Two allegorical/sexual sequences, then: one is capitalism and the other is communism. Both are sinister: both are fueled by libidinal energies, which they co-opt and transform into a surplus of seductive power. Makavejev shows us these transformations, without explicit judgment. We have to make what we can of them, and of their juxtapositions.

Miss World runs screaming from her wedding-night bed with Mr. Kapital. It’s less his obsessive cleanliness ritual that upsets her — he wipes both her and himself down with some sort of rubbing alcohol or antiseptic — than his golden dick, from which streams forth an abundant liquid flow (urine? oil? water? I wasn’t sure). She goes through a series of erotic and therapeutic encounters — with a stereotypical black American stud, with a fake-Mexican macho, etc. — and ends up in advertising: masturbating for the camera while wallowing in liquid chocolate that is being poured all over her — they are shooting a commercial that is supposed to make this particular brand of chocolate unforgettable.

Meanwhile, Anna Planeta and the sailor from the Potemkin are endlessly fucking in an enormous vat of raw sugar. It’s Reichian sex-pol revolutionary bliss, until (and even still when) Anna grabs a knife and castrates, then kills him. He swoons and dies still completely happy, as the red of his blood mixes with the white of the sugar, giving it a unique and pungent texture. He may be glad to die for the revolution, but the communist ship of state has an overall stench of corpses, mixed with the sickly sweetness of the sugar and its supply of lollipops and other candies. When Anna Planeta is neither fucking the sailor nor brooding on the bow of her ship, just above the Marx figurehead, she is busy seducing underage teenage boys (they look to be about 14), whose violated corpses are later retrieved from the ship by the Dutch police.

But I still haven’t mentioned the most viscerally memorable parts of the film, which involve Otto Muehl‘s anti-psychiatric collective. Miss World is brought to them in a wheelbarrow, traumatized and in shock from her experiences of sexuality-as-commodity. Muehl and his collective (who really existed; it is unclear to what extent Makavejev’s portrait of them is documentary, and to what extent it is staged for the film) engage in all sorts of rituals, art performances, and behaviors designed to break down ego defenses and return the group to a state of (Norman O. Brown-ish?) polymorphous perversity. In the course of a communal dinner, members of the group play with their food, play with their testicles, smear bodily fluids/products on one another, and regurgitate amidst screams of delight. Later, they dance nude to a rendition of the Internationale played on a hurdy-gurdy, and shit into dinner plates that are then passed around as culinary delicacies. All this is quite self-consciously performative — rather than ‘primal’ — but it is definitely ‘real’ rather than simulated. None of this does very much for Miss World, who continues to sit in the midst of all the activity in a glum stupor, except when she is nourished from a lactating woman’s breast — but presumably (insofar as we grant the story any sort of linear narrative meaning) it ‘liberates’ her to wallow in the chocolate in the following sequence.

Makavejev also intercuts other material — as one might expect — including orgasmic shots of Niagara Falls, and, most notably, documentary footage of the unearthing of the corpses of Polish soldiers/prisoners who were massacred on Stalin’s orders during World War II; and some sort of German Nazi footage of an Aryan baby being manhandled by a doctor in the name of greater Health.
All in all, this makes for a film that is considerably more visceral (and less immediately delightful) than WR. Makavejev is pushing limits here: both in his frequent shots of (non-erect) male genitalia, together with scatalogical imagery, and in his touching on emotional areas — like an adult woman sexually performing for underage boys — that is far more taboo today than it was in 1974. Still, for all Sweet Movie‘s shocks and extremities, I cannot quite think of it as “transgressive,” in the sense that word holds in so much 20th century art. Because, although Makavejev is going where no filmmaker (except, perhaps, in the low-end of porn/exploitation moviemaking) had ever gone before, he absolutely insists on intertwining erotic release with power and domination, love with death, sex with shit, sweetness with putridity. There is none of the glee in being outrageous that one finds, so endearingly, even in the most reprehensible sex or slasher exploitation movies. But there is also nothing like the way, for instance, that Samuel Delany depicts orgies of golden showers and the like with a rich, naturalistic density, and an attention to the pleasures and satisfactions of the body. Rather, Makavejev directly links the sublime and abject bodies he depicts to the film’s overall allegorical abstractions, in which bodies stand for, or reveal themselves as symptoms of, social conditons (capitalism, communism) that they nonetheless cannot embody or coincide with.

It’s this knottiness, and this insistence upon “intellectual montage,” that makes the film so difficult to parse. And that forces the viewer to confront his or her own affective responses, as much as the images that provoke those responses. For me, the film was as much about my own anality (as I suppose one would have to call it in psychoanalytic terms) as it was about anything else. I mean, I have no trouble watching the violations of, and violence to, human bodies in horror films, even in the calculated sado-porn of movies like Hostel. But I find stuff like in-your-face regurgitation, and bodily immersion in chocolate or sugar (not to mention shit), somehow difficult to watch. Especially when it seems that the actors are not simulating, but doing it “for real.” I guess food (and slimy or greasy or already-partly-digested-liquefied food in particular) is just too Real (in the Lacanian sense) to me. Or, perhaps, it is the site where my inner fascist, with its fear of boundary dissolution and flows (cf. Theweleit) comes into play.

In any case, the gustatory (or, rather, digestive) imagery in Sweet Movie was the nodal point of the film for me — others may fixate more on other material instead. But overall, the film’s power comes largely from the way that it insists that bodies and their (sexual, gustatory, sensing, etc.) modalities are both in a certain sense primordial, and at the same time caught up in webs of power relations, exploitations, commercial or propagandist manipulations, and so forth. NOT caught up in a web of signs or significations (the way the “structuralism” of the 1960s and 1970s so famously insisted), but precisely caught up in relations of production and circulation and exploitation that are irreducible to, and at times even directly contradictory to, those signifying networks. The point of Makavejev’s allegorism is precisely to make a direct link between the Artaudian viscerality of bodies on the one hand, and the so-abstract-as-not-even-to-be-representable circuits of money/power/influence on the other, while signification or the Symbolic drops out of the equation, since it cannot possibly mediate this link between the most concrete and singular, and the most universal and abstract. In this way, affirming all this, Makavejev remains very much a Marxist (all the more so for his harsh critique of actually existing socialism); while as a Freudian he has moved beyond the sterile dichotomies between Reichian apocalyptic liberationism and the right-Freudian insistence upon primal repression, to a more politico-cynical understanding of bodies and their drives, and how they fit into power relations and flows.

Sweet Movie is, at one and the same time, too intellectual to be ecstatic, and too visceral to be theorizable. Certain questions the film asks simply can’t be answered: there is no way really to evaluate what goes on in Muehl’s commune, and no interest in determining what Makavejev actually thinks of it, or might intend us to think of it. Rather, the density of what we see in the sequences with Muehl and his group makes it impossible to maintain either the sense that it was truly liberatory, or the sense that it was a kind of enforced-fascist nightmare embodying the worst, most oppressive, side of 60s/70s utopian naivete and groupthink. It’s worth noting, in any case, that Muehl’s group belongs to the film’s capitalist series, rather than its communist one; it plays a role in the capitalist storylineequivalent to the one that Anna’s seduction of the adolescent boys plays in the communist storyline. Both are provocations in which pleasure and control are intertwined; both energize their participants only to precipitate them into the film’s double culmination: the “obscene” orgy as ultimate commodity spectacle on the capitalist side; a grim police procedural, against a background that combines overfull sweetness (sugar) and grim decay (the stench of corpses, the stench of history) on the communist side.

Still, the film ends with a still on a final shot in which the teenage boys murdered by Anna Planeta, whose corpses are laid out on the verge of the canal, stir into life and begin to emerge from their body bags. Shortly before, there’s a brief shot of the Potemkin sailor, also returned to life, watching the shooting of the Miss World chocolate commercial. This fleeting suggestion of resurrection would be Makavejev’s only (and tentative) answer to both communism’s regime of death, and capitalism’s total colonization of life (what would today be called biopolitics). Is it merely a crypto-religious yearning, that these bones may live? Or does Makavejev’s libidino-cognitive mapping of the deadlocks of the twentieth century hold out any prospects to us in the twenty-first?

I suppose the lament for a life half lived is itself some sort of literary genre. But Delany, as always, has a unique take on what might seem a common theme. For Arnold is not “repressed,” in any psychoanalytic sense of this term. He is fully aware, throughout, of his desires; and he doesn’t disavow them, so much as he is first afraid of them, and later wearied by the prospect of trying to act on them. “Internalized homophobia” is also not quite the right term for Arnold’s condition. He doesn’t hate himself, or hate what he is, or feel himself driven by impulses that he dares not avow, or that he thinks will damn him. It is just that he feels, well, uncomfortable: uncomfortable in coming out of the closet at a time when there are real dangers in doing so; and later, when the existence of an active (and sometimes activist) public gay culture offers some defense against those dangers, uncomfortable with living his life in public, as a kind of spectacle.

Arnold also cannot be diagnosed as lacking the courage to live fully — in the manner of T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock, “do I dare to eat a peach?” (and remember that Eliot himself was something of a closet case). Rather, at times Arnold is (if anything) too generous and impulsive, as is dramatized in the middle section of this three-part novel (it moves backward in time, from an opening account of Arnold’s middle and old age, to a final section which goes back to his youth, his formative experiences, his sexual awakening). The middle section contains some of the most harrowing writing of Delany’s entire career: it narrates how Arnold agrees to marry a young homeless white woman whom he hardly knows, and who (as it turns out) really is crazy — or has been driven crazy, as “the pure products of America” always are (to quote another great American poet). The consequences of this impulsive, and non-sexual, marriage are calamitous — though they also provide the material for much of Arnold’s best poetry. Art is often nourished by horror and tragedy, though it certainly does not “redeem” or “ennoble” or “compensate for” such tragedy.

If anything, Dark Reflections is about the sad consequences of an exacerbated self-consciousness — although, in contrast to traditional (19th century) treatments of this theme, the problem is not intrinsic to self-consciousness itself, but determined by its social, cultural, and political surroundings. Arnold is hyper-aware both of being gay, and of being black, in America, and of the discrimination that has customarily attached to both. This is only heightened by the fact that he is as cultivated and sensitive as he is — which is a stereotype often applied to gay men, and the exact opposite of a stereotype often applied to black men and women. The book is haunted by a vile racist remark that Wallace Stevens made at the Pulitzer Prize banquet in 1950, responding to Gwendolyn Brooks’ winning of the poetry prize; Delany writes in a concluding “Historical Note” that this remark is “a refrain not only throughout this tale but in the mind of any black writer contemplating his or her possibility for reward or recognition in America.”

Indeed, Arnold is preoccupied with the question of recognition; he somewhat vainly and pompously tends to imagine himself as the object of a future biographer’s scrutiny, the result and reward of his becoming famous as a poet. But of course poets in America today do not become famous — and Arnold has to face the fact that his works have only been published in small editions, mostly by small presses, and that they are generally not to be found in any library. In his old age — described in the first section of the book — Arnold is poor and largely companionless. He is so alone that he even misses out on Nine Eleven entirely (despite living in lower Manhattan; but he has neither friends nor a television, so he doesn’t even find out about the attacks until the following day). Years earlier, as recounted in the final section of the novel, Arnold also misses out on the Stonewall “riots” or protests of 1969 — he had been a habitue of that bar the previous year, but he entirely misses the events that give Stonewall its historical significance. (Delany does remind us, however, that the Stonewall was largely a “black and Hispanic gay bar” — a fact that is often omitted from the official gay histories).

The sense of a “missed encounter” is crucial to Arnold’s history, and is the best key to his failure to live the life he might have lived. In the book’s last third, we do see Arnold in the Stonewall, with black, gay male friends and at least a nascent sense of community; but one that seems to slip away as Arnold grows older, and more private an circumspect. And the book ends with an epiphany, which is both aesthetic and erotic in import: it brings Arnold back to a crucial turning point, from early adulthood, when (an understandable) fear and an aggravated sense of isolation proved more powerful than desire, setting him on the path to his later loneliness and frustration. It’s almost a Sartrean moment of existential choice: and Arnold makes the “wrong” choice, condemning himself to subsequent ill-at-ease-ness and unfreedom. It’s as if Arnold had been offered a glimpse of a Delanyesque “pornotopia” — but was too freaked out by it, in a late-1950s social climate far different from the bohemian one that Delany himself (as recounted in his memoir The Motion of Light in Water) found just several years later in the East Village. In any case, Arnold’s aesthetico-erotic epiphany, with which the book ends, recovers the past in an almost Proustian sense — but (unlike Proust) without thereby redeeming it. It’s the missed encounter itself that returns, with its real sense of potentiality and hope, but also with the mortal awareness that such potentiality and hope have themselves been squandered.

I’ve written before about how Delany, almost uniquely among writers of the last half-century (or more), presents a vision of sexuality, and sexual “excess,” involving both real bodily expenditures and the projection, beyond possibility, of extravagant sexual fantasies, that is nonetheless not organized around the tiresome themes of “transgression” and “impossibility.” In Dark Reflections, Delany in effect writes correlatively about the denial of such a vision, or the failure to attain it, which nonetheless is not organized around the usual themes of hysterical repression and a puritanical thirst for denial (or “obscene superego jouissance”) with which libertines have baited their opponents for the last two centuries. This is not only to say (rather obviously) that Arnold is no T. S. Eliot, but also to register how deeply the personal is implicated in the transpersonal, or the social. It is not that selfhood is generic, or stereotypical, or a mere byproduct or epiphenomenon or structural effect of some sort of social “conditioning” or (more sophisticatedly) “coding”; but rather that the most deeply singular, private, and unsharable depth of ones own being is the place where one is most profoundly marked by one’s past encounters with others (both contingent, personal encounters, and more generally social ones that have to do with the priority of parents, of language, of mores and prejudices, etc.). This sort of precedence cannot really be described either in Sartrean terms of being condemned to freedom, or in Lacanian terms of the big Other — though both of these theories refer to aspects of it. Dark Reflections does indeed offer us a sophisticated account of the genesis and the maintenance of subjectivity, and of how things like gender, sexuality, race, and class impact upon it at the deepest level (without thereby “determining” it) — except that this “theory” cannot be abstracted away from the contingencies and particularities of Arnold Hawley himself, the fictive protagonist who, in Delany’s narrative construction, inhabits and projects it. Which is, of course, what makes the book a work of fiction rather than of theory, something that is larger than, and irreducible to, what it exemplifies — which is, I think, what we really look for in great works of fiction.

The change in one letter is crucial. The Mad Man is not a “porn-utopia,” but a “porno-topia” (“topos” = “place”). As Delany wrote to me: “rather than [Thomas] More’s fibrillation between ‘ouk-topia’ (no place) and ‘eu-topia’ (the good place), I’m evoking ‘pornos-topia’ (the place of the prostitute — prostitute in the sense of one who indulges in ‘sexual exchange’ or ‘exchanging things for pleasure,’ money, other sex, communication, information, sexuality seen as part of the extant social exchange system, rather than as a sublime/transcendent occurrence outside the social exchange system).”

It’s all the more startling (and embarrassing) for me to realize that I translated “pornotopia” into “pornutopia”, in that my own reading of the novel is precisely that it does not present sex — even extravagant and copious (in quantity) sex — as being transgressive, sublime, or transcendent, but rather seeks to bring it back to the everyday. This means that The Mad Man should be understood, not as a utopia (a no-place or good-place), but rather as what Foucault called a “heterotopia” (an “other-place”). Foucault writes that heterotopias, “as opposed to utopias,” are “real places, actual places… in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are, at the same time, represented, contested, and reversed, sorts of places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable.” (This from a 1967 text of Foucault’s called “Different Spaces”).

(Recall, too, that Delany’s much earlier novel Trouble on Triton (1976) was subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia”; the book can be read as, among other things, a response to Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974), which bore the subtitle: “an ambiguous utopia.”)

As a pornotopia or heterotopia, The Mad Man is explicitly concerned with sexuality in relation to “the social exchange system.” And indeed, this is something I didn’t say enough about in my previous posting. Indeed, I wrote there that “there is a lot here, which I lack the space and energy to get into, about the logic of sexual exchange, and how it relates to, and potentially differs from, the ubiquity of market exchange.” But this difference in logics is of course crucial. The two murders in the novel are precisely the result of a clash. between market exchange and another form of (noncapitalist) sexual exchange. The homeless “Mad Man Mike” institutes a strange rule of sexual exchange and sexual ownership, in which the cost of sexual desire/activity/transference is fixed at precisely a penny; and this comes into tragic conflict with the stringencies and desperations of the “market” for hustling at The Pit, the hustler bar in which the novel’s two murders take place.

I think that The Mad Man stands alongside Marcel Mauss’ The Gift and Pierre Klossowski’s La monnaie vivante (Living Money, unfortunately still not published in English translation) as one of the great texts about alternatives to capitalist/market version of (commodity) exchange.

(Note 1: I realize that I am leaving a lot out here, giving way too summary an account. One also has to look at, for instance, Braudel’s claims about the medieval “market” being something very different from the “anti-markets” of large-scale capitalist commodity exchange; not to mention other anthropological accounts, like Alan Page Fiske’s typology of forms of social exchange).

(Note 2: it was rather amusing to see how, in their “Freakonomics” column in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven V. Levitt went through all sorts of bizarre contortions in order to explain our habits of holiday season gift-giving in terms of standard — bourgeois, capitalist — economic rationality).

Delany calls the book (in his opening “Disclaimer”) a “pornutopic fantasy: a set of people, incidents, places, and relations among them that never happened and could not happen for any number of surely self-evident reasons”; he adds that the book is “specifically… about various sexual acts whose status as vectors of HIV contagion we have no hard-edged knowledge of…” Anid indeed, there is no anal sex in the course of this narrative of sexual relations between men; but the book contains copious, epic descriptions of cocksucking, piss-drinking (and occasional shit-eating) together with oceanic spurts of semen (as well as piss)erupting from truly gigantic cocks. Various sorts of fetishism are also on display, especially involving racial stereotyping, and the narrator’s idealization of homeless men. (Delany also remarks in his “Disclaimer” that a novel that truly focused on the homeless “would have to be substantially darker than this one”).

But I also said that The Mad Man is a philosophical meditation. Quite literally: the narrator, John Marr, a gay black man in his 20s, coping with the onset of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1980s, is a graduate student in philosophy, investigating the life and works of a (fictional) great philosopher, Timothy Hasler, a Korean-American thinker who was murdered, at age 29, in a gay hustler’s bar, almost a generation before (in 1973, post-Stonewall, but pre-AIDS).

Marr reconstructs Hasler’s life even as he comes to terms with his work, which involves the relation between “formal” and “informal” systems: the way that the logic of description abstracts from, and thereby simplifies, an initially chaotic and complex intermingling of multiple particulars. Hasler reverses the traditional assumptions of classical empiricism and 20th-century positivist and analytic thought. For those traditions, i.e. for thinkers from Locke to the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the world is analyzable into a set of discrete, atomic, entities (“ideas” or “facts”), and complexity results from the ways that, on a higher level, these entities interact, interfere with one another, form into intertwined combinations: “the first three quarters of our [20th] century has been dominated by the unquestioned conviction… that reality was built up of atomic perceptions, that language was built up from the meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words. Only when things got too complicated — in the interaction of system on top of system, system against system — did the appearance of systematicity break down.”

But Hasler argues pretty much the opposite: he argues that “large-scale, messy, informal systems are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable systems… the human mind, and possibly nature herself, master generalized, messy pointing, inexact indication, and flailing well before they learn to individuate and count.” And more, “the messy is what provides the energy which holds any system within it coherent and stable.” In this way, Hasler is closer to the later Wittgenstein, and to Whitehead, than he is to the mainstream of Anglo-American logical and linguistic analysis. (I mention these thinkers, rather than Derrida and Deleuze, because it’s important that Delany represents Hasler as coming out of — and deviating from, or radicalizing — the analytic tradition, rather than participating in “continental” thought).

The question, of course, is what to make of a book in which passages like the one I have just quoted alternate with lengthy descriptions of golden showers night at the Mineshaft, or orgies in the narrator’s apartment that end with cum, piss, and shit smeared over everything, and suffusing the space with their pungent odor. Is the book based upon the notorious Cartesian split between mind and body, as between philosophical asceticism and the corporeal pursuit of pleasure? To the contrary, it is evident that the “informal system” of sexual energy that the book depicts is necessary to the emergence of any “formal system,” any logic and order, of the sort that the novel’s philosophical passages explore. Delany has long written about the ways that “paraliterary” genres can accommodate possibilities foreclosed in more mainstream and “proper” forms of literature. Delany accomplishes this with pornography in The Mad Man, just as he did with science fiction and fantasy in many of his earlier writings. (Hasler himself alternated his philosophical publications with a series of science fiction stories, which are described as pulpy space operas — pre-1960s SF New Wave in content — that nonetheless embody his philosophical themes).

In the course of the novel, as Marr traces Hasler’s life, he also finds himself in effect replicating or repeating it — despite the vast difference between Hasler’s experience as a gay man in the post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS era, and the more circumscribed conditions that Marr faces living in the midst of the epidemic. Hasler and Marr share, among other things, an attraction to homeless men; they each fall in love with one such man; and Marr finally finds himself unwittingly recreating the situation that led to Hasler’s murder; only this time, a homeless man is killed, as Marr fails to substitute himself (as Hasler, it turns out, did, in a true act of love) for the intended victim. Marr’s growing identification with Hasler makes possible the traditional pornographic pattern of a series of sexual scenes or episodes, almost detachable from the surrounding narrative, and yet increasing in intensity as one moves through that narrative, with a culminating orgy that  provides a sort of emotional climax to the narrative as a whole. I don’t know how many readers will really get off on the pornographic scenarios that make so large a part of the novel (I have to admit that it didn’t do much for me in that regard); but it’s crucial to note that Delany does not endeavor to “redeem” or “transcend” pornography, to turn it into something “higher.” He insists on the aim of physically arousing the reader: which of course is what makes pornography a “low” and scandalous genre; in polite society, rhetorical effects are supposed to work only on the mind, not on the body. Thus again, the philosophical themes of the novel are energized and given form by the pornographic depictions, rather than standing in opposition to them.

What’s truly radical about Delany’s pornography — as I have noted several times before (e.g. here, here, here, and here) — is that its intensities are never presented as transgressive; the entire tradition of pornographic transgression, which stretches from Sade to Bataille and beyond, and which is often echoed in the naively liberationist rhetoric of much commercial porn — holds no interest for Delany, and in fact is something that his books explicitly critique. Even the great piss- and shit-stained orgy that is the culminating sexual scene of the book (that is followed by the murder that Marr unwittingly sets the stage for, and that replicates an orgy in Hasler’s apartment, 18 years earlier, that had taken place just before Hasler’s own murder) is depicted (I’m not sure that I can say this the right way) in naturalistic terms rather than lurid ones. By which I do not mean that its intent is not to arouse — since clearly it is — but that it presents such arousal in a continuum with all the other aspects of life (the narrator’s, the writer’s, and the reader’s) rather than as some sort of rupture with them. There’s a bit of comedy, even, as Marr has to explain away the remnants of the scene to his straight-laced, hetero academic advisor (who unexpectedly pops by for a visit the next day); but the whole point is that this embarrassment is a function of the advisor’s narrowminded-bigotry-clothed-in-liberal-goodwill, rather than any intrinsic aspect of the scene itself.

To say that Delany’s view and account of sex, and his “pornutopic fantasy,” have nothing to do with transgression is to say that they cannot be comprehended in the terms of any dialectic of contradiction, or even of any post-Kantian questioning of limits. Sexual exchanges — and there is a lot here, which I lack the space and energy to get into, about the logic of sexual exchange, and how it relates to, and potentially differs from, the ubiquity of market exchange — in fact this difference is the key to Hasler’s murder, and to that of Marr’s homeless friend — are for Delany a form of civility and collectivity, as well as a series of pleasures, or improvements of sensual enjoyment. This doesn’t mean that such sexual exchanges are tame or limited. The point is, rather, that there is no limit — no boundary to be transgressed, or that would mark a zero point, a void or lack, an encounter with death. The Mad Man is a novel quite cognizant of, and continually haunted by, death: in the form of Hasler’s death which is the starting-point of the narrative, and the homeless man’s death which is its conclusion, and more generally in the ever-present reality of AIDS in the world of its narrator. But this death is in no way intrinsic to or carried by the sexual acts that the narrative describes; rather, death always comes from outside (to use or abuse a phrase from Deleuze). Death arrives in The Mad Man, and the book thereby takes on a fully tragic dimension. But although death is inevitable, for we are all mortal, and it is more of a danger for gay man than for many other groups of people (because of the sort of society we live in), nonetheless death is also inessential. It is not a constituent and motor of sexual desire. One cannot imagine a greater contrast to the transgressive — Kantian or Hegelian — logics of Sade, Bataille, and so many others.

In this way, Delany’s pornography leads us to think — forces us to think — in ways that are so far from our cultural norms as to be virtually unimaginable. We don’t have the language — outside of the language provided in Delany’s own writing — to conceptualize what he is proposing to us. (It is something that the late-period Foucault pointed towards, with his ideas about “bodies and pleasures” replacing the transgressive logic of sexuality;  but I think Delany points us much further in this direction than Foucault did). Delany breaks with the utopian, 60s idea of sex as redemptive; but he also breaks, I think, even with the anti-redemptive arguments offered by such queer theorists as Leo Bersani and (more recently) Lee Edelman. Another way to put this is to say that Delany’s pornographic vision — the way bodies and pleasures are intensified to a point of impersonality and anonymity — cannot be described in terms of the Freudian/Lacanian “death drive.” It’s hard for me to express this as clearly or theoretically as I would like; but it has something to do with the way in which “extreme” sexual acts are described both — and simultaneously — as attaining a point where the ego, or the limits between one self and another, are dissolved, so that the experience of sheer intensity is all that remains, and as being experiences of intimacy, ease, togetherness, and (dare I say it?) even a certain homely coziness. This sense suffuses even, and especially, the one passage in the novel where the narrator cites both Sade and Marx (!) in order to explain “all the combinations and permutations of everyone hooking up with everyone else” in the culminating orgy scene. In the logistics of the orgy, we get the intertwining of Hasler’s informal and formal systems, as we get both a push to the point of physical exhaustion, and a sense of free and easy comraderie, one in which the odors of sweat, piss, and cum feel “familiar and comfortable,” and the exchange of bodily fluids are the nicest and sweetest thing one human being can do with another. Sexuality for Delany is a kind of communism, where anonymous relations with multiple others coexist with the exclusivity and special passion of (romantic?) love for one particular other person. As the narrator himself announces quite explicitly, The Mad Man is finally a love story. The pornutopian dimension of the novel has to do with the fact that it is, in the special sense I have been describing, a “communist” love story.

That The Mad Man is inadmissible in just about any discursive or social context one could imagine today is not a fact about the book, but a fact about the our society and its grim deficiencies.

Why Porn Now? In fact, I don’t believe that Now is the time. Of course, there’s more stuff available these days than ever before: extreme porn, gonzo porn, DIY porn, and what have you. Explicit images are everywhere. No fetish, no kink, is so obscure that you can’t find a group devoted to it on the Net, complete with ready-to-download videos. But I find it hard to regard all this as a triumph of anything besides niche marketing. Today, in the era of globalization, electronic media, and post-Fordist flexible accumulation, everything is a commodity. We have reached the point at which even the most impalpable and evanescent, or intimate and private, aspects of our lives — not just physical objects, but services and favors, affects and moods, styles and atmospheres, yearnings and fantasies, experiences and lifestyles — have all been quantified, digitized, and put up for sale. It’s true, of course, that there are many social forces opposed to the proliferation of pornography, and more generally of sexual fantasies and possibilities. In the United States, voters routinely approve anti-homosexual ordinances, and politicians and preachers score points by demanding action to stem the flood of “obscenity.” But really, isn’t this hysterical moralism just the flip side of marketing? The main effect of these crusades is to give pornography, and more generally all forms of nonprocreative sex, the shiny allure of transgression and taboo. And that, in turn, only serves to stimulate the consumer demand for porn-as-commodity, and sex-as-commodity…

In fact, there is nothing more banal than the spectacle of a right-wing politician who turns out to have a passion for teenage boys, or the minister of a fundamentalist megachurch who is discovered to be hiring rent boys on the side. (I cite only the two most recent of the incessant pseudo-scandals that make headlines in the American media). It’s no longer possible to understand these pathetic closet cases in terms of Freudian repression, or the Lacanian Symbolic, or any of the old categories of depth psychology. Rather, their logic is a commodity logic: fetishism in the Marxist sense, instead of the Freudian one. All our affects and passions are perfectly interchangeable, subject to the law of universal equivalence. That is to say, all of them are commodities, detached from the subjective circumstances of their affective production, and offered up for sale in the marketplace. Today our fantasies and desires — indeed, “our bodies, ourselves” — seem to be outside us, apart from us, beyond our power. And this is a very different situation from that of their being repressed, and buried deep within us. Commodities have a magical attraction — we find them irresistable and addictive — because they concretize and embody the “definite social relations” (as Marx puts it) that we cannot discover among ourselves. In the fetishism of commodities, Marx says, these social relations take on “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” The secret sex life of the right-wing politician or preacher is thus a sort of desperate leap, an attempt to seek out those social relations that are only available in the marketplace, only expressible as “revealed preferences” in the endless negotiations of supply and demand. In short, such a secret life is nothing more (or less) than a way of getting relief by going shopping — which is something that we all do. This realization dampens down whatever Schadenfreude such incidents might otherwise afford me.

Therefore, I don’t accept “the thesis of an increasingly pornographic logic of social relations and poltical conditions.” To the contrary: there is nothing exceptional, central, or privileged about pornography and the “pornographic” today. Pornography simply conforms to the same protocols and political conditions, the same commodity logic, as do all other forms of production, circulation, and consumption. Porn today isn’t the least bit different from cars, or mobile phones, or running shoes. It embodies a logic of indifferent equivalence, even as it holds out the thrilling promise of transgression and transcendence — a promise that, of course, it never actually fulfills.

Is it possible to imagine a pornography freed from this logic? Perhaps some recent writings by Samuel R. Delany provide an alternative. In novels like The Mad Man and Phallos, Delany envisions a sexuality pushed to the point of extremity and exhaustion. There are orgies of fucking and sucking, elaborate games of dominance and submission, and episodes of violence and destruction, together with enormous quantities of piss and shit and sweat and cum. Yet there’s no sense of transgression in these texts. Instead, the meticulously naturalistic thick description places these episodes firmly in the realm of the everyday. Delany presents “extreme” sex as a form of civility and community, an adornment of life, a necessary part of the art of living well. Delany’s is the only writing I know that answers Michel Foucault’s call for an ethics/aesthetics of the body and its pleasures, freed from the dreary dialectics of sexuality and transgression. As such, it provides an alternative as well to the relentless commodification that permeates every corner of our postmodern existence.

I’ve spent the last two days in Buffalo, N.Y., attending a conference honoring, and discussing, the works of Samuel R. Delany. It was exhilarating and intense (as well as a big exhausting) to spend so much time concertedly thinking and talking about the writing of one of our greatest living novelists and essayists. Delany’s work in what he has called the “paraliterary” genres of science fiction and pornography, together with his essays and interviews, constitute a body of work that has reflected on the deepest aspects of personal and social life, on the singularity and discomfort of desire, on the importance of pleasure and civility, on the codes and constraints of race, gender, and sexual orientation, not to mention class and Capital; and that has (seemingly) effortlessly covered an entire span between the most intimate autobiographical revelations and the most far-reaching and abstract theoretical speculations on subjectivization and identity and the forms of social and political (dis)order.

I fear my own attempts to describe the importance and impact of Delany’s writings have descended into vague and pompous generalities. In Western culture we have tended for centuries to put our writers and artists on Great Man (usually man rather than woman) pedestals, at the price of obscuring the minute particulars of their work. But I don’t know how to “mediate” between the particulars of Delany’s sinuous prose and the dazzling breadth of his vision. One minute he is writing in exquisite detail about the erotic appeal of a hand with dirty, bitten-down-to-the-nub fingernails; the next he is powerfully speculating on the way that relationships of power and subordination both incite and regulate desire, and how sexuality both permeates and fuels, and yet steps away from, or subtracts itself from, the predominant economy of exchange in capitalist (and, contrastingly, in pre- and post-capitalist) societies. The thing about Delany is that he doesn’t, himself, mediate between the singular and the universal, or (not quite the same dichotomy) the concretely, immediately personal and the wide-ranging abstraction; rather, his fictions draw us into a world (which is our own, only seen now from a different, and shockingly acute, angle of observation) in which making such broad and clumsy distinctions, let alone trying thereby to mediate between them and re-connect them, seems hopelessly naive.

(I suppose I should mention that I wrote, with more particularity than I am capable of here, about Delany’s recent novel Phallos in an earlier blog entry.)

Anyway, in the last two days I heard smart and passionate talks on subjects ranging from Delany’s writerliness and self-referentiality, to the proclivity many of his characters share for consuming and wasting bodily products (sperm, shit, snot, piss), to the way that visual artists have appropriated and been inspired by his words, and to the ways that his novels invent, imagine, and explore a queer space and a queer time, distinct from those of the dominant heteronormativity.

There’s no way to incorporate all the things that everyone said into some single, central thesis. But thinking about Delany’s work through the various angles the various speakers presented to us, I was able more clearly to see how Delany is a writer with a vision of excess, abjection, and waste that puts Bataille to shame (or reveals Bataille, by contrast, as the timid Catholic schoolboy he in some sense was) while at the same time — and this is perhaps the most radical thing about Delany’s fiction — this “vision of excess” has little or nothing to do with the thematization of capital-D Desire and/as transgression that was not only Bataille’s major concern, but that of so much 20th century modernism. For Delany, even excess to the point of exhaustion, and the most outrageous and “transgressive” (in the commonplace sense of this word) sexual acts (from eating shit to incest) have little to do with any dialectic of law and its transgression, but are rather articulated in terms of range or series of bodily pleasures and potentials that both connect people to one another and to the world, and help define the nature of a “self” that doesn’t pre-exist them. Delany, like Bataille, is concerned with expressing, articulating, and enacting a range of desires and deeds that escape the “economy” of capitalist exchange; but Delany’s vision of expenditure beyond exchange-value does not have any of the Bataillean connotations of sin, unnaturalness, “perversion,” and guilt. Bataille was both the most lucid, and yet the most helplessly ensnared, witness to and visionary of the hopes and horrors of the twentieth century. Delany, for the last thirty-five years or more, has already been looking forward to a possible new articulation of desire — and civility and compassion, and excess and extremity — for the twenty-first (though we are unlikely to realize anything close to the hopes and cravings he gives voice to, without a radical change for the better in our social, political, economic, and environmental conditions).

I am still defining the position of Delany’s fiction more in terms of what it is not, than of what it is. There are no utopian blueprints in Delany’s fiction or essays, and his vision always has a sense of limits and boundaries somewhere: we don’t ever abolish dissatisfaction, we don’t ever have everything; we always still face the unexpected, inevitable surprise and contingency and change. (Indeed, his novel Trouble on Triton is subtitled “an ambiguous heterotopia”; it depicts a world in many respects far better and more open to diversity and desire and mutability than our own, but still one in which there is war and resentment and class friction and willful stupidity — this last embodied in the rather obnoxious protagonist). But in the loops and digressions of Delany’s fiction, in its dazzling intellectual range, in its startling concreteness at so many points, and in its seemingly inexhaustible fecundity (even when it is thematizing, as several speakers at the conference pointed out) exhaustion and waste), there is something of a sense of what SF critics like Jameson and Freedman have called the utopian. It’s a call to think otherwise, more richly and broadly, but also a demonstration of how this richness and breadth is potentially graspable in the here and now, in the body, in human and social relationships.

Delany himself was present for the conference. This was a bit intimidating, as we were all talking about his work; but his comments and interventions, and his generous responses to all our presentations, played no small part in making the conference so satisfying an experience. The final evening, Delany gave a reading from some of his new work: he read the Coda to his current novel-in-progress, called Shoat Rumblin, His Sensations and Ideas. These pages just blew me away: they were luminous and deeply moving, a sort-of meditation (by one of the characters in the novel, the father of the eponymous character) on sexuality (of course) and compassion and fatherhood (this last, which I cannot help being concerned with as the father of two young girls, was approached with beauty and entirely without the sappiness that so often vitiates discussions and evocations of the subject for me).

Delany’s Phallos takes the form of a summary/synopsis/commentary, on the Web of a gay porn novel called Phallos, set in ancient Rome and apparently written in the 1960s, that is out of print and very difficult to find. So I guess it could be called meta-pornography: it’s a pornographic narrative that is only presented indirectly, through all the screens of a somewhat unreliable narrator choosing excerpts, and discussing issues of provenance and textual details about a book that (of course) only exists inside the book we are actually reading. As a result of this strategy, also, the copious sex of the pornographic narrative is not explicitly described on the page in any great detail, but mostly just alluded to. The book is allied, therefore, to Delany’s other sexual narratives (Hogg, Equinox, and The Mad Man) but in a reduced (in size and scope) and considerably more indirect manner.

This indirection is of course the point of the book, which is a book about the phallus of Freudian/Lacanian theory, the signifier of desire, and of erotic (& masculine) potency, but which (as a mere signifier) is always absent, or other than itself. The phallus in Phallos is both the unavailable, and only indirectly narrated, pornographic narrative itself, and also (within that distanced, non-present narrative) the missing male organ of an obscure god (or more precisely, of a statue or idol of an obscure god) whose absence, or quality of being missing, circulates through the narrative, and is the “absent cause” of its repetitions, permutations, and deviations.

Describing Delany’s novel in this way, however accurate, also sells it short, because it makes it sound as if the book were just an allegorization, or an “illustration,” of a philosophical idea: which it is not; because Phallos is not exhausted by its allegorical or ideational nature. This is because it is an affectively powerful work (with an intensity that is both playful and emotionally deep and compelling, if not — for me, at least, as a heterosexual reader — directly arousing). You might say that the novel embodies the absence, the non-identity, the simulacral emptying-out of virility, that is its subject: if embodying something non-present (if not quite a “lack” in orthodox Lacanian terms either) is not too much of an oxymoron.

Actually, the most accurate categorization would probably be to say that Phallos is a philosophical novel (or novella), in precisely the sense that Voltaire’s Candide and Diderot’s Bijoux indiscrets and Jacques le fataliste, together with other 18th century fictional works by Sade and others, are philosophical novels. It’s a work of speculation, and even of wisdom — but one in which the thought is carried by narrative, rather than by theoretical argument. It touches on metaphysical issues, having to do with the nature of selfhood and of desire; but ultimately it is a book about how to live.

The absence that is the phallus/phallos means that desire is never sated by total satisfaction, but always awakened again; that life necessarily implies a certain degree of loss, disappointment, and unfulfillment. The phallus, therefore, always implies change and becoming, without the possibility of attaining a final state of peace: it is “that signification itself by which something else always molds us toward something better — or sometimes, something worse — than what we already are” (77). Desire is never entirely realized — there is no utopia or nirvana — but nonetheless “desire is as endlessly unquenchable as it is repeatable” (62).The novel — or, rather, the novel within the novel, indirectly refracted to is — is filled with orgies and all sorts of sexual extremity; but (as has been the case in some of Delany’s earlier works (and as I have previously noted with regard to his Times Square Red, Times Square Blue) this sex is not presented as transgressive: rather it’s seen as a rather civilized way of negotiating the delights and disappointments, opportunities and limitations, of life. There may be a “lack” at the center of desire; but (sexual) variety is literally the spice of a life of desire, and does not contradict, but supplements a main sexual and partnering relationship that is secure and lasting; as Neoptolomus, the hero of the novel-within-the-novel, reflects at one point (not too far from the end), “with such variety [of sexual experiences and pleasures] it becomes hard to hold on to where that lack lies, since that absent center moves about so: If I have learned anything in this time, is that losing track of it, in such a secure relationship, is surely the closest we can come to filling it” (75). I’m not sure if this difficult pronouncement is sufficiently clear apart from its context in the narrative; but it does express a kind of pragmatic utopianism, if I can dare to use such an oxymoronic phrase, that does not make its point, or achieve its hope, at the price of ignoring change and loss — though it is a perspective that is scarcely intelligible or admissible within contemporary American social, political, religious, and psychological discourse, and in fact serves as a terrible condemnation of the wretchedness of mainstream America’s hopes and fears today.

I’ll stop there, though Phallos, for all its brevity, is so rich and (indeed) inspiring a text that it calls out for a more extended, as well as less muddled, appreciation than I have been able to provide here.