buzzes might we hear, and how might they direct our thinking aesthetically, methodologically, and politically?
 
“I come finally to the last great problematic,” Said intones at the book’s outset, “which for obvious personal reasons is my subject here—the last or late period of life, the decay of the body, the onset of ill health or other factors that even in a younger person bring on the possibility of an untimely end” (6). Said’s pathos on facing death is augmented by his readings of a cluster of aesthetic works he found most energizing. The self-described cultural conservative, who routinely defends a worldly reading of a pre-constituted Western canon, turns to a much-enjoyed set of high modern literary and musical texts that he “personally” relates to, conjuring up memories of his own trips to the opera, the symphony, the cinema. On Late Style treats Beethoven’s last works, Mozart’s late opera Cosi Fan Tutti, Richard Strauss’s representation of the eighteenth century, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard and Luchino Visconti’s subsequent film of the same name, Benjamin Britten’s operatic staging of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and various productions of Euripedes’s tragic plays. Jean Genet’s Les paravents and Un captif amoureux offer Said an opportunity to recall his face-to-face encounters with Genet himself in New York and Beirut. Readings of these works are rarely pursued in a consistently contrapuntal fashion, at least in the way Said theorizes it in Culture and Imperialism, with a worldly and politicized focus on “interdependent histories” and “overlapping characters” (“Interview” 3). The material on Genet is a welcome exception, helping Said navigate the distance between Genet’s views of the Black Panthers, his interest in Palestine, and the posthumous staging of Genet’s own late works in the wake of the first Palestinian intifada. Said’s close reading of the work of Greek Alexandrine poet Constantine Cavafy has a similarly familiar contrapuntal logic. More often, though, Said operates at the close formal, technical, and textual levels found in much of his other writings on music, from Musical Elaborations to Parallels and Paradoxes, as his analysis attends to patterns of allusion, cooptation, and revision, giving scant attention to the social worlds in which such patterns emerge.
 
Each of these works registers “late style” in often incommensurable ways, recapitulating Said’s earlier concerns in a new more strictly formalist guise. If exile, worldliness, oppositional intellectual practice, and the like are recurrent themes in Said’s corpus, late style becomes a way to describe their formal variations. Just as the intellectual is, at his or her most ethical, a figure for oppositional critical practice, late style “involves a nonharmonious, nonserene tension, and above all, a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness going against” (7). In Said’s commitment to imagining the dialectical framework of exile, for instance, lateness emerges as “a platform for alternative and unregimented modes of subjectivity, at the same time that [the artist-intellectual] . . . has a lifetime of technical effort and preparation” (114).
 
The staging of late style by one exemplary figure, the “virtuoso intellectual” Gould, marks the “full realization of a protracted and sustained contrapuntal invention, disclosed, argued, and elaborated rather than simply presented, through performance” (130). The placement of the final comma in this sentence is crucial: Said’s own commentary on Gould and his necessarily public performance provides an evocative—if momentary—heuristic condensing the impulses of many of Said’s other works. The journalistic essays that nearly every week documented the perilous position of Palestine under the schema of an ostensibly permanent “war on terror,” the lectures reclaiming humanistic critique as the imperative terrain of democracy: these and so many of Said’s other interventions unfold oppositional arguments, enacted, fleeting, both passing and facing the impasse of the current conjuncture. Gould’s recorded performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations—one produced at the outset of Gould’s career and one at its end—“[elaborate] an alternative argument to the prevailing conventions that so deaden and dehumanize and rerationalize the human spirit” (133). Indeed, on Gould’s intellectual engagement with Bach’s untimely contrapuntal works—in the face of the commoditizing impulses of a post-war classical music industry—Said captures some of the most fertile, dramatic, and condensed prose in On Late Style. The buzz we hear when we turn up the silence of that comma, a sound that in a moment will rub against another genealogy of music and performative methodology, makes us realize just how influential Gould was on Said’s thinking.
 
While the material on Genet, Cavafy, and Gould in particular provides some useful departures for listening again to Said’s contrapuntalism, more than anything this book stages his prolonged engagement with Theodor Adorno’s writings on music, the culture industry, and the modern condition. The first chapter, “Timeliness and Lateness,” draws on essays about Adorno published in the London Review of Books and Adorno: A Critical Reader, helping Said conceive of late style in Adorno’s various writings on “Spätstil Beethovens.” The late works of Adorno’s Beethoven, Said recalls, amount to “a moment when the artist who is fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship with it” (8). These works, Said continues in an oblique reference to his own early theorization, “served as a sort of beginning point for all [Adorno’s] analyses of subsequent music” (8). For Adorno and for Said, what is so generative in Beethoven’s late style is the way its “remorselessly alienated and obscure” aesthetics “[become] the prototypical modern aesthetic form” (14). This is late style’s fugitivity: that as a form it maintains its own elusiveness, that as an intellectual position it is marked by its own fleeting trajectory of escape from the social order. It emerges when Said considers Adorno’s critical engagement as a “self-imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming after it, and surviving beyond it” (16). A consistent, willed oppositional stance that long animated Said’s own intellectual practice, exile “work[s] through the silences and fissures” that reveal modernity’s deadening conditions of nationalism, domestication, corporatization, and privatization (15). The exilic intellectual’s attitude enables her or him “to avoid packaging and administration and is in fact to accept and perform the lateness of his position” (15), and recapitulates Said’s own commitment to anti-dynastic thinking, to proceeding continually and constructively through an unsystemized method marked by what he describes elsewhere as “restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others” (Representations 53). For all its centrifugal movement outward, weaving variations on a theme, On Late Style nevertheless tends to collapse specific artistic works with the performance of criticism and the critics themselves. An Adornian reading of late style, for instance, metonymically stands in for Adorno himself:
 

the concept of lateness . . . comes for Adorno to seem the fundamental aspect of aesthetics and of his own work as critical theorist and philosopher . . . being at the end, fully conscious, full of memory, and also very (even preternaturally) aware of the present.
 

(14)

Just as Adorno blends with his work, so too does Said, so much so that at the close of the book Adorno offers the enigmatic last word: “in the history of art late works are the catastrophes” (160).

 
This cryptic collapse into catastrophe signals the denouement, the post-climactic turn before the close, but also the catastrophe of what Said calls the “new and monstrous modern forms” of politics that Adorno’s exile both bore witness to and militated against: “fascism, anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy” (23). These are precisely the twentieth-century formations that reveal for Hannah Arendt the terrible problem entwining the refugee, the law, and human rights. The preternatural present acutely diagnosed in Said’s other late works hisses for a moment, louder here than anywhere else in the book. We might hear in this hiss the residue of Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted eighth thesis on the philosophy of history that, following Foucault and especially Giorgio Agamben, has received much recent critical attention. “The tradition of the oppressed,” Benjamin writes in flight from Nazi Germany, “teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule. We must attain to a concept of history that accords with this fact. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about the real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism” (392).
 
Taken on Said’s terms, we might see late style as an aesthetic that registers the “interdependent histories” and “overlapping characters” (“Interview” 3) of modern catastrophe by effectively sounding the linkages between Nazi genocide; the dispossession and displacement of Palestinians in 1948 (routinely called in Arabic Al-Nakhba, “the catastrophe”); and the continuing conditions of occupation and incarceration that maintain the West Bank and Gaza in a perpetual “state of exception.” Contemporary readings of Foucault and Agamben reveal precisely such linkages, yet for Said they would likely come up short as accounts of universal human agency and will. Rigorous oppositional intellectual practice in counterpoint to its specific historical juncture, late style as modeled by Adorno and mirrored by Said, enables something more than simply a schematic reinscription of systemic dominance; it offers instead a fleeting attempt to “improve our position,” knowing full well that capture might be lurking right around the corner. Criticism of Said’s reliance on the figure of the heroic individual artist-intellectual, which in On Late Style seems to include himself, would surely be well-founded. There is something notably out of joint, narrow in a way that harmonizes with Said’s high modern archive, where intellectual practice operates at a level of remove liable to abstract late style from the forms of dense and textured sociality Said has long recognized, and that indeed he interrogates in various ways in so many of his late analytical and journalistic writings. Further, for all its focus on the single concept of “late style,” the collection comes across at times as rambling, unfinished, unpolished—as we should probably expect from a text assembled posthumously. The title of the last chapter, “Glimpses of Late Style,” might in this way stand for the necessary limitation, if also the speculative quality, of Said’s own late style.
 
This stylistic roughness points the afterlife of Said’s work quite beyond its intention and towards a different yet deeply related articulation of “fuga,” one with a critical and critically important interdependent history that Said always keeps in view, even if he never substantively engages with it. This meaning emerges specifically out of a reading of the black radical tradition offered by Fred Moten, Brent Hayes Edwards, and other scholars working in the field of new jazz studies. It considers the aesthetics produced within the black radical tradition in ways that echo that fleeting moment in History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, where Foucault asserts not only that “genocide is indeed the dream of modern states” (137)—what Said might see as Foucault’s deadly totalizing vision of biopower—but also the much more nuanced and speculative statement: “it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them” (143). This emergent engagement with black radical aesthetics shares with Said a commitment to thinking very carefully about the formal logics of the musical, of the nonrepresentational, of the performative—the buzz we hear in the silence of that comma. But this engagement builds on the likes of Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey to consider specifically jazz music, jazz poetics, jazz practice as points of departure carefully attuned to the political imperative not merely to re-assert humanism’s democratizing impulses (as Said does), or even to reveal humanism’s catastrophic contradictions (as Said also does). Rather, this work begins to ask: what political as much as formal and methodological trajectories are revealed in the performative practices of freedom elaborated by the black radical tradition of Parker, Mingus, Miles, and Monk, for instance, in counterpoint to Gould, Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart? What would it sound like to take as an analytical framework not simply the hiss of emergency in the wake of Nazi genocide or the 1967 war, but more broadly the aesthetics of escape that continually confront Euro-American paradigms of sovereignty, that circumscribe and circumvent modernity’s logic of white supremacy, that are, as Moten calls them, appositional to enlightenment—“remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute” (“Knowledge” 274)?
 
The deeply formal, literary, and political questions emerging from Said’s late scholarly practice, it seems to me, might channel our future intellectual energies, even if such criticism rings of a certain belatedness as it buzzes in the comma describing Gould’s politics of performance and hisses in the Benjaminian struggle against fascism. When we read On Late Style in the way I suggest, such questions push us to hear Said’s contrapuntalism contrapuntally, through a frame that reveals its historical, its theoretical, its aesthetic analogues and antecedents in ways that might inform and transform it as they grapple with the persistent perils of modernity. When sounding On Late Style through its relation to “fuga,” it is through and yet despite its anachronism that the text offers us a preternaturally fugitive glimpse at willful beginning in the face of continued catastrophe.
 

Kathryn Bond Stockton’s Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” takes shame as a productive site of inquiry about identities that are produced by repeated public debasement, even though, as Stockton says, “debasement should not be seen as a theme in this book” (8). Not wanting to view Blackness and queerness as simple or fixed notions (as indicated by the quotation marks in Stockton’s title), Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame seeks rather to explore “switchpoints between black and queer, queer and black” (5) in order to discover the value of shame for critical cultural analysis. Stockton writes:
 

Debasement is a fully indispensable informant. It is a key to understanding the ties, bold and subtle, between two signs that would seem linguistically, historically separate. The strangeness of queerness would not seem particularly destined to meet the darkness of blackness, except in the bodies of dark queer folk. We will see this is not so. Shame is an equal-opportunity meeting place for these signs. In fact, I believe we cannot grasp certain complicated cultural, historical entanglements between “black” and “queer” without, at the same time, interrogating shame—its beautiful, generative, sorrowful debasements that make bottom pleasures so dark and so strange.
 

(8)

Exploring “black” and “queer” in connection with the unlikely category of shame allows Stockton to bring together terms and texts that are not frequently in dialogue with each other. She considers the “dark camp” of Toni Morrison’s Beloved in the context of “cloth wounds and skin wounds” in David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club (206, 216). She finds concern with Blackness in the unlikely interstitial spaces of canonical queer texts that do not feature characters of African descent, such as Jean Genet’s 1953 Querelle, Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness, and Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 Stone Butch Blues. In these texts, Stockton argues innovatively that clothing becomes the vector for negotiating the shame and debasement of non-normative genders and sexualities much as black skin has become both a marker and vector for racial debasement. She claims:

Cloth and skin touch on each other’s meanings since each is a surface—with intense, complex, and variable codings attached to it—that may be the object of prejudice, violence, attraction, and invective. Each may be physically marked with a wound (torn cloth, torn skin) and each can elicit psychic wounds (self-loathing, for example) because of the shame it seems to carry. Each can also, in certain contexts, elicit pride—or sexual attraction and aesthetic delight. That is, there is beauty.
 

(40)

Drawing a correlation between skin and cloth allows Stockton to explore the ways in which wounding is enacted upon and then reappropriated by those subjected to it in relationship to the categories of shame and debasement. Stockton explores the characters in these novels as “martyrs to their clothes” to reveal how “shame can adhere to forms of beauty” (41). Those whose only “sin is their skin” might bristle at the idea that clothing could be made equivalent to the complex social codings of race. Nonetheless, Kathryn Bond Stockton’s book suggests the possibilities and pitfalls for theorizing beyond conventional understandings of race and gender. On the one hand, Stockton’s desire “to probe the value of debasement as a central social action” allows a necessary inquiry into the ways in which “‘black’ and ‘gay’ at the level of signs” are locked into what she terms “a bottom” enactment of the complicated politics of shame (2). This allows her a provocative and original engagement with texts by Toni Morrison, Jean Genet, Norman Mailer, Radclyffe Hall, James Baldwin, and Roland Barthes. On the other hand, by accepting “debasement” as the predominant category through which to view “the crossing of signs” between Black and gay, Stockton locks her inquiry into widely accepted concepts of “black” and “queer” (as evidenced by her reliance on the New York Times Magazine in her opening discussion of “the Down Low”). This has the unfortunate effect of severely limiting Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame’s potential level of engagement with the actual texts, histories, and contexts where “black” and queer” have met socially, historically and culturally.

 
The book’s most valuable contribution is its challenge to conventional understandings of terms such as “value,” “shame,” “abjection,” “wounding,” and “contamination,” which it puts in relation to wider critical discussions. For example, Stockton relates Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum from Camera Lucida to the notion of “aesthetic wounding” found in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction and in images from Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 collection Black Book, and so contests the parameters that Barthes’s vision of the image allows. Stockton can thus explore the “rhetoric of violence that is inherent in the act of looking yet is often overlooked in critical discussions of visual culture that do not consider race as a necessary category of inquiry (123). Stockton makes another unlikely connection between what she labels the “bottom” politics and “anal economics in the history of Black neighborhoods,” citing the way in which she claims Toni Morrison “dares to value debasement” in her 1973 novel Sula. In doing so, Stockton argues that Morrison’s work not only celebrates the “bottom values” of debasement but also “debases Freud” (67, 72). Consequently, Stockton is able to read the “value” in the “bottom” politics of Freud’s multiple investments in anality at the same time that she can read the critique of Freud inherent in Morrison’s nuanced account of life on “the bottom” of the social, economic, and cultural scale for African American residents in Sula, who live in a segregated section of town known as “the Bottom.” Stockton writes: “To debase Freud, in relation to the Bottom, as we will see, is to credit his accounts of feces as coins but to make more sorrowful what he clearly felt some necessity to celebrate: namely, how the bottom is lost, left behind, as one becomes more ‘civilized’” (73). In another particularly provocative pairing, Stockton deploys cultural categories from Eldridge Cleaver’s controversial 1968 racial polemic Soul on Ice to declare that Todd Haynes’s 2002 film Far From Heaven “succeeds in suggesting something already implicit and hiding in Cleaver’s sexual semiotics” (215). Exploring Far From Heaven in relationship to the categories that Cleaver defines for sexual subjectivity in Soul on Ice, Stockton concludes: “The film makes its highly intentional bridge between blacks and queers by having the woman who personifies clothes (artifice, surface) be the one to notice—finally, dramatically—the wound of black skin” (214). Stockton thus highlights Far From Heaven’s challenged to a deracialized notion of “camp” and explores what is potentially useful as well as problematic in a largely forgotten text that approaches the same material as the film from a closer historical vantage point.
 
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” raises the obvious question about the positioning of “shame” and “debasement” at the center of a study that also invokes, however deeply qualified, terms like “black” and “queer,” terms that have also existed historically as markers of liberation and emancipatory possibility. Stockton herself asks the question: “Is the conception of valuable shame something only a queer would consider (a white queer at that?)” (9). What role do cultural politics and an intellectual culture that continue to marginalize people of African descent play in the choice to highlight the question of shame and debasement in relation to these categories? Indeed, the question is even present in the jacket art of the book, which prominently positions the J.B. Higgins photograph “Andre”—a nude, aesthetically well proportioned young Black man with his head bowed—as a visual tease on the front cover and the Eurocentric intellectual tease on the back cover, that the book reads its texts “with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani.” Is it possible for such a study to explore the symbolic economy of shame in relation to the “switchpoints of ‘black’ and ‘queer’” without simply replicating the historical and cultural politics that created these switchpoints in the first place?
 
This question is further highlighted by the very brief but significant inclusion of the work of two writers who self-identify as “Black queers,” Robert Reid-Pharr and Gary Fisher (whose posthumously collected writings Gary in Your Pocket were also published by Series Q at Duke University Press). Fisher’s observation that “I haven’t read Hegel yet…I’m afraid to know” stands beside his declaration, “I want to be a slave, a sex slave and a slave beneath another man’s (a white man or a big man, preferably a big white man) power” (140). This statement posits the “switchpoints between black and queer, queer and black” at the critical intersection of knowledge and power, the full force of which Stockton’s study tantalizingly suggests but fails to fully engage. What would it mean to read Fisher’s desire to “be a slave, a sex slave” in relation to a liberatory politics of social transformation? In Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, his defense of “freaks” and “sexual courage,” Herukhuti insists that fundamental to his own practice of SM is a recognition of “the way race and gender intertwine to make Black men both slaves and slavemasters, givers of pain and receivers of pain in this society” (166). Stockton excerpts Reid-Pharr’s exploration of his desire for “an ugly, poor, white trash southerner,” published in the marvelously complicated 2001 essay collection Black Gay Male, in relationship to his declaration that “I still have to resist the impulse to flinch when someone refers to me as a queer and to positively run for cover when someone refers to me as a black queer.” Stockton cites Reid-Pharr in order to read these claims in the context of the debased categories of identity (21). Reid-Pharr and Fisher’s invocation of power, dominance, and knowledge in connection with shame raises the question of the role dominance and power play in Stockton’s valuing of shame as an analytic category. Stockton’s study turns on the term “switchpoints” as a critical conduit of symbolic exchange between the terms “black” and “queer,” an imaginary moment of “social communion—through acts of debasement and the crossing of signs” (2). “Switchpoints” serve as vectors of intersectionality for the symbolic “baggage” of “queer,” “black,” and “shame,” but the term enacts a balance of exchange that both Fisher and Reid-Pharr suggest rarely exists either in moments of literal social communion or in the social imaginary of the textual.
 
Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” begins its discussion of “switchpoints” with a minor but narratively significant African American character in John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch. This focus on a minor character in a “major” independent film again raises the question of what it means to examine the “switchpoints” between “black” and “queer” texts where Black queer aesthetics and Black sexual subjectivities are not the major focus. In examining “the black man’s momentary passage through the text” of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Stockton offers a definition of “switchpoints”:
 

By switchpoint here, I mean the point at which one sign’s rich accumulations—those surrounding “American black”—lend themselves to another—“East German queer” . . . . That is . . . numerous meanings attached to “black” switch onto new tracks and signify in the field of “queerness”. . . . I think of a switchpoint, at least in part, in railroad terms, according to which a “switch” is “a movable section of railroad track” that is “used in transferring a train from one set of tracks to another”; or, in electrical terms: “a device used to open, close or divert an electric current”; or, in a general sense of a switch as “a shift or transference, especially if sudden or unexpected” . . . . Largely, I will use the term to refer to a point of connection between two signs (or two rather separate connotative fields) where something from one flows toward (is diverted in the direction of) the other, lending its connotative spread and signifying force to the other, illuminating it and intensifying it, but also sometimes shifting it or adulterating it.
 

(4–5)

 
To find the switchpoint between the terms “black” and “queer” within the conceptual space of “debasement,” Stockton moves towards theoretical texts whose interests lie primarily outside of African American studies or critical race theory and also decidedly away from texts that explore racial subjectivity in moments where shame or debasement have a liberatory or emancipatory potential. Stockton locates her “critical genealogy of influential thinkers thinking through shame . . . Bataille, Kristeva, Taussig, Bersani, and Sedgwick—the latter most centrally—along with Edelman, Litvak, Kennedy, Muñoz, Holland, and also Reid-Pharr” (6). Though Stockton hopes to challenge at various moments the hierarchal divide between the creative and critical enterprises by, for example, a strategy “to emphasize Morrison’s parity with Freud as a theorist,” the fact that most scholars in her critical genealogy have given little attention to fields such as African American studies or critical race studies creates a pattern in which African Americans such as Morrison and Baldwin provide the occasional creative material for the study but little of the critical content. Thus Stockton can make innovative connections to texts that have not been thought about in African American studies or in critical race theory, as in her discussion of fabric in Querelle where, she claims, clothing becomes “an elegant, self-embracing shame—one that will dramatically show up as blackened skin” (58). It also allows her to make such connections between texts and fields, as when she invokes Barthes to discuss the moment of visuality surrounding the rape of an African American character in Pulp Fiction as a “pulp punctum” (141). However, her choice to engage with these texts in this way also create significant limitations on the scope of her conceptual framework and tends, unfortunately, to replicate the historical erasure of those who have existed precisely at the juncture of the signs “black” and “queer.”
 
One wonders about the ways in which Kathryn Bond Stockton’s notion of the “switchpoints between black and queer, queer and black” could be brought to bear on the histories of African diasporic sexualities that lie beyond the critical theory that fails to acknowledge them and studies like Stockton’s that seem only capable of acknowledging the shadow of their reflection in representation by people who are, by and large, neither Black nor queer. Do notions such as “switchpoints” or a practice of reading white critical theorists against the grain move us beyond the politics of refusal and erasure that have effectively kept these histories from our critical scrutiny? For instance, though Afro-British soccer star Justin Fashanu was the first Black soccer player in Britain to be paid in excess of one million dollars to play professional soccer and remains to this day the only European soccer player to come out as gay while still playing professionally (“Why”), he has largely been forgotten in both European history and sports history as well as within queer history and the history of the African diaspora. This is due to the complicated intersections of racial memory, shame, accusation, and erasure connected with Fashanu’s 1998 suicide by hanging following sensationalized accusations of sexual assault against a seventeen year old boy. John Fashanu, Justin Fashanu’s only brother, who was also a professional soccer player, was typical in his stance towards his brother’s coming out and his premature death in its characteristic enactment of a politics of refusal and erasure. Claiming that he hadn’t spoken to his brother in over seven years, John Fashanu insisted: “It doesn’t interest me one iota what he does” (“Fashanu May Have Fled”). John Fashanu, who indicated that Justin’s behavior had put him beyond the pale of not only family loyalty but also public representation, had publicly disowned his brother when he initially came out, labeling him “a complete outcast” (“John Fashanu”). While Justin Fashanu’s life and creative output were defined by shame, his death was marked by erasure. Stockton opens Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” with the “real world” controversy surrounding Black men on the so-called “Down Low” (1). Stockton argues that the controversy highlighted the “the strained relations between ‘black’ and ‘gay’ at the level of signs, even as ongoing struggles for rights and a health epidemic of epic proportions continued to connect black and gay people” (2). Her invocation of the AIDS crisis and the ongoing struggle for human rights that connects “‘black’ and ‘gay’ at the level of signs” highlights the potential deadly consequences of shame for those who live under those signs, but can Stockton’s “switchpoint” methodology offer something that can make sense of the refusal and erasure that continues to construct the lives of “dark queer folk”?
 
Besides considering the ways in which James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room reworks white characters into a racialized economy to explore decomposition as a site of attraction, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” pays little attention to the cultural production of artists or critics who literally and historically locate themselves and their work at the nexus of “Black” and “queer.” There are only too brief discussions of the works of Black queer artists and theorists Robert Reid-Pharr, Gary Fisher, Sharon Patricia Holland, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, and Rotimi Fani-Kayode. The book suffers from this exclusion and ultimately seems more concerned with the category of shame in the “switchpoints between black and queer, queer and black” for what it tells about whiteness and normativity, as evidenced by the book’s concluding line: “Apparently, even straight white folks need beautiful bottoms” (221). People of African descent have long been made to be aware of their use-value for the symbolic economy of Western culture, as Hortense Spillers famously writes in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”: “My country needs me, and if I was not here, I would have to be invented” (257). But what is the use-value and what are the consequences of the categories of shame and debasement for African people? How have they used these conditions to construct a culture of consequence for themselves? Stockton chooses to focus on debasement because of “its relation…to the concept of value” (7). She also “asks the reader to keep close at hand” the terms “abjection” and “humiliation,” and she interestingly defines abjection as having the sense of being cast or thrown away, while she wants humiliation to be understood in relation to “religious mortification” (7,8). Both of these terms as she defines them suggest a productive quality that lies outside of traditional modes of valuation that may have more significance to cultures that have been denied access to “value” as such. Recent studies have considered the ways in which abjection has historically been constitutive for African Americans’ aesthetic, cultural, and identity production. Elizabeth Alexander’s incisive essay, “‘Can You Be BLACK and Look at This?’: Reading the Rodney King Video(s),” and Saidiya V. Hartman’s definitional study of slavery, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, consider the ways African American cultural production remakes what Alexander labels “the ‘fact’ of abject blackness” into “a cultural memory [carried] on the flesh” (110, 91). Hartman argues in Scenes of Subjection that “the performance of blackness is inseparable from the brute force that brands, rapes, and tears open the flesh in the racial inscription of the body. In other words, the seeming obstinacy or the ‘givenness’ of ‘blackness’ registers the ‘fixing’ of the body by terror and dominance and in the way in which that fixing has been constitutive” (58). Studies like these can potentially deepen the understanding of abjection as a base material of culture-making beyond the ways in which it is invoked in the works examined in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer.”
 
Ultimately, the value of Stockton’s work lies in the seemingly unlikely connections it is able to make. Stockton’s chapter “Prophylactics and Brains: Slavery in the Cybernetic Age of AIDS” explores Toni Morrison’s 1988 novel Beloved in relation to cultural discourse around AIDS. It focuses on obvious cultural artifacts, such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1986 photograph collection Black Book and Morrison’s play about the murder of Emmett Till, as well as on the discourse of viral contamination in cyber culture that propagates at the birth of the AIDS crisis and the birth of Morrison’s novel. Stockton writes:
 

I want to read Beloved as it is never read—as a novel born in 1987, in the cybernetic age of AIDS. Its melancholy pairing of untimely deaths with dangerous transmissions (between the living and the living dead) is the major issue I wish to consider. This is not to read Beloved as an AIDS book—not exactly so—but to claim kinship to 1987 in its conception of a viral gothic. That is, Beloved, perhaps not accidentally, forges a model of viral memory.
 

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Stockton’s ability to bring Morrison’s work in conversation with cyber culture and the language of viral contamination adds much to our critical understanding of cultural transmission and the ways in which death and the dead become sites for negotiating “dangerous transmissions” and of the interpenetration between memory and the brain, the body and its surface, while negotiating the question of reproduction in ways that answer to the cybernetic age as well as the historical past. For me, this chapter, with its concepts of the “viral gothic” and “threatening reproduction,” was haunted by the spectre of Julius Eastman, the African American classical composer who scandalized the world of avant-garde music in the seventies and eighties with his unconventional performances and compositions such as “Gay Guerilla,” “Evil Nigger,” and “Crazy Nigger,” only to die in 1990 in anonymous poverty and complete obscurity in an upstate New York hospital. Rarely recorded, and only incompletely archived, the vast majority of Eastman’s compositions were lost in the 1980s when he was evicted from his New York City apartment and became homeless, his possessions first seized and then disposed of by the Sheriff’s Department. Despite Eastman’s previous notoriety, Kyle Gann notes that Eastman was dead six months before anyone bothered to write an obituary for him. Eastman’s composition “Evil Nigger” is written to be performed by multiple pianos and its enigmatic, building repetition is haunted thematically as well as sonically by its reiteration of the sense of “dangerous transmissions” and “threatening reproduction” of which Stockton speaks.

 
Once when Nina Simone introduced her controversial 1963 protest song against racial segregation and racist violence, “Mississippi Goddam,” she pronounced it a “show tune whose show has not been written yet.” Simone’s ability to pronounce the unpronounceable contributed to the sublime nature of her performance and this sublimity, moreover, lies at the critical nexus of “black” and “queer” along with what Kathryn Bond Stockton marks as “shame.” When called upon in 1980 to justify his controversial naming of his “Nigger Series,” Julius Eastman similarly responded with the typically enigmatic statement: “There are 99 names for Allah and there are 52 niggers.” Eastman thus maintained a sense of the “holy” in what Stockton explores as “nigger jokes” in the work of Morrison, Quentin Tarantino, and others (73). What is missing from Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” is precisely this sense that is most present in the work of Black queers who exist at “switchpoints between black and queer, queer and black”–not the celebration of debasement, but the counterpoint of the holy.
 

In 2000 the Human Genome Project, a consortium of privately and publicly funded researchers, drafted the first full sequence of the DNA in the human genome. Since that event, genes and DNA have exploded in public consciousness. Genes and DNA are not the same, and both determine plant and animal nature more than heredity and far less than total biological causality. Still, both are now understood as the overlapping, nearly-unitary source of biological as well as social and cultural determinism. Though this conception of DNA is not factual, it predominates in discourse about science and society. These popular misconceptions provide simplistic answers to complex social questions about the nature of gender, sexuality, and race, and the role of scientific knowledge in human life. To counter these misconceptions, we need scholars such as Judith Roof, who has channeled her formidable knowledge of gender theory and media studies into The Poetics of DNA, a pioneering cultural studies analysis—alongside cultural studies work on genetics by scholars like Dorothy Nelkin and Donna Haraway—on the narratives of DNA. Roof argues that the language about DNA circulating in the public has adverse effects on our ideas about identity, in particular about gender. However, this language persists because it is rooted in some of our most deeply held ideas about knowledge and about human life. Roof’s book outlines how this circular relation has worked in the history of genetics, and demonstrates that the way we talk about DNA reveals more about society than it does about the biological functions of deoxyribonucleic acid.
 
Roof’s central and most powerful argument is historical: DNA was discovered at an eerily perfect moment of scientific and philosophical change, just before structuralism gave way to post-structuralism. Roof describes how early geneticists incorporated structuralist language and concepts into their work on DNA and heredity, though more scientifically accurate models, such as systems and complexity theories, were newly available to them. The physical form of DNA fuels this curious fidelity to structuralism: DNA is a twinned chain of nucleotides that reproduces itself by splitting down the middle and duplicating its matching other half, reproducing biological information in the process of self-replication. DNA is a self-contained knowledge system whose structure equals its function: a perfect example of structuralism. Roof explains, “self-contained and self-identical, DNA does what it is by making more of itself. . . . It links agents of heredity directly to the life processes of living organisms. Structure melds with function in a self-reproducing strand of nucleic acids” (30). However, this structuralist paradigm is misleading; because DNA’s “self-identical functional structure [was] regarded as almost infinitely meaningful, it masks a shift to the contemporaneous emergence of less structuralist, less dialectical (or more poststructuralist) ways of thinking about phenomena” (32). Roof argues that scientists and philosophers fixated on a conception of DNA as structuralist and dialectical at the expense of scarier but more compelling notions of unpredictability, complexity, and indeterminacy that were emerging in the mid-twentieth century. In the sciences, theories of complexity, systems theory, and relativity were emerging at the time; complex systems theory in particular better describes DNA’s role within reproduction and heredity processes. In literary philosophy, post-structuralist models better suit the ways identity is formed by a still-unknowable interplay of culture and biology. However, Roof argues, the discovery of DNA helped preserve the more comforting and long-standing, if inaccurate and misleading, modes of knowledge crystallized in structuralism. Roof’s shorthand for the structuralist conception of DNA as a simplistic agent of heredity and biological determinism is “the DNA gene,” a phrase that describes the way popular discourse erases the difference between DNA and the gene and, by extension, other complicated biological processes associated with DNA and genes. Roof argues that “if there hadn’t been such a thing as a DNA gene, we would have contrived it anyway” —because “the DNA gene is the point at which many long-lived ideas about the order of the universe converge,” because we are already conditioned to conceive of DNA structurally, and because structuralist systems of thought are more exploitable than those that followed them historically (28). The profound power of “the DNA gene” to obfuscate these more accurate but threatening models grounds the rest of Roof’s book, which theorizes the ability of our metaphors about “the DNA gene” to preserve patriarchal, binary hierarchies, to privilege reductive narrative over other, more generative models of communication, and to appropriate biological minutiae for capitalist gain:
 

While biologically DNA is the means for reproducing and preserving genetic information, culturally it is the mechanism for reproducing and preserving the familiar world of meaningful structure, the linear cause and effect of (narrative) relations, the organizational sense of mechanical hierarchical function, and a belief in the generative power of the word that has typified Western thought from the Greeks to Albert Einstein.
 

(31)

From this perspective, our cultural and scientific narratives describing DNA and genetics are reductive at best, incorrect at worst. Roof argues that because our use of language and narrative remains rooted in structuralist conceptions of binarism, oppositionality, linearity, and logocentrism, the myriad and omnipresent linguistic metaphors for DNA are deeply integrated with the structuralist conception of “the DNA gene.” Both linguistic and structural conceptions of what she calls “the epic acid” have destructive social effects. Linguistic metaphors such as “the book of life,” “blueprint,” and “code” imply reductive and misleading ideas about DNA: that it functions like language, that genes can substitute for each other without negative side effects, that the arrangement of DNA sequences creates their meaning, that a segment of a DNA sequence has a one-to-one relationship with a particular life process, and that DNA is akin to an authored product available for copyright protection. Roof’s book outlines and speculates about the social and scientific effects of these dangerous misconceptions.

 
Most of the book applies narrative and gender theories to language about DNA; her primary texts come mostly from popular science writing, but she also discusses corporate public relations material, DNA and genetics scholarship and, all too briefly, screwball comedy films about DNA-based transformation. Though her central argument closely follows the basic premises of gender theories about narrative and about science, it is no less powerful. Roof uses the premise of science studies, that scientists base their research questions on pre-existing cultural norms and then use their experimental results to naturalize those norms. In the case of DNA, its binary, self-replicating structure reinforces the idea that reproduction depends on the complementary binaries inherent in heterosexuality. Scientific knowledge about DNA is then used to reinforce the heterosexual norm, which is in fact not genetically determined. Further, linguistic narratives about DNA perpetuate the patriarchal aspects of language itself as binary, hierarchical, and linear, and these characteristics in turn create the conceptual frames of scientific research and of popular discussions of that research. “With DNA genes, already endowed with reproductive missions, the seemingly inherent and inevitable heteroreproductive pattern saturates the world of imaginary operations” (116), including both the fictional and non-fictional representations of DNA that circulate in culture. For these reasons, Roof argues, gender and sexuality are becoming increasingly associated with genetic determinism while race is disconnected from it; that is, “at the same time that we start imagining genetic cotillions, race as a genetically based category is declared to be genetically nonexistent” (140).
 
On this point, Roof is off the mark. In an odd reversal of her book’s main thesis, she outlines ways in which structuralist taxonomies of human physiological types are out of intellectual fashion, even as genetics has enabled the persistence of structuralist approaches to biologically determined sex and gender (140–3). Her explanation for this, without much evidence, is that the contemporary global economy now privileges a “one- world” model of humanity in which race is no longer an economically or culturally necessary category (144–7). In general, Roof relies on speculation over deep analysis of evidence; on this topic her omission threatens to turn her book into a simplistic restatement of second wave feminism. In fact, she omits a large body of work that addresses the very phenomenon she claims is finished: what Duana Fullwiley calls the “molecularization of race” (1). Fullwiley and others, most notably sociologist Troy Duster, have shown that the ties between genetics and race are even stronger with the mapping of the genome. Even while race is conventionally understood to be a combination of cultural practices, historical forces, and evolutionary traits, technologies such as ancestry testing, DNA-based forensics, genetic screenings for “target” populations, and pre-implantation genetic screening of in-vitro embryos threaten to bring what Duster describes as eugenics in through the back door.
 
Despite this omission, and despite her claims that sex and gender are more associated with genetic determinism than is race, Roof’s arguments about narrative, metaphor, sex and gender are still compelling. For example, she uses feminist narratology to show that linguistic metaphors about DNA technologies reshape our notions of paternity while reinforcing paternity as crucial to identity. She begins with metaphor and metonymy, poetic devices that Freud and Jakobson argued provided two basic “poles” of language and representation. Roof notes that sexual politics have functioned according to these poles as well: paternity has been established using metaphor, the father’s name substituting for biological paternity. Metonymy, however, a mother and child’s proximity during labor, defines maternity. Similarly, linguistic representations of DNA encourage a misleading understanding of it as metaphor, according to an assumption that substitutions and replacements of DNA sequences result in stable meanings. Systems or complexity theories, biological representations modeling more accurately the way DNA works, characterize DNA as metonym, operating by contiguity and embedded in complex biological systems of which a double-helixed protein sequence is one part. Describing DNA as operating metaphorically perpetuates outmoded patriarchal narratives of reproduction. According to Roof, “the logic of substitution (symbolization, paternity, soul, magic) eclipses the contiguity that underwrites it, even—or especially—in relation to DNA, whose operation is purely metonymic. In this sense, DNA, genes, and metonymy are a figurative mother whose regime is thwarted and constantly reshaped by the representational machinations of an increasingly obsolete paternal law” (89). To avoid losing the meaning of paternity and, more generally, of law, “DNA is rewrapped in metaphor—and not just any metaphor, but the analogy of the Word, the code, the same figure applied to originary paternity and law (which, at least biblically, came together)” (91). This feminist reading of linguistic metaphors of DNA helps explain how new biotechnologies affect social structures such as gender and sexuality. Similarly, Roof argues that linguistic, metaphoric conceptions of DNA preserve human agency: if genes are like language, we can manipulate them easily. We can replace one gene sequence with another the way we use synonyms, or arrange sequences as if they were dependent clauses in a sentence. This illusion of genetic agency consoles those who may be disturbed by the homogeneity that genetic knowledge enforces—all humans share the same genes with each other and most genes with other primates—as well as by the idea that our genes are more in control of us than we are. According to the patriarchal, hierarchical logic of the DNA gene, Roof argues, linguistic metaphors of DNA and genetics facilitate ownership; DNA sequences are like strings of words “written,” and thus copyrightable, by the scientists who discover them. Further, these metaphors encourage the magical thinking of pseudoscience, misguided notions of linear cause and effect that characterize genetic science as a simple manipulation of protein sequences with predictable, stable therapeutic effects. Roof’s discussion of these various ways that structuralist, linguistic conceptions of “the DNA gene” enable illusions of mastery over our genes is essential reading for any student of biotechnology and culture.
 
This book’s primary weakness, exemplified by Roof’s omission of much work on race and genetics, is its lack of disciplinary substance on either the “science” or the “cultural studies” side. There are no extended close readings of texts, no extended analyses of laboratory practices, and no original historical reviews of genetics. This emphasis on theory and speculation rather than on intensive analyses of primary texts points to this book’s position as an early union of literary studies and genetic science. To establish the contours of an emerging field—what Lennard Davis and David Morris have called “biocultures,” the multidisciplinary approach to the intersections of biology and culture (411)—Roof establishes transdisciplinary understanding. She solves this problem by writing what amount to short introductions to literary theory, gender studies, and genetic biology, and by developing her arguments directly from the premises of those fields, such as the premise of literary studies that language structures understanding. As her background is in literary and cultural studies, her use of those fields’ premises overshadow her introductory use of genetics, and her argument is similarly weighted toward the literary. Her discussions of these disciplinary premises are extremely clear and straightforward, written in lively, enjoyable prose, and they make a compelling case for transdisciplinary scholarship. The downside of her choice is that she substitutes basic narrative and gender theories, as well as rudimentary biology, for intensive analysis on either disciplinary side. In general, science studies books such as those by Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and Anne Fausto-Sterling argue for the cultural studies of science by analyzing ways that culture affects scientific practice, challenging the positivist premise that scientific research is fueled exclusively by a quest for empirical truth. Roof’s point, that linguistic practices and their cultural associations affect scientific progress, remains more speculative here. Her best example of the way language shapes science is the etymology of “gene”: geneticist William Bateson, a translator and proponent of Mendel, proposed the term “genetics” in a 1906 letter. He felt that this term would represent adequately the field of science devoted to discovering the agents of heredity and of generational variation. Another scientist, Wilhelm Johannsen, then coined smaller etymological units from “genetics” — “gene,” “genotype,” and “phenotype” —in 1909, establishing a field-wide move toward the reduction of biological processes to ever-smaller agenic objects. The two concepts inherent in this etymology—the root “gen” associated with both birth and race or species, and the increasingly small agents of biological processes—established a subsequent destiny for genetics research to fulfill. Roof argues that “the analogies and figurations of DNA as the genetic agent that prefigure and anticipate the working out of its structure already determine (or overdetermine) the directions research takes as well as predefine the analogies and coincident conceptual baggage that accompanies DNA as the mode of its public transmission” (77). This description of the way language structures scientific understanding is compelling, but it is Roof’s only example of language determining science. Her larger argument that structuralist theories determine scientific goals is convincing, as are her analyses of the dangerous consequences of contemporary corporate press releases purveying what she shows are reductively structuralist characterizations of DNA as a language. But Roof’s arguments rest on a more humanist assumption, that by creating our perceptions of science, cultural norms affect the social status of scientific research but don’t necessarily substantively change the research itself. A stronger science studies position or argument is difficult to find in The Poetics of DNA. The book seems to be written for humanists interested in science culture, rather than for scientists interested in a literary and cultural studies perspective, and so its introductory explanations of literary, narrative, and gender theory seem misplaced. Still, this is a rhetorical problem of audience and not an overriding weakness of argument. As the broader intersection of literature and science and the more specific cultural studies of genetics develop, and as an audience for such work grows and stabilizes, Roof’s book will be seen as an important initial investigation of the dynamic and potentially damaging relationship between cultural norms and genetic research.
 

Poetry liberates language from ordinary constraints. Media Poetry is a paramount agent in pushing language into a new and exciting domain of human experience.
 

Eduardo Kac, Media Poetry

Introducing Eduardo Kac’s collection Hodibis Potax, the fictional author “Philip Sidney” (identified as “Director of Thermal Ion Verbodynamics Division” in a “Department of Literary Timeshift Experiments” at an “Eternaut Training Center” in Shanghai, who refers to the artifact in hand as a “qbook”) recalls Kac wanting to send holopoems (holographically displayed poetry) towards Andromeda in 1986. Set in the future, the introduction describes the collection—a short and beautifully rendered bilingual edition of Kac’s work over the past twenty-five years—and situates his artistic output as a whole as being ahead of its time. Poetry, writes Sidney, “makes things either better than nature brings forth, or quite anew, forms such as never were in nature” (7). For him, this trait is literally apparent in the work in Hodibis Potax (a curious title for a printed retrospective, since it is devoid of overt meaning). These playful gestures, and the lofty statements offered by Sidney with regard to Kac, are an interesting reflection—as match and counterpoint—to works presented both in this monograph and in Media Poetry: An International Anthology, an anthology Kac recently edited. Whereas Kac’s own inventions are futuristic and fanciful explorations of non-literary territory, relying on good-natured cleverness to deliver a message or concept, the poetry and poetics illuminated in Media Poetry are absolutely contemporary (often reporting on completed works), and are for the most part serious discussions of process and product.
 
In 1996, Kac edited a special issue of the journal Visible Language devoted to “New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies.” The first anthology of its kind, it was one of the few authoritative texts about diverse global practices in digital poetry, containing many useful references to historic artworks, artists, and theories. The value of the writing and images Kac initially collected is signaled in his introduction: “The revolutionary change in writing and reading strategies new media poetry promotes,” he writes, “are likely to have a long lasting presence” (100). A decade later, Kac—now more widely known as a biological artist than a pioneering author, theorist, and curator of digital poetry—has revisited his influential (yet somewhat obscure) anthology and has published a revised edition titled Media Poetry: An International Anthology. He has also issued a partial catalog of his own artworks via Hodibis Potax. Together the two volumes intimately chronicle a trajectory of digital poetry through the lenses of major critics and practitioners, and offer an in-depth catalog of a single artist, Kac himself. Extensively updated, Media Poetry combines original content (with amendments) alongside new essays important to the study and practice of electronic literature, and proves Kac’s initial observation correct. Poetry created with computers and by other scientific means is no brief trend; this volume provides expert viewpoints on emerging media poetry practiced since before the emergence of the World Wide Web. Scholars will almost certainly use these writings to fortify discussions about the subject for years to come. Hodibis Potax complimentarily spotlights one artist’s range of elegant output in fields the anthology historicizes but can only partly divulge (e.g., Holopoetry, Digital Poetry, Biopoetry, Space Poetry).
 
Media Poetry is valuable both as an historical record and, as it is intended, as “a contemporary tool meant to be instrumental in the wider dissemination of the poets’ achievements—the poems” (9). The book is organized into three sections—Digital Poetry, Multimedia Poetics, Historical and Critical Perspectives—although these distinctions rather fluidly demarcate the artistic practices under investigation. A set of appendices include an up-to-date “Media Poetry Chronology,” a “Selected Webliography,” sources, and biographies. Covering past and present areas of inquiry, essays in “Digital Poetry” and “Multimedia Poetics” share practically identical approaches: the author uses her/his own artworks to explain a particular perspective on computer-based poetics. This characteristic diminishes in the “Historical and Critical Perspectives” section, in which the essays (with the exception of Jean-Pierre Balpe’s “Reflections on the Perception of Generative and Interactive Hypermedia Works”) have broader objectives; here the authors present an overview of works done by others. Each section of the book contains one more “new” essay than old, tipping the balance of the collection’s focus in favor of the contemporary, an editorial decision that promotes new thinking on the subject while establishing its lineage. Ideas that come from pioneers of media poetry are entwined with the latest thinking on the subject, covering the gamut of experimentation within the discipline. A reader who is not already familiar with any of the essays might not be able to distinguish the writing of one era from another, a testimony both to the vitality of works presented and to the sophistication of the field in general.
 
Kac’s curatorial approach shows that many forms of digital expression are no longer new to artists and writers, and that “what is at stake in media poetry is not a retake of the modern ideal of the ‘new’ as a value in itself” (8). Addressing the subject as media poetry (instead of “new media”), Kac widens the scope of investigation to introduce “photonic and biological creative tools as well as non-digital technology” (such as works on videotape). Compared to other fine anthologies on the subject, such as New Media Poetics (Morris & Swiss, eds., 2006), Media Poetry is overtly more expansive in scope, significantly veering away from literary (or even artistic) foundations much of the time. While the focus of investigation in both volumes is digitally processed material prepared for computer screens, Kac includes essays on a wider range of topics than are usually covered in the field and covers unexpected disciplines that inform the work. By doing so, Media Poetry provides a greater sense of expansion of diversified forms in poetry as redefined by media poets than other anthologies on the subject.
 
Essays from the original volume by Philippe Bootz, John Cayley, Ernesto M. de Melo e Castro, Ladislao Pablo Györi, Kac, Jim Rosenberg, André Vallias, and Eric Vos—now landmark writings representing fundamental aspects of mediated poetry such as automatically generated text, visual poetry, hypertext, holography, and use of unconventional syntax—are interwoven with new essays in each section. While the more recent essays unquestionably reveal new areas of exploration, the familiar material here is still vibrant and seemingly contemporary because media poetry, if no longer new, is still at an early stage of development. But media poetry is always finding new realms in which to operate, which Media Poetry clearly attends to. Kac selects eleven new pieces for the book; each discusses possibilities that have emerged since the mid-1990s. Kac wisely includes essays by authors who focus on the implications of the influence of machinery on poetry, paying particular regard to increased portability, media convergence, broadband networks, and gaming. In addition to technological and artistic considerations brought forth in the volume, the growing influence of scientific thought emerges as a substantial theme in several essays.
 
Strickland’s essay, “Quantum Poetics: Six Thoughts,” for example, one of the longest and most sophisticated pieces in Media Poetry, begins by discussing “Time Dimensions” in new media poems. The fact that “Quantum Poetics” is the focus, emphasizing temporal and biological aspects of (or made possible by) works, indicates a move away from a technical, or even an aesthetic, orientation in analysis. Strickland’s discussion establishes time as an important component in the narrative of digital poems. Strickland also considers the anti-spatial orientation of some works, the meaning of acts of multitasking, media resonance, translation, and the implications of the layering of information on our minds, bodies, and texts. “There is no seamless information environment,” she writes, “only increasingly extended forms of attention and inter-attention, cross-modes of attention, muscular, neural, endocrinologic, visual, acoustic, kinesthetic, and proprioceptive” (37). Strickland’s non-technical musings on the possibilities for digital poetry represent a trend in digital poetry to merge the arts and sciences and reflect the wider critical outlook found elsewhere in Media Poetry. While most of the essays are—understandably, unproblematically—rooted in the technological aspects of the work, Strickland’s and those of a few others (e.g., André Vallias, Kac, Brian Lennon) include philosophical and scientific perspectives. Her discussion of the particulars of True North, The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, V, and other works is not overshadowed by theoretical considerations. Kac’s essay, “Biopoetry” (which appears in Media Poetry and Hodibis Potax), also acknowledges digital poetry’s affinity with science. Since poetry has been migrating away from the printed page since the 1980s, he writes, “in a world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic creatures, it is time to consider new directions for poetry in vivo,” and proposes the “use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal, and non-verbal creation” (191). Offering a twenty point outline, accompanied by illustrations of six biopoems he has created or envisioned (2002–2006), Kac playfully outlines various directions human expression can take through biotechnology and the use of living organisms. His “microbot performance” involves writing and performing with a contrived mechanical bee, “in the language of the bees, for a bee audience, in a semi-functional, semi-fictional dance.” Other ideas presented are equally unique, but the fact that some, like “Nanopoetry,” “Transgenic poetry,” “Luciferase signaling,” and “Haptic listening” are far-fetched and involve technologies inaccessible to most people raises questions about the practicality and public utility of microbot performance. In general, the essays in Media Poetry demonstrate that media poetry is a sophisticated expressive force that cannot be dismissed as a superficial folly. These essays contribute to legitimizing the practice, and give readers plenty of reasons to consider the work. The importance of a concept like “Biopoetry” is thus its originality. Media poets, especially those who are steadily producing new works at present, can afford to look towards the future in such a way. Years hence, perhaps we will see some of these ideas brought to fruition. Even if only aesthetic (and not practical) results could be achieved, the displays envisioned by Kac would still represent a profound artistic achievement and an expansion in the sphere of the arts. Who knows? Maybe seeing a spectacle such as “Luciferase signaling” (creating “bard fireflies by manipulating the genes that code for bioluminescence” [192]) could have a positive, transformative effect on society.
 
Kac’s more down-to-earth essay in the volume, like most of the others, discusses work already accomplished by the artist. He traces the metamorphosis of his digital poems “from ASCII to cyberspace,” culminating in a brief discussion of an “avatar” poem he has created (“Perhaps,” 1998/99). In “Perhaps,” a “world” with 24 avatars (each a different word), the reader establishes her/his “own presence in this textworld through a verbal avatar” (63), recalling practices often used in gaming. The names of the avatars Kac has chosen resonate with digital poetry’s burgeoning engagement with scientific principles (e.g., ion, lumen, nebula, quanta, titanium, and xeric). Otherwise, the essay is much like others in the collection that illuminate the various qualities (kinetic, interactive, visual, hypertextual) that make digital poetry what it is—not a rival to, but an activated relative of, written and artistic forms.
 
Several of the newfound spaces for poetry, including cell phones, Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) with Internet capabilities, and other portable devices, are introduced in Giselle Beiguelman’s essay in Media Poetry, “Nomadic Poems.” Beiguelman discusses three of her projects, each of which indicates shifts in the modalities of poetic presentation invented after Y2K, that employ mobile devices such as electronic billboards to generate spontaneous works. Using a combination of wireless and other technologies to prepare interactive verbal and visual artwork, Beiguelman investigates “the possible realm of a post-phonetic, hybrid culture, crossed by printed and digital layers, where the informational and esthetic codes are entangled through programming and produce a new semantics involving a rearrangement of signs and signification processes” (97). Following indirectly in the lineage of Concrete poetry, she intends to put unconventional, often symbolic poems that are written in ways poems are not normally written in places they are not normally seen. Making historical connections here is not as important, however, as noting that Beiguelman’s applications of common technology for creative purposes are historical acts. Many artists have used L.E.D. displays, but few—if any—have enabled interactive content in such a way. This effort to reach out to mass culture by using the tools of mass culture expands the physical terrain and the visibility of the poem. Using the latest digital gadgets outside their original contexts, Beiguelman’s works seek to project text into the reader’s “non-place, space-time of antiphenomenology and visibility,” where “within the intersections of words and symbols, the boundaries of communication and of art are being redefined” (97–98). She addresses the foundations for, and conditions of, her work, showing how poetic works can be made (and consumed) by someone walking down the street typing SMS messages (or the like). In her examples the emphasis is graphical; in Poétrica (2003–04), non-alphabetic fonts construct visual patterns in order to “undo verbal and visual ties through the combination of fonts and numbers, languages and codes” (102). Not only is Beiguelman exploring new technological ground, she convincingly redefines the boundaries of what can be considered a poem. Such mobilized, transient conceptions of poetry give rise to yet another connotation for the (now clichéd) phrase, “poetry in motion.” While acknowledging that all the efforts involved with the projects may be in vain because such projects can (and do) vanish, Beiguelman does not offer critical perspective on her work. One of the “starting points” for these projects is the claim that “nothing imprisons the text” (97). Knowing the unreliability of network technology and hardware, however, and given the limitations of handheld interfaces, it is difficult to believe that anyone participating in the project would not encounter various sorts of limitations. By concluding the piece with the statement that “the interface is the message” (103), Beiguelman implies that these works produce a change in presentation, but obviously that is not all there is. With these new interfaces, new types of poems are made.
 
Two promising areas of growth, namely gaming and hardware modification, are revealed in Orit Kruglanski’s contribution to Media Poetry, “Interactive Poems.” Kruglanski tells a casually written story about her writing digital poetry using alternative methods, media (including PDA), and adapted hardware. Her first project was a poem-as-game, titled “InnerSpace Invaders” (1998), based on the type of interaction found in the videogame Space Invaders (a user shoots words descending on the screen); her second involved modifying the voice and content of a child’s speaking doll. A modified Palm Pilot (tilt sensor added) served as the platform for another project (“Please,” 2000), and Kruglanski built a “force feedback mouse” for another (“As Much as you Love Me”). In this work, a mouse to which two electromagnets are added sits atop a metal mousepad; a microcontroller in the computer modulates magnetic friction, making the mouse harder to move. In addition to ruminating on her enthusiasm and concerns regarding interactive poetry, Kruglanski’s essay documents (without extensive detail) some of the first efforts to present poetry as an interactive, digital game—a practice seriously pursued subsequently by Jim Andrews, Marko Niemi, and others. Since artists such as Aya Karpinska have subsequently made poems using gaming consoles, cellular phones, and magnetic card readers, and Daniel Howe—in order to realize his outstanding work “Text Curtain”—has built a computer and an operating system that permits simultaneous use of two computer mouses, Kruglanski’s essay seems almost prophetic. As does each of the essays added to Kac’s collection, Kruglanski’s provides an insider’s view of the innovative media poets are working on at present, suggesting areas of application readers may expect to see develop further. Because the works are often very complex (yet sometimes subtly so), having such authorial accounts is invaluable. In addition to giving context to future endeavors, these essays offer useful instructions on how to read the poems. Processes used by the poets are demystified, showing clearly what is going on inside the participatory mechanisms they have constructed.
 
Bill Seaman’s “Recombinant Poetics” discusses interactivity within mutable fields, and the dynamic construction of meaning, through his computer-based application “The World Generator / The Engine of Desire.” Bootz’s “Unique-reading Poems,” Balpe’s “Reflections on the Perception of Generative and Interactive Hypermedia Works,” and Kostelanetz’s “Language-based Videotapes & Audio Videotapes” are equally strong, and build functional models and frameworks of communication for multimedia poetry by using their own works as a point of departure. Each, in its own way, creates a framework for understanding the shared responsibility of the reader and writer who interact with, to use Seaman’s phrase, “mutable dynamic media” (159). The consequences and significance of layering texts and meaning using complex, interactive methods are discussed throughout the collection. In sum, the essays in Media Poetry provide a broad-based view of the practices they cover, exposing multiplicities (histories, contexts) inherent in the work. They explain expertly what is at stake and what is entailed in reading and participating in such texts. Two essays in the “Historical and Critical Perspectives” section of Media Poetry, Friedrich Block’s “Digital Poetics or on the Evolution of Experimental Media Poetry” and Lennon’s “Screening a Digital Visual Poetics,” provide a practice-based history alongside theoretical observations to portray a viable scenario that places digital media poetry in the lineage of experimental twentieth century arts. As have others, Block connects contemporary critical discourse in digital poetry to the intellectual climate of Europe in the 1960s (e.g., deconstruction, cybernetics). Artistic analysis of digital poetry, for Block, involves considering the material and digital media, the animation and information process, and the audience’s activity and interactivity. These are the points of consideration in an “art-specific” reading of texts that sees texts as being made in the spaces in between literary and technological context and action. Lennon traces the evolution of digital text, and explores the results of the “putative demise of textuality” on the Web. He offers yet another perspective for media poetry by addressing hybrid theoretical models, hybrid bodies, and, finally, the type of hybrid practices with which we are now becoming familiar. Through a study of Kac’s 3D/virtual poem “Secret” (1993), Lennon speculates on the role media plays in future traditions of poetics. “Secret” is amongst Kac’s many works illuminated in Hodibis Potax; as we see in this particular piece, a simple “ideogrammatic word constellation” (Lennon’s phrase) appears as the viewer interacts with the virtual object. As in many of Kac’s poems, a combination of single words or short phrases is used to convey a larger concept, coordinated by the media employed. On the surface, Kac’s work tends to use clever poetic juxtapositions of language, especially as textual layering is minimal. In effect, however, Kac relies as much on myth, the unknown, novelty, and fancifulness.
 
The first section of Hodibis Potax contains more than twenty illustrations of Kac’s holopoetry (adding more than two dozen representations to what appears on his website, http://ekac.org). The terse poems expand as a result of their highly technologized treatment. Morphing, dissolving, and juxtaposed words appear as the viewer moves in space. Another section of Hodibis Potax, “Numeric Poetry,” documents Kac’s electronic experiments circa 1982–1999, some of which are available via the Web. These works display fundamental attributes of digital poetry: permutation, and kinetic graphical rendering (sometimes distortion) of visually-based expression. Since the analog/print form does not represent the “live” work faithfully, one value of these pages, beyond their vibrant documentation of the work, is that they may lead the reader to authentic versions of the poems, as does (ideally) the “Webliography” in Media Poetry. In addition to the essay on “Biopoetry,” Hodibis Potax also includes another essay that appears on the Web, “Spatial Poetry,” which speculates on possibilities for “poetry conceived for, realized with, and experienced in conditions of micro or zero gravity.” Of course, such work is only imagined at this point, but if we are to believe the author of the book’s introduction, it will eventually be produced.
 
While wordplay is an unquestionable characteristic of works produced by media poets (e.g., Melo e Castro’s distortions of language and Kostelanetz’s morphing words), a serious tone pervades Media Poetry. In Kac’s own work, by contrast, we do see humor. In “Biopoetry,” for example, he envisions “Atomic writing,” in which atoms are precisely positioned to create molecules and spell words. “Give these molecular words expression in plants,” he writes, “and let them grow new words through mutation. Observe and smell the molecular grammatology of the resulting flowers” (191). Can such ideas be completely dismissed, seen as ludicrous? Given the accomplishments of DNA and genomic engineering, who’s to say that “Atomic writing” or “Luciferase signaling” will remain impractical and without value? Kac’s levity, while it does not exceed the boundaries of possibility, is a welcome diversion from the staid articulations offered elsewhere in Media Poetry. The new “space” of digital writing, as evoked in Media Poetry, has evolved so as to include the overt influence of physical sciences, the important role time plays in media poetry, and authorial interests in gaming. Now the field is becoming even more aesthetically diversified, and its demographic expands (e.g., powerful essays by women are featured, whereas the original volume had none).
 
Media Poetry is a news-broadcast from an international gathering of digital poets; Hodibis Potax provides a vivid record of the techniques used by a pioneer in form(s) not commonly practiced, such as holopoetry. The absence of an accompanying CD-ROM or DVD featuring examples of the work discussed in these volumes would be notable, were it not for the generous “Webliography” included in Media Poetry and at ekac.org; Kac’s website has for many years featured examples of most of his oeuvre. Logistical, technological, economic, and other factors that prevent media files from being appended to books about electronic literature are becoming less a misfortune thanks to the World Wide Web. As new forms and approaches to composition emerge, our authoritative documents need revision (as we have seen for example in Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space and George Landow’s Hypertext). We can hope that Kac will, in decades hence, continue to use his experience and expertise as an artist and researcher to issue additional volumes.
 

Joe Amato’s Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture is a book about a great many things, but it is most successfully a book about the slings and arrows of outrageous academe. In this book Amato charts his trajectory through a blue-collar upbringing, a career as an engineer in large corporations, and, finally, through work as a poet and tenure-track English professor who accidentally jumps the track. He does this using all the tools in the shed—including poetry, aphorism, narrative, theory, and textual manipulation.
 
Amato’s book is composed of three “demo tracks”—long, multifarious chapters—that are punctuated by short, aphoristic lists called “Grant Proposals” that meditate on the place of art in late capitalist culture. The term “demo track,” which refers to the sample songs musicians use to gain fans, get booked at clubs and, they hope, signed to labels, at once communicates two very important aspects of this project: the energetic provisionality (carefully cultivated, of course) that is its style, and its constant self-awareness of its essential status as a professional gambit. Many other connotations of the term also resonate: Amato’s is anything but a one-track mind.
 
The first and most cacophonous track of the three, “Industrial Poetics: A Chautauqua Multiplex in Fits and Starts,” adopts the formal metaphor of the Chautauqua —a turn-of-the-century educational form that amounted to a kind of pedagogic traveling circus where the lions were supplanted by educational lectures and populist politics. As Amato stages his show, his most persuasive organizing principle is his interest in the plight of the poet-scholar (and his or her creative output) in the academic-industrial complex. The book is not a thorough survey of this complex problem, but is rather at its core a theoretically robust Künstlerroman, an erratic narrative of Amato’s own progress toward an elusive self-realization as a poet and scholar.
 
In Track 1 Amato charts a direction for the project: “My polemic is geared, admittedly, toward the more positive aspects of a poetic industrial—an industrial poetics. To see where this takes us” (37). Amato’s attempts to develop a theoretical or practical understanding of what an “industrial poetics” might be or do are continually thwarted, however, as the text swerves into discussions of the means of production of scholarly work. This is not, however, to suggest that the book fails—imagine our loss if Tristram Shandy had just gotten to his point. With Amato, we are along for a ride in which the whole point is how difficult it can be to get to the point, particularly within the working conditions of academe.
 
For example, the section that follows the above declaration of intention consists, without transition, of a pasted-in email message, rendered in a new computer-styled font. The email informs “Joe” that his manuscript has been rejected, and forwards along a reader’s report about a text that sounds not unlike Industrial Poetics itself. The reader’s report begins, hilariously: “I really think you should NOT publish this.” Any writer—poet, scholar, or otherwise—will wince at the adamancy of the capitalized NOT, as it calls all of the ghosts out of one’s own closet of horrifying rejection letters. Shortly thereafter Amato takes a new turn as he introduces an argument in which he equates academic scholarly practices to corporate bureaucratic supervision: “the refereed journal is thus a simple feedback mechanism designed to regulate ‘quality,’ yes, but ‘quality’ of the game itself” (41). Amato then proceeds to describe the parameters of this feedback mechanism in a barbed technocratic language that must really be read in total for its effect, but here is a taste:
 

Each thermo-regulating subcommittee accepts and rejects submitted knowledge-bodies to maintain professional, sangfroid environs, setpoint 68 deg. F., with ± 2 deg F. permissible variation.
 

(42)

What makes this joke work is not only that it is a part of a larger argument that successfully skewers the flaws of the peer-review system, but also that Amato is fluent in such highly “engineered” language. Track 1 has already revealed Amato’s former life as a design engineer, a life in which this was his primary professional language, but it is in Track 2 that this story, which is the reactor-core of the book, fully explodes.

 
This second track, “Technical Ex-Communication: How a Former Professional Engineer Becomes a Former English Professor” (a version of which was published as an essay in PMC 10.1), presents a lively and relatively linear narrative of Amato’s professional career—first as an engineer and then as a poet-teacher-scholar—so that he might make some key connections between those realms. For some of us, the transition from doing design engineering for a pharmaceutical company to teaching English and producing ambitious scholarship will seem so mysterious as to be nearly alchemical. And yet, Amato’s primary argument in this section seems to be that the yawning gulf between the culture and practices of one job and those of the other is much smaller than we, even on our most cynical days, might imagine. Amato focuses on his work as a design engineer for Miller Brewing Company and then at Bristol-Myers Co., and details the tenacity of his desire to have a job in which he is left alone to do his own work (designing temperature regulating systems and the like), rather than being constantly encouraged and recruited into the management of his fellow laborers, a prospect whose endless meetings and corporate sloganeering never appeals to Amato. And so he leaves it all behind for the unmolested life of a poet in academe (cue laugh track).
 
In Track 2 Amato tells the tragicomic tale of his time as a tenure-track professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). The heart of this section is a close reading of a book probably few of us have read, The Idea of Ideas. Amato describes the book: it “appear[ed] in all faculty mailboxes [at IIT]. It’s called The Idea of Ideas, by one Robert W. Galvin, ‘Special Limited Edition’ published in April 1991 by Motorola University Press” (85). Amato explains that Galvin, the former CEO of Motorola, sits on IIT’s Board of Trustees, and along with fellow corporate billionaire Bob Prizker, has essentially kept IIT in business by donating many millions to the university. The Idea of Ideas, as Amato parses it, is a master-class in the fantastically empty language of Corporate America. Amato’s skillful reading of the book performatively suggests why such a realm would have precious little space for the nasty critical reading habits of an Amato. While calling into question the practices of corporate-academic integration somewhat distinctive to IIT, this close reading also calls into question the work that the hallmarks of scholarly integrity—the paper quality, the scholarly apparatus, the university press—can perform for a writer, regardless of the quality of her or his work.
 
The Bobs managed, according to Amato, to forge a marriage at IIT between corporate industry and education that far surpasses the student-as-consumer model with which we are increasingly familiar—thus, corporate manuals in the faculty mailbox, and much worse. A liquidation of the Humanities at IIT predictably follows, and Amato finds himself a casualty, denied tenure for reasons that finally remain locked behind closed doors. He is told only that the deans had concerns about his being fully “aligned with the new vision of IIT” (93).
 
Track 3, “Labor, Manufacturing, Workplace, Community: Four Conclusions in Search of an Ending,” contains the most traditional critical work in the book. It develops some new concerns and deepens others. While “Conclusion the 1^st: Labor” goes on to thoughtfully deepen Amato’s interest in imagining “a poetry that is not subsidized at some level by Fortune 500 attenuations” (111), “Conclusion the 3^rd: Workplace” offers a fresh inquiry into the notoriously slippery issue of “craft,” a discussion that is one of the critical highlights of the book. Of course, the problematics of the industry of poetics continue to seep in everywhere. “Conclusion the 4^th: Community” theorizes the “poetic community,” but the concern for the industry around that community necessarily permeates the discussion. Here, within an argument focusing on the poetic reading as a scene of community, Amato makes clear that the “regulating machinery” of scholarly publishing is always influencing his writing, and thus that his poetic performances are irrevocably inscribed within that feedback system, even as they work to circumvent it. He writes:
 

I type

 
The magic of poetry

 
and my readers (provided I have any), from outside reader to editor to copy editor to blurb-er to John Q (in print and, if I’m lucky, during public reading), are forced to negotiate what I mean by these words. Like magic! —though we should bear in mind that all manner of material transaction has taken place in order to get these words “across.” The magic of poetry, then, enables productive, unproductive, and non productive energy transfers associated with cultural, spiritual, and emotional work. Poetry works its magic despite the many trade-offs . . . that accompany the I-give-I-give of publishing, of going public.
 

(156)

“Conclusion 2: Manufacturing” consists of a long poem that I can’t help but feel would fare better in the sphere of performance which Amato discusses in Conclusion 4.

 
So we are given four conclusions and no ending, and I think Amato might be pleased that his book be deemed “suggestive”—not in the way that word is often used, which can be to damn with faint praise, but authentically, as a word that denotes a text original enough to jar your thinking out of the tracks in which it normally runs. As should be clear by now, Industrial Poetics works in two recognizable genres—critiques of the profession and genre-bending critical-autobiographical works by poets. This splice is productive, although the book is most successfully a critique of the profession that draws on the formal innovations of critical-poetic work like Susan Howe’s. This works in part because one continually senses that Amato would prefer to be writing books like Howe’s, if only the industry in which he toils would allow it, and this anxiety is itself an important part of Amato’s project. In this way, his book differs profitably from other books in the state-of-the-profession field. One of last year’s best examples of that genre, Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works, is an incisive, formally traditional scholarly analysis and rethinking of trends in academic labor. Bousquet, an activist on academic labor throughout his academic career, writes from the safety of a tenured position, however, and thus is free to complete a book like How the University Works without having to live through the contingencies that plague Amato and others like him (which is not to imply that Bousquet is eating bon-bons all day, but rather to point out a fact to which Bousquet himself calls attention in his work). Amato’s book thus produces a sense of urgency through an authentic anxiety that is qualitatively different from what a book like Bousquet’s can (or should) achieve.
 
But Amato’s book does more than illustrate Bousquet’s ideas about the problematics of the academic division of labor from a perspective closer to the front lines. Indeed, Amato’s uneasy relationship to academe comes not only from not having/ making tenure, it comes from his working class background, from his experiences in white-collar jobs in manufacturing and, importantly, from his position as a poet. The innovation in language and form in Amato’s book proves valuable as a way of disrupting our scholarly reading habits, which are conditioned by the very disciplinary forces Amato seeks to question. Think of the sections of Susan Howe’s The Midnight in which she collages together scholarly research, the reporting of the process of that research, autobiography, images. Howe’s book is like a Louise Bourgeois work in which rags from various places are sutured together and stuffed to make a human-shaped sculpture whose uncanny vital force is more than the sum of its parts. In Amato’s book similar formal innovations succeed even (and perhaps especially) as they fray at the seams and fail to achieve the symbiosis of disparate elements that makes the work of Susan Howe so pleasurable.
 
As I finished Amato’s book, the question left hanging was how it appeared in my hands in the first place, given the realities of the academic marketplace it probes. The sardonic honesty that characterizes Amato’s voice in much of the book is, strikingly, a tone that one increasingly identifies with the genre of the blog. Academic blogs routinely take up issues related to academic production and destruction; one thinks of blogs like historian Claire B. Potter’s witty Tenured Radical (http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/), which (among many other things) offers practical career advice for untenured radicals as well as a space for commiseration. It seems important to note that despite tonal and some formal similarities, what Amato does in his book exceeds what can be done in a blog. Or, if it is imaginable that Amato might produce a similar text in weekly chunks on his blog, it is unlikely that they would ever be read holistically, in the way that we, at least for the time being, continue to read books. What would be lost in dismembering the book thus is the reader’s very awareness of the disjointed, interrupted nature of academic production, a fact that is obscured in a blog because such discontinuity is the default character of blogs—it is the message of their medium and as such is usually invisible to their readers.
 
Interestingly, as self-consciously self-conscious as the book is both about its status as a non-traditional critical work and about the scant places for such work at the banquet table of academe, there is minimal discussion, even in the acknowledgements, of how the book got picked up and published in the company of a number of more traditional (though likewise strong and provocative) books of literary criticism in the Iowa Contemporary North American Poetry series. We are told by Amato to blame Charles Bernstein for the book, and Bernstein is nearly a palpable muse for this text. Naturally, the absence of the story of the book’s coming-to-life makes sense, in that telling the story of the publication of a book within the pages of the book is the archetypal dilemma of autobiography, but it is precisely the kind of impossible task that a book like this leads the reader to expect to see attempted. No doubt Amato’s book was selected for publication much the same way many books are—a combination of hard work, good luck, and generous friends (Bernstein among them) bending the right ears. I’m sure it was more complex than that, and ultimately that story remains to be told elsewhere. Regardless, the final paradox of a book that is propelled by them is the physical fact of the book itself—its very publication offers an optimistic rejoinder to the kind of dire questions it poses about the Poetic Industry.
 

If these past decades of ruminating on J.L. Austin have rendered I do a paradigm of performative utterance, one of the actions with which this performative arguably coincides—beyond conjugal contract, beyond ostensible entrapment in a certain symbolic narrative—is the no less paradigmatic act of all acts, the sexual encounter. The more familiar opposite of this performative informs the no less powerful pseudo-tautology No means No. Against the rhetorical and non-rhetorical certainties of I do and No, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has more recently posited the periperformative—I want to have said it—whose frisson depends on a formulation’s propinquity to some more conventionally understood locutionary scenario (e.g. having actually said it). The auxiliary of “wanting…” implies that the periperformative describes a lexical correlative to desire, as the performative describes a lexical correlative to a fantasy of the instantaneousness between desire and that desire’s objects.
 
Bersani and Phillips’s recent book offers an important contribution (one might say non-contribution) to such performative scholarship, in its displacement of “that act” as we know it; in its trenchant argument that one of the most important things to do with words is not the instantiation of or flirtation with action, but rather the potentially indefinite deferral and reconceptualization of action, for the sake of holding a bit longer onto the uncertainties of words, the uncertainties of what is recognizable as action (in metonymic rather than metaphorical relation to language). intimacies presents theorizations of intimacy unhinged from desire as we know it, intimacies whose most (if not only) reliable component is a spatial closeness neither definitively predicated on nor leading to sexual inevitability.
 
This sexual moratorium is all the more remarkable given intimacies’s insistence on a psychoanalysis held apart from the erotic energies on which that discipline is usually imagined to rest (and act). Psychoanalysis constitutes both subject and object of these delicately transitive meditations. That is further surprising in that much of Bersani’s career has so vigorously pursued the question of how to do things with sex. Or rather (in the spirit of the aforementioned sense of non-contributiveness), how not to do things with sex. The violence of sex, as Bersani has announced, is peculiarly valuable in its capacity to disable the aggressions of egotism. (I shall return to the aporetic-seeming mobius of disabling capacity.) intimacies, on the other hand, articulates modes of interrelation that might (ethically, epistemologically, psychoanalytically) be possible only in the temporary disabling of the sex machine’s disabling—clearing a salubriously under-explored space between the stringencies of either having or not having an ego. This book, then, besides its more manifest contributions to queer-theoretical and psychoanalytic thinking, as importantly contributes to the more nascent field of disability theory. Or to be less hypostasizing, suggestively redescribes a psychoanalysis of disability. Or to return to the grammatical vocabulary of Austin, a psychoanalysis of subjunctivity. Subjunctivity, here, is grammatically equivalent to disability (that of which psychoanalysis might be constituted and that which it regards), but also (beyond auditory affinity) meant as evolving proxy for what otherwise, following Lacan or Foucault, has been taken as subjectivity, as subject.
 
Powerfully contrapuntal to Bersani’s earlier articulations of the knack for psychoanalytic subjects to administer and incur damage, intimacies considers the possibility of a no less psychoanalytically grounded vocabulary of safety. The terms on one level are not unfamiliar; if in works such as “Is the Rectum a Grave” or Homos aggression arises as the ineluctable raison d’être of personhood, the exploration in this work of impersonality necessarily illuminates in its veer from persons less the evacuation of impulse so much as an impulse differently attuned to innocuity. Impersonality (or in its adjectival form, the impersonal) does not oppose personality so much as rewrite personality, as though we might hold onto the former as temporary misnomer until either personality itself were more capaciously accessible or some term more precise than impersonality were available. Innocuousness (my term, not Bersani’s or Phillips’s) itself serves as temporary misnomer for what more exactingly might be understood as the subjunctive.
 
That grammatical terminology could so importantly figure in the new forms of psychoanalytic engagement imagined by Bersani and Phillips attests to the extent to which intimacies extends the Lacanian aphorism of unconscious-structured-like-a-language to a differently fructive aphorism of writing-structured-like-psychoanalysis. To parse grammar is to parse persons—not because persons or subjects are textual (we’ve thought this for some time), but because the architectures of grammar invariably harbor and effect the pulsions of persons. Especially interesting for me is the way in which a grammatical lexicon could defer the further adventures of metaphoricity for the sake of the no less bracing lexicon of the non-transformative. The subjunctive, indeed, seems less a rhetorical shibboleth than a grammatical residuum, although with not too much imagination, the temporal openness of subjunctivity (as opposed to subjectivity) recalls the peculiar diachronics of de Manian allegory. I note the affinity between allegory and subjunctivity to reiterate the extent to which impersonality speaks only tangentially to the concerns at hand, the extent to which the subjunctive, in its gravitation toward mutability, is less a diminished mode of personality than a terrifically refractive and therefore richly complicated site of possible personality. The realm of the possible, in Bersani’s readings, does not hover as ideation so much as assume the body of an actuality. What would it mean to imagine an equivalence between a person and the personification of that person’s subjunctive possibilities? What would it mean to treat personification as an empirical (rather than a figurative) phenomenon?
 
Psychoanalysis, in this light, less parses the vicissitudes of being a person than opens the possibility of imagining persons as personifications, thereby entitled to the same scrutinies solicited by the least over-embedded hermeneutic modes of recovery. intimacies responds generously to such queries to the extent that its archive consists of persons and characters whose lives (textual and otherwise) are indistinguishable from their own rhetorical resonance. The book’s first chapter, for instance, cites Patrice Leconte’s film, Intimate Strangers, in which a psychoanalytic relation blooms from the putative analysand’s erroneously entering the office of a tax lawyer, instead of that of an analyst. What ensues feels removed from verity to the extent that the former is catalyzed and then knowingly sustained by misrecognition. In its acceptance of fiction as the grounds for therapy (if not a life), the film’s explicit allusion to Henry James’s novella, The Beast in the Jungle (literary product placement if ever there was one) confusingly registers as non-gratuitous, in further complicating the film’s own examination of fiction’s inseparability from non-fiction. One can say that the film’s theory of fiction transforms the characters of James’s novella from literary precedent to filmic presence in their own right, separated by a temporal rather than an ontological distinction. To ground a film predicated on What if on a novella predicated on What if subtends both works’ fascination with subjectivity—the extent to which one could understand oneself, let alone another person—on the particulars of subjunctivity: a predilection for the capriciousness of knowledge, over and against any hostility harbored against psychical caprice.
 
The heroine of James’s story is aptly named May, as in it may happen, it may not, I may or may not prefer this decision. A heroine who denominates an allegory of the pure subjunctive, May also occupies the position of analyst to the story’s hero, John Marcher. Marcher doesn’t march so much as shuffle, and while the latter under the direction of different authorship might rule out the status of hero, the shuffle is exemplary of Jamesian heroism, which is as much to say that it serves as exemplum of a particularly psychoanalytic heroism (to be distinguished from Bersani’s earlier implicitly heroic accounts of the gay bottom, etc.). Marcher, weekending at an English summerhome, is told by May that at some point many years back he had told her something that she had never forgotten. Already, here, we are in a realm beyond that of a conventional unconscious, to the extent that May—as both analyst and proxy psyche—catalyzes the story (such as it is) as instantiation of memory, rather than of forgetfulness. More precisely, May instantiates the form of memory without any necessarily substantive mnemonic content (a point left unremarked in Bersani’s analysis): she tells Marcher that their first and only other meeting was in Naples, and in Marcher’s desire to enact his not having forgotten, he accedes to the memory-form that May offers. At this point, however, it’s not quite so simple as May’s remembering versus Marcher’s not: rather, May Bartram either offers up a shared experience or fabricates one. Crucially, the difference is nugatory.
 
Marcher’s desire to seem as though he has remembered what she offers trumps the inevitably dubious provision on Bartram’s part of producing what might or might not count as valid memory. If the unconscious, proverbially speaking, is the shore of all-forgotten, this shore, in James’s novella, non-antagonistically stands as shore of possibility. Do you believe me, or not? Did we or did we not meet in Naples? To say yes, on the basis of memory, is barely distinguishable from assenting in the name of art. Which is to say, beyond James’s frame, that psychoanalysis might analogously found itself on an eloquent fiction (a fabulism at which Bersani already hints in his earlier reading of James’s Maggie Verver, in A Future for Astyanax). Less that truth is out the window than that truth shares a bed with fabulisms approximate or intelligent enough to prolong the germinal conversation, Bartram and Marcher agree to live on (or off of) this shared possibility of having previously met, met previously in Naples, site of putative offering of their secret. The secret may or may not be real, more or less contingent on the reliability of the locus of sharing. Unconfirmable. We are finding, here, the sort of adventurous and aspiring psychoanalytic configuration that for many years has languished, adumbrated by the strictures and indices of a psychoanalysis that less for better than for worse has gone restrictively predictable. Bersani’s freefall into James enacts a psychoanalytic freefall into ambiguity whose irretrievable bounds anticipate a new vocabulary, a new set of relations. And to the extent that being interpersonal (or in Bersani’s vocabulary, impersonal) maps onto a cliff, we have no choice, in the midst of the previous landscape’s aridity, to take the jump, even as the jump requires revisiting what may from other vantages have seemed conventional. Falling through the conventional differs, apparently, from tourism of the conventional. And fall we do.
 
At the chapter’s end, Bersani wonders whether the “impersonal intimacy” cultivated by Leconte’s “analyst” and “analysand” (scare quotes rendering both categories less dubious than interchangeable) “might emerge from larger relational fields” (39), against the film’s suggestion that this intimacy can survive only in being “sequestered” from the world as such. While there are several salient expressions within LeConte’s film of the world excluded from the psychoanalytically modelled relation, the analysand’s husband seems both especially to fit the bill and to complicate exclusivity’s perceived bearing on the “relational field” from which it is barred. If we follow Adam Phillips’s aphorism with which Bersani’s chapter begins, that “psychoanalysis is about what two people can say to each other if they agree not to have sex” (1), the sex life of the analysand and her husband ought in its (implicitly contractual or consensual) relation to sex seem least like a psychoanalytic encounter, least welcome within the psychoanalytic field even as its translation into the narrative of a sex life constitutes one of the archives on which the psychoanalytic encounter depends.
 
Marc, the analysand’s husband, would seem at first blush to consolidate—precisely in his normative capacity as husband—some conjugal intimacy at odds with Bersani’s interest in impersonality. Nonetheless, Leconte’s film demonstratively positions Marc’s marriage as unusual, precisely on the order of the sexual which would otherwise foreclose its psychoanalytic purchase. As Bersani distills their marital predicament, “Anna’s husband, Marc, has been impotent since a car accident six months earlier when Anna (at least according to her account), having gone into reverse rather than drive, backed their car into him and crushed one of his legs against the garage wall. Watching another man have sex with Anna will, he feels, reawaken his own crippled desires” (7). In an essay expressly interested in modes of contractual abstinence, Bersani’s gloss of Marc’s “crippled desires” feels undertheorized: all the more so transposed with James’s John Marcher, whose failure and fate, by many accounts, seem as much an instance “crippled desire” as anything else. What is James’s subject if not the erotic cripple, and what is James’s genius if not (at least partly) the vivescent and inextricable energies of erotic and epistemological disability?¹
 
While “erotically crippled,” as a category, skips across the surface of Bersani’s essay like a stone, it likewise more resonantly sinks into the medium of the essay’s meticulous exploration of impersonal intimacy. On the level of the vernacular with which the terms initially register, “erotically crippled” and “impersonally intimate” might well seem if not synonyms then kindred spirits (or disspirits). In the context of Bersani’s particular project, “erotically crippled” maps (if over-broadly) the space between impersonal intimacy and the aesthetic subjectivity that is the subject of one of Bersani’s coterminous essays. Erotic crippledness and aesthetic subjectivity already imply a relation based precisely on the limitations (intrinsic or extrinsic) on the radius of personal action. In both, perceived proscription of normative action precipitates, in the loss of action, a florid repertoire of displacement begotten by the contingencies of ocularity. Neither the world nor the self becomes under either optic a work of art; rather, world and self lose their customary borders under the influence of a perspicacity unable to distinguish between the perceived and the experienced. In the implosive propinquity of perception and experience, the world of a sudden seems unreliably and (as in James’s An American Scene) garrulously non-objective, and the self seems unreliably and garrulously inseparable from the world which from other discursive vantages would seem less miscegenate. Along the lines of correspondence between self and world, aesthetic subjectivity, as Bersani writes, “eschews psychologically motivated communication and replaces such communication with families of form” (168). How better to describe the Jamesian displacement of psychological motivation? How better to articulate the aesthetic compensations of an erotic crippledness whose removal from the realm of the actual initiates a new realm of contemplation. Erotic crippledness, that is, occasions an epistemology rather than a phenomenology, whose erotic component depends not on the execution of erotic acts but on the pleasures gleaned from ruminating on the aestheticization of the erotic act.
 
John Marcher, by his own account, is—until his “reunion” with May Bartram—a man of crippled desire. The “secret” he shares with May (again, a secret whose utility extends beyond necessary veracity) retroactively justifies his detachment from a life denominated as a series of inhabited forms—his modest patrimony, his library, his garden, his London acquaintances. Inhabited forms, uninhabited life: the possibility of a secret occupies the negative space of a life itself otherwise characterizable as negative space. Marcher doesn’t want anything, has never, ostensibly, wanted anything, since his desiring energies have been preoccupied with a fate of which before his encounter with May he was unaware. Marcher’s entreaty for May to wait with him and watch for this fate to materialize further justifies his detachment from the world, and renders fate itself an imminent picture at an exhibition. The overdetermined passivity that subsequently organizes their shared vigil (to be sure, no more overdetermined than any Jamesian passivity) is essentially aesthetic. This particular aesthetic, again, is an effect of the dubious fate that simultaneously adumbrates both future and past:
 

What it had come to was that he wore a mask painted with the social simper, out of the eye-holes of which there looked eyes of an expression not in the least matching the other features. This the stupid world, even after years, had never more than half discovered. It was only May Bartram who had, and she achieved, by an art indescribable, the feat of at once—or perhaps it was only alternately—meeting the eyes from in front and mingling her own vision, as from over his shoulder, with their peep through the apertures.
 

(James 510–11)

Such an indescribable art—and the narrativized aesthetic which that art engenders—surely isn’t equivalent to Bersani’s understanding of aesthetic subjectivity, even as its intersection with the latter seems non-coincidentally persuasive. Again, as Bersani writes in the earlier essay, “aesthetic subjectivity . . . eschews psychologically motivated communication and replaces such communication with families of form” (168).

 
And what of Marc’s crippled desires? What is the relation between impotence and desire? To say that impotence physiologically hampers desire’s expression too quickly, I think, reduces erotic expression to the vicissitudes of erection and ejaculation. Something similar can be gleaned from James’s earlier The Princess Casamassima, whose bedridden (and eventually, suggestively, couch-ridden) Rose Muniment extends nothing if not a series of erotic queries and requests. The novel’s internal repugnance of Rose’s character subsequently confirms the extent to which impotence’s own vim instigates far more discomfiture than vim or impotence. The confluence of disability and imagination monkeywrenches the novel’s disposition to redescribe Rose’s iconoclastic surveillance as otiose, if not pathetic—even as Rose’s particular constellation of disability cannot be disentangled from her particular capacities as reader (if not author).
 
The second chapter of intimacies presents an argument structurally analogous to that of the first—the laying out of a system of relationality to be assessed less as exemplum than as template—which corrects the reductions of ejaculation by subjunctively estranging ejaculator from ejaculation from ejaculate. What if there were models of intimacy akin to psychoanalytic conversation is followed by what if there were models of intimacy akin to barebacking. We have moved from a contractually non-sexual set of narrative transactions and confidences to a contractually non-narrative set of sexual transactions and confidences. By “contractually non-narrative” I mean an agreement between the members of a given barebacking community against normative modes of erotic and sexual plot development, characterology, telos. We have, furthermore, finagled a theoretical ornamentation that might reconfigure Rose Muniment’s bedriddenness into its own heroic and less (or at least differently) repellant vantage of both erotic reward and information. Rose both is and curates the jetsam of erotic (which is to say psychical) residue. Disability is her attraction, her impediment, and her tease. Structurally speaking, Rose’s position in Casamassima is of a supine psychoanalyst. Regardless of one’s estimation of her interlocutionary facility, she can be said furthermore to occupy positions of analyst and analysand simultaneously—recalling the fluidity of analytic hydraulics in Bersani’s reading of Intimate Strangers. Or rather, the boring familiarity of her position on the couch transforms the status and availings of the couch. Countertransference here is a place-holder for a volubility both stained and availed by a psychic estrangement severely distinct from physical unreliability.
 
Even as Bersani’s account of barebacking relies on a reading of Guillaume Dustan’s novel, Dans ma chambre (or, as Bersani notes, less Dustan’s novel than what Dustan himself denominates “an auto-fiction”), the novel at hand—all the more so following Bersani’s reading of James’s differently radical Beast in the Jungle—itself recapitulates the particular rhythms of a sexual repetitiveness that consolidates non-distinguishability over and against the distinctions that otherwise characterize if not constitute the terms of novelistic phenomenology. This is to say that one does not lose oneself in the time of Dustan’s novel so much as, potentially, lose oneself in its anti-time, whether the detemporalized inventory of sex toys or the temporally amnesiac disorientiation of ejaculation. Beyond Bersani’s own methodology (what if there were models of intimacy akin to but not equivalent to ____), the valuation of ejaculation, in its overfamiliarly double valence, sutures this second chapter to the first. The foreclosure of one form of ejaculation for the sake of absolute immersion in the form of another seems all the more interesting in a book such as intimacies, imagined from its first introductory pages as conversation.
 
To momentarily pull out (forgive the pun): subjunctivity aims to redescribe Bersani’s interest in subjective dilation/diffusion in grammatical/temporal/epistemological terms. To the extent that gravitation to the figure (or negative space) of impersonality risks too quickly presuming that we eschew our adequate enough understanding of personality, subjunctivity seeks to rescript the vicissitudes of personality and impersonality along an axis sufficiently unfamiliar to either one (at least within the kingdoms of either psychoanalysis or queer theory), such that, should we decide ultimately to return to (im)personality, it will be on the basis of neither analogy (a model such as this ____) nor tautology (____ is what we desire, which is _____). Subjunctivity likewise seeks to reconcile recent misformulations of the Drive with coterminous misformulations of psychoanalytic futurity; after all, if (as Tim Dean has persuasively argued) the Drive is characterized less by its stringent commitment to corrosion than by its capricious uncommitability, how better to describe the latter capriciousness than in terms of the subjunctive mode. If this could happen, or would happen, that might or might not follow:
 

after the tops’ departure, another man uses a blue plastic funnel in which he has collected the semen of other men to inseminate young Jonas with the ejaculate of men he has never met. (Several bottoms in these videos, like Jonas, maintain a smile that struck me as at once idiotic, saintly, and heavily drugged.) Dean calls the funneling scene a “ritual summoning of ghosts” that engenders “a kind of impersonal identification with strangers past and present that does not depend on knowing, liking, or being like them.”
 

(48)

Such a sex scene ratchets sexual personality to its most rigidly minimalist components. First the departure of the top, and then the departure of any penis (or penis-shaped object) whatsoever. Sex at its most austerely utilitarian, which is to say gay sex as a correlative to the impugned severity of heterosexual utilitarianism (down to the denomination, as Bersani and Dean note, of the ejaculate as the bottom’s “baby”). The blue plastic funnel strikes me as phallic less in homology than in function, as though a man’s gravitation to another man’s penis were itself purely functional. That one possible function of the funnel—ghostly conduit—is the transmission of HIV on one level, suggests that the thrill of this particular sex practice (insofar as “sex” with a funnel forecloses sundry other more conventional thrills) is the possibility of possibility. It is one thing to be the consensual bottom for a serio-converted top: another thing to be the consensual bottom for a funnel bearing what may or may not be infectious semen.

 
The difference instructively juxtaposes vernacular and more canonical accounts of the death drive. In the former case (willingly risking one’s own serio-conversion from being barebacked by an HIV+ top), death drive seems a given, if we understand the death drive to be akin to a deathwish. The latter case, however, more astutely demonstrates the capriciousness of death-drivenness. It’s less that one might be infected than that one might or might not. We have moved from “might” as noun (the might of an ego requiring being taken down a peg, the might of the death drive itself, impelling one toward the latter, the might of the top, or bottom, within the fine print of the sexual contract) to “might” as qualifying auxiliary (which might well be another way of describing the funnel).
 
It’s less that the psychical askesis described by Bersani in “Is the Rectum a Grave” might find in eventual infection a medico-physical correlative; rather, that psychical askesis (if one can reach such a thing with a funnel in one’s rectum) might or might not find correlation in the sex act. One’s relation to another set of bodies already having been rendered equivocal (as one is being gangbanged, how to discriminate between one set of thrusts and another), one’s relation to one’s own body is rendered equivocal. Equivocality, again, is not equivalent to self-abstraction, nor is equivocality equivalent to impersonality. The melodrama of Jonas is or is not decisive or somatically transformative. As with a placebo, we might or might not respond to something that is or is not eventually present in our blood stream.
 
The thrill of the death drive, thus instantiated, is less in knowing one’s relation to a funnel of semen than in not knowing. The death drive, for all its externally imposed Tarantino-esque luridness, depends on the contingencies of knowing, themselves dependent on a horizon in which contingencies might themselves come to fruition (or to recall Edelman’s reading of The Birds, come to roost). The death drive, then, doesn’t oppose futurity so much as depend on the deferral of futurity so as to extend as long as possible the Jamesian project of waiting. The death drive, even in its cathexis to deferring, is futurally organized. The death drive may be impulsive (the manner of drives), but maximization of its concomitant pleasures requires patience, in requiring and being ravished by the tick of minutes, hours, days, in between the fever-dream of possibility and its coming or not coming (as it were) to pass.
 
I have in the past responded to Bersani’s multitudinous accounts of self-shattering with the frustration of not understanding self-shattering’s remainder, if there is one. If in fact we were to call “ego” both the source and engine of aggressivity, and if the ego were in fact self-shattering’s target, then it would seem reasonable to pursue this psychoanalytically inflected regimen of self-askesis; but to what end? With what is one left, in the loss of self? More generically: in the wake of obliteration, could one still speak of oneself as a “one” at all? Would the pronomially disingenuous neutrality of the “one” likewise count less as an impersonal selfhood (one invariably speaks, on some register, on behalf of some more particular one) than the reconstitution of ego under another name? What could count if not as compensation, then as consolation? In its perhaps most luminously emphatic articulation, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” askesis feels all the more definitively teleological in the essay’s actual staging (if not outright theorizing) of it, not only as crescendo of the essay’s final paragraph, but as that final paragraph’s final word. Where to go from askesis? How to think beyond it without finding one’s self rebounded by the ego’s vicious lure?
 
The remainder, intimacies suggests, is kinder and gentler, though kindness and gentleness of different orders, insofar as they are unmoored from fictions of interrelationality on which they are ordinarily (ideologically, sentimentally) predicated. By what name can we call a self so sedulously at odds with the myriad ways its intelligibility is said to exist in the first place? If not self, if not person, if not subject, if not human, then what? Bersani’s recent meditations on these very questions makes possible the conceiving of a post-asketic self as an interlineation of subjunctivities (perhaps imaginable as the radicalization of Whitmanian adhesiveness). Bersani notes that in the Foucauldian analysis of power, “intentionality is not eliminated . . . it is displaced” (64). Intentionality, that is, does not accrue to a given subject, to a locatable nexus, but goes diffuse. In the context of psychoanalysis, the displacement of intentionality occurs in the recalibration of temporality from the ego’s declarative to the id’s subjunctive. Subjunctivity’s imposition of contingency between grammatical subject and grammatical object in fact renders diaphanous the veracity of ontological subject (and ontological object); no less so, it renders diaphanous the distinction between subject and object, to the extent that the possible fruition of one inevitably will depend on that of the other.
 
The non-destructive, non-sexual slippage of one person into another—one subjunctivity into another, or more precisely, their one shared subjunctivity—returns us to Henry James. John Marcher, of The Beast in the Jungle, counts among literature’s great presumptive narcissists. Most accounts of the novella position May Bartram as ever watchful, ever patient, for John Marcher’s eventual discovery that the secret—shared but undisclosed—haunting his life is the possibility of his truly loving May for herself, rather than for her maieutically hermeneutic relation to his cultivation of self-interest. She dies before such a discovery is made. His infatuation with what she might know about him putatively forecloses the depths by which he might know her. intimacies, however, supports a different account of James’s text—not by replacing the failure of amorous narrative with some non-amorous narrative, but by making explicit a vantage from which James’s love story is, in fact, successful.
 
If Marcher is a narcissist, it is Bartram who has made him so. It is Bartram who has suggested to Marcher that something, crucially, is missing from his life, and Bartram who spurs, if not Marcher’s recovery of this missing thing, then his new career of rotating, ruminating, reassessing the syntactical complications of what is missing. What is missing, by conventional accounts, is Marcher’s desire for Bartram (which in earlier instantiations of queer theory, would indicate Marcher’s desires elsewhere). In fact, the story seems less about desiring what is lacking than about cultivating interest in what is lacking. And if what is lacking is not Marcher’s desire, we may take the absence toward which Marcher and Bartram both gravitate to be the missingness of Marcher’s ego. The plausibility of waiting for something to come, for Marcher, redescribes Bersani’s clarification of the id as virtuality, and resituates the ego as that which might call from a horizon never entirely reached. The Beast in the Jungle, then, describes neither the desireless selfishness of Marcher’s ego, nor the put-upon selflessness of Bartram’s, but rather Bartram’s catechism of Marcher into his own immersion in impersonality, in the stringent and irreducibly amorous (if not erotic) manner in which Bartram less partakes in or is excluded from Marcher’s ego than shares with Marcher the experience of not having an ego. This is self-shattering without sex. This is askesis without self-shattering. This is gentle, patient conversation in which Bartram and Marcher evince each other’s own gracefully and ethically depleted narcissicism. Such a reading of James’s text might or might not have been anticipated by Bersani, in his own interlineating of Beast in the Jungle and Intimate Strangers. The “might or might not,” borne out across the time and space of my own writing (it may well have been anyone else’s), enacts another version of the fructive and constitutionally stalled amorousness of intimacies, a dilation that doesn’t jeopardize closeness so much as consolidate it, or at least carefully and collectively watch it, for signs of waking.
 

The very early days of television, when puppets on strings ruled the airwaves, were quite essential to my stature as a fallen angel (a filmmaker who fell into hell via a CIRCUIT CITY basket). I don’t always shop there, as sometimes I like the BEST BUY stores best as the ceilings are usually higher than their prices. This makes them cooler too. Anyway, television in the old days had lots of puppet shows instead of the kind of wooden entities you see on TV today, plus you could see that the balsa wood beings were being manipulated by strings (something not visible with today’s modern mannequins). The current dummies are wired more discreetly for maximum cleavage potential with the crotch area fully latexed to prevent unwarranted voltage from browning pink panties. The male mannequin requires less grounding for his antenna as the filaments of a hairy buttock make excellent circuitry for discharging ionized effusions.
 
Puppets were not the only denizens of early TV as you had lots of space operas with canned music but no canned laughter. That was organically generated by the viewing public in the comfort of their own homes since the shows were “live” with gaffs galore! Scenic backdrops would crash and makeshift props backfire or flaccidly flop on camera while the adrenaline pumped performers huffed and puffed their way through putrid plots, all inadequately funded. I loved it so much and that love hurled me into the realization that I too was destined for videographic Valhalla where the proud and the beautiful were shrunken down to fit into an electronic gizmo. That boxed gizmo itself was filled with other cubist containers all labeled with a Cocoa-Puff cosmology of cerealized serializations dramatizing pre-Sputnik space junk. The results to me, the viewer, were as sweet and flaky as the sponsor’s products and I drank it all in with an Ovaltine cocktail designed to rocket me into being a consumerized cosmonaut befitting the Eisenhower/Einstein, space-time continuum which continued to grind out these programs weekly on a boob tube devoid of boobs (except for maybe Xaviar Cugat’s new wife on one of the many variety shows that endangered the universe with gyrating ASS-teroids).
 
But unfortunately all was not sordid, as Loretta Young never had a costume malfunction while whirling through a door to introduce tepid teleplays. Nor did Howdy Doody make tangible his last name in the creases of his jeans, despite the fact that Clarabelle the clown squeezed incessantly at the rubber appendage of a horny hole near his mid section to excite the peanut gallery with a flatulating fracas.
 
I’m of course discoursing on early American, 1950s TV. Therefore this essay may mean absolutely nothing to those of European descent. My stimulating brush with continental TV was mainly in viewing Benny Hill programs. He was the shadow shape that followed such giants as Allister Cook who basked in the blazing brilliance of Masterpiece Theater thereby casting a darker doppelganger on the British telly (if there still be such a slang). I enjoyed his full figured shenanigans greatly even though the full figures of his stable of bevies weren’t exactly my cup of 4 o’clock tea. British mixed grills were always a bit skimpy on beefcake in that prime (rib) time.
 
For beefcake I had to settle for Joshua Logan musicals like South Pacific or the fan magazines that featured Tab Hunter shaving in the privacy of his privies (if, once again there be such a slang). Now-a-days there’s such a vacuum of words since so many have been considered off limits…banished except for the first letter. These will certainly make future dictionaries shockingly skimpy plus the human mouth will undoubtedly lose some of its provocative elasticity since it has already been hideously mutated with cosmetic injections. No muscular activation, because of vowel disembowelment, will be able to keep the lips operative during theatrical readings, causing the great classical orators of stage and screen to mimic the sound of farts from of a fist fucker’s familiar (pardon my olde English).
 
Speaking of the stage, only lately have I been attending live theater, as in the past the classic repertoire of Shubert Alley remained unexplored being that the “great white way” was too bright for the kind of activities I preferred in alleys. But age, and an increase in wallet girth, has changed all that. Before, the general trend was to purchase plays in soft cover editions and read them in the privacy of my own bedroom. Since most of the hot action occurred within the pages of those texts rather than under the sheets, I led a chaste life filled with lurid and hopefully libido-building aspirations where four letter words and deeds had been supplanted with the seeds of literary foliation. Filthy episodes in any medium should be rendered with delicate strokes of aspirational cravings for the hungry souls that desire its protein. Protein is bodybuilding but the energy to acquire that nutrient comes from the carbohydrates of carnality. It’s this transference of yin and yang that produces the poon tang powerhouse that we call great art.
 
For behind every man there stands a woman and behind both there looms a beast that demands the juices of both in order to ovulate the eternal. Whether that juice trickles into word or image, possibly both in my particular case, depends upon the squeezing this beast exerts in the ritual of triad termination. As the doomed die hot in the heat of crushing desires, the fat of their loins ignite, fueling future hell fires: conflagrations destined to singe our senses. Fire storms which burn eternal in the buns of Beelzebub, creating demon winds of inspiration that blast free from his constricting hell hole to fumigate our consciousness with a whiff of Shangri-La. Oh, sweet mysteries of light and shadow, how thy flickering upon the silver screen brings such gold into the teeth of our torment! And if it’s not the silver screen, but the cool glow of a plasmatic putrescence, then let the pixels dance with ruby slippers of scarlet, for black and white rubber is reserved for Hare Krishna footwear: insulated grounding to accompany chanting pin heads. And how many angels are on the head of a pinhead? That can only be guessed at from the droppings such cherubs leave behind. So be pure of intake yet potent in digestion for the remains of this nourishment will someday fertilize the unspeakable; and who cares (as you’ve probably surmised after reading this essay): a picture is worth a thousand words anyway.
 

 

 

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Pizza.