BEYOND MEMORIALIZATION: RHETORIC, AESTHETICS, AND AIDS LITERATURE

by

MICHAEL CHIAPPINI

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May 2019 2

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Michael Chiappini

Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy*

Committee Chair T. Kenny Fountain

Committee Member Michael Clune

Committee Member Kimberly Emmons

Committee Member Rachel Sternberg

Date of Defense March 8, 2019

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. 3

Table of Contents

List of Figures...... 4

Acknowledgements...... 5

Abstract...... 6

Introduction...... 7

Moving Beyond the Documentary Impulse of Memorialization

Chapter 1...... 50

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out": The Strange Epideixis of William S. Burroughs

Chapter 2...... 81

AIDS-Enhanced Vision in David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives

Chapter 3...... 109

"GET RID OF MEANING": Author as Virus in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless

Chapter 4...... 137

"An apocalypse of shit and piss": Rhetorical Figuration and Pornography in Samuel R. Delany's The Mad Man

Conclusion...... 172

The Future of Viral Logics

Works Cited...... 183

4

List of Figures

Fig 1. Let the Record Show...... 19

Fig. 2 "Element Chart"...... 70

Fig. 3 Hieroglyphic Writing...... 70

Fig. 4 LOVE...... 75

Fig. 5 Imagevirus...... 75

Fig. 6 "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in LA)...... 177

5

Acknowledgements

This dissertation is inextricable from the work of my committee members. Thanks to my chair, T. Kenny Fountain, whose "needlessly classical" orientation to rhetoric leaves an indelible mark on my work; to Kimberly Emmons, whose influential work on genre and uptake showed me early in my graduate career that rhetors have the agency to draw from the discourses around them for fashioning arguments; to Michael Clune, whose insistence that literature is itself a form of knowing and doing that stands apart from the social informs my entire approach to both rhetorical and literary studies; and to Rachel

Sternberg, whose patience in teaching me ancient Greek opened worlds of possibility for understanding how antiquity can bubble up into the present in novel ways.

Special thanks to my colleagues Philip Derbesy and Ryan Mitchell for listening to me hash and rehash ideas from this dissertation over the last three years, and for their valuable insights into the problems it wrestles with, and for their generosity in commenting on drafts at all stages of the writing process.

6

Beyond Memorialization: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and AIDS Literature

Abstract

By

MICHAEL CHIAPPINI

Bridging rhetorical and literary studies, Beyond Memorialization: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and AIDS Literature, examines how AIDS Crisis writers transform medical discourses and biological images into aesthetic objects for suasory purposes. Specifically, I examine a strain of texts that rhetorically operationalize the discourses and images of HIV/AIDS, often in perverse ways, through ekphrastic techniques of rhetorical presencing. These writers and artists use vivid descriptions, striking details, evocative figures, and arresting images to bring before the eyes the unseen realities and possibilities of HIV/AIDS. In the process, these ekphrastic images, which blur the distinction between description and narrative, destabilize and erode conventional conceptions of history and memory.

7

Introduction

Moving Beyond the Documentary Impulse of Memorialization

What is AIDS literature? In attempting to answer this question, perhaps you thought of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America, or Larry

Kramer's polemical play The Normal Heart, or maybe even the work of poets Thom

Gunn or Mark Doty. You probably thought of works about AIDS, after all the moniker

"AIDS literature" often describes texts that represent and/or respond to the AIDS Crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. If you are twenty-three or younger (and therefore born after the introduction of Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy, or HAART, in 1996, the combination of medicines that slowed the exponential death rate and made AIDS a chronic, often manageable disease), perhaps nothing came to mind because AIDS has never been a dominant fixture of your cultural landscape; in this case, you would probably still come to the same conclusion through deduction: AIDS literature is written about or in response to AIDS.

I phrase this opening question in the present tense purposely, a reversal of the structurally similar question of Kenneth Warren's provocative book What Was African

American Literature? Warren's argument that the genre of African American literature both "was a historical phenomenon" and that "the possibility for its demise was built into its very reason for being" (739)i (i.e. that it was written in response to the conditions of

Jim Crow and that once these conditions purportedly dissipated with the Civil Rights Act, the genre had achieved its ends) is controversial. The same structure is taken as simple fact to describe the conditions of the genre of AIDS literature: it names texts representing 8 the AIDS Crisis that often had an activist orientation that attempted to intervene in the cultural narratives of the disease and to bring about the end of the Crisis. Once that Crisis was ended, so too was the production of AIDS literature.

Writing in a 2016 Huffington Post article entitled "Is AIDS Literature Dead?", the novelist John Whittier Treat asks, "Does anyone read fiction about AIDS anymore?" In an attempt to account for why it seems that no one does, Treat goes on to inadvertently define the contours of what "fiction about AIDS" might contain by suggesting that "The best stories, novels and memoirs about AIDS published in the decade of 1985-95 were written by men who were soon to die of it, insuring [sic] their silence." That is to say, he reinforces the commonsense view that AIDS fiction was produced for roughly a decade and that it was produced only by gay men with AIDS, who then died. Or, if they didn't die, Treat allows, they started writing about something else: "Other great writers of those days are alive but have turned, out of frustration with the publishing industry’s resistance to AIDS or with the need, post-trauma, to write of other things." Of course, all of this boundary defining and hypothesizing is really a ruse belying the clickbait nature of the article's title; the article is in actuality an announcement of Treat's own forthcoming historical AIDS novel, a corrective to the narrative he has just invented.

Similarly, writing in a 2017 Guardian article entitled "Why are there so few novels about AIDS these days?" Zoë Apostolides replicates Treat's logic, pointing to the numbers of those who died and the inability of those who survived to overcome their trauma as reasons for the paucity of AIDS texts in the present. However, she adds a strange hypothetical dimension to the argument: "Why are there so few? We’ll never know how many books on the subject were lost when authors were claimed by the virus; 9 how many died with the intention to write about their experience and never managed to."

In addition to posing a question that cannot have an answer of what these authors might have written had they lived, this kind of theorizing gives the genre of AIDS literature a hypothetical, imaginary quality—our theorizing about it tends to involve what the genre might have been, or what it ought to be, not what it actually is. As such, Apostolides adds a moral imperative to her discussion, arguing that "given the sheer numbers of people whose lives were ravaged by the virus, there should be more." She calls for a new generation of writers to take up this mantle and get over their fears of representing something they did not witness firsthand, as there is a moral imperative in producing new works of literature about AIDS to help change the cultural conversations around the disease: "Our attitudes to illness, death and notions of morality are reflected in what we as a society elect to write about, and books improve not only our understanding, but the understanding of generations after us." That is, the scant amount of AIDS literature texts is a reflection of what our society does and does not value, and we can only solve this problem by theorizing what the genre might be.

AIDS literature, as narrowly defined by both of these writers, is conceived of in terms structurally similar to Warren's notion of African American literature: as a historical phenomenon produced during a set period of time that is no longer produced.

Warren's argument is controversial precisely because other scholars insist that "African

American literature" is something that continues to be produced.ii The case of AIDS literature is the exact opposite—the problem is that nobody produces it anymore, and it is thus in danger of being erased from our canons by the onward march of time. However, the call to produce new AIDS texts as a solution to this problem still tethers the issue to 10 this rough decade of the 80s and 90s, reducing the genre to a kind of historical fiction whose only purpose is to mimetically represent what has transpired. The call to produce fiction that realistically depicts the Crisis suggests that the Crisis itself gave birth to its own originary representations; this paradoxical logic places acceptable limits on how the

Crisis can be represented and by whom. Additionally, the genre serves a pedagogical function: it is meant to preserve the historical record of the Crisis and the experiences of those who suffered both as a kind of moral instruction for society and as a means of giving access to these narratives to younger generations.

This dissertation refutes both assumptions made in this popular conception of

"AIDS literature," namely: 1) that AIDS literature merely records what happened during the AIDS Crisis, and is now subject to a precarious scarcity; and 2) that the function of

AIDS literature is to operationalize this record to both memorialize those who died and to serve as a kind moral instruction for future generations. I argue instead that this conception of AIDS literature as a historical genre is unnecessarily delimiting, and as a result a host of texts that do not operate according to these logics of memorialization are ignored or misread, texts that have the potential to challenge and redefine what AIDS literature is and can be. Instead, I advocate a conceptualization of the genre that moves away from mimetic representations of the Crisis as the main way of conceiving of AIDS literature, and instead towards a conceptualization that includes texts that mine AIDS and its associated discourses, using them as literary resources for thinking through other problems. Such a conception shows that the afterlives and influences of the logics of

AIDS literature are all around us. To do this, my dissertation will analyze a collection of

AIDS-related texts, written during the Crisis years, that are often either excluded from the 11 genre or misread, texts that find in AIDS and its viral logics an aesthetic and rhetorical resource with which to explore issues as diverse as memory, death, identity, narrative, and sexuality. Because the aesthetic has a unique position that is not identical with the social or political, it has allowed these writers to explore these problems with a freedom to make present alternative ways of conceiving of solutions to them. By analyzing the rhetorical and literary presencing techniques of experimental works by William S.

Burroughs, David Wojnarowicz, Kathy Acker, and Samuel R. Delaney, I will demonstrate that literature is uniquely suited for imagining alternatives to these problems because of its rhetorical ability to use the capacities of language for visualization in order to make readers see and imagine potentialities that are unrealizable elsewhere.

Situating the problem of this dissertation at the crossroads between rhetorical studies and literary studies, or rhetoric and poetics, reveals that a literary problem can also be a deeply rhetorical one. The aesthetic problem of the memorializing text, as evidenced by the popular conceptions of AIDS literature I've reviewed heretofore, doubles back upon itself as a rhetorical problem: the misrecognition of what the genre can do. This project advocates a dual approach, a rhetorical-literary analysis that unites these oft-divided fields of study for solving this aesthetic-rhetorical problem. Speaking of the need for rhetoric and poetics to rejoin after centuries of being split apart, Charles

Altieri makes clear that modernist poetry's refusal to engage with rhetoric has left it with a decreased audience in the civic world, such that it must "either construct an audience or find those fit but few who can bring the work back to life from its ashes" (480). Similarly for Altieri, rhetoric "loses much of its power and its capacity to transform social life when it is conceived only as an instrument of enlightened praxis" (491). That is to say, 12 when literature finds itself separated from the fabric of social life, it is robbed of some of its transformative power in the same way that when rhetoric is seen only as having a logical or practical function, it loses its ability to transform the social in uniquely aesthetic ways.

By way of an introduction to my larger project, I will provide an account for why we read AIDS literature the way we do, and propose a framework for how we might read it otherwise. First, I will explore what I term the documentary impulse of memorialization, a fundamental misrecognition of the purpose and rhetorical function of texts from the epideictic branch of rhetoric (what Aristotle categorized as the branch of display oratory, such as funeral orations and lyric poetry). To provide a context for how and why this memorializing reception became the dominant mode for conceptualizing

AIDS texts, I turn to a historical examination of AIDS criticism, from the cultural studies activist orientation of the Crisis years through the present period of "AIDS amnesia."

Second, I will examine how this memorializing impulse manifests in AIDS literature by examining the reception of two texts, arguably the first and the most recent artistic responses to AIDS, respectively: a concept album from 1982 and a novel from 2018.

Third, to provide a corrective to this memorializing interpretation, I advocate a return to neglected dimensions of the epideictic by focusing upon literature's power to display through techniques of rhetorical presencing and to make present what is unrealizable or absent in realist depictions. Finally, the introduction will conclude with an overview of my dissertation, including a brief outline of the chapters that follow.

13

The Problem of the Epideictic: The Memorializing Impulse and the Culture of

Redemption

The conception of the genre that I have outlined (that AIDS literature records what was, and that it is a pedagogical tool) is grounded in the belief that AIDS texts do or must memorialize those who died during the Crisis. Writing in a forward to 2007's Vital

Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction, the only anthology of AIDS fiction published since the

"end" of the Crisis in the mid-1990s, the novelist Dale Peck (whose own 1993 novel

Martin and John is considered a work of AIDS literature) argues that AIDS literature is something no longer produced, listing the same reasons as Treat and Apostolides.

However, Peck locates the problem in the being of literature itself; he goes on to philosophize about how literature works:

It's important to remember that literature doesn't facilitate understanding,

but rather empathy. It's important to remember also that literature can only

enfold the present within its scope by displacing it in time, in the process

rendering the events it describes static, finished, past. As a consequence,

fiction and memoir serve first and foremost as memorials: to worlds lost or

worlds that never were. (vii-viii)

This idiosyncratic and fallacious understanding of literature as a perpetual failure to make things new means that any representation, once it has rendered something in words, freezes that thing as a past object. The notion that literature "can only" do this act of

"enfold[ing] the present" is a twisting and diminishing of literature's powers of projection, suggesting that all literature aspires to realism and that such aspirations are futile; how speculative or imaginative fiction fits into this framework is unclear. Thus, 14

Peck's explanation of AIDS literature as being both something past and finished, as well as something that then serves as a memorial to that past, necessarily limits AIDS literature to the realm of realism. It is also symptomatic of what I term the documentary impulse of memorialization. The documentary impulse is marked by a focus on vivid and realistic detail that documents the object of memorialization with seeming precision such that the object can serve both as an unquestionable record of events and experiences that have transpired and that these details can be used to help younger generations visualize historical narratives they cannot access otherwise.

Where does this sense that literature "can only" preserve some present, and that this preservation is only a mode of "facilitat[ing] empathy," come from? I argue that the understanding of literature as a site of memorialization stems from a fundamental misrecognition and conflation of the different roles and functions of genres of texts belonging to the rhetorical branch of epideictic rhetoric. Often glossed as meaning

'display,' 'show,' or 'demonstration' (Carey 237), the Greek word epideixis serves as a category for oratory that isn't that of the courts or the realm of civic debate. Rather, it is the oratorical category of funeral orations, lyric poetry, and myth—literary genres which have "no immediate practical outcome" (when compared with the other branches of deliberative and judicial rhetoric) but which play "an important role [...] in social definition" (237). The category is ambiguous, but its legacy includes those types of discourse that realize "the full potential of prose" and the performance-oriented nature of oratory, a characteristic that often (mis)aligns the epideictic with flowery ornateness or outright propaganda. 15

The genre, as well, according to Aristotle, has a relationship with the present. In his treatise On Rhetoric, he systematically outlines the three branches of rhetoric as the deliberative, judicial, and epideictic. While deliberative and judicial rhetoric have their practical places in the public sphere and the law courts, the epideictic is described vaguely as being about "either praise or blame" (48). Perhaps more strangely, Aristotle names the "time" of the epideictic as the present, "for all speakers praise and blame in regard to existing qualities," but concedes that they do, in fact, "remin[d] [the audience] of the past" and "projec[t] the course of the future" (48-9)iii. Further elaborations of the branch dwell upon defining what is virtuous and how to properly praise some quality; blame, on the other hand, is merely "derived from the opposites [of these]" (83).

Aristotle's downplaying of the epideictic implicitly values the logical proofs used in deliberative and judicial branches more, making the epideictic a "wastebasket for classifying lesser orations" (Rosenfield 133).

Many scholars have pointed out how Aristotle's narrowly conceived notion of epideictic rhetoric was a way of separating certain literary genres from those directly engaged in civic discourse and of separating his rhetorical project from that of the sophists. Andreea Ritivoi argues that "The Aristotelian treatment, with its emphasis on the aesthetic aspect of epideictic [...] tr[ies] to domesticate epideictic through its alignment with literature—a way of dismissing its social and political function" (124).

Michel de Certeau similarly notes that this domestication occurs because of Aristotle's dismissal of "the ancient art of the sophistic" (38). Certeau argues that the sophistic tactics of argument, which relied on dialectics, "perverted, as he [Aristotle] saw it, the 16 order of truth" (38). Hence his famous dismissal of the sophist Corax in On Rhetoric, whom Aristotle accuses of "mak[ing] the weaker seem the better cause" (Aristotle 189).

What is limited from view when we conceive of literature and art in this way?

Lawrence J. Prelli suggests that Aristotle's domestication of the epideictic as a kind of rhetorical showmanship has caused the epideictic to "pal[e] in public significance when compared with the oratory of politics and law" (2-3). The result is that display and ornateness are domesticated to do the bidding of the social sphere, and to set examples of excellent and praiseworthy behavior. In this way, all literature becomes subordinated to the normalizing function of the civic union of a community where an audience "join[s] together in thoughtful acknowledgement, celebration and commemoration of that which is best in human experience" (3), such as in a funeral oration that unifies a community around the heroic deeds of the deceased. This narrow view of the epideictic, according to

Jeffrey Walker, ignores sophistic notions of the genre where the powers of display are used for "leading an audience [...] to contemplation, possible insight, and to formations of opinions and desires on matters of philosophical, social, ethical, and cultural concern"

(9). As such, Walker argues, the epideictic is not a mere tool for reinforcing what a culture already believes—its powers to display can also "work to challenge or transform conventional beliefs" (9) precisely because the genre is not tied to the practical needs of the civic or social spheres. Here, the epideictic arises as an alternative to the logical constraints of judicial and deliberative genres.

It is within this division of the epideictic that the problem of the documentary impulse of memorialization arises. Treating aesthetic texts as mere historical records and moral instructions for how we ought to live is to deny them their power to transform the 17 conventional beliefs of the everyday. Furthermore, it robs the epideictic of its power to display and project alternative realities inaccessible and unrealizable in the logical proofs of the social and political spheres. This impoverished view of the epideictic is represented in early and even contemporary AIDS literary criticism, which from the beginning of the academic response to AIDS has insisted upon a practical, activist orientation that attempts to end the Crisis by intervening in cultural representations. This tendency continues today in an attempt now, thirty-something years after the Crisis, to battle a cultural amnesia surrounding AIDS and to make the historical record of loss accessible to a younger generation.

AIDS Criticism and Cultural Studies: "Intervening at the Site of Production":

The twin notions of the documentary impulse that art should create a record of what has transpired and that this record is a pedagogical tool for future generations arise out of what academic AIDS activists termed "the AIDS activist aesthetic" (Watney,

"Representing" 179). This aesthetic is explicitly linked to the cultural studies goal of producing civically engaged scholarship that could "enable people to understand what

[was] going on, and especially to provide ways of thinking, strategies for survival, and resources for resistance" (Hall, "Emergence" 22). The growth of cultural studies in the

American academy is inextricable from the AIDS Crisis, and indeed provided perhaps the greatest test to the school of thought's programme. Writing of AIDS in 1992, Stuart Hall acknowledged the Crisis's humbling effects on cultural theory:

AIDS is one of the questions which urgently brings before us our

marginality as critical intellectuals in making real effects in the world [...] 18

I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual

practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality,

how little it registers how little we've been able to change anything or get

anybody to do anything. (“Cultural Studies” 284-284)

Despite Hall's sense of ephemerality, the desire to change the social sphere, to mobilize people to bring an end to the Crisis, was part of the project of AIDS criticism from the beginning. As Paula Treichler argued in her 1987 article "An Epidemic of Signification," published in Cultural Studies journal, "We must explore the site where such determinations really occur and intervene at the point where meaning is created: in language" (31). Treichler's essay was reprinted in a 1987 special issue of the contemporary art journal October devoted to the role of art in bringing about an end to the AIDS Crisis. Titled "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism," this volume made clear that analyzing and critiquing (often homophobic) cultural objects was itself a form of activism. In addition to Treichler's essay, this volume produced a number of essays that are now canonical works of AIDS criticism and of AIDS art in particular: Douglas

Crimp's "AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism," Simon Watney's "The Spectacle of

AIDS," and Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Unfortunately, however, the analysis of AIDS, and specifically of AIDS-related art, has never moved beyond the imperatives stated in this single issue of October.

The art historian Douglas Crimp, October's editor, writes in his polemical titular introduction that "AIDS exists only in and through [cultural and linguistic] constructions" and that there is an "imperative to know them, analyze them, and wrest control of them"

(“AIDS” 3). As part of this imperative, Crimp argues that we must free art from galleries 19 and museums and gala benefits, and instead take it to the streets to engage in the battle to end the epidemic. He controversially and polemically argues that "we will have to abandon the idealist conception of art. We don't need a cultural renaissance; we need cultural practices actively participating in the struggle against AIDS. We don't need to transcend the epidemic; we need to end it" (7).

What is fascinating about Crimp's imperative is that the activist art he offers as an example of the right kind of AIDS art is already, in 1987, functioning according to the documentary impulse. Using the artistic tactics of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP, as exemplary of the AIDS activist aesthetic, Crimp points to their installation piece by Gran Fury, Let the

Record Show, which was displayed in the window of the

New Museum in November of

1987 (see fig. 1). Let the Record

Show is simultaneously complex and simple, mixing a variety of materials and texts, but with a clear message with a large mural of the Nuremberg Trials as its backdrop, and the iconic ACT

UP image of a pink triangle with Figure 1: Gran Fury, Let the Record Show, the phrase "SILENCE=DEATH" in New Museum, 1 Feb. 2019, archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/158 glowing neon above. The title of 20 the installation refers to both using the words of "AIDS criminals," which are cast in literal concrete at the front of the installation, and the use of a running digital ticker of text relating facts and figures about government funding for the Crisis, the number of deaths, and further quotes from figures like Ronald Reagan.

There is undeniably an artistic element to this piece—the use of neon and the running ticker call to mind techniques developed by Jenny Holzer and other postmodern artists. What is particularly interesting is the moral condemnation the piece makes by juxtaposing Nazi war crimes with "AIDS criminals," and the use of their own words, facts, and figures as evidence for their guilt. The art object becomes the historical record—it condemns and eulogizes all at once. Capped by the glowing neon of the phrase

"SILENCE=DEATH," the installation unambiguously goads those walking down the sidewalk of the Bowery to question their own complicity in remaining silent about the

AIDS crimes, in the same way the silence of Germans is complicit with Nazi genocide.

Using the phrase "the activist aesthetic," Simon Watney makes clear why this kind of activist art is more effective than that which seeks to transcend the Crisis; the activist aesthetic is grounded in the photographic image, what Watney identifies as the main site of the contestation of meaning in postmodernity:

[W]e need photographic records, to tell our side of the history of the

epidemic, on our terms. This archival aim is related to but also distinct

from the parallel project of developing a confident AIDS activist aesthetic

in the field of the photographic media [...] The images that will do justice

to this epidemic will be those that manage to communicate something of 21

the power and nature of the forces that justify such a murderous

indifference to AIDS. ("Representing" 185)

Watney's call for the development of an AIDS activist aesthetic around the technology of the photograph, not just as documentation but as an argument, is a placement of the power of the epideictic into Aristotelian terms: holding up an image of the present and articulating, through praise or blame, how the culture ought to move forward.

Similar to Crimp, Watney's definition of an activist aesthetic is made in opposition to what he determines as the pretentions of "great art." "Whilst we hopefully find solace in works of fiction, art and poetry," Watney contends, "we surely do not need

AIDS to value them the more?" He goes on to ask "How many times can we read King

Lear in the course of these years? Most of us eventually put the bookmark back into

Middlemarch after a few hours" (166). Instead, Watney champions more egalitarian forms of art, such as the NAMES Project AIDS Quilt as "an adequate source of public or private consolation for everyone" (166, emphasis original). The great irony is that in the present we continue to read King Lear and Middlemarch and the AIDS texts that dared to transcend the Crisis, like Angels in America. Meanwhile, the AIDS Quilt sits in a warehouse in Georgia, undisplayed for the last decade, because the NAMES Project can raise neither the funds nor the institutional support to display it.

The AIDS activist aesthetic of both documenting the Crisis and attempting to intervene in the cultural field quickly found its way from Crimp and Watney's positions on fine arts to that of the literary arts. By 1992, Emmanuel S. Nelson argues in his introduction to AIDS: The Literary Response that attending to gay writers' experiences of the Crisis is both "morally and politically necessary" (1). He goes on to reaffirm that the 22 documentary, memorializing nature of "the most poignant and enduring texts of the AIDS era" (1) results in a collision of "what is testimonial and what is fictive [...] resulting in works of fierce authenticity and haunting eloquence" (2). That is, the best texts, the ones worth talking about and the ones that will last, both provide an authentic record of the

Crisis and allow us to be haunted by it, to memorialize those who died. Judith Laurence

Pastore similarly argues in 1993's Confronting AIDS through Literature that AIDS literature primarily serves a pedagogical function. She raises the specter of the aesthetic by asking "Beyond its didactic goals, does literary AIDS have other, more traditional literary aims?" only to then answer, "As an expressive medium, it most certainly does, as countless artists have used it to assuage their grief and to bear witness to those destroyed"

(5). Again, we see the documentary impulse of memorialization at work, determining the only two things these texts are capable of is serving as didactic models for how we ought to respond to the Crisis and to bear witness through memorializing. Interestingly, Pastore directly invokes Aristotle as justification for why we ought to read AIDS literature:

If Aristotle was correct, then the artistic representation of human

suffering shouldn't make us depressed [...] Literature about AIDS does not

make us feel better because someone else is in pain; rather, the

imaginative depiction of other people exhibiting a nobility of spirit makes

us proud to be human and willing to imitate their endurance and strength

of character. (2)

Pastore here collapses Aristotle's notions of the mimetic and its role in creating catharsis in tragedy with the epideictic function of praise and blame, of feeling lifted up by some 23 socially defining feature of discourse. Again, the art object's role within this framework is to realistically depict AIDS so that we might both learn from it and honor it.

AIDS Criticism Today: AIDS Amnesia and the Documentary Impulse of

Memorialization

I argue that the reaction against high art that "transcends" the Crisis in favor of an activist aesthetic by prominent theorizers of AIDS such as Crimp and Watney can be directly linked to the (perceived) paucity of texts in our present, what many contemporary scholars identify as "AIDS amnesia." This term was coined in Susan Blumenthal’s 2008

Washington Times article “AIDS Amnesia in America.” As the medical advisor at the

Foundation for AIDS Research (amFAR), Blumenthal's concerns are largely with domestic HIV testing health communication; she argues that the focus on HIV and AIDS overseas has created a kind of amnesia surrounding testing and prevention here in the

United States. Despite the material, medical focus of the article, the phrase “AIDS amnesia” proved useful to cultural studies scholarship dealing with HIV/AIDS, as it gave name to an increasing sense that in the new millennium, it was as though AIDS never existed.

In a 2010 PMLA article, Gregory Tomso lays the blame at the feet of the humanities, arguing that "an outpouring of new work on HIV/AIDS by economists and political scientists in the past few years [...] accentuates the decline in scholarly attention to HIV/AIDS in the humanities that has occurred now that the high tide of AIDS activism has receded" (443). Interestingly, Tomso cannily points out the tie between AIDS activism and scholarship here, perhaps acknowledging the problem of the two remaining 24 dependent upon each other. However, rather than calling for a renewed activist aesthetic or attention to aesthetic forms, Tomso makes the strange recommendation that the humanities turn to the social sciences as a model for "practical and immediate" responses to the global AIDS pandemic. He names the failure of the humanities to address these practical concerns as "global crises in HIV/AIDS subjectivity" (443). We don't seem to have tools in our fields useful in solving these problems, Tomso argues; instead it

"requires looking at problems of HIV/AIDS and subjectivity through the lens of political economy" (444).

Tomso's call for an ethical and activist engagement isn't the only attempt to reach outside of the confines of the humanities’ aesthetic concerns for a more "practical" approach. Sarah Schulman, a novelist, academic, and founding member of ACT UP, locates the problem of AIDS amnesia in her 2012 memoir/polemic The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination. Schulman locates multiple axes to account for the current dearth of AIDS Crisis discourse, namely gentrification. Gentrification is a supple metaphor for Schulman—her analysis shuttles from the literal gentrification of the

Lower East Side in the years following the Crisis, to a metaphorical gentrification of the gay community by white middle-class gay men who pushed for the gay marriage agenda, to the notion that Amazon and other online booksellers have gentrified literature through the use of algorithms. Schulman identifies the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent national memorialization project as the covering over of the “gaping hole of silence” (47) of the Crisis and replacing it with “the ritualized and institutionalized mourning of the acceptable dead” (47) of the terrorist attacks. But most importantly, AIDS Amnesia 25 results from a generational divide between the Gen Xers of the ACT UP era and the millennials of the (then) present. Schulman complains,

The younger people loved ACT UP. But in some fundamental way they

couldn't relate to it. They didn't understand what we had experienced.

They had never been that profoundly oppressed. And yet, they wanted to

relate. They also had never been that inspired, that inventive or that

effective. (7)

Interestingly, Schulman's ultimate recommendation returns us to the memorializing impulse—reading about ACT UP through its Oral History Project, which Schulman names "the most remarkable story I have ever experienced," is itself "a model for human behavior in all realms" (156). That is to say, access to realistic narratives of those who lived through the Crisis provides both an opportunity to honor and memorialize those who came before us and serves as templates for what we ought to praise and blame as a culture.

Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed conservativelyiv blame this trend of

AIDS Amnesia specifically on poststructuralist queer theory and the idea of “queer” itself that arose during the Crisis, arguing that the loss of an essential identity for gay men results in a kind of amnesia. Combined with the high death toll from the disease, the

AIDS Crisis itself becomes “an occasion for a powerful concentration of cultural forces that made (and continue to make) the syndrome an agent of amnesia” (3) and deprive the current generation of LGBTQ youth of “the remarkably vibrant and imaginative ways that gay communities responded to the catastrophe of illness and death” (3). Their approach is also a fundamentally backward glance to the past to recover gay ways of 26 remembering through art; interestingly, Castiglia and Reed turn to the aesthetic as a model for this by mining the artwork of Félix González-Torres, though they ultimately subject it to the same memorializing impulse:

What is needed now is an aesthetics of memory that can articulate the

relationship of loss and hope, of commemoration and idealism in relation

to gay culture—memorials that will help us overcome our traumatized

forgetfulness of the gay past. (186)

Even when the aesthetic is involved here, it is still in the service of both providing a kind of idealized template for living (in the form of gay culture) and it is to serve as an antidote to forgetfulness in the form of memorialization.

The contemporary literary response to AIDS amnesia takes very similar paths as

Schulman and Castiglia and Reed, arguing that AIDS literature (always from the past) serves primarily as an act of testimony, bearing witness to the horrors of the AIDS Crisis that we in the present did not experience ourselves. Of the handful of monographs making arguments about AIDS literature, most use a testimonial or trauma theory framework to analyze largely non-fiction accounts of the Crisis. These non-fiction accounts tend to take the form of diaries or memoirs, with the authors serving as witnesses to the syndrome and the Crisis as a whole. For example, Ross Chambers argues that authors of AIDS literature use writing as a form of testimony that is “capable of transforming the marginality/residuality of the witness into an experience of liminality that can be felt, in turn, by the readers” (xxvi, italics original)—that is, readers who have forgotten the trauma of the AIDS Crisis are reminded of it by these ghostly writer figures, most of whom died of the syndrome before the Crisis’s end. Drawing on Chambers’ 27 work, Sarah Brophy similarly uses a psychoanalytic trauma theory framework that examines several works of non-fiction that take the AIDS Crisis as subject matter. She argues that “personal testimonies written in response to HIV and AIDS attempt to intervene in cultural memory by rewriting the story of the body and its locations, thus significantly altering how readers receive and respond to these imaginings and re- imaginings” (5). More recently, Monica Pearl reads the writing of AIDS literature as a form of Freudian grieving that functions as the formation of both the authors’ and readers’ identities, arguing at the outset of her monograph, “[T]he literature of AIDS is a response to grief, that is, it is part of the work of mourning itself” (1). It is inarguable that all of this post-2008 scholarship, whether cultural studies or literary studies-oriented, is tethered to the same logics as the "activist aesthetic" put forward by Crimp, Watney, and others over three decades ago.

The Legacy of AIDS Criticism’s Documentary Impulse

To illuminate what exactly is omitted, or misread, from this misrecognition of the function of epideictic literary genres by adhering to the AIDS activist aesthetic, I wish to consider two representations of AIDS: Patrick Cowley's 1982 disco/electronic concept album Mind Warp and Rebecca Makkai's 2018 novel The Great Believers. These texts are radically different both in form and content, but, as I will show, when subjected to the documentary impulse of memorialization, they are flattened and made relatively homogenous as texts that memorialize the AIDS Crisis.

28

A. Patrick Cowley's Mind Warp (1982)

In November 1981, the influential San Francisco-based disco producer and DJ

Patrick Cowley entered the hospital after weeks of feeling ill. Puzzled by his symptoms, doctors diagnosed him with food poisoning, unable to offer further comfort. Throughout the next year, Cowley's health would continue to deteriorate as he broke through with mainstream success, producing tracks for the disco artist Sylvester and forming Megatone

Records. Cowley died in his home in San Francisco on November 12, 1982 of AIDS- related illness (Lefebvre)v, less than two months after the Centers for Disease Control first used the acronym AIDS on September 24th to describe the mysterious illness (US

Dept. Health). Cowley would be one of the first 771 cases of the disease reported in the

US by the end of 1982 (amfAR).

A few weeks prior to his death, Cowley released his final work, a Hi-NRG electronic/disco concept album entitled Mind Warp. Cowley produced this final magnum opus quite literally from his deathbed; unable to eat or walk, he propped himself up on pillows in the studio to finish mixing the tracks of what was called "the death record" by friends and colleagues (Lefebvre). Because of the conditions of its creation, Mind Warp is often read as "a bleak concept album about, and made during, his own death" that is now "an essential document of the AIDS plague years" (Dorris). The album's strange content and energetic rhythms, though, make such a reading tenuous and beg questions about how exactly the album reworks death and AIDS into its conceptual framework.

AIDS does not appear by name on the album, nor do any of its symptoms; rather, Mind

Warp's treatment of the disease seems to operate on a largely metaphorical level. For all its strangeness, its tracks tell a relatively straightforward narrative of interstellar invasion 29 by an alien race, mutation, an apocalypse that returns the world to a primitive state, and a return to space.

The album's opening track "Tech-No-Logical World" establishes the present as a technological dystopia where "satisfaction [is] guaranteed" but the "flags of doom unfurl." The album's narrative voice describes a desire to "get away/From that video stare," but because of some unexplained market operation cannot: "If your production drops/If your sector flops/You'll be meeting Doctor Terminus." In these oblique lines, it seems that if one's technological output slows, the result is a meeting with death in the form of the mysterious Dr. Terminus (who isn't described further or brought up again).

This already dystopic world is interrupted by an unexplained invasion from outer space; the following instrumental track "Invasion" gives a sense of space invaders, its synthesizer tones approximating falling objects and a mad race. What invaded, exactly, is related to the listener in "They Came at Night": "They came at night, they all arrived/In form familiar to the eye." Cowley's lyrics never give us a visual approximation of what

"They" look like, giving the song a metaphorical capacity that forces us both to draw on science fiction tropes of "intruders from the sky," as well as to read the invaders as AIDS itself. Cowley instead describes them obliquely as "the voice behind your eyes" and their

"only trace [is] a greenish glow." Importantly, though, these invaders "strike when you're alone," entering by "spinal tap" where they then take root "inside your mind." Here, the album's use of the ambiguity of a yet-to-be-defined AIDS leads to a kind of conceptual multiplicity; the invaders borrow from the logic of an unseen and unknown infectious agent, but they also signify something else related to science fiction narratives. 30

However, unlike AIDS, the invaders impart upon the infected a transformative vision, a fact of the album that is almost unilaterally ignored by critics. Following "They

Came at Night," whose account of bodily invasion can indeed be interpreted as horrifying, the album's titular track "Mind Warp" offers a generative and revelatory vision of bodily and cognitive transformation. The narrator comments on this transformation as being imbued with a kind of ancient mysticism:

I woke up in the middle of the night

A voice behind my eyes

It spoke to me in an ancient tongue

I could not recognize

That is to say, the invisible invader in the mind of the infected begins to speak to its host, speaking in some kind of language that is intact and un-degraded from the dystopia of technology. The narrator continues:

A warning it was calling out

Violation taking place

I taste the fear that long ago

Technology disgraced

How do we parse the vision of infection from a primitive foreign body that leads to a rediscovery of some primal fear or urge that has been covered over in the present technological age? And what is this primal fear? Is it death, which has been covered over by technology, or something else? And does this thus mean that if the invader is a metaphor for AIDS, that AIDS somehow puts us back in touch with natural dying processes that we have been disconnected from in the present? 31

The following track, "Primitive World," is purely instrumental, and in its incorporation of Afro-Caribbean beats and a (stereotypical) tribal chanting into the sonic landscape, the "primitive" world of the invader has replaced the harsh technological sounds the album opened with. Transformation has become complete by the next track,

"Mutant Man," where the presumably now fully-mutated narrator has achieved a state of full understanding:

Returning to the source

Rhythm touching rhythm

Is the underlying force

When he hears the harmony

Inside mutant man

He will understand

That is, the infected and now-transformed "mutant," able to hear the ancient voice, can return to some primordial source made of rhythm and harmony. This new, primitive harmony creates meaning and understanding, something previously unavailable in the dystopic technological world. This track fades into the album's final ebullient closing number, "Going Home." A chorus of voices chants to a pulsating disco dance number:

Going home

Leave your troubles far behind

Going home

Far beyond all space and time

We're on a journey to parts unknown

We're gonna take you along 32

If "going home" is a metaphor for death, this is not a sad one, as critics frequently interpret it. Yes, there can be an ironic difference between form and content, but given the progression of the narrative up to this point—from technological dystopia to primitive understanding and harmony via infection from a foreign invader—we can read this final number at face-value. The journey of death holds mystery "far beyond space and time" where the troubles of the present can be discarded. Death isn't the end here—it's a transformation into something alien and exciting.

Mind Warp sounds like the future; Cowley's album has more in common with the

Afrofuturist tradition of Sun Ra dreaming of outer space than it does the elegiac response to the AIDS Crisis that will follow in the coming decades. The album's earliness in the

AIDS Crisis seems to be at play here; Cowley's inability to receive a clear diagnosis of his condition and the uncertainty of what caused the disease to eventually be named

AIDS lend the subject matter a certain degree of freedom. As well, the album clearly has other ontological investments than AIDS alone. What are we to make of the opening track's description of a technological dystopia? And why is it that the "invaders" bring a form of primitivism with them that apocalyptically cleanses this dystopia? Further, it is sonically evident that the harsh synthesizer tones of the albums first half reach some kind of optimal state when the "primitive" beats are allowed to harmonize with them. These are elements that the critical responses to Mind Warp continually misread in an attempt to reckon with the very serious conditions of its production. Often, this tendency manifests in an inability to reconcile the album's dancibility (what it was produced for) with its thematization of death. 33

With the recent rediscovery and renewed popularity of Cowley, critics turn to

Mind Warp with a desire to revive it, but also struggle to integrate Cowley's own miserable death with the album's utopic commentary on death. Usually, the album is read as a simple allegory for AIDS. The New York Times characterizes it as a simple meditation on dying of AIDS, despite the album's genre of dance music: "But the revelry belied the grim content of “Mind Warp,” a meditation on the body besieged that Mr.

Cowley created while withering from the effects of a mysterious affliction" (Lefebvre).

Similarly, writing a plea for renewed attention to the neglected album in 2013 for

Gawker, Rich Juzwiak argues that "Mind Warp is not album [sic] about death, but about dying, and its unpleasantness is essential to its message. It is a tough listen, almost devoid of the joy prevalent in Cowley’s work that came before it." Juzwiak, unable to imagine an ethical enjoyment of the album, puzzles over Mind Warp's commercial success:

"Though it did well on Billboard’s Dance/Disco Top 80, it’s hard to imagine anyone dancing to it today."

These critical responses fail to see Mind Warp for what it is: an aesthetic exploration of death that is able to come to utopic conclusions because it is aesthetic and therefore has the freedom to make present alternative ways of conceiving of death.

Instead, these critics try to read the text as an allegory that confirms their pre-existing beliefs of how terrible it is to die of AIDS. As a result, they are either forced to leave out key aspects of the album's narrative, or they are faced with the incommensurability of the album's upbeat tone with the conditions of its production. They turn a speculative, imaginative text into a didactic, morally instructive one that is tethered to both the present and the social in an effort to turn it into a memorial for the artist who created it. 34

B. Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers (2018)

That Rebecca Makkai's novel The Great Believers, a tracing of the effects of the

AIDS Crisis on a group of friends from 1985 Chicago to 2015 Paris, is being hailed as a contemporary classic is indicative of the persuasive power of the documentary impulse of memorialization. The novel has been named a Top Ten Book of 2018 by the New York

Times and a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, in addition to making many lists of the best literature of 2018 and announcing a renewed attention to the historical conditions of the AIDS Crisis.

Beginning in 1985 at the wake of a young gay man deceased of AIDS, The Great

Believers introduces a wide web of characters whose lives crisscross over the next three decades. Each chapter alternates timelines; the timeline of the past, beginning in 1985, marches onward to 1992 by the novel's end, many of its characters dying, losing loved ones, and living in fear that they will die. The novel's other timeline occurs in 2015, as a mother (Fiona, the sister of the man who is dead at the novel's beginning) now searches for her estranged daughter who joined a religious cult and fled to Europe.

The novel at times reads like a codex of Important AIDS Events, with references to historical topics that function as a pedagogical history lesson for the reader and a means of anchoring the novel's fictional plot in real historical details: the Catholic church's position on condoms (6), debates over the HIV test (11, 69), Reagan's lack of response to the Crisis (57), Rock Hudson (57), conspiracies the US government created the virus (75), etc. Often these references are clunkily dropped into dialogue in a way that relates to nothing in the scene at hand, a kind of obsession with meticulous realism that is meant to grant the text an aura of authenticity. A casual reference to the AIDS Quilt (404) 35 serves the same function as a casual reference to seeing the film Out of Africa (197): they are a form of shorthand that lets you know where you are in time and simultaneously authenticates the novel as aspiring to some documentary form of realism.

One character who transcends both timelines is the photographer Richard Campo, who fastidiously documents marches, rallies, the wasting bodies of his friends, and their ultimate deaths in the 1985 timeline, and who in the 2015 timeline is now a world-famous artist staging a retrospective in Paris. His documentary photos of the AIDS Crisis return to haunt the present, in particular Fiona whose trauma never healed and has now combined with the trauma of her daughter running off. Looking at Richard’s polaroids from the 1980s, Fiona is haunted by the images of the past, attempting to rub a Kaposi's

Sarcoma lesion from the face of one of the photographed boys: "She stared at these sick men who didn't know they were sick, the spot that was still, that summer, only a rash"

(41). Even the mere discussion of Richard's photography haunts Fiona; when at a party someone asks her about Richard's triptych of a friend, Julian, showing him as healthy, ill, and near death, Fiona's PTSD kicks in and she nearly blacks out. "It's art," she explains,

"but I was there. Those were my friends" (164). The art object in this novel (and indeed the novel itself) paradoxically occupies a space as an aesthetic object and, perhaps more importantly, a monument of time—a reality that can come back into the present and disrupt the lives of those who choose not, or are unable, to remember.

The novel's reflexive commentary on art's ability to memorialize is not lost on those who praise it; in a blurb on the novel's jacket, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen remarks that "just as her novel evokes art's power to commemorate the departed, The Great

Believers is itself a poignant work of memory." Similarly, writing in LA Review of Books, 36

Dan Lopez notes that this theme of art's ability to preserve "offer[s] a timely commentary on the price of memory and the role of art in securing legacies at risk of being lost."

Reviewing the novel for the New York Times, Michael Cunningham finds it a useful cure for many of our current civic woes: "it’s an antidote to our general urge to forget what we’d rather not remember, but it’s also — which is more important — an absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis." That is, each of these critics subsumes the aesthetic object's relevance back into the memorializing civic function of the epideictic: The Great Believers can only remind us of what is, or ought to be, important to us as a society. It is a time machine that adequately memorializes those who died and realistically renders the past so that we may ourselves experience and learn from it.

Despite the recurring endorsement of the idea that art objects capture moments of the past and preserve them in amber, Makkai herself is anxious about the novel's reflexive attempt to the do the same for AIDS. In an author's note at the end, she bemoans the lack of resources about the AIDS epidemic in Chicago and provides an exhaustive list of the research she drew from. Importantly, these documents lend credence to her novel, working to authenticate it: footage of an AIDS march she represents can be found on

YouTube, the photographer whom Richard Campo is inspired by and whose photos

"brought the era to life" for Makkai can be found in a particular book. As if to apologize for the novel's inability to fully render reality in its totality, Makkai caps this list off with a disclaimer of sorts:

This project was undertaken with a great deal of ongoing thought and

conversation and concern about the line between allyship and 37

appropriation—a line that might feel different to different readers. It is my

great hope that this book will lead the curious to read direct, personal

accounts of the AIDS Crisis—and that any places where I've gotten the

details wrong might inspire people to tell their own stories. (420)

Here, Makkai acknowledges (and endorses) the documentary novel as simultaneously exhaustive and never fully capable of capturing true reality. Yet there is a simple cure to this problem: read more AIDS literature, do your own research, write your own stories.

Or, perhaps more accurately, do some memorializing yourself. Makkai's website offers further pedagogical instructions for properly learning about the Crisis, where a page associated with the novel offers "some selected resources for learning more about The

Great Believers, the research that went into it, and how you can learn more about

HIV/AIDS" ("Interviews, Essays"). In addition to providing links to interviews and essays Makkai gave and wrote about the novel, the page lists a kind of rough canon of

AIDS texts. Included are texts immediately associable with AIDS, such as Angels in

America and The Normal Heart, and more recent documentary films and compilations of testimony. It is telling that all of the suggested works are ones that aspire to realism, that encapsulate the history of AIDS in some way; The Great Believers creates its own canon that it then places itself within.

How did we get from A to B? More specifically, how did we move from the wild, deranged vision of viral transformation in 1982's Mind Warp to the melancholy, yet fastidious, documentation of fact in 2018's The Great Believers? As well, what can the critical responses to both texts tell us about how we view AIDS literature in general?

Why does the weirdness of Cowley's invasion metaphor leading to an apocalyptic 38 cleansing of technological dystopia get smoothed over into a kind of eulogy, while the relatively common impulse of The Great Believers to document and preserve the past is presented as a revolutionary and daring act?

Writing about Holocaust literature, Walter Benn Michaels identifies a tendency of works and their criticism to give sway to what he terms "ethical kitsch," or "the valorization of subjectivity" that "appears most powerfully as the expression of our desire to bask in our own disapproval—of the Holocaust, of slavery, of all the genocides" (923).

While this assessment may seem particularly harsh, it adequately describes the contemporary responses to Cowley's work. Juzwiak's inability to imagine anyone actually dancing to Mind Warp, despite providing evidence that it was a major dance hit, is a kind of retroactive disapproval from the present—if only those dancing away to this hit in

1982 knew what lay ahead, they might have been more sufficiently sad. As well, Dorris's assessment that the album is "an essential document of the AIDS plague years" and " a heartbreaking end for someone whose work celebrated [...] fabulous nights out" doesn't really get at what the album is conceptualizing or what makes it interesting; neither statement (nor indeed the entire review) makes any kind of analysis of the album as music. Furthermore, I would argue that Makkai's nervousness over her novel's seeming appropriation of historical fact has a structural relation to these assessments of Cowley in that it is concerned with the ethics of representation, not really in any aesthetic sense, but only from the sense that realism can never be exhaustive. The common thread between the two, as Michaels phrases it, is "our desire to bask in our own disapproval" of atrocity.

The impulse that Michaels is critiquing has resonances with Leo Bersani's notion of the culture of redemption—that the value of "art's faithful adherence to experience [...] 39 repairs inherently damaged or valueless experience" (1). By placing these two concepts side by side, we can see how the documentary impulse of memorialization can be both an ethical imperative on the part of authors and critics to "valoriz[e] subjectivity" and sufficiently disapprove of atrocity, in the words of Michaels, as a means of making a damaged experience valuable and salvageable, in the words of Bersani. Bersani makes a strong argument for the autonomy of art from the redemptive aesthetic's fetishization of

"nearly literal realism" (1). The desire for art to "beneficently reconstruct" (1) experience depends upon "a devaluation of historical experience and of art" (1); that is to say, catastrophes such as the AIDS Crisis seem to pale and matter less when they are compensated for by a work of art like The Great Believers. And art itself becomes a mere

"patching function, enslaved to those very materials to which it presumably imparts value" (1), such as the critics of Mind Warp read the album as "an essential AIDS text" but pay no heed to its sonic landscape or strange message. Bersani's linking of the culture of redemption with an ancient notion of "art as preserving otherwise perishable experience" (1) alongside Michaels's viewing ethical kitsch as a way of praising or blaming particular aspects of society again point us back to the muddled view of the epideictic that we have inherited from Aristotle. In both cases related above, the artwork is praised for elements outside of its aesthetic function and instead viewed as a memorial which spurs us to make ethical, or activist, decisions about AIDS. How do critics move beyond this limiting understand of AIDS Literature which, as the discussion of Cowley’s and Makkai’s works demonstrate, is still very much with us? In this dissertation, I propose a mode of criticism that moves beyond the documentary impulse to instead focus on how texts use AIDS rather than on how texts represent it. 40

Techniques of Presencing as an Alternative to Memorialization

The problem of literature’s relationship to the historical events it seeks to encapsulate and represent, particularly traumatic events, has been examined by Amy

Hungerford’s study of personification and Holocaust literature, The Holocaust of Texts.

Hungerford questions the desire to personify works of literature, to treat them as persons that can tell us things about the past. Her claim that “understandings of literature and understandings of holocaust are connected by certain beliefs about the nature of representation and its relation to persons” (12)vi arises out of an analysis of trends in scholarship and political discourse that suggest works by survivors or about the

Holocaust are embodied representations that can live or die similar to the persons murdered in genocide represented within their pages. Hungerford suggests the connection of these beliefs about representation and literature attempts “to make the Holocaust transmissible to a generation of people (both Jews and non-Jews) who could not have experienced it” (19).

The connection between representations and their ability to transmit an event to a person who did not experience it is at the heart of the major monographs about AIDS literature and the surrounding discussion about AIDS amnesia. It’s no coincidence that

Chambers’ and Brophy’s work explicitly likens the texts under consideration in their respective monographs to Holocaust literature, often examining AIDS texts alongside texts about the Holocaust. The notion that these works function as kinds of memorials that make us see or feel something we did not experience ourselves by recreating that event is ethically suspect to Hungerford, who questions why identification with the texts is “the privileged model for how we understand things outside of ourselves and our 41 experience” (19). Rather than this identification, Hungerford instead champions the imagination that literature so readily affords its readers: “The fantasy of the personified text, the fantasy that we can really have another’s experience, that we can be someone else, that we can somehow possess a culture we do not practice, elides the gap that imagination […] must fill” (157).

Hungerford's exhortation that we use the imagination rather than an appeal to the

"realism" of a historical account places her directly within the realm of a sophistic sense of the epideictic. Literature for Hungerford has the potential to create dialectical moments between author and audience; for instance, she explores how Sylvia Plath's use of

Holocaust imagery in poems like "Daddy" "invokes a context in which the speaker's experience will be immediately understood because it is shared [by the audience] and because suffering creates its own communal language" (38). Here, the epideictic capacities of language are able to make present a kind of imaginative, shared language that doesn't depend upon the logics of the social/political sphere, but are fully realizable in the aesthetic.

Language's ability to engender this presence, to display for the audience, is an inherent feature of the vivid power of the epideictic. It is also the means by which authors and artists can get around the stultifying ocular regime of the documentary impulse; if the documentary impulse subjects the epidictic to the logical, social spheres of the judicial and deliberative, then the same ability of the epideictic to realize worlds outside of what is currently present is another mode for moving beyond that impulse. As Alan Gross argues, presence is a concept that has been part of the rhetorical tradition since its classical roots (37). As early as Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the power of a rhetor to “bring 42 before the eyes” of her audience some vision has been lauded as a persuasive and artistic skill. Ruth Webb makes explicit the link between persuasion and the arts by examining the textbooks that were used in the sophistic schools, the Progymnasmata. These manuals utilized a pedagogy of imitation in which students would learn to emulate ekphrastic techniques by reading examples of great ekphrastic descriptions that “plac[e] the subject before the eyes” (18). Webb's return to a classical sense of the ekphrastic is instructive here; her definition of ekphrasis as “a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes” (1) returns to the ancient Greco-Roman conceptions of ekphrasis that did not differentiate between rhetorical speeches and descriptions in literary works. She carefully traces the trajectory of the definition of “ekphrasis,” arguing that our modern conception of the term as a literary description of an artwork only takes hold at the turn of the 20th century. This Aristotelian concept, referred to by Aristotle as enargeia, is taken up by

Romans such as Cicero, Quintilian, and Pseudo-Longinus, who spell out in their rhetorical handbooks how presence might be effectively carried out by the orator or poet.

The Rhetorica ad Herennium, whose authorship is unknown (though historically attributed to Cicero), adapts enargeia into the concept of “ocular demonstration,” defined as “when an event is so described in words that the business seems to be enacted and the subject to pass vividly before the eyes” (408). The author then briefly reiterates that ocular demonstration “is very useful in amplifying a matter and basing on it an appeal to pity, for it sets forth the whole incident and virtually brings it before the eyes” (409). The

Roman rhetorician Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, a twelve-volume textbook for the education of the orator, contains one of the most famous pedagogical lessons on the implementation of this kind of ekphrastic visualization, which he terms “vividness.” 43

Quintilian remarks, “It is a great virtue to express our subject clearly and in such a way that it seems to actually be seen” (375). He further remarks on the persuasiveness of vividness by suggesting that without it “the judge feels that he is merely being told the story of the matters he has to decide, without their being brought out and displayed to his mind’s eye” (376-77). Interestingly, here the ekphrastic practice moves out of the mere linguistic that the Rhetorica ad Herennium confines it to by turning it into “description” and instead moves towards a psychological model whereby the ekphrasis creates an image in the “mind’s eye” that somehow differs from mere description or storytelling alone.

Pseudo-Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime similarly speaks of the cognitive power of the ekphrastic, termed in this text as “visualization” (215). For Pseudo-Longinus, these visualizations add “weight, grandeur, and urgency” to one’s speech or writing, and have the ultimate effect of stirring strong emotion in the reader or listener so that “you seem to see what you describe and bring it vividly before the eyes of your audience” (215) He argues that the use of the sublime to transport the audience “out of themselves” is an aid to persuasion. For Pseudo-Longinus, enargaeic rhetorical ekphrasis was not exclusively related to oratory and persuasive speeches. In the treatise, these presencing techniques are just as integral to poetry as they are speeches, showing a kind of continuity between persuasiveness and what we would now consider more literary texts. For this reason, this dissertation’s use of an ancient conception of rhetorical ekphrasis alongside contemporary literary acts allows us to see how presencing, even when used as a literary device, is necessarily a persuasive, rhetorical act. 44

This ekphrastic concept receives renewed attention in the 20th century by philosopher and rhetorical theorist Chaïm Perelman who argues that creating presence will become the sole domain of the rhetorician, through what he terms “techniques of presentation” (37). For Perelman, the ability of the rhetor to make premises stick in the minds of audience is the key to persuading them of those premises; he establishes a direct line, a “tie,” between how well something is kept at the forefront of the mind to how important we perceive it to be. There are techniques, mostly borrowed from ancient rhetoric, for successfully making an element “present” to the audience’s consciousness, and these techniques, rather than logic, are the sole domain of the art of rhetoric.

Perelman is unfortunately vague on what these techniques are, but his examples often fall back on the types of linguistic structures and rhetorical moves that Quintilian and others characterize as enargeia, a kind of “vivacity” of language that paints a picture (phantasia) in the audience’s mind.

Recent scholarship, though, has turned its eye towards how the concept of presence and these techniques of presentation can potentially be used not just for making absent things present, but making unseeable or unrepresentable things present. Michele

Kennerly argues that techniques of presentation actually function as a kind of time/distance collapse she terms “rhetorical transport” (270), a capacity that allows “a rhetor [to] appeal to the same mental faculty that enables self-indulgent escapes into fantasy” (269). This capacity, Kennerly continues, allows writers to instrumentalize the object made present to either enable or impede the audience’s judgment on some matter

(269). Similarly, Allison Prasch argues that the ability of a rhetor to bring something

“before the eyes” of an audience allows “the audience [to] experience and enter into the 45 physical place and scene along with the actors of the story” (268). Prasch adds the element of the physical to her conception of presence, showing how rhetors “can ‘point’ verbally to physically real places, people, and things,” allowing that which is brought before the eyes to work as a “tangible, touchable manifestation of rhetorical vision”

(268).

This dissertation returns to an earlier rhetorical formation of these concepts in order to capture a particularly literary orientation to the epideictic’s rhetorical techniques of presencing. An attention to rhetorical presence offers the critic of AIDS Literature the possibility to see how writers and artists use the aesthetic for non-activist means. This helps us uncover a variety of responses to the Crisis, which found in the disease itself resources for thinking through some of the challenges the disease posed to or revealed about existence. These experimental texts provide us with a variety of aesthetic responses that both connect AIDS Literature to a larger canon of works and with an opportunity to

(re)discover rhetorical strategies for tackling enduring problems such as death and memory. For the rhetorical critic, these aesthetic strategies extend the reach of persuasion outside of the logical proofs of the judicial and deliberative genres of rhetoric, and allow us to see how literature can uniquely enact the visions it creates.

Chapter Summaries

In elevating neglected and misread AIDS texts such as Cowley's Mind Warp, this dissertation seeks to expand our current conceptions of the genre of AIDS literature. Each of the texts examined in the following chapters in some way capitalizes on the viral logics of HIV/AIDS in order to think through some problem. An analysis of the rhetorical 46 techniques of presencing that each author employs will reveal the role of the epideictic’s literary aesthetic in projecting new visions of experience and existence.

In my first chapter, "'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out': William

S. Burroughs's Strange Epideixis," I examine Burroughs as an unlikely source of inspiration for artists and writers working during the AIDS Crisis. This chapter argues that Burroughs's notion of the word/image virus, found throughout his vast literary output, served as a useful template for his cut-up method and as a means for thinking through the enargeiac capacities of language; that is, how words bring to mind images.

Specifically, the chapter argues that Burroughs's conception of language is a useful starting point for understanding how the epideictic genre might be elevated beyond mere funeral orations and be seen as having a performative effect upon the social world.

My second chapter, "AIDS-Enhanced Vision in David Wojnarowicz's Close to the

Knives," examines Wojnarowicz’s ekphrastic form of writing. Employing a process he terms “filmic exchange,” Close to the Knives endlessly revises memory and experience through the collage-like process of rendering visual stimuli into textual objects. This process allows Wojnarowicz to develop a kind of X-ray vision, enhanced by his HIV+ status, which has the power to see through the oppressive structures of society.

My third chapter, "’GET RID OF MEANING’: Author as Virus in Kathy Acker’s

Empire of the Senseless," examines Acker’s appropriation of the logics of virality as a means of bypassing the controls of narrative. Fashioning herself as a virus within the narrative structure of her novel, Acker destroys narrative cohesion by plagiarizing and cutting up bits of canonical texts, such as Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Gibson’s

Neuromancer, into her novel as means of corroding and degrading the novel’s structure. 47

My fourth chapter, "'An apocalypse of shit and piss': Rhetorical Figures and

Pornography in Samuel R. Delany’s The Mad Man,” examines how the novel negates the fear of AIDS through the production of extremely graphic pornographic scenes. The chapter analyzes these pornographic scenes as rhetorical figures, which function to crowd the mind with vivid detail. Delany formulates this rhetorical tactic as a figure/ground relationship in his novel, so that the repeated and overly vivid sex acts that he depicts cause AIDS to recede into the background as an object of our attention.

Finally, the conclusion of this dissertation, "Viral Logics: A Future for AIDS

Literature," will posit a heuristic for understanding both what is limiting in how we currently conceive of AIDS literature as a sites of memorialization, and how we might overcome that limitation by opening up the genre to include texts that operate according to the logics of virality, which are enacted through rhetorical techniques of presencing.

The conclusion will also posit affordances such an approach has for the fields of rhetorical studies and literary studies overall.

A final note on what this dissertation is not arguing. What I hope to make clear in the following chapters is that an overvaluation of memorializing works engenders a certain poverty in the way we think about AIDS Literature, that it crowds out ways of talking about how works might be doing something else equally interesting and political.

I am not arguing that we disregard works that demonstrate the memorializing impulse in favor of the works I examine. Having taught AIDS Literature courses to students predominantly born at the turn of the millennium or after, works that render the Crisis in realistic detail serve a particular pedagogical function—they instruct those who do not have access to historical narratives of the Crisis (as their proponents suggest they do). 48

Access to these narratives is indispensible in making sense of what other more difficult and experimental texts, such as the ones I examine in this dissertation, are working through or against. As well, there are works that reflexively challenge the constraints of memorialization. For instance, Amy Hoffman's Hospital Time, a memoir of caring for her friend as he dies of AIDS, renders the horrors of caring for a dying body in vivid detail as a means of eschewing the sentimental. In this work, the humming of hospital machines, the endless diarrhea, the misery and sometimes cruelty of the afflicted, are tools with which Hoffman can refuse to give her friend's death, and thus the AIDS Crisis, a redemptive meaning. As she writes of her friend’s final moments, “He had no relationship left, except with pain […] No final reconciliations. No last words. No transcendence. No peace. Just pain and muscle spasms” (123).

This dissertation is also not attempting to make an argument for or against appropriation of others' experiences or identities, per se. While some of the work I draw on in this introduction places my work in the realm of that conversation, it is not within the purview of this dissertation to make an extended argument about the ethics of appropriation. For instance, Amy Hungerford's work on the Holocaust cited earlier challenges the issue of appropriation by examining the body of criticism on Sylvia Plath's use of Holocaust imagery in her poetry. In all of the cases I examine, the use of AIDS as a literary resource is really the appropriation of the virus itself—while Kathy Acker's

Empire of the Senseless explicitly traffics in the taboo and transgressive, I think it would be strange to argue that her use of the logics of virality is somehow appropriative of the experiences or identities of HIV positive people. It would seem, instead, that the documentary impulse of memorialization is the arena within which debates about 49 appropriation hold the greatest currency, given its desire to render with literary realism just how people with AIDS suffered during the Crisis. It is, of course, Makkai who worries her historically accurate argument will be taken as appropriation rather than allyship. The use of the logics of virality, while on its surface may seem touchy, is ultimately less of an issue if we truly believe that the virus is capable of affecting all people.

i I quote from Warren's reflexive essay "On 'What Was African American Literature?'" rather than his book itself, as he is distilling what he perceives he does and does not argue in that text. ii See the debate between Warren and Henry Louis Gates in the Chronicle of Higher Education; Gates suggests what Warren really refers to might be more accurately called "Negro Literature." iii Translator George A. Kennedy remarks that this application of time is "somewhat strained" in all cases, and that classic examples of the epideictic such as Pericles's "Funeral Oration" and Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" are both concerned with praising past actions with the express goal of "inculcating models for future actions" (49). iv I say that Castiglia and Reed are “conservative” because their work seeks to conserve a past gay identity that is separate from contemporary notions of “queer.” But, it seems a small step to argue that this position is also politically conservative, considering how they operationalized the same logics of gay identity in their transphobic attack of Grace Lavery in the pages of LA Review of Books in December 2018. It pains me to cite these scholars, but in a field as small as AIDS Literature, it is difficult to bypass their scholarship and influence. v Given the relative obscurity of Cowley until recently, official biographical information or peer-reviewed academic treatment of his work is currently unavailable. In the face of such a paucity of information, I here rely on what has been reported by venues such as The New York Times and Pitchfork during the recent rekindling of interest in his work. However, a website compendium of biographical information, anecdotes, and photographs uploaded by friends, lovers, and colleagues of Cowley does exist under the name "Patrick Cowley: 'The San Francisco Sound' Biography" , though does not appear to have been updated in the last decade. vi Hungerford’s use of a non-capitalized “holocaust” is relevant here; her work grapples with both the Jewish Holocaust and other conceptions of holocaust, such as nuclear holocaust. Importantly for my project, she briefly, though explicitly, discusses the use of the term “gay holocaust” (6) to refer to the AIDS Crisis and how such thinking spilled over into other discourse surrounding AIDS, including the popular phrase “SILENCE=DEATH” (6) used by ACT UP. 50

Chapter One

"When you cut into the present, the future leaks out": William S. Burroughs's Strange

Epideixis

William S. Burroughs predicted the AIDS Crisis. Or so many of his admirers would have us believe. Usually pointing to a passage from Naked Lunch that describes "a virus venereal disease indigenous to Ethiopia" (36), fan communities such as Beatdom

Literary Journal argue that Burroughs predicted the Crisis some twenty-five years before its beginnings, like so many of his other "eerily accurate prophesies" (Wills). Often, a letter from Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg that further explains this passage of Naked

Lunch is pointed to; in it, Burroughs details that "The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on assembly-line basis. Real theme of the novel is Desecration of the Human Image by the control addicts who are putting out the virus" (Letters 365). Closer analysis of these moments of

"prediction" tend to show nothing more than surface similarities between the virally- transmitted diseases of Burroughs's early work and the constellation of symptoms associated with AIDS; for instance, despite the African provenance and sexually transmitted nature of the disease in Naked Lunch, its symptoms of "elephantiasis of the genitals" and "stricture of the anus" that must be relieved with an apple-corer are unrelated to AIDS (37).

Despite the devil being in the details, notions of Burroughs's oracular prediction of AIDS (and other phenomena, like global climate change) persist; the claim is murmured on Reddit threads and Burroughs message boards, and even taken as fact by 51 special collections of major universitiesi. Later in his career, Burroughs himself encouraged the notion that he predicted the Crisis, particularly during Naked Lunch's renewed cultural relevance in 1991 from David Cronenberg’s film adaptation. In a

Village Voice interview with Burroughs on the set of the film, the writer Gary Indiana remarks upon the similarities between Burroughs's diseases and AIDS. He writes, “More cosmically, all of Burroughs’ early novels describe a fatal, sexually transmitted virus that produces AIDS-like symptoms. If he can see into the future, I think, Burroughs should be able to see into the past, too: I ask him where he thinks the virus originated.” While

Indiana does celebrate the legacy of Burroughs in this article, he also does what his

Village Voice column was famous for: deflating the pomposity of art-world figures.

Burroughs answers:

“It’s hard to say. A number of people have suggested that it was a

laboratory product, and quite deliberate. It’s a simple variation on the

Visna virus that occurs in sheep, and it’s always fatal. It would be a very

simple job for a biochemist to make. So, it could have been deliberate. For

example, the connection with Kaposi’s sarcoma. Why Kaposi’s? [...] Why

that should be associated with AIDS is pretty much an enigma.”

Burroughs pauses meaningfully. “One of many.”

The joke is on Burroughs in this interview, as Indiana gives comic weight to his meaningful pause, as it is (and was at the time) entirely clear why KS lesions were associated with the disease. This interview reveals why treating Burroughs as a predictor or soothsayer doesn't really give us any fulfilling answers: it merely points out a kind of 52 surface-level similarity without telling us what is interesting or meaningful about that similarity.

Surprisingly, this popular tendency to give Burroughs almost oracular powers is often repeated in scholarly examinations of his work, particularly regarding his signature cut-up technique and its corresponding concept of the Word/Image Virus. For instance, writing about Burroughs's notions of "the word" and its relations to the cut-up method, N.

Katherine Hayles remarks that "without having read Foucault and Derrida, Burroughs came to similar conclusions a decade earlier "(214), ironing out from the comparison that for Burroughs, "the word" is a living organism from outer space.ii In surveying the scholarship surrounding Burroughs's cut-up method, Lee Konstantinou complains of this scholarly elision of strangeness from Burroughs's concepts: "His ideas about the cut-up are often rendered less strange than they actually are" (129). That is to say, in claiming that Burroughs's cut-ups anticipate and draw on poststructural theory and the techniques of mass media, as most scholars assume, the critic does not consider the "odder consequences" of Burroughs's views, such as that "reality is actually a movie" (129).

This scholarly elision of strangeness from Burroughs's concepts results from reading them metaphorically, which Burroughs himself seems to encourage with his mystical and idiosyncratic descriptions of his own project. In a lecture on the cut-up method, Burroughs remarks, "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out"

("Origin"). We could read this phrase as a metaphor for the ways in which his experimental texts seem to indeed predict future situations. Or, we could instead take

Burroughs at his word that this strange notion of the cut-up method and its complementary concept of the Word/Image Virus are forms of "flashing forward in time" 53

("Fold-ins" 96).iii This explanation of the effects of the cut-up seems metaphorical.

However, when we take Burroughs at face value, and instead provide an account for what it means for the future to leak out of the present, or for how the cut-up method "enabl[es] the writer to move back ward and forward on his time track" (96), we might get at something inherently interesting about the cut-up method rather than likening it to some concept we already understand.

This chapter seeks to move beyond the paradigm of understanding Burroughs and his techniques as oracular, particularly the cut-up method and Word/Image virus, and instead give an account of what is influential about his work, particularly for the artists and authors working during the AIDS Crisis examined in the following chapters. As

Michael Clune persuasively argues, "Claims of anticipation suffer from a kind of bad faith" ("Formalism" 1195). That is, we argue in bad faith when we point out a

"prediction" because our foreknowledge of what is being predicted masks the belatedness of naming it as anticipatory. Such a move makes no argument, but merely notices a kind of similarity between concepts. Clune advocates instead a model of influence, which requires that the critic "do the work of locating and describing the relevant causal chains

[...] bringing the text into critical engagement that corrects or transforms or extends some aspect of the social" ("Formalism" 1195). This chapter does such work by examining how

Burroughs's cut-up method and the word/image virus both enact the future through rhetorical techniques of presencing and serve as literary resources for AIDS Crisis-era artists and authors.

Examining Burroughs's relationship with the AIDS Crisis is revelatory, if not idiosyncratic, in understanding what it is about his literature that seems predictive. While 54 there is no scholarship examining the uptake of Burroughs's ideas by AIDS-era writers and artists, considering this chain of influence (i.e. what a future generation of AIDS artists found interesting and useful about Burroughs's techniques) illuminates how virality functions in Burroughs's own textual practice. I argue that Burroughs's theory of the word/image virus (that is, of words' ability to bring to mind images) illuminates aspects of his cut-up method that have been previously underplayed. Namely, that in drawing on the capacity of language to bring images to the mind of the reader,

Burroughs's cut-up method is able to performatively enact in the aesthetic space of the text that which is unrealizable in the social world. To achieve this, I will argue that the effects of Burroughs's literary experiments can best be understood as acts of rhetorical performance that bring something new into the world through techniques of presencing.

The implications of this argument are that it puts the cut-up method and the word/image virus into contact with the rhetorical branch of the epideictic, both extending and transforming our often-muddled view of how epideictic discourse functions: what appears as a future-orientedness is, in fact, the use of a literary aesthetic to reveal what the social and political spheres cannot. I will then explore the implications that

Burroughs's literary resources have in the intervening decades of the AIDS Crisis by analyzing an AIDS-related aesthetic text that incorporates the viral logics of Burroughs's word/image virus and the cut-up method: the artist collective General Idea's iconic artwork Imagevirus.

55

Epideixis for the Future

"I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement toward breaking this down," Burroughs declares in the opening pages of The Third Mind, his collection of essays and texts co-authored with the poet/artist Brion Gysin that explain and demonstrate the cut-ups' political and aesthetic import (5-6). While the "construct" he references is Aristotle's "either-or" logic

("Either-or thinking just is not accurate thinking. That's not the way things occur,"

Burroughs argues), Burroughs goes on to suggest the cut-up is also a freeing of the aesthetic from literary genre constraints, specifically plot and character: "[T]he new techniques, such as the cut-up," he argues, "will involve much more of the total capacity of the observer. It enriches the whole aesthetic experience, extends it" (6, emphasis mine). It would seem here that Burroughs is triangulating a relationship between

Aristotle's "either-or" logic and the tying of the aesthetic down to a specific arena

(literary form, or plot). While I'm not arguing that Burroughs had specific theories of the epideictic, we can see in this explanation that the cut-up is a tool for challenging

Aristotelian "either-or" notions of where an aesthetic experience is acceptable (in a controlled genre, such as tragedy, with plot, but not in, say, the law court) and what capacities one uses when engaged in such an experience.

Here, too, Burroughs locates the potentiality of tearing down this division in a textual exercise, a "technique"—not in something mystical or oracular. The novelist

Kathy Acker, often compared with Burroughs (and the subject of a later chapter) brings us to realize that this future-oriented nature surrounding Burroughs is actually part of his writing practice, that his writing itself seems to perform this act of prediction, and that it 56 is tied to the breaking of aesthetic experience from conventional, generic form. In

"William Burroughs’s Realismiv," Acker begins by invoking Burroughs's oracular powers, declaring that “In his novels, Burroughs saw the society around him so clearly, he announced the future” (2). However, she goes on to locate this power of vision in specific formal elements of his writing:

The language of media who dictate our political and social actualities is

that of (false) continuity and (always partially false) fact: simple

declarative sentences, as little use of ambiguity as possible, no dwelling

within verbal sensuousness. Burroughs fights this post-bourgeois language

with poetry: images, dangling clauses, all that lingers at the edges of the

unsaid, that leads to and through dreams. (3)

Acker's insight that Burroughs's prose "portrayed futures that are now our present" (2) points to a quality of his writing itself that often remains unremarked upon in Burroughs scholarship: that writing, that words themselves, have the ability to make things present in the minds of readers through portrayal. For Acker, this "verbal magic," in the words of rhetorical presence's greatest theorizers Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, is in direct opposition to the language of the political and social; rather, Burroughs writes against the social using a poetic form of language that hauls into being what the political and social forecloses or leaves unsaid. Burroughs's "verbal sensuousness," his imagistic writing, serves a rhetorical purpose in its challenging of continuity and fact.

I argue that this rhetorical nature of Burroughs's writing can be understood as having a presencing function that challenges the Aristotelian devaluing of epideictic rhetoric, as previewed in this dissertation's introduction. As Acker makes clear in her 57 description of Burroughs's writing, he deploys "verbal sensuousness" (what we might liken to the "ornamental" or "artificial" quality of epideictic language that marks it as purely ceremonial for Aristotle) against the rigid, logical (and by her account, false) language of the political and social. By considering Burroughs's writing as epideictic, though, we might move away from Aristotle's limiting conception into something stranger, yet more pliable.

Despite multiple attempts by rhetorical scholars across the decades to rehabilitate the branch of epideictic rhetoric with renewed relevance, it remains a stubbornly under- theorized concept that over the last decade has mostly been used to illuminate ceremonial speeches and civically-engaged discourse.v While the epideictic is certainly these things, a question remains of how we might make Aristotle's sense of the branch more pliable, and what contemporary genres and practices might be illuminated by its function. Celeste

Condit argued over three decades ago that our narrow theorization of the epideictic as having something to do with civic engagement renders the branch powerless, that given the "pervasiveness, variety, and significance of the genre, our understandings of it are inadequately complex" (485). She writes,

Because students of epideictic have directed their efforts towards

identifying a single, simple, and essential characteristic that might

uniquely distinguish such discourse, each of the several existing

explorations has been inadequately sensitive to the variety of functions

epideictic serves for its speakers and audiences. (485)

Condit's suggestion that we move away from some essential characteristic of the epideictic and instead toward a model of functionality, is instructive. Rather than 58 determining whether some genre or piece of discourse is epideictic, as the Aristotelian model has made us wont to do, we might ask what is the epideictic doing in a particular piece of discourse. By asking how it functions, we might gain a greater sense of how the epideictic operates in a variety of situations rather than just, say, funeral orations.

The essentialism of the epideictic that Condit complains of can be traced back to

Aristotle's perpetually problematic categorization of the branch as dealing with praise or blame, and as having the quality of ornateness. As early as the Romans, there were complaints of the under-theorization of the category; Quintilian complains in Instiutio

Oratia that

if we place the function of praise and blame in the third part, on what

'kind' are we to think ourselves engaged when we complain, console,

pacify, excite, frighten, encourage, instruct, explain obscurities, narrate,

plead for mercy, give thanks, congratulate, reproach, abuse, describe,

command, renounce, wish, opine, and so on and so forth? (3.4, 31)

Quintilian is already recognizing the paucity of Aristotle's categorization, pointing out the proliferation of actions which seem adjacent to the epideictic but which don't quite fall under "praise and blame." Furthermore, he is puzzled over the Aristotelian distinction between ornate display and logical proofs, which had been collapsed into "demonstrative oratory" by the Romans, where the two qualities intermingled (Prelli 3). Quintilian remarks, "The division is facile and tidy rather than true. For in a sense, they all depend on the help of others" (3.4, 37). Cicero, by contrast, ultimately writes off most of the branch in De Oratore by highlighting the style's unsuitableness for civic matters: "The epideictic oration, then, has a sweet fluent, copious style, with bright conceits and 59 sounding phrases [...] it is fitter for the parade than the battle [...] it is spurned and rejected in the forum" (42).

By modernity, the epideictic was further devalued for similar reasons that Cicero points to—its floridity and relation to more lyrical and aesthetic genres. Writing in 1867,

Edwin Meredith Cope regards the epideictic with outright disdain, arguing

The third branch is inferior to the two preceding in extent, importance, and

interest. It is the [...] demonstrative, showy, ostentatious, declamatory kind

[...] and their object is to display the orator's powers, and to amuse an

audience [...] rather than any serious interest or real issue at stake. (131)

Moving into the twentieth century, this ability of the epideictic to display holds a great deal of power, and is difficult to discount—it becomes the domain of propaganda.

Attempting to give the epideictic new relevance in their treatise on argumentation,

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca attempt to "rescue" the epideictic in The New Rhetoric by separating it from its aesthetic, ostentatious roots. They argue that in the absence of judgment, the true ends of the epideictic are obscured:

[I]n the absence of the concept of value-judgment, and of that of intensity

adherence, the theoreticians of speech, from Aristotle on, readily confused

the concept of the beautiful, as the object of the speech [...] with the

aesthetic value of the speech itself. (48).

Here, the Belgians break off the notion of the formal qualities (i.e. ostentatiousness) of the speech, which they seem to discount. Instead, they argue, establishing the object of the speech (i.e. beauty or truth) as a shared value is useful in securing an audience's adherence to your argument. "The epideictic speech has an important part to play," they 60 concede, "for without such common values upon what foundations could deliberative and legal speeches rest?" (49). In this model, while the epideictic is made somewhat acceptable by denying its aesthetic qualities, it is still narrowly conceived of as being about either praise or blame and as being subordinate to the other two branches of rhetoric. Writing in the wake of World War II, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca acknowledge that praise and blame of "common values" is the wheelhouse of the fascist; in an attempt to rescue the concept, they suggest the epideictic orator is more akin to an educator, which "is less directed toward changing beliefs than to strengthening adherence to what is already accepted," and, in their view, good education "increases resistance to adverse propaganda" (54). The slippery slope between the educator and the propagandist gets at the heart of our current unease (and sometimes distaste for) surrounding the epideictic. By the 1980s, Marxist theories had put the final nail in the coffin of the epideictic; Takis Poulakis suggests the epideictic is a form of pure hegemony, while Ray

McKerow named it "a celebration of ideology" (193).

What if, though, the "ornateness" and relationship to display and showing forth is the major function of the epidictic, not its ability to create common values through praise and blame? That is to say, what if formal qualities of epideictic discourse do something to its audience, such as the aforementioned theorists fear, and what if that is the point?

Writing in 1980, Lawrence W. Rosenfield complained that these limiting conceptions of the epideictic condemned the genre to a "wastebasket for classifying lesser orations"

(133). Rather, Rosenfield implores, we have completely missed the point by continuing to understand the epideictic as tactics for declaiming praise or blame. Instead, he argues, the epideictic ought to be understood as a kind of technology that allows for "the 61 recognition of what is (goodness, grace, intrinsic excellence) or the refusal to so recognize in a moment of social inspiration." Drawing on the philosophy of the pre-

Socratics, in particular their notions of 'luminosity,' Rosenfield argues "epideictic discourse is unique among public address types in that it lets be what lies before us so that we may acknowledge the radiance that is present to us" (132). That is to say, the epideictic is the form of address that has the capability of making something present through techniques of rhetorical presencing, and that when that thing is before us (or, in our mind's eye), we can attend to it.

Walter Beale gets us out of the problem of this concept being tethered too closely to pre-Socratic luminosity by articulating this in terms of J. L. Austin's theory of performativity (i.e. that utterances do things). Beale, in his "new theory of the epideictic," argues for a notion of the "rhetorical performative," which he defines as an "act of rhetorical discourse which does not merely say, argue, or allege something about the world of social action, but which constitutes [...] a significant social action in itself"

(225). The effect of this new performative orientation is that the epideictic "participates in the reality to which it refers" (226)—it no longer merely entertains, or displays for our pleasure, but it has some concrete action in the world, like Austin's performative utterance.

The notion that the epideictic has effects and isn't just display, has always been part of the genre, of course, despite Aristotle's domestication of it. In describing the operation of sophistic rhetorical training, Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong make clear how exactly epideictic genres are a form-shaping reality, of doing things with words. As students were trained in areas of arrangement and performance, they drew on a wealth of 62 common texts, which they mixed and remixed "with some spontaneity for the occasion and purpose at hand" (16). In describing these Progymnasmata, Jarrat and Ong make clear that oration was never just about showing off, and are careful to guard against claims of sophistic relativity by pointing out the radical potential of such practices:

But the rhetor's task was not merely recycling or dressing up of well-

accepted public opinion. The technique of juxtaposing propositions

foregrounded the contradictions found in any complex social order;

rhetorical training created a critical climate within which to question,

analyze, and imagine differences in group thought and action. (16,

emphasis mine)

Here, the epideictic is a space for doing what is incapable in the courtroom—imagining and questioning. If the epideictic is the genre of literary forms like myth and lyric poetry, then we see here that literature itself has a performative quality that allows it to do things in the world, to lead us to question and analyze through imagination, rather than in spite of it.

Interestingly, it is literary studies that has made peace with the epideictic, finding a use for it in conjunction with the aesthetic that shows how it does something. In his study of the intertwined nature of rhetoric and poetics in ancient lyric, Jeffrey Walker makes space for understanding the epideictic as something that both the orators and the poets practice. Walker concedes that our general understanding of the epideictic as that which reflects a culture's values is shaped by a Ciceronian notion of "showing forth of things" for suasive purposes. "In this view," Walker argues, "'epideictic' appears as that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which society or 63 culture lives; it shapes the ideologies and imageries with which, and by which, the individual members of a community identify themselves" (9). Because of this, the epideictic is not merely a reinforcement of dogma, nor is it mere ornamentation—it is a neutral technology that can be used to uphold or tear down discourse. Listing the dialogues of Plato, the economia of the sophists, and Isocrates's panegyrics, Walker explains, "Epideictic can also work to challenge or transform conventional beliefs" (9).

Because of this power to essentially create, Walker boldly names the epideictic "the

'primary' form of 'rhetoric'" (9) from which all other civic and political rhetoric flows.

Similarly, Jonathan Culler makes clear how this performative nature of the epideictic has led to further divisions in literary history. In speaking of problems conceptualizing lyric poetry, Culler points out that "the lyric's attempt to be itself an event rather than a representation of an event" (35), i.e. its non-mimetic nature, has led to it being sidelined in Western (i.e. Aristotelian) theories of literature. Advocating a turn to understanding the lyric, and by extension the epideictic, as a kind of performance to honor this event-based formulation, Culler leads us to see how the lyrics of Pindar have a certain contiguity with contemporary poetry; lyric poems, he argues, extend our notion of what literature is doing, because "they claim to offer truths, to cast values in new light, to ostensibly disclose aspects of the world and praise what should be noted and remembered, but they claim especially to offer thought in memorable form" (122).

Ultimately, Culler suggests a redefinition of epideixis, not as display, but instead as performative; such a redefinition allows us to see how the epideictic can be "discourse conceived as an act, aiming to persuade, to move, to innovate" (130). In the same way that Beale wants to rearticulate the epideictic as a rhetorical form of performance that 64 does something in the world, so too does Culler suggest we see the lyric, and by extension, literature under such auspices.

Understanding the epideictic as performative, rather than as mere ornamentation and virtuosity, moves us to a place of understanding epideictic genres as both generative and future oriented, and understanding literature as making real arguments for the potentiality of the world. By understanding Burroughs's work as operating within an epideictic framework, we might come to understand the relationship to time his work has; the texts don't so much predict the future as they make visible and realizable some alternative. Clune refers to this quality of Burroughs's texts as "the virtual," which "shows us the kind of thing that what would regularly happen if the world were different in some particular way" (77). To rearticulate this in the terms of the framework, we might say that

Burroughs's texts are epideictic in that through rhetorical techniques of presencing, they perform and make visible some other alternative to the political and social; they allow us to imagine how things might be otherwise.

Making the Future Present: The Cut-Ups and the Word/Image Virus

Burroughs's quip that "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out" is the kind of koan-like notion that can help us make sense of both those who claim he is a soothsayer and my own claim that his work is epideictic in a performative sense. Culler's distinction between mimetic art and art that seeks to be a performance itself, "an event,"

(35) is instructive for thinking through how Burroughs's textual practice might be considered epideictic. Culler is useful in articulating how Burroughs "disclose[s] aspects of the world" (122) to us in a way unique to the literary function of the epideictic, but 65 how does this "fight" the arenas of the social and political, as Acker claims his prose does? Before digging into Burroughs's cut-up method and the word/image virus, I want to make the case that these concepts are valuable not only because they show us things the social and political cannot, but because they have an effect on them—sometimes a corrosive one. This distinction prevents the aesthetic text from merely being a privileged form that is protected from the social and political, and allows it to transform and cut through them.

Roland Barthes's idiosyncratic set of lecture notes "The Old Rhetoric: an aide- mémoir" both highlights the "literary aesthetic" of the epideictic genre in the second sophistic and shows how the genre can both trouble and transform the other branches of rhetoric—a perhaps negative take on the optimism of Beale, Rosenfield, Walker, and

Culler's generative notions of the epideictic. Writing of the improvisational methods of the sophists, Barthes identifies the act of spontaneously generating arguments from common texts (the process Jarrat and Ong explain in the quotation in the previous section) as a site for contesting meaning: "Improvisation shifts the order of the parts

(dispositio) to the background; discourse, having no persuasive goal but being purely decorative, is destructured, atomized into a loose series of brilliant fragments, juxtaposed according to a rhapsodic model" (28). That is to say, the act of putting different common texts together shatters the discourse into pieces; when these texts are cordoned off from being persuasive (or, we might say, relying on logical proofs), their function is shifted to that of aesthetic display. Barthes continues, identifying the most "highly prized" fragment as that of descriptio or ekphrasis, which was "highly prized" because it was "transferable from one discourse to another" (i.e. from the deliberative or judicial to the epideictic). 66

This new "unit" of discourse, a vivid description, "abandons oratorical (legal, political) discourse and readily unites with narration, with a story line" (29, italics original). The new unit of vivid description, generated from the improvisational act of juxtaposing common discourses, breaks free from these discourses and becomes literary, or epideictic. "Once again," Barthes declares, "the rhetorical 'eats into' the literary" (29).

Could there be a better explanation for the rhetorical-literary operation of

Burroughs's texts, and the way that the literary "eats into" (or "cuts," in Burroughs's own estimation) the social and political? Burroughs's textual practice of the cut-up method reveals that what for Aristotle and others is a drawback (style or display), for Burroughs is a feature capable of cutting through what he terms forms of control (which include everything from repressive government to language itself). Cutting up these forms of control and rearranging them has the potential to "bring you a liberation from old association locks" (Ticket 205), Burroughs explains.

The cut-up method is exactly what it sounds like: the cutting up of texts and rearranging of them into new patterns for generating novel insights that "cut" through lines of control. The scholarship surrounding what exactly the cut-up method signifies is voluminousvi. Here, I am less concerned with its ontology, with what it is patterned upon, than I am with understanding its function and its relationship with the future, which involves Burroughs's ideas of viruses and virality. The method, which Burroughs and his collaborator/innovator, the poet/artist Brion Gysin, describe across a number of essays, books, and interviews, is actually a constellation of varying practices. A cut-up might involve cutting a preexisting selection of literature (say, the final paragraph of

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby) into quarter pages, and rearranging them to produce new 67 text. It could similarly describe the cutting up of two separate pieces of text and the mixing of them together. At smaller levels, it could involve a sentence from here or there mixed into Burroughs's own prose (The Third Mind 14-17). Another version of it involves audio, and the cutting of literal audio tape that sound has been recorded onto; the tape is spliced back together and transcribed, a new text created from the jumbling and juxtaposition of the fragments of the old. Burroughs describes how the cut-up method produces novelty in this way, as "words which were not in the original tape but which are in many cases relevant to the original text as if the words themselves had been interrogated and forced to reveal their hidden meanings" (Ticket 205).

The notion that words have "hidden meanings" in this account of the cut-up method refers to the linkage between word and image, the word's ability to make things visually present and vice versa; as well, it suggests the controlling power of language, which is encoded with repressive discourses that control us. Burroughs's dominant concept for understanding the control of images and language is termed the word/image virus throughout his texts. Viruses appeared throughout Burroughs's body of work as forms of control, notably in his early novels Queer and Naked Lunch as explanations for heroin addiction and sexual dysfunction, but begin to take on special significance as

Burroughs began experimenting with the cut-up method.vii As Burroughs sums up in his

1986 essay "Ten Years and a Billion Dollars," "My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus [...] it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself" (59). The Word (and the Image), because of this function of replication, can be used as a form of control by government and mass media to replicate particular strains of discourse or visions in the minds of people. To cut these lines of 68 control, the virus becomes a kind of template for the cut-up method, a seizing of the means of production, if you will, to weaponize language and writing against controlling forces themselves.

In The Book of Breeething, a 1974 illustrated treatise on the origins of language,

Burroughs makes clearer the connection between language's virality and its ability to conjure images in the mind, and how these two features are a useful technology for writing. The short book is perhaps Burroughs's most coherent articulation of the overarching theory of the virality of language and the word's relationship to the image that spans his body of work. Writing, Burroughs contends, is different from mere communication: "Word only exists in a communication of sender and receiver. It takes two to talk. Perhaps it only took one to write" (65).

Returning to Egyptian hieroglyphics as his model, Burroughs further argues that whether we remember it or not, there is always a pictorial aspect of written language.

While the word "leg" is no longer represented by a picture of a leg, the letters of the word

"leg" still create a visual form—it still retains some sense of the hieroglyphic. This inherently visual aspect of the word, then, shows both how words are easily spread and how they can be rearranged to create new meanings. Burroughs makes a particularly filmic case for writing as an act of rearranging: "a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures" (66, emphasis original). The revolutionary potential of this ability of words to act as moving pictures is that they are "capable of infinite variation" (66). Here, it becomes clear how the materiality of words themselves function in the cut-up method, and how the cut-up method is itself a kind of machine for producing vision. The remainder of The Book of 69

Breeething enacts this theory by creating out of a set of hieroglyphics

(see fig. 2) an infinitely revisable narrative (see fig. 3); Burroughs then demonstrates how this same logic can be applied to the word, performing the cut-up method on the words themselves.

The Third Mind, a collection of essays and examples of the Figure 2: "Element Chart" (The Book of Breeething 67) cut-up method co-authored with Gysin, makes clear how viruses are tools of cutting through control. In an essay entitled "Fold-ins,"

Burroughs demonstrates for the reader the fold-in version of the cut-up method, which he used to compose the bulk Figure 3: Hieroglyphic Writing (The Book of of his cut-up trilogy of Breeething 70) novels, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded, and Nova Express. The fold-in consists of folding a page in half down the center and placing it on top of another page.

The resultant text is then "read across half of one text and half the other" (96). Burroughs 70 gives the reader two examples of the process; he explains in a section entitled "Notes on

These Pages" that in order to show the fold-in method, he is going to operate on two of his own pieces of writing. The operation being demonstrated, he explains, will fold into these two texts a number of newspaper articles and selections from various writers, living and dead, including Shakespeare, Beckett, Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Mailer, among others

(97).

The resulting fold-ins are reprinted, but left unexplained and unannotated by

Burroughs. Using ellipses to indicate where fragments of text meet other fragments, the pages appear as a constellation of unrelated fragments. As a random example, here are approximately five lines of the first fold-in:

cool path from ruined suburbs...stale memories...excrement mixed with

flowers...fly full of dust pulled up his pants...birdcalls...lapping water...a

distant cool room...leg hairs rub rose wallpaper...pale dawn shirt in the

door...sharp smell of weeds...you touched frayed jacket....mufflers... (100)

The fold-in example continues this way for approximately three pages. While I'm not particularly interested in demonstrating what this fold-in means, or interpreting these juxtapositions of fragments, I am interested in how this technique is essentially a machine for producing the kinds of "brilliant fragments," to use Barthes's phrase, that can be pried loose from discourse and allowed to emanate a kind of ekphrastic glow that eats into or cuts out of the context of origin. Consider the unit above, "leg hairs rub rose wallpaper." I don't know what this "means," per se, but it immediately brought to my mind a vivid image of a hairy leg rubbing against pinkish wallpaper. That is, because of the hieroglyphic nature of the written word, to use Burroughs's theory of writing, an image 71 was immediately brought to mind. Each unit in the above fold-in does this to some degree.

But what do we make of the barrage of all of these images and sensations together, a kind of visual and sensual cacophony that seems to resist narrativization?

Reading the units of a cut-up as moments of embodiment, Clune argues that Burroughs

"does not intend for us to approach these texts as a random string of letters, but as a fictional world of experience" (91). He goes on to explain that the unit created by a pair of scissors, when juxtaposed against another unit, creates a "fictional world," or a virtual space, where those units can interact. Thus, "leg hairs rub rose wallpaper" butts up against "pale dawn shirt in the door" and "sharp smell of weeds" to create a strange experiential space where legs, color, light, and smell coalesce. Again, returning to

Burroughs's hieroglyphic model, we can see the words colliding with each other and producing images as though on a film strip. The cut-up method functions like montage editing—the reader, who involuntarily visualizes what the words signify, sees the images play and coalesce together as in a film. This, according to Burroughs, is a form of time travel. "The fold-in method," Burroughs explains, "extends to writing the flashback used in films [...] When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one" ("Fold-ins" 96). Like in his hieroglyphic-film explanation, we see here that the "brilliant fragments" created through the fold-in method function as a kind of visual time travel. Herein lies the predicative, oracular nature of

Burroughs's textual practice.

Between the two fold-ins, Burroughs places (unexplained) a section entitled

"Technical Deposition of the Virus Power," which is written in lexically coherent 72 sentencesviii. We might read this passage sandwiched between these two exemplary fold- ins as a technical demonstration of the virus's power and relevance to the cut-up method.

The passage begins, "Gentlemen, it was first suggested that we take our own image and examine how it could be made more portable" (101). The speaker of the passage continues to explain that they attempted to place the image in binary code, but that what they eventually found was that the code must be written at the molecular level so that it didn't need a large storage space. The passage explains the relevance of this invisible, molecular code: it exhibits the features of a virus. When it was found that the image material "exhibited a capacity for life which is found elsewhere in the form of virus," the

Technical Deposition explains, the potential of this viral image is fully realized: "Our virus infects the human and creates our image in him" (101). While this description is clearly in the mouth of a repressive authority trying to control humanity, the section also reflexively makes clear how the virus is a relevant model for the preceding cut-up you just read: "To this end we invented variety in many forms, variety that is of information content in a molecule, which, enfin, is always a permutation of the existing material"

(101). The cut-up method, predicated upon the word/image virus' ability to conjure images in the mind of the reader, is a tool for creating variety. By cutting the word/image loose from its originary, controlling context, and reformulating the sequence of images that it is meant to convey, the word/image can be endlessly permutated into different configurations, a variety of "brilliant fragments" of ekphrasis that continually "eat into" the social and political to generate an epideictic vision of how things might be otherwise.

Cutting up, then, is a form of invention, a way of bringing something into being.

In a way, Burroughs's formulation solves the problem that Poulakis and others identify as 73 inherent to the epideictic, that it is the tool of the fascist and the propagandist. Burroughs provides us with an aesthetic model that can bypass the controlling ideology of the social and political, destroying their logical proofs and instead fashioning them into ornaments, into words that operate along the logics of making something present to one's mind.

Importantly for this analysis, cutting-up creates something new; it is, in Culler's sense, an event that leads to an innovation. It brings something new into the world that did not exist before and is unrealizable under the current terms of the social and political (or, it is virtual in Clune's terms); this newness is brought about and performed into being through techniques of visualization.

AIDS, Art, and the Word/Image Virus

Highlighting the word/image virus' relationship to the epideictic, its ability to generate aesthetic visions separate from the social and political spheres, makes clear how it could be a useful concept, along with the cut-up method, for challenging the controlling ways dominant discourses narrativize experience. In the case of the AIDS Crisis, the cut- up method and its attendant virus serve as techniques for challenging the totalizing nature of the documentary impulse of memorialization. Rather than subsisting on a set of preconceived narratives and representations that the Crisis seems to have given birth to itself, artists and writers might use these Burroughsian techniques to cut-up and play with the "realism" of the dominant mode of representing the Crisis. The word/image virus, as indicated at the beginning of the chapter, seems to anticipate the literal HIV virus causing the disease. As such, AIDS and HIV themselves can be transformed into templates for thinking through social issues. While the following chapters each will explore writers 74 who use the techniques of the cut-up method and the word/image virus as literary resources for their own projects, the remainder of this chapter examines a case that picks up Burroughs's concepts directly: the conceptual artist collective General Idea's

Imagevirus.

While it could be argued that many AIDS artists and writers depended upon the logics of virality spelled out by Burroughs (such as Patrick Cowley's album Mind Warp discussed in the introduction), the Canadian collective of conceptual artists General Idea explicitly cite Burroughs's ideas as foundational to their artistic praxis, and indeed named their most iconic piece of AIDS artwork Imagevirus after Burroughs's own concept.

General Idea, made up of the artists AA Bronson, Felix Parts, and Jorge Zontal, employed a conceptual style of art that often mixed the tactics of mass media with fairly run-of-the-mill objects such as wallpaper and balloons as a means of circulating their work. Burroughs's notions of virality as a mode of circulation combined with the ability of words themselves to both bring to mind an image and radically alter meanings come

Figure 4: Love, Robert Indiana Figure 5: Imagevirus, General Idea (MoMA) (MoMA) 75 together in this artwork to simultaneously strip the word "AIDS" of meaning and to spread the artwork as far as possible.

Imagevirus is a parodic reworking of Robert Indiana's pop art print/sculpture Love

(Figure 4). Using the same red, blue, and green color scheme as Indiana's iconic image,

Imagevirus simply replaces the letters of LOVE with AIDS (Figure 5), figuring both

Burroughs's tactic of appropriation and a virus's ability to camouflage itself to pass undetected in a host. Given that Indiana's sentimental original image had risen to the height of international fame, Imagevirus, because it was practically identical and used the same color scheme, could be plastered in public spaces with the likelihood no one would even know it spelled AIDS instead of LOVE. General Idea indeed plastered the image across New York City, in art galleries, on subway cars, on the sides of buses, and soon in

San Francisco and Europe. A "vision of aesthetic perfection," General Idea understood

Imagevirus as a form of "mindless repetition, an automatic self-reproduction" that was

"Emotionless, without conscience or consciousness, inhuman" (Bordowitz 11).

Similar to those at the outset of this chapter, General Idea points to Burroughs's novels of the 50s and 60s as predictors of AIDS, arguing that they "seem to predict the

AIDS crisis precisely, and to prefigure all the conspiratorial fantasies that arose to explain its appearance" (13), naming him as the largest influence on their conception of the logics of Imagevirus. They align the "formulas and chance operation" of his cut-up method as an epistemological influence where "revelation [is found] in calculated methods to achieve a perverse logic" (17). Burroughs's notions of the ability of the word/image virus to spread and run rampant provided General Idea with the artistic praxis that "viral infection is the creative principle" (13); this praxis became reality when the image 76 became so popular that charitable organizations adopted it, it was placed on stamps, and was used on the July 1992 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine (Bordowitz

51).

Importantly, General Idea understood Imagevirus as art disconnected from direct- action activism, like that of the ACT UP art championed by Douglas Crimp. They defended the radical potential of art to mean nothing, identified as "the point where poetry and visual art consort in modern art history" (109), creating a space for the artwork to be understood as a form of epideictic discourse that enacts some vision that is not necessarily realizable in the social or political sphere. Critics of Imagevirus alleged the piece "drained the meaning out of the letters constituting the acronym AIDS precisely at the moment when there was a terrible battle over the meaning of the disease itself"

(109), echoing the ethos of the documentary impulse of the activist aesthetic. General

Idea countered that that was the point, and that such a refusal for the artwork to be engaged in direct action did not sap it of its political nature:

It was not expressive or personal. To the contrary, it was impersonal. It

was neither lyrical nor didactic, and it was most unsympathetic. It was a

cold piece of anti-humanism, vacant in its refusal to mean anything,

unclear who it was meant to address [...] The group steadfastly

refused clarity of intention, message, audience and emotion, and during a

time of 'war,' Imagevirus occupied huge sections of valuable cultural real

estate with nonsense. (108)

Imagevirus has received little critical attention, perhaps unsurprisingly given the polemical and antisocial nature of the project. Importantly, General Idea saw themselves 77 working directly against the project of memorialization and its attendant documentary impulse; they explicitly state that Burroughs is key in this distinction, and they contrast his influence with that of Andy Warhol's, citing Peter Wollen's distinction between the two that "Burroughs's paranoid fear of being taken over by alien words and images is the exact converse of Warhol's 'reverse paranoid' desire to be taken over" (qtd in Bordowicz

66). General Idea saw themselves as saboteurs of these words and images, rather than as documenters of them: "Burroughs is fending off infection from the constant stream of information in the advertising age, while Warhol is afraid of loss—he is afraid he will miss something because he can't take in enough" (66). The documentary impulse, then, might be situated as a shoring up of cultural fragments for preservation out of a fear of loss, while the viral logics of Burroughs are a corrosive, destructive tactic for cutting the lines of control and refiguring something new out of them.

Virality and the Magic of Writing

The invisibility of Burroughs's word/image virus, and its ability to spread undetected, wreaking havoc on forms of control, is the predominant affordance of the concept. It stands as a preexisting literary resource that can be appropriated by artists and authors in another time and place, both articulating new possibilities beyond Burroughs's intentions and creating a kind of canon of viral texts with a lineage.

In "Ten Years and a Billion Dollars," Burroughs advocates a form of writing that transcends both literature and other forms of popular writing, such as journalism: "The original invention from which writing developed was quite simply to create on a cave wall images and scenes [...] The purpose was originally ceremonial or magical, and when 78 the work is separated from its magical function, it loses vitality" (60), he writes, reinforcing his belief in the transformative and magical power of the word's linkage to images. Speaking of journalism, which is "closer to the magical origins of writing that most fiction" (60), Burroughs shows how the exploitation of such magic can be a form of control rather than an instrument of radical freedom. Journalism capitalizes upon the virality of the word/image, allowing writers to "stick pins in someone's image and then show that image to millions of people" (60). The networks of mass media are a dangerous form of control quite simply in that these words and images need have no tie to reality, but can be spread quickly and persuasively.

Here is the underlying concern for the realistic depictions of AIDS that the documentary impulse of memorialization demands; certain forms of realistic and documentary art and writing traffic in the ability to present falsity as truth that can then be spread to audiences of millions of people. Burroughs's exacting and idiosyncratic standards for what writing ought to be and what it ought to accomplish serve as an opportunity to rethink the role of the epideictic in both literary and non-literary genres. If writing ought to make something or some way of being visible, if it ought to crack open the mire of the present and provide some kind of template for a future, even a glimpse of a different possibility, we might move beyond the problems rhetorical scholars have had for centuries in articulating what exactly the epideictic is, as well as understand how literature and its attendant genres are capable of doing that. The epideictic need not only be a means of achieving consensus on some cultural issue; it can, as Burroughs shows us, be a way to smash consensus and build something new and exciting out of it. 79

The following chapter examines the artist and writer David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, a text that blends the author's reflections on living with AIDS and watching his friends and loved ones die around him with meditations on memory, consciousness, and artistic practice. Wojnarowicz's strange artistic method of collage, modeled upon Burroughs's cut-up method, creates portraits that at once are deeply affecting and deeply strange, evidencing the epideictic literary aesthetic's potential to visualize alternative realities to the horrors of the present.

i In a 2000 announcement of an exhibit on Burroughs at Brown University, the head of preservation at the John Hay Library is quoted arguing that "Burroughs has proved to be an insightful and visionary writer, accurately predicting the outbreak of an AIDS-like virus, the government’s war on drugs, and the effects of global warming.” ii This tendency is present in a larger scholarly trend of suggesting Burroughs predicts 20th century philosophy and theory. Allen Hibbard suggests Burroughs predicts the poststructural theories of Barthes, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, writing, "We are now in a position to look back at Burroughs's production through the lens of theory and appreciate how prescient he was. An artist with his antenna up, Burroughs responded to the same cultural landscape that spurred and shaped so much of contemporary theory" (13). Similarly, Jones Irwin argues that Burroughs's work can be "especially connected" (276) to the Continental philosophical tradition. iii Edward W. Robinson remarks that this same description of the cut-up method is an instance that "further enhance[s] Burroughs' reputation as a prophetic writer," but that given the "sardonic" nature of Burroughs's presentation, "quite how seriously Burroughs intendeds such claims to be taken is debatable" (41). iv As will be discussed in Chapter 3, Acker's notions of realism are idiosyncratic. Realism, which she equates with narrative, is an attempt by writers "to tell you how things are," which she understands as "simply a control method" ("The Killers" 17). Thus, because Burroughs uses poetic images to communicate how things are, his non- narrative style is closer to "reality" than and superior to narrative "realism." v For instance, Lois Agnew explores graduation addresses as a site of the civic function of the epideictic; E. Johanna Hartel and Jennifer Asenas examine the Minutemen Project, a nationalist anti-immigration project, as an example of posthuman circulations of the epideictic; Brooke Rollins turns to Derrida's writing on his friends' deaths as forms of funeral oration; Lisa Storm Villadsen analyzes public apologies by public figures as epideictic. vi The dominant trend for reading the cut-up method as signifying a kind of postmodern randomness or indeterminacy is detailed by N. Katherine Hayles, Robin Lydenberg, Oliver Harris, John Kuehl Brian McHale, and Scott Bukatman. Timothy S. Murphy counters that the cut-up is a kind of "amodern" art in a Deleuzian sense, differentiating 80

the cut-ups from Frederic Jameson's negative conception of the postmodern. Michael Clune creatively reads the method as creating a virtual space that phenomenologically reconstructs F. A. Hayek's ideas of price structuring in free markets. Lee Konstantinou, in slight disagreement with Clune, argues that the similarity between Burroughs and neoliberal economists is really a response to centralized state power, which Burroughs uses the cut-ups to project a kind of dystopic space that would form the basic inspiration for punk culture. vii Douglas Kahn carefully catalogues the permutations of viruses across Burroughs's body of work, noting the influence of Wilhelm Reich and Count Alfred Korzybski on earlier forms of the virus, which are animalistic and protean, to the Scientology influence of the cybernetic virus throughout Burroughs's cut-up projects. viii In actuality, the passage is lifted from Burroughs's cut-up novel Nova Express. In the context of that novel, this passage serves as a technical description of how the novel's anthropomorphic virus villains, the Nova Mob, invade and infect humans with their images. That context is not given in these pages, though. 81

Chapter 2

AIDS-Enhanced Vision in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives

Writing in an unpublished essay on David Wojnarowicz's collage paintings,

William S. Burroughs notes two things about the artist: 1) that Wojnarowicz has a similar artistic praxis to his own and 2) this praxis involves the visual process of seeing the unseen structures of reality, and thus rendering them powerless:

David is an artist who sees the function of the artist as I do: the artist is a

meaning-sensitive observer, who creates and changes the structure of

reality by precise and sensitive observation [...] He says the most

dangerously subversive thing we can do is to look at and see the structure

of society—or reality. When it is seen, it disappears. The process of

becoming weapon. (“Wojnarowicz”)

Burroughs’s identification of “the process of becoming weapon” is easily articulable in terms of his own praxis. As the last the chapter covered Burroughs’s weaponization of language’s ability to generate images and meanings against forms of control through his cut-up method, we might see in this statement a structurally similar kind of weaponization, though one slightly different. Wojnarowicz, according to Burroughs, weaponizes sight. That is to say, the act of seeing, of observation itself, is an artistic practice that is capable of creating and changing the social sphere. How could that be?

Early in his collection of personal essays Close to the Knives: A Memoir of

Disintegration, Wojnarowicz makes a strange observation about the way that the objects we see before us work in conjunction with memory formation. While detailing a period 82 of his life when he drifted around the American Southwest, Wojnarowicz posits the following about the nature of vision and memory:

There is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and

actual vision. Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye.

These fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory

before they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made

up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the

form and textures of thought. (26)

This theory of vision, made as though it were an obviously true and accurate description of the processes by which we form memories, is complex and strange. The radical nature of the assertion that what we actually see and what we fantasize are not categorically different is grafted onto and buoyed up by the more acceptable claim that our fantasies and memories are built piecemeal out of the collected, fragmentary images our eyes take in. That this observation occurs early in a memoir that is largely taken to be an accurate first-hand account of living (and dying) during the AIDS Crisis is perhaps even stranger.

How can the documentary impulse of memorialization even function in such a framework, if reality is indistinguishable from fantasy, and if we’ve already processed an image before we’ve even seen it?

Indeed, Wojnarowicz's theorizing of the recursive process of vision and memory encoding each other troubles the genre of "memoir" named in the book’s subtitle; if reality and fantasy are indistinguishable, then what exactly are we reading? Eric

Waggoner notes the difficulty these features pose to fitting Close to the Knives into the genre of memoir or autobiography, arguing the text refuses easy categorization as 83 autobiography "largely because of the resolutely visceral nature of its writing and the

'pastiched' construction of its narrative" (172). The genres of memoir and autobiography,

Waggoner contends, depend upon an easily identifiable narrative progression that

Wojnarowicz's text lacks. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, however, read the “pastiched” nature of Close to the Knives as a form of writing “‘close’ to the body” (41) to capture an embodiment that is “immersed in the visuality of memory” (41). It is this strange narrative technique of autobiography through imagination, they contend, “that the photographer taps to recreate sensory experience” (41).

Despite this general debate surrounding what the book actually is or what genre it belongs to, Close to the Knives has become unambiguously understood to be a text that is about the AIDS Crisis and what it means to have (and be dying of) AIDS. In the absence of a coherent, chronological narrative that stretches from beginning to end, the text's commonly received narrative becomes one of the Crisis in general. For instance, in his recent LA Review of Books article examining the Whitney Museum’s retrospective of

Wojnarowicz’s art, Jonathan Alexander describes Close to the Knives as “track[ing] his steady deterioration from AIDS, which he equates with the demise of a larger American culture.” This conception isn’t exactly untrue, but it also elides most of a memoir in which AIDS doesn’t appear until around page 84 of the 275-page text. Such a reductive understanding, this chapter will argue, ignores the connection between these multiple roles the text takes and their relationship to the overarching backdrop of the AIDS Crisis, as well as the constitutive nature of the technique of visuality that Smith and Watson identify as key to Wojnarowicz’s autobiographical project. Indeed, Wojnarowicz makes explicit throughout that AIDS has imbued him with a kind of power of vision, remarking 84 at one point "with the appearance of AIDS and the subsequent deaths of friends and neighbors, I have the recurring sensation of seeing the streets and radius of blocks from miles above" (88-89). AIDS is directly responsible for laying bare and revealing the world around Wojnarowicz, imbuing him with an ability to perceive and make present that which cannot be seen.

This chapter closely examines Wojnawowicz's understanding of AIDS as giving him a particular capacity to see and deconstruct the reality around him, to see his own body and actions as weapons of defense against a hostile and controlling world, as a form of epideictic visualizing through rhetorical techniques of presencing. Borrowing from the viral and filmic metaphors of William S. Burroughs discussed in the previous chapter,

Wojnarowicz develops a practice of collage and pastiche modeled on the cut-up method that reflexively transforms vision and seeing into a kind of weapon. Specifically, I argue that Close to the Knives develops a theory and technique of ekphrastic vision that allows one to see the unseeable of the world by deploying the imagination alongside what is being experienced (vision, hearing, sex, etc.), and that AIDS and the logics of virality are constitutive elements in developing that imagination. To do so, I will detail and examine the theory of vision that Wojnarowicz sets forth in Close to the Knives before turning to

Wojnarowicz's appropriation of viral discourses and logics to describe both how his own bodily actions and his artistic method serve as weapons for cutting through oppressive discourses and reality. This examination will explore the essays of Close to the Knives in order to show how the visual and filmic metaphors of his written work are co-constitutive of his artistic practice, a practice intertwined with the visuality made possible by his infection with HIV. 85

This chapter, by focusing on Wojnarowicz's theory of visuality, departs significantly from the ways literary critics tend to read Close to the Knives. Given the text's purported genre of autobiography and the sway that the documentary impulse of memorialization holds over narratives of the AIDS Crisis, there is a tendency to read the work in an entirely representationalist manner: Wojnarowicz's accounts give us access to this particular period of history, or to particular queer practices during the AIDS Crisis.

For instance, the text's detailing of his sexual encounters becomes the focus of much queer-oriented scholarship: Ben Grove places his “complex and lyrical accounts of promiscuous sex and desire” (134) in a tradition of gay writers like Larry Kramer and

John Rechy. Or, as in the case of Burroughs scholarship, Wojnarowicz models particular theorists or philosophers; Tom Roach places the text in conversation with several theorists, including Foucault, Deleuze, and Bersani, arguing Close to the Knives “offers a strategy of resistance unwedded to the identititarian logic of biopolitical governance”

(125), while Kevin Floyd can fit the text into a larger framework of queer Marxism, remarking “Close to the Knives ultimately refuses abstract negation, integrates future with past by historicizing both, aspires to some historical location beyond social disintegration, beyond multiform, privatizing violence” (226). Tasia Hane-Devore finds fault with the text's politicization of AIDS, arguing that "Despite his obvious aversion to social proscriptions that govern sexuality and the definition of health, his text still falls in line with the sociomedical narrative construct of risk and illness as it regards gay male sexuality" (121).

These readings of Close to the Knives usually fail to account for the imaginative portions of the text that engage Wojnarowicz's theory of visuality. Interestingly, art 86 historians and performance art theorists have provided the most rigorous examinations of this dimension of the text alongside their analyses of his artwork and photography, uniting his written theories of vision with his artistic practice. Performance theorist

Robert Semper's reading of Wojnarowicz's photography, for example, engages the theory of visuality set out in Close to the Knives, writing “While Wojnarowicz’s AIDS writings and images result from this social diagnosis [of AIDS] and the ‘altered’ vision following from infection, they also initiate a sustained investigation of how perception itself is implicated in the creation of the ‘Other World’” (33). Similarly, art historian Mysoon

Rizk identifies his imaginative visuality as part and parcel of his artistic practice: “To elude the clutches of mechanical and social conditioning as well as the sensation that he was pre-programmed, Wojnarowicz returned again and again to the processing skills of his eyes, mind, and hands, and through them, to the use of his imagination” (46).

While these scholars note the contiguities between his written and visual works, few of them explore the role visuality plays in both. Notably, in a 1989 essay, Felix

Guattari makes much of this relationship by referring to Wojnarowicz as a “painter- writer,” examining how "he fully subordinates his creative process to the daily disclosures in his life.” This creative process is bound up with what Guattari notes as a kind of "imaginary plane" that transfers the visual into language through writing where these sensations and "daily disclosures" are made realizable:

It could even be said that it is through his plastic work and literary texts

that he has turned himself into what he is today. The authenticity of his

work on the imaginary plane is quite exceptional. His "method" consists in

using his fantasies and above all his dreams, which he tape-records or 87

writes down systematically in order to forge himself a language and a

cartography enabling him at all times to reconstruct his own existence. It

is from here that the extraordinary vigor of his work lies.

The "forging" of a language for Wojnarowicz happens through the translation of experiences and dreams into an ekphrastic, metaphorical linguistic description of those experiences; this is, as Guattari notes, where the "vigor" of his written and visual work can be found. This attention to process, of recording and transcribing, links

Wojnarowicz’s artistic practice to that of Burroughs. The act of taping, of transcribing, calls to mind the cut-up method and its ability to break loose fragments of discourse from reality to forge new aesthetic visions.

Notably, as well, Guattari apprehends that Wojnarowicz’s HIV infection enables this vigorous imaginative process, writing “He knows he has the Aids [sic] virus in his body and he integrates this sequence of his life into what may be the ultimate phase of his

Aids [sic] virus; he reinvents on the way the inspiration of the great '60s movements.”

The virus here serves as both an occasion for invention and something to be integrated, to be used as a kind of pattern for living (that is somewhat revolutionary, given Guattari's likening it to the movements of the 1960s). The previously quoted passage from Close to the Knives where AIDS reveals to Wojnarowicz an entire hidden world reflects Guattari's analysis here; translating a sensation into written text that enacts a visual analogy of what that sensation is like is an act of invention, of using one's infection with HIV as an impetus for imagining ways to see the invisible world that created the possibility for that infection in the first place. Wojnarowicz does not attempt to describe this world in realistic terms, to render it with a degree of fidelity so that the reader can get an idea of 88 what it is actually like and bear witness to its existence. Rather, he is interested in how a reflexive use of visuality can make a seemingly invisible world present for a reader in a way that might drive them to action.

Visuality, Rhetoric, and Analogy

This relationship between a visualization made possible and enacted through infection with HIV and the imaginative, inventive possibilities such a visualization enables is deeply epideictic, given the extremes to which Wojnarowicz works to create and invent these verbal visualizations from his own experience. Wojnarowicz's visual project is constructive in the way that Cara Finnegan recommends visual rhetoric projects ought to embrace, arguing that "Acknowledging visuality is ekphrastic; it 'brings before our eyes' new ways of conceiving rhetorical theory" (245). That is to say, paying heed to visuality is also epideictic, for it involves prospective ways of conceiving of what scholarship might be. Such a conception, she writes, is necessary for breaking through false oppositions between textual rhetoric and visual rhetoric. An analysis of how and why Wojnarowicz's attention to visuality is rhetorical, and how his theory of visuality works, provides us with a template and model for visual rhetorical analysis itself. As

Finnegan argues, the time has come to turn away from the mere analysis of visual images, from treating visual rhetoric "as a unique genre of rhetorical artifact" (235), and instead to creating "a project of inquiry that considers the implications for rhetorical theory of sustained attention to visuality" (235). What does Wojnarowicz's use of visuality as a reflexive, inventive process tell us about the workings of rhetorical theory and the ekphrasitc? 89

Finnegan’s tracing out of the societal fears surrounding visual images, or what

W.J.T. Mitchell terms "iconophobia" (xx), that lead to such a false dichotomy reveals to us what is so powerful about Wojnarowicz’s technique, what Guattari identifies as

Wojnarowicz's ability to reconstruct his own experience with vigor through visual language. The general postmodern anxiety surrounding a "culture totally dominated by images" (Mitchell 15) fuels a representational fear, which Finnegan dates back to a

Platonic association of the rhetorical and visual "with the danger of appearances"

(Finnegan 245). For Mitchell, this anxiety lays bare and often obsesses over "the rift between the discursive and 'visible,' the seeable and the sayable" (12), a trope at the heart of the documentary impulse of memorialization. What is visible and what is able to be narrated are the central concerns of the trauma theory-centered scholarship that dominates the field of HIV/AIDS literature and was outlined in the introduction of this dissertation.

Unsurprisingly, because Wojnarowicz's technique is a form of invention that builds something new out of visuality, he became a figure of controversy during the

Crisis itself for his non-realistic representations of living with HIV/AIDS. Wojnarowicz was one of several artists criticized by art historian and activist Douglas Crimp for not creating art that was actively involved in political protest, art that was legible and accessible to common people resisting the government's handling of the Crisis and could be used for activist ends; the debate spilled over to the pages of Artforum where David

Deitcher accused Crimp of making him “feel bad for liking David Wojnarowicz’s art”

(122).i 90

Rather than the documentary activist aesthetic that Crimp and others were championing as an ideal form of art that could engage in direct political action through its documentation of the Crisis, Wojnarowicz's art and writing are invested in a project of documenting what cannot be seen. While I wouldn't agree that Wojnarowicz fits into

Crimp's conception of non-activist AIDS art as being "elegiac," it is certainly "personal."

Crimp's lumping of the elegiac and the personal into one category is telling—that which is not objective is somehow sentimental; that which cannot be objectively represented is in danger of being an illusion, in the Platonic sense that Finnegan outlines. Rather than give in to Platonic representational determinism, Wojnarowicz shows us how visuality of the personal sensation, the dream, the imagination can be used analogically in order to reveal an objective reality that is unable to be seen with the naked eye. That is to say, these personal moments, because of their visual nature, can be persuasive to reader or viewer when performatively enacted using rhetorical techniques of visualization.

This persuasion happens through analogy, a necessarily visual trope identified by

Barbara Stafford as the key to building a useful rhetoric of the visual. For Stafford, visualizing is a form of cognition: she writes, "I want to recuperate the lost link between visual images and concepts, the intuitive ways in which we think simply by visualizing"

(61). Stafford's project is necessarily reparative, setting aside the hermeneutics of suspicion that plague iconophobia; her project is admittedly "unfashionably positive and frankly polemical" in its desire to stake out "an alternative view of the pleasures, beauties, consolations, and, above all, intelligence of sight" (4, italics original). Stafford turns to Aristotle to investigate this intelligence afforded by visuality, showing how his rhetorical notion of the metaphorical depends upon a logics of analogy, where mimesis 91

"visibly convert[s] and reconvert[s] words in order to see phenomena in a new or better light" (116). Wojnarowicz's artistic practice serves as a kind of blueprint for this analogical thinking, for converting and reconverting visual sensation and experience into and out of words to get at some better understanding of the initial experience. Like the workings of the cut-up method, this process unlocks hidden meanings of experiences by playing with the transfer between word and image, and the ability of words to place images in the mind’s eye. Ultimately, this converting and reconverting is a form of inventing oneself out of the oppressive structures one is born into. As Finnegan argues, it is the type of visual rhetoric project that through its "sustained attention to visuality"

(235) becomes ekphrastic itself as it "'brings before our eyes' new ways of conceiving"

(235) not just rhetorical theory and invention, but also the hidden structures of daily life.

Wojnarowicz’s reiterative practice of converting and reconverting image and vision into words is, like the cut-up method it is influenced by, an aesthetic technique with which we can epideictically imagine other futures outside the narrow confines of the social and political.

Vision, Memory, Imagination, and the Preinvented World

At the center of the Close to the Knives, and across all eight of its essays,

Wojnarowicz sets forth an overarching theory of vision. This vision, which takes the form of the "recurring sensation" in the quotation discussed in the introduction above, becomes constitutive to Wojnarowicz's artistic practice, both in his visual and written works. Early in the memoir, he sets up a theory he entitles "filmic exchange" (27), a process of transformation between memory and vision that has the potential to be 92 damaging, but which one can ostensibly work around with an awareness of its existence.

This theory is detailed and laid out across the essay "In the Shadow of the American

Dream: Soon All This Will Be Picturesque Ruins," an account of Wojnarowicz's formative time spent in the American Southwest in the early 80s. Wojnarowicz details the simple act of driving a car across the desert landscape, offering vignettes of the crumbling architecture of the cities he drives through, an erotic encounter with a hitchhiker, and a visit to the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque along the way.

Wojnarowicz, however, defamiliarizes this seemingly quotidian travel diary by using what he is literally seeing before him as fodder for exploring the structures of the reality that surround us. The simple act of driving across a landscape provides

Wojnarowicz with an opportunity to reveal this "filmic exchange" in full. He writes,

"Driving a machine through the days and nights of the empty and pressurized landscape eroticizes the whole world flitting in through the twin apertures of the eyes" (26), suggesting that the body is a kind of experience-recording machine, a camera-head with apertures for eyes that filters the outside world and landscape into an internal apparatus holding a reel of film for the image to be recorded upon. Even the extremely common and banal phenomenological experience of perspective, of items on the horizon appearing much smaller than they actually are, is revelatory of the interplay between what one is seeing and one's mental images, one's imagistic memories. Immediately following the

"twin apertures" sentence, Wojnarowicz writes, "Images in the distance that could fit in the centimeter of space between the upheld thumb and forefinger of my hand carry the same compacted energy of the same image close up. Possibly more" (26). That is,

Wojnarowicz seems to say, the act of seeing depends upon a recording of the image in 93 one's sightline while simultaneously comparing that image with other pre-recorded ones stored in memory. The distanced image contains as much "compacted energy" as the close-up image because as one is looking at it, one is already imbuing it with the energy of prior, similar images recorded by the "aperture" of the eye.

Wojnarowicz quickly offers the reader a concrete example of this interplay at work: "Turning the bend in the highway suddenly reveals, a quarter mile away, a highway crew standing in a jumble of broken earth and enormous machines" (26). Again, this example is entirely ordinary—one is driving a car, observing the landscape, turns the corner and comes upon a road crew. This banal, widely held experience is personally revelatory for Wojnarowicz, though; at the exact moment of seeing the workers in the bend ahead, his mind is already working to imbue them with prior memory. He goes on to record what he is seeing, rapid fire, composing a list of the features of the workers: "In that instance I see the browned flesh of a shirtless man in shorts, [...] I see the pale white underarm with the accompanying dark spot of wet hair belonging to a guy up in a cherry picker" (26) and so on. These features are imbued with an eroticism that can only be found by comparing them with prior existences—the images already have an erotic meaning for Wojnarowicz before he has even processed them into thought. The bodily response is immediate: "I feel the fist of tension rising through my solar plexus beneath my t-shirt and the sensation grows upward, spreading like some strange fever in my chest" (26). Arousal happens instantaneously; the "browned flesh" of the shirtless worker and another's "dark spot of wet" armpit hair elicit this bodily sensation.

Perhaps most importantly, these eroticized images remain present even as the workers fade in the distance. As Wojnarowicz continues to drive on, he remarks, "In a 94 moment the vehicle I'm steering passes by the scene and I'm left populating the dry plains

[...] with the touch and taste of flesh. I fill the gullies with small but heated fictions" (26).

Strangely, these images do not continue to play in the mind's eye for Wojnarowicz, but instead are projected outward onto the landscape. Fantasy and daydreaming isn't an act of introspection here. Instead, imagination becomes a tool for projecting outwards into the visual field. The gullies of the desert are "populated" and "filled" with the long-gone images of the workers, suggesting a kind of feedback loop in which what has been sensed is recorded in the mind, projected back outward onto a different image, and then reenters the aperture eye combined with the new sensed image. Wojnarowicz remarks, "[I]t doesn't matter that they are all actually receding miles behind me on the side of the road.

I'm already hooked into the play between vision and memory and recoding the filmic exchange between the two" (27). That is, reality, the social sphere, becomes irrelevant as

Wojnarowicz begins epideictically world building in his imagination; the aesthetic project of recoding what has been seen with memory is an act of both changing and preserving what has been, setting it aside for later recoding and cutting up and mixing in with later visions and memories.

Immediately following the description of driving past the workers and entering a kind of imagination projection onto the landscape, Wojnarowicz drops the dense, philosophical paragraph examined at the outset of this chapter regarding the indistinguishability between memory and actual sight. This assertion theorizes what exactly he has just detailed. He writes,

Vision is made of subtle fragmented movements of the eye. These

fragmented pieces of the world are turned and pressed into memory before 95

they can register in the brain. Fantasized images are actually made up of

millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the form and

textures of thought. (26)

The aperture eye, raven-like, grasps onto image fragments and files them away for later use. The image fragments go through some sort of memory processing and sorting,

"turn[ing] and press[ing]," prior to being filed away and registered. This collection of

"observations" becomes fantasy and imagination. The repository serves as a kind of imagination resource pool that the mind can pull from, rearrange, and process into a thought. This process of "recoding" the "filmic exchange" that occurs between seeing and remembering what is seen is a creative act that engages reality alongside the imagination, giving form and meaning to what is external to the self. It is also a dangerous act - it eliminates difference between "actual vision" and memory, making objectivity impossible.

While this subjective memory-vision complex sounds liberatory in the example

Wojnarowicz gives of his simultaneous seeing and fantasizing about the workers alongside the road, the "aperture" of the eye is a double-edged sword that poses a discursive problem, namely that its immediate relationship to memory forming and its separateness from thought and registration in the brain puts one in danger of unreflectively incorporating and interpolating what one sees. Much like Burroughs’s word/image virus, Wojnarowicz’s process of recoding can be dangerous; if what one sees is precoded with damaging and controlling discourses, the taking up of that image taints the resources of the imagination. If there is no difference between actual vision and 96 memory, what is actually present might only be seen through the lens of the damaging discourses and visuals one remembers.

Wojnarowicz introduces what he terms "the Preinvented World" shortly after laying out of this theory of filmic exchange. After a particularly affecting discussion of a visit to the National Atomic Testing Museum in Nevada, he inserts a lengthy, didactic section detailing his philosophy of the Preinvented World:

We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies

and in that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the

tribes are in the business of sucker-punching peoples [sic] psyches in the

form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government—they sell the

masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as

well as a corrupted and false future. (37)

“Preinvented existence” here is dictated entirely by the political and social—the government, creating a false notion of oneness and tribalism, manipulates its subjects by

"sucker-punching" the imagination with a "corrupted and false history" and future. The

"pile of green-tainted meat" is a pile of images for consumption. The masses will feed on this infected "meat," take it into their system, and become corrupted by it. The meat is, for Wojnarowicz, literally images. He goes on to explain how those in power use visuality as a form of control:

They [rich white men and women in power] toss up a fake moral screen,

nail it to the wall of a tv and newscaster’s set and unfurl it like a movie

screen […] their interpretations of law and religion are just as

manufactured, false, interchangeable and disposable as the fake moral 97

screen. They have an entire media system to dispense their manipulations.

(58-59)

The television set and the movie screen, purveyors of images and visuals, become tools by which those in power can further disseminate their Preinvented “interpretations of law and religion” that justify the exploitation of minorities in the interests of those groups retaining their power. Similar to Burroughs, Wojnarowicz sees the media system as manipulation, as engaged with the upkeep of the Preinvented World. Wojnarowicz writes, “The people who control the means of image production are the ones who are in power. Owners of newspapers and owners of tv stations are the ones who have the most power” (139).

The Preinvented World goes far beyond the media, though. Wojnarowicz elsewhere describes it as “The world of coded sounds: the world of language and the world of lies” (87-88). Language itself is implicated in the Preinvented World, making it nearly inescapable, much like the Word/Image virus of Burroughs’s fiction. This world is also “the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of barren wilderness from the human step” (87).

Language is Preinvented in that it is handed to us. We are born into this world of a system of signs, and we must comport ourselves to it, learn it in order to live in it.

Language has the ability to recode what we see and experience for Wojnarowicz; he writes, “Words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience” (153). Perhaps most importantly for Wojnarowicz, the words of the

Preinvented become part of the self. He writes, “What blood flows these arms and hands?

What color and sensibility in that blood? What textures and images are coded and locked 98 into those genes, those cells, those bones that drag the world toward my eyes? What do these eyes have to do with surveillance cameras?” (63). The images and the words of the

Preinvented enter one’s very cells and DNA, making supposedly natural, subjective acts such as vision complicit with it. In this world, one does not merely look at something and see it for what it is, one “drag[s] the world toward [their] eyes” like a surveillance camera, forcing the codes and textures onto objects that are both already ingrained into those objects (because one is already born into this world) but also reincoded and reinforced by having those codes become part of the visual process. In this way, the

Preinvented World is inescapable, all-consuming, always-already there.

One explicit way of challenging the coded vision of the Preinvented World lays in the act of queer sex. As he continues to drive through the desert and reflect on the nature of filmic exchange and preinvented existence, Wojnarowicz writes of a sexual encounter with a stranger he cruised at a rest stop along the highway. This encounter delineates the possibility of connecting with other people through sex, of getting beyond the constraints of subjectivity. Though this is never explicitly stated, subjectivity seems to be bound up with the Preinvented as a way of keeping people and bodies in their normative place; at one point in the memoir, he writes, “Of course, those in power count on the fact that we are stuck inside these gravity vehicles called bodies. The pressure that gravity sustains on our bodies keeps us crawling around in the preinvented existence” (60). Whether subjectivity exists before Preinventedness and serves to bolster its effects, or is an effect of Preinventedness is unclear. At any rate, sex and the connection with other subjectivities is one of the ways of getting outside of the “gravity vehicle” that keeps us 99 tethered to damaging images and discourses. In recounting this sexual encounter,

Wojnarowicz writes,

The hallucinatory sensation I recall from the depths of fever is the idea

that this guy and I are part of the same vascular system; he and I are two

eyeballs sitting in the dark recesses of a metallic skull viewing the world

through the windshield the way one’s eyes would if they could proportion

and transmit information independent of each other as well as recall

separate private histories. (56)

Sex allows him to literally become one body with this stranger, to be of “the same vascular system,” to share blood and body but to retain individual memories. It allows for a unified sight—each is able to see the world through the same eyeball, to recall each other’s separate private histories, in a way that might dismantle those controlling images of the Preinvented world that one has interpolated. It is an instance of extreme intersubjectivity that dismantles the “gravity vehicles” that Preinventedness feeds on.

Queer sexual practice, here, mirrors the queer artistic practices delineated elsewhere.

Each uses a precoded, Preinvented object to rearticulate something new, to make the private realizable through imagination. Each uses embodiment and bodily processes as a kind of weapon against the strictures of reality.

The Body as Weapon: Deploying Ekphrastic Visuality

AIDS itself and Wojnarowicz's own infection are an impetus for challenging the coded vision of this Preinvented World. Recall Semper 's claim that Wojnarowicz's

"‘altered’ vision following from infection [...] initiate[s] a sustained investigation of how 100 perception itself is implicated in the creation of the ‘Other World’” (33); being infected with HIV literally causes the perceptual change that animates Wojnarowicz's project of visuality. His body becomes a kind of weapon that can be used to deconstruct the oppressive discourses of the Preinvented World. Ann Larabee reads Wojnarowicz's altered vision and deployment of his body as a weapon as a capitalization upon the discourses of the cyborg present in popular culture and critical theory in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Quoting Wojnarowicz's estimation of himself as the "robotic kid looking through digital eyes" (63) she writes, “These eyes were capable of scanning through scale and proportion, freezing images and penetrating bodies. Thus, Wojnarowicz stole from the image of the militaristic rogue cyborg who was unaffected by a hostile, radioactive environment” (80). The rearticulation of this culture trope is, importantly, explicitly

Burroughsian for Larabee, and she is the only scholar to explicitly link Wojnarowicz's project to Burroughs's. Differentiating Wojnarowicz from the activist-bent of figures like

Crimp, Larabee writes

Whereas AIDS activists embraced the stable order of the domestic shelter

in public discourse, Wojnarowicz instead borrowed from William

Burroughs's technologically enhanced Wild Boys, terrorists and saboteurs

[...] Wojnarowicz used the tough, mutant persona of a character from a

postapocalyptic novel, roaming the barren countryside, using any means to

survive" (79).

Indeed, Wojnarowicz's "filmic exchange" seems taken from Burroughs himself. In his

1965 Paris Review interview, Burroughs remarks that his novel Nova Express reveals the filmic nature of reality: "Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is 101 actually a movie. It's a film, what I call a biologic film" (Knickerbocker). He goes on to elaborate his cut-up method's place in such a reality; the nova police of Nova Express

"have gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where they’re in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring.” The goal for the artist, or the

“meaning sensitive observer,” is, of course, to get to the darkroom before oppressive institutions do. This darkroom metaphor seems to aptly describe Wojnarowicz's entire project, from recording and writing down fantasies and imaginative scenes to reinscribing them back into reality; endless revision and reinscription seems to be Wojnarowicz's own take on the cut-up method, where the cutting happens cognitively.

A most striking example of this Burroughsian ability to lay bare the reality around us that Wojnarowicz captures as an artistic practice occurs in the aforementioned section of Close to the Knives where Wojnarowicz explicitly states that AIDS has enabled a kind of X-ray vision in him. He subsequently devotes approximately three pages to spinning out metaphors and analogies, all inherently visual, for understanding the Preinvented

World. By turns, he describes this process of seeing the unseen, truly igniting a visual process of imagination. Wojnarowicz likens the process of having the Preinvented World revealed to one as sensing the visual change at a stoplight: "One stops before a light that turns from green to red and one grows centuries old in that moment [...] It is the distance of stepping back or slowing down that reveals the Other World" (88). The process of having that world revealed to you is one of perception; it is analogous, to use Stafford’s phrase, to noticing the stoplight changing, of slowing down long enough to note the quality of such a change. Wojnarowicz continues, "It's the dislocation of response that reveals it for the first time because the Other World gets into one's bloodstream with the 102 invisibility of a lover. It slowly takes the shape of the cells and their growth, internalized until it becomes an extension of the body" (88). Again, Wojnarowicz deploys a visual analogy: the Other World, invisible, "gets into one's bloodstream" like a lover. This analogy is somewhat opaque, but speaks to the rhetorical issue that Finnegan and Stafford put forward that visualizing is a form of thinking. Describing just how oppressive discourses become internalized is nearly impossible for Wojnarowicz, if we take seriously his claim that language and vision are already precoded with those discourses from birth. Describing them requires a kind of looking askance at them, at making the sensation analogous with some other visual experience. In this case, AIDS and its associated viral discourses provide both fodder for making sense of the unexplainable (in a Burroughsian sense, the Other World is viral; its discourses are like viruses that sneak into your body unseen, transforming you from the inside out) and for taking control, or weaponizing oneself against it (in order to rob encoded discourses of their controlling power, Wojnarowicz deploys his "infected vision," to borrow Sember's phrase, in a process of reencoding and reinscribing them with new memories, desires, visual import).

Wojnarowicz continues to spin out visual metaphors for the sensation of becoming aware of the Preinvented World, writing towards the end of this passage, "Ever since my teenage years I've experienced the sensation of seeing myself from miles above the earth, as if from the clouds. I see the tiny human form of myself from overhead either sitting or moving through this clockwork of civilization" (88). This sensation is, of course, imagined: it is analogous to the sensation of having the structures of reality laid bare to you, "as if" you were looking above from the clouds seeing yourself see. And yet this description's approximation of what that would feel like depends entirely upon the 103 spinning out and the thinking through of a different visual analogy; the metacognitive act, or self-awareness, of seeing one's self go through life is so abstract that it must be approximated through visual analogy. One can imagine the sensation of seeing oneself from miles above, though one could never truly experience it. The ekphrastic description of the tiny human form moving through clockwork creates this vision in the readers’ mind through techniques of rhetorical presencing, and this vision becomes a useful and productive analogy for experiencing something virtual and reflexive, something that does not yet exist that is unrealizable outside of aesthetic experience.

To further relate to the reader this key unexperienceable experience, Wojnarowicz spins out one last visual metaphor, something more concrete that could very well have been experienced by the reader and which might be lying in their mind dormant, ready to be activated. In the quoted section in the introduction of this chapter where Wojnarowicz attributes this new power of vision to his infection with HIV, he writes,

I have the recurring sensation of seeing the streets and radius of blocks

from miles above, only now instead of focusing on just the form of myself

in the midst of this Other World, I see everyone and everything at once.

It's like pressing one's eye to a small crevice in the earth from which

streams of ants utter from the shadows—and now it looks amazing instead

of just deathly. (88-89)

Here, the unexperienceable experience of seeing the world from miles above is likened to something a little more concrete: the visual analogy of ants streaming from some crevice in the earth. The experience is like seeing this, Wojnarowicz suggests through simile. The sensation of having the world and its structures of reality laid bare to you is at once 104 horrifying and full of wonder, like seeing an anthill. Within Wojnarowicz's framework of visuality and memory, it doesn't matter whether you've seen an anthill in real life or your image comes from National Geographic—you're still drawing from a hoard of mind images, of phantasia, to approximate the sensation of looking at yourself looking.

This description of what is unseeable in the reality right in front of us relies upon the use of language to make present for a reader an image they cannot be rendered outside of aesthetic experience. Wojnarowicz engages in classic descriptio; his description of the Preinvented World draws on the everyday imagery and around us: stoplights, ants, the sensation of seeing the ground from high above what we cannot see, the description is indeed what Webb repeatedly defines as rhetorical ekphrasis, a description that "brings before the eyes" of the audience what you want them to visualize.

Wojnarowicz's descriptions of his own experience are, in a sense, pedagogical; by forcing us to see this constellation of analogous visualizations, we ourselves might eventually be able to look with X-ray vision at the structures of reality surrounding us, and become aware of both how they reign us in as well as serve as the raw materials for breaking out.

It is not incidental that this section of Close to the Knives was originally conceived of as an essay that Wojnarowicz entitled "AIDS and Imagination" (NYU archival research). Revealing and seeing the Preinvented World is far less strange than

Wojnarowicz's descriptions would make it seem. If we understand this activity as linked to the imagination's ability to visualize phenomenon, and this visualization as a form of cognition, the strangeness dissipates and we are left with a kind of visual thought. To borrow Amy Hungerford's approximation of the value of the imagination, the aesthetic experience that literature affords can help us analogically make sense of another's 105 experience. Rather than being handed a stiff, unbending realistic narrative of someone else's experience, Wojnarowicz shows us that we can imagine what he sees by analogously drawing on our own mental hoard of memories and shored up visions. We can ignite our imagination to "elid[e] the gap," in Hungerford's words, between your experience and mine (157).

Weaponized Sight and Memorialization

It is clear that Wojnarowicz's artistic practice is deeply political; the concept of the Preinvented world is a way of explaining how ruling classes dominate minorities, and how the media "with their fake moral screens" keep such classes in power. There are portions of Close to the Knives that read like activist pamphlets, such as the short essay

"Additional Statistics and Facts," which, similar to ACT UP's artwork Let the Record

Show discussed in this dissertation's introduction, lists startling facts juxtaposed against the condemnable words of "AIDS criminals." The fact that "One in every four people in the bronx is HIV positive" (134) is butted up against quotes from the Catholic church such has "Morality is the only prevention for AIDS" (132). How do we interpret such direct-action essays against the lyrical wildness of Wojnarowicz's ekphrastic vision?

By way of conclusion, I want to consider how Wojnarowicz's textual practice fits into, and extends or enriches, the impulse to memorialize by refurbishing it with an epideictic literary aesthetic that challenges our views of the social and political. While much of Close to the Knives' first half is not about AIDS explicitly, the oft-anthologized titular essay “Living Close to the Knives” renders the suffering and anger of AIDS patients with such vivacity that its narrative becomes a kind of stand-in for the entire 106 work. When Alexander writes that Close to the Knives "tracks [Wojnarowicz's] steady deterioration from AIDS, which he equates with the demise of a larger American culture," this essay is predominantly what he refers to. The first part of the essay is a relatively straightforward narrative of Wojnarowicz taking his close friend, Peter Hujar, to a doctor’s appointment, and later, of Peter’s death. The essay is at turns disturbing and deeply moving, in part due to Wojnarowicz’s vivid ekphrastic descriptions of the event— one feels as though one is in the doctor’s office with Peter, bearing witness to his suffering. However, within the larger context of vision, memory, and imagination that this chapter has analyzed, to call this a straightforward, realist representation that one could bear witness to is disingenuous. Indeed, after Peter has died in the second half of the essay, Wojnarowicz writes the following imaginative description of visiting Peter’s gravesite that problematizes, or even undoes, the political import of the first part of the essay:

The eye hovers in space inches from the back of my head; seeing myself

seeing him, or, the surface extension of him—the wet tossed earth—and

further seeing his spirit; his curled body rising invisible just above the

ground; his eyes full and seeing; him behind me looking over my

shoulder, watching me looking at the fresh turned earth where he lies

buried. (101)

Lest the reader believe this is some ghostly apparition, Wojnarowicz clarifies that

I talk to him, so conscious of being alive and talking to my impressions,

my memories of him, suspending all disbelief. I know he’s there and I see

him. I sense him in the hole down there under the surface of the earth. I 107

see him without the covering of the plain pine box. The box no longer

exists in my head […] And his death is now as if it’s printed on celluloid

on the backs of my eyes. (102)

Here, as the erotic gaze projects the roadside worker’s bodies back outward onto the landscape, Wojnarowicz’s imaginative filmic exchange between reality and memory re- encodes the new, fantasized memory back onto his celluloid retinas. The facts of Peter's death cease to exist; the pine box dissolves. Wojnarowicz's mourning for his friend and former lover becomes another example of the aesthetic experience of filmic exchange.

Death is transformed into something generative; Wojnarowicz "print[s] it on celluloid on the back of [his] eyes," preserving it, but not in a realistic way. Instead, filmic exchange allows him to encode the experience, and his memory of Peter, with his conversations, with Peter alive, all in one film frame.

In such a model, how would bearing witness work? If we take seriously

Wojnarowicz's claims earlier in the text about the Preinvented World, that our vision is always already, from birth, encoded with poisoned, normative discourses, how could one bear witness to anything? Realist representation must always be on the terms of those in power, those who control the "moral screens." For Wojnarowicz, the way out of this problem is through imagination; and so, to treat this essay as the paradigmatic example of bearing witness is to ignore the strangeness of what it is actually saying. Yes, it bears witness, but it bears witness in a completely different, imaginative way, an extremely personal way, that breaks and extends the genre of "bearing witness" by giving it an epideictic flavor that enacts a certain generative vision of memorialization. Wojnarowicz is performing memorialization, rather than just consuming it. 108

Wojnarowicz makes present this other, imaginative vision through rhetorical techniques of presencing that supplant the real, lived version of Peter’s death, in effect bearing witness to something other than the death itself. As Ps.-Longinus asks us to see, the ekphrastic is not always wed to ideas of fidelity; it can inflame the reader, move them, persuade them, in other words, make present some vision that could not exist within the poisoned codes of reality, offering an alternative, virtual space for bearing witness, and modeling how the reader might do so herself. Wojnarowicz's modeling of an alternative form of bearing witness is a reconceptualization of AIDS literature not only as texts that faithfully bear witness to the past, but also as texts that use AIDS as an occasion for exploring new modes of experience.

Wojnarowicz's model is a generative one, a way of existing and surviving within the poisoned codes of reality by using a pseudo-cut-up method of artistic collage that reinvigorates personal memories and visions. The following chapter, on the other hand, will explore a destructive, corrosive use of HIV/AIDS as a way of getting out of the poisoned codes of reality. Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless is a novel that isn't quite about AIDS in any real sense, but which appropriates the discourses of virality to bring about an apocalyptic end to those poisoned codes, to essentially infect them to bring about their demise.

i Crimp gives a somewhat belated apology in his 2002 edited collection essays Melancholia and Moralism, writing in the introduction, “I have never suggested that anyone shouldn’t like David Wojnarowicz’s art; I like it myself” (26). 109

Chapter 3

"GET RID OF MEANING": Author as Virus in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless

This dissertation has asked from its outset, "What does it mean to affix the label of AIDS Literature' to a work?" In the case of Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives would probably pass the documentary impulse's litmus test of being a text that both represents the Crisis and records a historical record of it, even if Wojnarowicz calls the veracity of that record into question with his technique of "filmic exchange." This chapter places further tension on the question of what counts as "AIDS Literature" by asking, "What would it mean to affix this label to a work in which AIDS is somewhere in the mise en scene of the text, but it is not the primary content of the work—the work could not, in any sense, be said to be "about" AIDS?" Kathy Acker's 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless can serve as a kind of litmus test for answering these questions, for helping us to reformulate a definition of "AIDS Literature" that moves beyond content or plot that centers around the disease. Whereas in the previous chapter, I have argued that

Wojnarowicz's memoir is both about AIDS in terms of the work's content and uses AIDS as a literary resource for the sharpening of his aesthetic project, here I will argue that

Acker's novel accomplishes the latter without the novel needing to be about HIV or

AIDS, and that is enough for a reconsideration of the work as "AIDS literature."

The novel, famously difficult to summarize or analyze, follows two narrators,

Abhor and her lover Thivai, who are navigating a post-apocalyptic Paris against the backdrop of a revolution led by Algerian terrorists. Abhor, “part robot, and part black”

(3), and Thivai, a sadist pirate, wander the city’s ruins, encounter a cast of terrorists, 110 revolutionaries, and CIA operatives, fall in and out of love and trouble, and engage in abusive, sexually explicit behavior in a series of loosely connected scenes that give

Acker’s novel a sense of the picaresque.

The novel is not a statement on HIV or AIDS and does not, at the surface level, have anything to say about the Crisis that would be reaching an apex in 1988 around the time of its publication. Yet AIDS and its associated discourses are all over Acker's text.

Her use of AIDS in Empire is, at first glance, ornamental; she tacks AIDS on as an adjectival description, often without further context or explanation. AIDS peppers the novel, often without any outwardly apparent significance to plot: “More than fifty per cent of Western Europe now has gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes or AIDS” (60); Paris is described as the “city of AIDS” (168); the time is described as “the age of AIDS” (178).

Characters have AIDS or are at risk for having AIDS: “There was a teenybopper […] who said to a guy in my gang, just as he was about to rape her, that she had AIDS” (224).

These many mentions of the disease are arguably tapping into a kind of late 1980s zeitgeist. And yet, Acker merely gestures to AIDS in all of these examples: they are not descriptive accounts of the virus or the epidemic, they do not add anything at the surface level of plot, and they are not necessarily even metaphorical uses of the word “AIDS.”

No criticism of Acker's novel even mentions the omnipresence of HIV and AIDS in the noveli. Recent work on Acker can get very close to apprehending the role AIDS plays in Empire, but it often fails to give the virus or disease any larger significance beyond the moment it is mentioned in. For instance, Michael Clune's analysis of Acker's vision of the bloodstream as a free market utopia can acquiesce that Acker's use of AIDS reflects "the special horror of the virus [...] depends on a fictional context where blood is 111 money" (American 108) without assigning the virus or disease any larger role in the novel's functioning. Similarly, Walter Benn Michael's analysis of the novel as creating a kind of "feminist writing with the body" that occurs through the "intermingling of bodily fluids" (Shape 68, emphasis original) can apprehend how blood and bodily fluid play into

Acker's greater scheme, but not how that blood and bodily fluid is always already interpolated by the omnipresence of HIV and AIDS.

Rather, to find any claim that Empire has anything at all to do with AIDS requires returning to the novel's original publication in 1988 during the apex of the Crisis.

Interestingly, in a review of the novel for the Pittsburgh Press in 1988, Doug Rice ties the novel explicitly to AIDS, writing

Empire of the Senseless is the first book that has anything to say about

AIDS. The savage sexualities of both the in-laws and the outlaws in this

"empire" have been brought about not only by the attack AIDS has leveled

against society, but also by the simple-minded inhumanity of the public

politics of diseased minds. (105)

While a newspaper's review of the book really has not the space for a detailed analysis,

Rice manages to apprehend that the novel's logics depend upon HIV and AIDS, that the world Empire exists in has been brought about by the age of AIDS. He makes the further claim that "The striking brilliance of this novel is that there will be no way to take it, to cure it. Ms. Acker may be the healthiest disease going," transferring the qualities of

"cure" and "disease" of the novelistic universe Empire occurs in to the act of Acker's writing itself. That is to say that the novel is both about AIDS, if not at the level of plot then at least at the level of the world it creates, and that Acker's method of writing is like 112 an incurable disease, that Acker's writing and text are somehow themselves like HIV and

AIDS.

This chapter, taking seriously Rice's early review of Empire as a book that functions on two levels—one that has something to say about AIDS and another that uses

AIDS to say something—seeks to deny that Acker’s use of AIDS as a kind of adjective is merely a result of the ever-prevalent topic of AIDS in 1988 that would inevitably seep into her prose, and instead seeks to show that there is something more at play.

Specifically, I argue Acker’s use of AIDS is an indexical or deictic one, i.e. the word

“AIDS” itself carries a plethora of associations, what Kenneth Burke terms “a whole bundle of principles” (87), that serve as a kind of nudge for the reader to envision a whole

AIDS universe. This chapter will show that not only is Acker’s use of AIDS drawing upon the reader’s associations, this use is of utmost importance to the inner workings of

Empire of the Senseless. This use of AIDS produces what Deborah Hawhee terms rhetorical vision, “a dense and simultaneous proliferation of both images and ideas” (155) rather than the single, detailed image we have come to associate with ekphrasis. More specifically, the use of AIDS as a linguistic marker functions in a context where "words

[...] can stand in for or facilitate vision [and] help others see" (139), leading the audience or reader to envision associated images and ideas not necessarily implied by the rhetor. In such a model, the epideictic quality of rhetorical presencing is sneaky, it's invisible, it's viral. Like a Trojan horse, Hawhee's notion of rhetorical vision is like a virus that slips into the bloodstream of the reader, bringing a whole coded "bundle of associations" with it that can't be seen with the naked eye. 113

Acker’s surface-level deictic use of AIDS and the bundle of associations and ideas it brings to readers ultimately works on a second, meta-level in the novel; these deployments of AIDS and its discourses function as a blueprint for Acker’s literary aesthetics that seek to reinvent the traditional uses of narrative. The implantation of scenes from contemporary novels like William Gibson’s Neuromancer and canonical texts such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn function almost literally like the biological function of a virus. They appear within the novel with very little changed (almost word for word in the case of Neuromancer) and they seem to have no immediate effect on the novel’s plot or narrative. It is almost as though they are laying in wait, truly replicating

Burroughs’ description of the word/image virus as “an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself” ("Ten Billion" 59). Narrative and its functions become rewired for alternative purposes; narrative’s usual function of information delivery is tossed aside and it becomes a Trojan horse, a way of sneaking associations and visualizations into the text. Acker’s deranged use of these famous narratives, patterned upon a virus sleeping in the novel’s bloodstream, has the effect of Hawhee’s rhetorical vision: bundles of ideas and associations are snuck into the novel, lying in wait to replicate themselves with Acker’s own ideas.

This chapter ultimately argues that Acker’s two-leveled use of AIDS, the first as an actual surface-level production of rhetorical vision that animates Acker’s blood-based utopic myth within the novel and the second as a virtual template or blueprint for literary production and canonic transmission, collapses a distinction between narrative and the ekphrastic; in the universe of Empire of the Senseless, narrative and ekphrasis are not necessarily two separate entities, as literary scholars have traditionally characterized them 114

(Heffernan, Krieger), but rather are part of what classical scholar Courtney Roby terms the “ekphrastic complex,” a concept that returns to the ancient Greek conception of ekphrasis that did not understand it as necessarily separate from narrative. Roby capitalizes on Tamar Yacobi’s conception of “narrativized description” where the ekphrastic objects are “projected into the flow of story time, rather than enumerated in spatial coexistence” (Yacobi 612). Roby goes on to add that “Expanding the ekphrasis from a static description […] to a temporally extended narrative can drastically increase the amount of detail a reader can absorb about an artifact” (Roby 150-1). Understanding

Acker’s dual use of the AIDS virus in an ancient sense of the ekphrastic as not necessarily split or separate from narrative, we might begin to understand the visions these works set forth as a rhetorical tool that troubles narrative stability, that seeks to show rather than tell what is unable to be narrated, to allow different ways of knowing the AIDS Crisis and its effects.

The Trouble with Narrative

Throughout her career, Acker viewed narrative and storytelling with disinterest, and later, with outright distrust. Narrative, and in particular its use in novels, is ultimately a tool for the educated populace; Acker remarks in her 1989 essay "A Few Notes on Two of My Books" that "the novel is one of the most conservative art forms in our century"

(9). In an interview with the magazine On Our Backs in 1991, Acker explains her desire to find a place in-between the controlling forces of the novel and the elitism of poetry: "I came out of the poetry world, not out of prose, so I wasn't concerned with the traditional narrative or even narrative at all. I wasn't interested in telling a story, where you make up 115 one or two fictional characters and tell about their relation to the world" (Palac 19).

Narrative for Acker is ultimately a quality that prevents writing from being "part of the world" (Palac 19), of having real-world consequences, of engaging with the classes and identities for which writing could have the most radical impact.

Acker expands upon this distaste for narrative in her essay "The Killers," giving more political reasons for her distrust for the strategy. Linking up narrative to a project engaged in realism, Acker argues the following: "Within the realm of realism lies the assumption that language mirrors all that isn't language, right? A table. That's what a narrative is about: telling what is or should be true. That a narrative mirrors reality" (17).

Because of this power to seemingly mirror the world through language, narrative and or realism (Acker seems to be completely conflating these two terms into one and the same thing in this essay) pose a problem for Acker where the aesthetic becomes a tool for political control and ideology. She explains further:

If I'm going to tell you what the real is by mirroring it, by telling you a

story which expresses reality, I'm attempting to tell you how things are.

By letting you see through my own eyes, I give you my viewpoints, moral

and political. In other words, realism is simply a control method. (17)

A writer who attempts to channel vision through language to the reader, according to

Acker's formulation, is engaged in indoctrination and control. Narrative, then, must be supplanted or worked around; realistic vision that mirrors reality must be killed off so the work can be "part of the world" and have real social and political impact.

While she doesn't explicitly address narrative in Empire, she touches on many of the problems associated with language and breaking through the control of language that 116 she outlines in the aforementioned interviews and lecture. In a self-reflexive, didactic moment about halfway through the novel, Acker inserts a discussion of the failures of deconstruction and Burroughs's cut-up method, the guiding praxis of her previous novels, into the scene. As Abhor is tattooed, an act that will become the text's central metaphor for the act of writing, she reflects that the unconscious is "our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgment, prison"

(134). Abhor remarks that while in the recent past it seemed possible to destroy language

"by cutting that language" (134), by turning it into nonsense, this project is an ultimate failure because "nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to normalizing institutions" (134). In order to get away from these institutions, one's praxis must be totally disengaged from them. And so, Acker must invent new ways of writing in order for literature to move beyond normalizing institutions.

Acker has acknowledged elsewhere that Empire of the Senseless marks a break in her oeuvre as it moves away from deconstruction and instead towards the invention of a new myth upon which to found a future society. In her essay "A Few Notes on Two of

My Books," Acker remarks "I thought as I started Empire, there's no more need to deconstruct, to take apart perceptual habits, to reveal the frauds on which our society's living. We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth. Somewhere real [...]

Empire of the Senseless is my first attempt to find a myth" (11). This attempt, since it is the first, though, must kill off the normalizing institutions and bring about an apocalyptic vision that ends the world so that a new one may be created; it can no longer attempt to rearrange that world, to try to work within it. There is no cure—Acker-as-disease must ravage what is left before this new "real" place can be founded. 117

It is, I argue, no coincidence that Empire is both an attempt to find a myth by bypassing the controlling trap of narrative and a novel that has something to say about

HIV and AIDS. Acker's novel is both of these things, and that the bypassing of narrative and a preoccupation with AIDS are mutually constitutive concerns.

Viral Metaphors and the Disruption of Narrative

The Human Immunodeficiency Virus, simple in structure, is not a living thing. It does not consume sustenance, produce waste, or create energy. Because of this simplicity, scientists and textbooks on the subject of HIV and AIDS, such as AIDS: The

Biological Basis, "hesitate to refer to viruses as 'alive'" (Weeks and Shorts 40). Despite this hesitation, the virus is almost always imbued with a consciousness and a motive; the same textbook that hesitates to refer to it as alive declares the process of viral replication as "among the more remarkable of natural phenomena" and refers to replication as the virus using a cell "for its own purposes" (Weeks and Shorts 40). The virus is, in a sense, sleeping in the bloodstream; it has already been with us for some time before we even become aware of its internal stirrings.

Viral replication itself is already imbued with a sense of metaphor; the virus, in its simplicity, is a set of codes, a bundle of genetic instructions, wrapped in a protein case. It is far smaller than the living cell it attacks, penetrating the cell's wall and waiting silently within. The virus’s "purpose" is multiplication, a mindless proliferation of a bundle of genetic instructions: reproduction for the sake of reproduction. The hijacked cell bursts, and in its death throes releases more protein-encased bundles of information. Cell by cell, the virus destroys the carrier's immune system. 118

The virus as an agent of disruption is capitalized upon in Empire in both the use of AIDS and blood-based metaphors throughout the novel, which I have already catalogued, and through Acker's use of literary piracy and plagiarism to get around the problem of controlling narrative. Acker, operating upon a similar use of the virus and blood to Burroughs' use of the word/image virus as both a symbol of oppressive and controlling institutions but also a valuable template for ways of working around those institutions, such as the cutup method, both employs the discourses of AIDS in the novel's universe while also capitalizing upon the viral logics of AIDS as a kind of template for aesthetic creation. To make sense of this dual use, I will here employ

Michael Clune's language of the actual and the virtual, where virtual refers "to the tendency of artworks to project blueprints for a kind of conscious experience that we can't yet actualize" (Writing 35); that is, artworks that point beyond themselves, that dream up new forms that current artistic forms do not have the capability of actualizing.

The actual virus and the wonderment of its blind, unthinking drive to replicate itself at the destruction and expense of its host cell serves as a kind of apocalyptic virtual blueprint for how fiction and aesthetic form might get beyond the controlling institutions (like realistic narrative) that attempt to hem it in.

To unpack the impact of the use of actual blood and viruses in the novels I wish to examine a complex in Empire's plot whereby Acker imagines a utopic future where capitalism can exist in and across bloodstreams, allowing for complete union between persons; on the other hand, because the novel exists in a universe where AIDS exists and is perpetrated by the CIA and government, this utopic space is always under siege by threat of contamination. These actual, literal uses of blood and AIDS function as kinds of 119 deictic, cognitive nudges to readers at the time of the novel's publication in 1988; this is no secret, for instance, to Rice, whose early review is quick to point out the effect of writing AIDS into the novel. As previously stated, these instances of blood and AIDS are not descriptio, they do not paint a vision, but rather act deictically by pointing to discourses of AIDS and developing their imagistic power from reader's own associations with the disease.

The detailing of Acker's utopic blood-based union is perhaps a perfect example of how her use of blood and AIDS is deictic. Abhor, after wandering through Algerian- controlled Paris and returning to her hotel to watch Thivai inject drugs, details her view of the bloodstream as a democratic free-market. This passage is sparked off by Abhor watching Thivai inject some drug with a needle; she remarks, “My boyfriend’s a drug addict. His needle is long and thin. After he’s inserted and removed it, he puts it and the eye-dropper in a glass of cold water. The blood flowing into the dropper is like a river”

(55). Here, the detailing of Thivai intravenously injecting drugs and the blood flowing

“like a river” immediately opens onto the detailing of Abhor’s blood as a market: “These days the principle economic flow of power takes place through black-market armament and drug exchange. The trading arena, the market, is my blood. My body is open to all people: this is democratic capitalism. Today pleasure lies in the flow of blood” (55).

Clune’s reading of this passage as a free-market system where blood becomes a form of value that enables “Acker to imagine the human word as a market without an outside” (American 108) is persuasive, given the explicit market-based language of the passage. Yet, I wish to explore a little further the mechanism by which blood is turned into money, by which the bloodstream is a river that ties you to me. Clune reads this as a 120

“fictional combination of blood and money” (108), yet I wish to place pressure on the notion of this system as fiction. Certainly, it is literal fiction, as my identity or consciousness cannot literally connect to you through our bloodstreams, but there’s something of a metaphorical truth to blood’s ability to connect us. And this ability is made articulable through the discourses of AIDS prevalent in the drug injection scene that occurs just before.

Recall that Thivai’s needle sparks this reflection by Abhor of a blood-based market. It is Thivai’s blood “flowing into the dropper like a river” that sparks the detailing of the blood market, not her own. Intravenous drug use is, of course, a high-risk behavior associated with contracting HIV and AIDS. Interestingly, 1988 marks the opening of the first needle-exchange program in North America to slow the rate of infection in drug users (US Dept. of Health). Quite literally, the bloodstream opens up the body to other bodies, allowing things (viruses) to pass from one body to the other. This logic would not have been applicable pre-AIDS, pre-HIV, or at least not to the extreme level the heightened awareness of blood’s potential for contamination of the late 1980s that would have been available to Acker. Heightened sensitivity to the ability of blood to transmit infection from body to body in the late 1980s provides a discourse Acker can metaphorically capitalize on, to turn a negative metaphor of infection into a positive one of exchange.

The effect of AIDS on discourses of blood circulation are most evident in the incident of the contamination of the national blood banks in the early 1980s that resulted in (heterosexual) hemophiliacs, women, and children contracting HIV. The most widely publicized of these cases, Ryan White, a hemophiliac teenager who contracted HIV from 121 a blood transfusion, reached national headlines as his mother fought for his right to attend school. By 1988, he testified before the President’s Commission on AIDS and helped draft the highly-publicized Ryan White CARE Act (US Dept. of Health). In 1983, the

FDA and the Public Health Service issued the infamous “blood ban” that is still in effect to this day; the ban prohibits blood donations from any man who has “had sexual contact with another male, even once, since 1977” (qtd in Bennett 2). The disaster of the contamination of the national blood banks added a very real discourse of transfer between bodies to the already symbolic act of donating or receiving blood.

Once the Algerians have overthrown the government of Paris and set up their own economic system based in the free flow of blood, they declare to their former “masters”

(71) that their days of ruling have ended. “Gone are the glorious days of sailing when white men, by marketing slaves, ruled the entire earth,” the skeletal Algerians can be heard “screeching” (70-1). “No longer will you work in our muscles and our nerves creating herpes and AIDS, by doing so controlling all union, one and forever” (71), they declare. The blood money system, naturally without any kind of control, is always at the risk of succumbing to some kind of government plot or set-up. Here, AIDS was introduced to keep blood from comingling; Acker does not elaborate, but we can imagine it is through fear of contamination or death that citizens would not want to let others' blood flow into their bodies.

Acker’s use of the government-created AIDS conspiracy, while perhaps absurd in retrospect, would have been tapping into deep-seated fears and firmly held convictions of the gay community in 1988. Only four years prior had the cause of AIDS—the HIV virus

—been determined, and it remained a hotly contested topic until the early 1990s. In 1984, 122 after a worldwide race to locate the cause of AIDS, American scientist Robert Gallo published four articles in the journal Science with several international collaborators. The first, “Detection, Isolation, and Continuous Production of Cytopathic Retroviruses from

Patients with AIDS and Pre-AIDS,” declares in its first sentence “Epidemiologic data suggest that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is caused by an infectious agent that is horizontally transmitted by intimate contact or blood products” (Popovich

497). This claim contradicted the widely-held belief by medical professionals throughout the early 1980s that the cause of AIDS was behavior-induced: gay men taking too many drugs and having too much sex had compromised their immune systems, leaving their bodies open to attack from a host of infections (Epstein 55-60). The contraction of HIV by “innocent” people through the blood blank contamination did nothing to discourage detractors from the behavior-based model of AIDS etiology; prominent Berkeley scientist and infamous HIV denialist Peter Duesberg continues to this day to expound his theories that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. His website declares, “Duesberg has challenged the virus-AIDS hypothesis […and] He has instead proposed the hypothesis that the various

American/European AIDS diseases are brought on by the long-term consumption of recreational drugs and/or AZT (a treatment for AIDS) itself” (Duesberg).

Steven Epstein’s comprehensive sociological examination of the construction of scientific knowledge surrounding AIDS, Impure Science, traces how the questioning of

HIV as the cause of AIDS from within the scientific community by such public figures as

Duesberg threw scientific certainty and the slowness of research and government funding for research into doubt by gay community members desperate for an end to the epidemic.

Epstein writes of the gay community’s insistence upon the democratization of 123 information surrounding the disease they were suffering and dying from: “A more profound democratizing claim, also pushed by some of the HIV dissenters, is that the scientific marketplace must be opened up to all those who seek to compete within it”

(176). Epstein’s uncanny marketplace metaphor is apt in that the controlling of research money by the federal government—which scientist’s theories get funded and which do not—places a kind of economic limit, a concentration of economic power, that disallows the free flow of ideas. Normally, the public would be expected to trust the scientists who were putting forth the best ideas, but the AIDS Crisis was a hotbed of conspiracy theories

(some understandable—after all, Ronald Reagan did not publicly acknowledge the AIDS

Crisis or give its research any government funding until the astonishingly late date of

1987).

The distrust of nondemocratic scientific experts pervaded gay media, notably the gay-owned bi-weekly newspaper The New York Native. Owner Chuck Ortleb used the newspaper as a mouthpiece for his increasingly bizarre theories, running the gamut of suggesting AIDS was an airborne disease to being caused by medical waste dumped in the ocean. He interviewed scientists who would not be taken seriously by colleagues in their own fields, yet who fit his profile of self-educated nonexperts with a “critical attitude toward scientific authority” (Epstein 100-101). While Ortleb and the Native became controversial figures for their unorthodox views by the late 1980s, major publications, including the New York Times, picked up on certain stories, and the questioning of whether HIV was the cause of AIDS was alive well into the early 1990s in such major publications as Spin, which was questioning AIDS scientists as late as 1992: 124

“The ‘AIDS establishment’ is under the impression that it has a right to govern all discourse on AIDS” (Farber 65).

Such distrust of scientific and government institutions unwilling to work with and share information with the gay community easily tipped into conspiracy theory. While there were legitimate debates about the etiology of the HIV virus and whether or not it was the de facto cause of AIDS within the scientific community in the early years of the

Crisis, these debates signaled a kind of weakness in scientific knowledge to non-experts.

Homemade pamphlets, such as the infamous 1986 “AIDS: USA Home-Made Evil,” spread by Soviet disinformation agents Drs. Jakob and Lilli Segal who were involved in the KGB’s Operation INFEKTION, argued AIDS was accidentally created in a US military lab by splicing two viruses and was then tested on prisoners, gained traction with members of the gay community (Bratich 137). The San Francisco Sentinel, a gay community newspaper, reported on this theory and several others in a 1986 article entitled “AIDS Conspiracy—Just a Theory?” The author writes,

While this writer finds problems with most of the germ warfare scenarios,

the other kind of allegation—severe and perhaps deliberate

mismanagement of the public-health response to the epidemic—is hard to

refute […] For the real value of a conspiracy theory is to wake us up to

today's holocaust and to augment ongoing efforts to save lives. (James)

The notion that a conspiracy theory, even if unbelievable or untrue, has the potential to make us more aware of our surroundings and in that process positively add to life-saving efforts is particularly interesting. This chapter takes a step away from the pure insanity of a medicalized or psychologized view of the conspiracy theorist and instead grants them a 125 kind of powerful agency to change things. In a way, Acker’s use of the crackpot conspiracy that the multinational government was trying to introduce AIDS into the blood market to control all union acts as this weird kind of agency. Acker borrows a real bio-warfare conspiracy theory about the creation of AIDS and applies it to her utopian blood market as a form of government control; she seems to deliberately choose the most unrealistic conspiracy theory, but, like the Sentinel article, seems to see value in using a theory that is unbelievable as a way of raising awareness and questioning controlling authorities.

All of these images of contaminated bloodstreams and government conspiracy are undoubtedly at the forefront of readers' minds when a blood-based utopic marketplace where all bodies are connected by the flow of blood is illustrated. Given the heavy coverage of the AIDS Crisis and the general aura of fear and panic of contamination, such actual uses of blood and viruses are sure to bring forth associations in the readers' minds. And yet Acker never tells the reader what to think of AIDS—her references merely pepper her text without explication. They are imagistic without being discursive; no description is necessary.

Hawhee's exploration of rhetorical vision in Aristotle and contemporary rhetoric,

"Looking Into Aristotle's Eyes: Towards a Theory of Rhetorical Vision," provides a solid framework for examining why these associations have a powerful impact upon an audience. Hawhee, in an attempt to expand upon Aristotle's notion of enargeia, develops a robust theory of rhetorical vision that places some agency in the hands of the audience.

She points out that "enargeia occurs as much in the audience as it does in or around the metaphorical subject" (154), suggesting that a rhetor need not spell out specifically what 126 an audience should think or do; rather, presenting the audience with one image spurs a cascade of mental associations that they then must use to come to some conclusion on the matter at hand. To further this point, Hawhee turns to Kenneth Burke's conception of the metaphorical image being not a single concrete image, but rather a "bundle of principles"

(Burke 154) that come to life through the resources of the audience's imagination. Acker can present the audience with the single word "AIDS" or "blood" and all that those words deictically connote will be brought to the forefront of the audience’s mind, even if those images and principles are contradictory. In this way, the simple word "AIDS" becomes ekphrastic; it becomes an image. Hawhee furthers the persuasive, rhetorical nature of such an act by quoting Moran: "In presenting his audience with an image for contemplation, the speaker appears to put them in the position of working out the meaning of a phenomenon rather than in the position of believing or disbelieving something they are being told" (Moran, qtd in Hawhee 155). That is to say, the speaker need not be didactic about the interpretation of such an image or bundle of principles being used, but rather the audience, because of the role Aristotle's enargia plays in judgment, will be forced into a position of contemplation, of making up their own minds about what they have been presented with. This is epideictic discourse, a use of rhetorical techniques of presencing that do not follow the logical proofs of the deliberative and judicial, but instead make something present in the mind of the reader to contemplate.

This is democratic capitalism for Acker—the free flow of ideas across bodies without the interfering control of narrative or logical proofs. Acker need not tell you how a thing is, how to think about it, or even describe it; you can do that for yourself. Hawhee refers to this complex of deictic bundles opening in the audience's mind from the mere cognitive 127 nudge of one word as a "dense and simultaneous proliferation of both images and ideas"

(155). It is, I think, no coincidence that this proliferation is viral in nature; Hawhee goes on to say, "Invention can no longer be said to rest with the rhetor alone but spreads to the audience members engaged in deliberative phantasia" (155, emphasis mine). For an author who rejects romantic notions of authorship and instead engages deliberately with plagiarism, the idea of invention being a part of the audience's role in this exchange is revelatory. That invention happens through the process of words setting off and calling up hidden images and associations in the brain, infecting and spreading the dense proliferation, is apt.

Bad Endings: Acker's viral use of Huckleberry Finn

Looking to narratology and narrative theory and its all-encompassing, exhaustive view that everything under the sun is narrative might be useful for examining Acker's demand that narrative be killed off. Narrative theory rarely examines anti-narrative texts, such as those of Burroughs and Acker, instead often focusing on classic and traditional narratives. James Phelan's Experiencing Fiction sets out to describe a master theory for the ways in which readers engage with and form judgments on the texts they read.

Purporting to be about how we make sense of fiction, Phelan's selected texts are telling; in his introduction, Phelan sets out the organization of his monograph as discussing ten fictional texts of varying kinds. These ten texts are divided into two groups: one of texts with "a high degree of narrativity" (xii), which Phelan defines as "that which makes a given text a narrative" (xi), and another group of texts that "synthesize narrativity with what [he] call[s] lyricality [...] or portraiture" (xii). Given the book's title Experiencing 128

Fiction alongside this selection of texts, we find that for Phelan, a text's status as fiction is synonymous with its ability to be recognized as a narrative. As Aristotle places stranglehold on the epideictic genre, so narrative theory arbitrarily decides what counts as fiction by its formal elements rather than by what the text does.

Narrative theory that does address anti-narrative works of fiction often reinscribes them into the domain of narrative; in his essay on the non-plot functions of narrative in

Joyce's Ulysses, "Beyond the Poetics of Plot: Alternative Forms of Narrative Progression and the Multiple Trajectories of Ulysses," Brian Richardson briefly attends to works of anti-narrative, labeling them "aleatory," that is, randomly assembled. His examples include Burroughs and Beckett, and even these works, despite their author's clear, stated desires to overcome narrative, must be brought under narrative's domain. Richardson, making a telling value judgment of these works, exclaims they are "a cluster of examples that at times no doubt threaten to turn into an episodic collocation of entries devoid of all the basic elements of a good plot: unity of design, inescapable development, and definitive conclusion" (176). To reinscribe them to narrative, he performs the rather lazy sleight-of-hand of saying that such works merely lack plot: they achieve narrative progression by other means so that "while the concept of plot alone cannot describe the various sequencing patterns present in many recent works of fiction, most of those patterns can only be fully comprehended in relation to plot" (177). Thus, despite

Burroughs' well-described plans of creating texts that can be "cut into at any point" as a means of overcoming the control of the shackles of the "Aristotelian construct" (Third

Mind 5), the cut-up or anti-narrative text is still a narrative at the end of the day. 129

Examining the simultaneously all-encompassing reach of narrative theory alongside its inability to meaningfully incorporate works of fiction that resist categorization allows us to better see Acker's distrust of narrative and her ultimate discarding of it. Richardson's characterization of a "good plot" is telling here; if "unity of design, inescapable development, and definitive conclusion" are the markers of "good,"

Acker then must ultimately incorporate a "bad" plot as a way of overthrowing this hegemony of the meaningful narrative. To do this, she uses the ending of Mark Twain's

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an infamously bad ending and plot-ruiner, as the ending of her own novel, putting this act of literary piracy to work as a kind of narrative virus to kill off any semblance of narrative's reach in her text.

After some hundred and seventy pages of horror, terrorism, rape, and depravity,

Acker chooses to end her novel on an absurd note, having Abhor and Thivai reenact

Twain's voyage of Huck and Jim down the river resulting in Jim's imprisonment. In "A

Few Notes on Two of My Books," the same essay where Acker labels Empire her

"attempt to find a myth," she justifies this decision as follows:

The last section of Empire begins with the text of Huckleberry Finn, one

of the main texts about freedom in American culture. I make nothing new,

create nothing: I'm a sort of mad journalist, a journalist without a paid

assignment. Twain was obsessed with racism; me, with sexism. (13)

The section, titled "Pirate Night," again showcases the tension between the actual and the virtual in Acker's work. Abhor and Thivai are literal pirates, a role Acker romanticizes as

"the most anarchic form of private enterprise" (26). Piracy becomes a virtual mode of writing for Acker; as she states in the previously quoted essay on her novel, as an author 130 she "make[s] nothing new, create[s] nothing" (13). This act of plagiarism, of literary piracy, then, is one of anarchism.

The novel's earliest and most blatant moment of piracy interestingly connects the act of piracy with virality. Acker appropriates, nearly word for word, a section of William

Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer into her own text. In a section entitled

"Dead Love" that doesn't really match the genre or action of Empire of the Senseless,

Abhor and Thivai become terrorist cyberpunks who must steal a "construct," or hard drive, from the American Intelligence's "central control network" (36). The scene is poached entirely from Gibson's novel, often replicating word for word elements of his plot. The goal of stealing this hard drive is to deprive the repressive institution of "its memory, what constituted its perception and understanding [...] a necessity for sociopolitical control" (36). Breaking into MAINLINE, Abhor and Thivai retrieve the construct. In moment of reflexivity, it is revealed that the construct has a name: Kathy

(34). Thus, the memory center of sociopolitical control is the author of the book you are reading now. Acker herself is the construct who is constituting what we perceive and understand about her novel. After Abhor and Thivai steal Kathy the construct, they retrieve a piece of code from inside. The code reads: "GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR

MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR

MIND" (38). The mindlessness of Kathy, a literal computer virus that works to rid memory centers of meaning by controlling perception and understanding, is a virtual model for the author as virus paradigm. Acker can incorporate pieces of text from

Neuromancer that carry with it a whole plethora of associations, a kind of deictic pointing to a set of discourses that readers can draw on for themselves. That the function 131 of the incorporation of plagiarism of this novel in particular is to introduce a virus reflexively named "Kathy" into the system of the novel, whose hardwired code reads

"GET RID OF MEANING," makes the author-as-virus paradigm, well, literal.

So what, then, do we make of Acker's use of the ending of Huckleberry Finn as the ending of her own novel? What is particularly anarchistic about the choice of Twain's ending to Huckleberry Finn as a text to plagiarize is not so much Acker's stated role as "a journalist without a paid assignment" who neither makes nor creates anything new, but rather the act of plagiarizing a notoriously bad text. Twain's ending has been nearly universally reviled by scholars since its publication; the most famous instance of the disdain of this ending comes from Ernest Hemmingway, who remarked that while the novel is perhaps America's greatest, "If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating." (22). The "fake" ending of Huck Finn, alongside of the novel's widespread use of the word "nigger," dominates scholarship, as well. Leo Marx's famous 1953 essay "Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn" takes to task the titular critics who extoll the virtues of Huck Finn while ignoring its bad ending. Marx argues that the ending (which he rightly points out is more than a mere ending, but actually a fifth of the book) isn't merely an unsatisfactory and unrealistic closing, nor is it merely a failure of plot or form, but one of "'content,' of value, or, if you will, of moral insight" (292). The entirety of Twain's critique of racism and slavery in the novel is effectively undone by the minstrelsy and lazy plotting of Jim's escape from prison and unrealistically rewarded freedom. Marx goes on to clarify, "I believe that the ending of Huckleberry Finn makes so many readers uneasy because they rightly sense it jeopardizes the significance of the entire novel. To take seriously what 132 happens at Phelps farm is to take lightly the entire downstream journey. What is the meaning of the journey?" (292). Marx's boiling down of the novel's major narrative structure to the word "journey" is telling—the ending undoes the meaningfulness of that narrative structure by appearing capricious, unrealistic, and minstrelsy.

What better text, then, for Acker to place at the end of Empire as a way of killing of narrative entirely, of "GET[TING] RID OF MEANING"? The appropriated ending of

Huck Finn acts as a virus sleeping in the bloodstream of the novel's narrative. Like the

HIV virus unleashed by the French government/American CIA in an attempt to "control all union," and endanger the free flow of blood between bodies, this virtual plot-virus seeks to control unification, the interlinking of individual scenes of the novel into a coherent narrative. The scene arises rather inexplicably; narrated by Thivai, the section begins with him waking up alongside the Seine after escaping from the CIA-operated prison he was held in for the previous third of the novel. By chance, he finds Abhor after being separated from her for the bulk of the novel, and in the spirit of pirates, they decide to take a rowboat down the Seine. The scene suddenly, inexplicably becomes Twain's

Huck Finn: Abhor (who, recall, Acker characterizes as "part robot, part black" in the novel's first sentence) becomes the Jim figure with Thivai, the narrator of this section, serving as Huck. Acker signals this shift in scene by directly plagiarizing Twain's words:

"Sometimes we slept all day while the boat and the river and the world drifted on, and sometimes we didn't sleep at all" (183). Abhor, inexplicably, begins speaking in the dialect of Jim, copying Jim's famous account of seeing the Devil:

"I doan' want to go fool'n' 'round er no wrack [...] Shee-it. Like 'as not we

never gon' get home to our loved ones cause the Devil Himself 'assitn on 133

that wrack an' He got a hatchet in His Left Hand 'n He's just a waiting for

our necks, to cut through them, so he can pearl necklaces for His loved

ones." (185)

Interestingly, she dips in and out of this accent, recounting only a few sentences later that the Devil "always sleeps with someone He likes, He's bisexual, cause when that person dies of somethin', AIDS and syph, the Devil's done worse evil than if he slept with someone He didn't care about" (185). It is no mistake, I think, that the novel's preoccupation with AIDS raises itself in this moment of 19th century plagiarism, a modern voice interrupting the dialect of Twain.

Thivai similarly adopts the cadences of Huck Finn. While part of the power of

Twain's commentary on race is his satirical characterization of Huck feeling bad for aiding in the escape of Jim, Acker reverses this and has Thivai give Abhor over to the

CIA, Acker placing Huck's words in his mouth: "I was going to get Abhor in prison in the first place cause she was as strong as I was: I knew I was a snake and low and crawling on the ground" (192). Thivai leaves a note for the CIA reading "Dear CIA, The runaway nigger who engineered the bust-in to your Washington DC computer library a year ago is now floating down the Seine in an old rowboat. I know where she is and I am willing to lead you to her for lots of money" (192). In a rare moment of continuity across the text,

Thivai refers to the previous plagiarism of Neuromancer. The ironic reversal of an already-ironic trope from Twain—Thivai feels like a snake for not turning Abhor in to the CIA, versus Huck feeling like a snake for helping Jim escape—sets up the ending of the novel for the infamous Phelps farm scene that Marx and others have taken such umbrage to. 134

Continuing with inexplicable relations to Huck Finn, a random character, heretofore unintroduced, appears to help the now lonely Thivai break Abhor out of jail.

The character, simply named Mark, becomes a stand-in for the deus ex machina arrival of

Tom Sawyer in the final chapters of Huck Finn. Mark plots a complicated plan similar to the nonsense minstrelsy of Huck and Tom plotting to get Jim out of the pen he is kept in on Phelp's farm. Acker characterizes him thus: "Mark's plan was so complicated it was sure to get me and him killed. Which was good. [...] I didn't care about the other details of his plan. Besides, Mark was always changing all his plans all the time. That could have been because he was gay. If that’s what being gay is" (196). Acker lampoons the fly-by- the-seat plan drafted by Tom that includes secret messages, a hidden tunnel, snakes, and a rope ladder by not even detailing the plan and instead suggesting that this is all because

Mark is gay (rather than the notion that Tom hatches this plan because he is a young boy who reads adventure stories).

Much as in Huck Finn, Abhor is actually already free despite all the machinations of Thivai and Mark. Yet, rather than have the novel end here as Huck Finn does, Thivai and Mark decided that in order to be truly free, Abhor must be "seriously maimed" (202) to be a true pirate. To do this, she must write her memoirs in her own blood. The pair slice open Abhor's thumb and she writes in blood what is evidently the novel we are already reading: "I drew three hearts in her red blood [...] a scroll which said EMPIRE

OF THE SENSELESS twined writhed wriggled and giggled, like a snake, around our double hearts" (203-204). Here, the act of writing, in one's own blood, placed within the context of the appropriated ending scene from Huck Finn as a means of releasing one from prison, acts as both the killing off the narrative we have read as well as its 135 simultaneous creation. Huck Finn's bad ending, which, if we take Marx's claim seriously, undoes the morality of all of the journey that had come before, functions in Empire as a kind of simultaneous undoing and creation; the bad ending results also in the creation of the text you are reading. The scene functions, truly, like a virus replicating within a host cell; the original narrative is killed off, the moral journey undone, while simultaneously codes of anti-narrative are released from the dying cell the scene has infected. A new start is born of the death of an old model.

As previously cited, Acker marks Empire as a philosophical turn in her output, an attempt to "go somewhere" by founding a new myth. That the killing off of the old world in favor of imagining a new one occurs through the virality of AIDS is interesting for

Acker's overall body of work; plagiarism had always been her modus operandi, from her early imitations of classic novels where she plagiarized plot and title as her own, such as

1983's Great Expectations and 1986's Don Quixote. However, this novel finds in AIDS and its attendant discourses a way of illuminating the viral, and corrosive, nature of piracy and plagiarism. Is this a work of AIDS literature? I would argue that, yes, given the novel's preoccupation with metaphors and virtual models of virality as techniques for producing epideictic vision, it exhibits what I laid out in the introduction as viral logics: the use of AIDS and HIV as a literary resource for solving some problem.

The next, and final, chapter will consider a similarly apocalyptic and corrosive novel: Samuel R. Delany's pornographic-philosophical novel The Mad Man. While Acker uses AIDS to help us visualize an apocalyptic image, Delany uses apocalyptic images to cover over and deny AIDS. The resultant text is almost the other side of the coin of 136

Acker's: a novel that barely mentions AIDS, but seems to be entirely about it without invoking it.

i Beyond the handful of texts discussed further in this paragraph, the most recent scholarship on Empire of the Senseless can be broken into two trends: Acker’s style and the implications of terrorism in a postcolonial world. The first trend can be seen most clearly in Richard House’s 2005 essay “Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless” and Amy Nolan’s 2012 essay “‘A New Myth to Live By’: The Graphic Vision of Kathy Acker,” attempts to square Acker’s aesthetic practice with her political ideology, using poststructural theories to unpack her avant garde stylistics. The second trend can be seen in the 2009 edited collection Kathy Acker and Transnationalism, which seeks to understand Acker’s body of work in relation to the developing field of trans- and postnationalism, and includes essays such as Angela Naimou’s “‘Death in Life’: Conflation, Decolonization, and the Zombie in Empire of the Senseless” and Maureen Curtin’s “Between Being and Sense: Incest, Capital, and Sovereignty in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.” 137

Chapter 4

“An apocalypse of shit and piss”: Rhetorical Figuration and Pornography in Samuel R.

Delany’s The Mad Man

John Marr, the narrator of Samuel R. Delany's 1994 novel The Mad Man, makes the following reflexive observation about his own narrative selection in the story he is telling you: "To deal with this world, certain things and ideas that are present must be said no to. Certain things that are absent must be hailed and hauled into play" (150). John has, up to this point of the text, "hailed and hauled into play" detailed pornographic accounts of fetishistic sex acts in gay clubs, in porno theaters, and in public spaces with homeless men. What he has "said no to," conversely, is the omnipresent fear of AIDS dominating the (then) present-day setting of New York City throughout the 1980s and early 90s. The result is the curious effect that The Mad Man is a text about AIDS with the caveat that

AIDS rarely makes an appearance across its 500 pages. Instead, the disease is crowded out of the narrative as John fills the reader's mind with taboo visions of orgies, urine drinking, and in the most extreme cases, feces eating. At one moment in the novel, John observes that most of the fetishistic sex that he has just related to the reader is entirely about AIDS, despite him rarely hailing the disease into being: "It occurs to me, reading it over, that it may only seem that a few lines concern this odd and awful illness. But, reading it over, I see every line of it is about the disease" (179). It would seem, then, that Delany is providing an alternative narrative of the Crisis, one that overvalues sexual exchange and undervalues discussion of the disease itself.

In the following pages, I argue that in its negation of AIDS and the fear of AIDS,

Delany's novel illuminates how vivid description can be deployed as a form of political 138 argument, a rhetorical shaping of the reader's experience of the narrative at hand. The alternate world The Mad Man constructs through these visions makes for an especially interesting case of the use of the epideictic as a kind of argument for how things ought to be, persuading the reader to see differently than what is immediately before them. As Alan

Gross and Ray Dearin argue, "to be persuaded is to live in a world made significantly different by the persuader" (150); The Mad Man is an attempt to hail such a world into being by forcing the reader to see differently. Whereas in the previous chapter I explored

Kathy Acker's use of HIV/AIDS as a corrosive, apocalyptic force to negate the present and bring into being her vision of the future, in this chapter I will explore the inverse—

Delany's use of extreme "pornotopic" (xiii) visions to negate AIDS itself by crowding the imagination with vivid description such that there is no cognitive capacity left to consider the threat of AIDS. Delany refers to these visions as “figures” which have a relationship with a “ground” of the social. Rhetorical figuration is a way of making things present; ekphrasis itself is a kind of figure. Delany overvalues these ekphrastic figures in his text as a means of crowding AIDS from our imagination, deploying and reflexively incorporating complex poststructural theories of grammar and syntax throughout the novel to do soi. The cognitive dimensions of techniques of presencing are treated at length by

Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in their influential The New Rhetoric, where, drawing on the work of Piaget, they argue that a rhetor can persuade by making an element present to their audience, for "the thing on which the eye dwells, that which is best or most often seen, is, by that very circumstance, overestimated" (116-117, italics mine). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca conclude that the rhetorical power of presence supersedes that of rational argumentation, and that "by verbal magic alone" the rhetor can 139

"make present [...] what is actually absent but what he [sic] considers important to his [sic] argument" (117). While I discussed Perelman's claim that rhetoric itself is the "art of creating this presence" (37) in the introduction, this chapter will explore further exactly how that creation happens and what formal elements of a text can aid in such

"overestimat[ion]."

The Mad Man is an outlier among Delany's body of work, namely in that it is set in the present world, that its narrative is relatively straightforward and linear, and that it contains no (overt) science-fictional elements. While it is often contextualized as belonging to his "pornographic trilogy" along with 1973/1995's Hogg and 1973's Equinox, scholarship on Hogg, the most extreme of the three, far outpaces the other two.

Additionally, The Mad Man has been in and out of print since its publication in 1994, currently only widely available as an e-book released in 2016. As such, there is far less scholarship on the novel than on Delany's more widely known works. Additionally, the novels' length, complexity, and inclusion of multiple genres and fragments of other texts, ranging from Foucault and Nietzsche to Wagner and Yeats, allows for multiple entries into the novel as scholars attempt to make sense of its relationship to Delany's larger body of work and contributions to critical theory.ii Of the handful of articles and book chapters examining The Mad Man from these multiple points of entry, only two consider exclusively the novel's preoccupation with AIDS.iii None, however, mention or examine

Delany's explicit, reflexive incorporation of theories of figure and ground, and the cognitive effects of valuing one over the other. This chapter argues that these theories must be taken into account to consider what exactly Delany is doing with AIDS in the novel, perhaps most clearly articulated when the narrator John explains how repeated 140 exposure to fetishistic sex has made it seem as though his "whole brain were untying itself, neuron by neuron [...] and reweaving itself into a new pattern, in which the fear of

AIDS [...] was simply no longer there" (178, italics original). To begin this analysis, I will first detail the novel's complex preoccupation with poststructualism and systems, relating

Delany's philosophy to the rhetorical uses of techniques of presencing. I will then examine the role the pornographic figure plays in destabilizing such systems, before turning to close readings of key scenes in the novel that demonstrate pornography's ability to crowd

AIDS from the imagination.

Negating AIDS through Ekpyrosis

The Mad Man is set from approximately 1980 to October of 1994, and as such chronicles the sexual exploits of its narrator throughout the AIDS Crisis. As the novel begins, John Marr is a black philosophy PhD student at the fictional Stanford stand-in,

Stilford, studying under one Irving Mossman. Mossman is in the midst of composing a complex project on one of his former advisees, the Korean-American Richard Hasler, a precocious young graduate student who was mysteriously murdered at the age of 29 some ten years prior, and whose pseudo-poststructural articles and unfinished dissertation are revolutionizing the field of philosophy. In addition to situating itself as a novel of academia, the narrative begins to follow the recognizable genre conventions of the gothic mystery as Mossman enlists John to research a biographical account of Hasler's life, and to hopefully shed light on his mysterious murder. John becomes increasingly obsessed with the work and biography of Hasler, uncovering in his private journals narratives of fetishistic and extreme sex acts with homeless men. In an attempt to recreate these 141 experiences for himself, John embarks upon a personal journey of discovery by reenacting

Hasler's sex life. John's recounting of his own sexual encounters makes up the bulk of the novel. The scenes are described ad nauseum, often lasting anywhere from 20 to 50 pages, and include the overly-vivid and repetitive details of excrement eating and the recreation of foul smells and tastes. Their inclusion in the novel (and outpacing and outnumbering of the narrative's other preoccupations with Hasler's murder) is so excessive that it becomes clear they must be serving some other function.

What that function is, however, requires unraveling Delany's dense theory of figure and ground and the resulting cognitive effects of swapping the two. In a

"Disclaimer" to the novel, Delany assures the reader that the explicit sexual scenes they will encounter in the following pages are fictional, a "pornotopic fantasy," as he terms it, where the "set of people, incidents, places, and relations among them [...] could not happen for any number of surely self-evident reasons" (xiii). One of the "surely self- evident reasons," as it will turn out, is that the novel is set during the AIDS Crisis. The

"fantasy" of this narrative, then, is that such acts could occur unconstrained by both the fear of becoming infected with HIV and infection itself. The "pornotopic" aspect lies in

Delany's use of the generic norms of the pornographic to enact the fantasy, and excruciatingly vivid description to bring them into being.

John, despite regularly engaging in risky, fetishistic sex throughout the 1980s, somehow evades becoming infected with HIV, announcing this fact to the reader in the novel's striking opening lines: "I do not have AIDS. I am surprised that I don't. I have had sex with men weekly, sometimes daily—without condoms—since my teens" (7). Delany's novel thus begins with a radical statement of negation; in this novel "about" AIDS, our 142 hero will be spared infection despite his "bad" (i.e. promiscuous and condomless) behavior. This opening sentence works to contradict Delany's claims in his "Disclaimer" that "The Mad Man is not a book about 'safe sex'" (xiii). "Rather," Delany counters, "it is specifically a book about various sexual acts whose status as vectors of HIV contagion we have no hard-edged knowledge of..." (xiii). To marshal evidence for this problem of a lack of scientific research regarding sex acts that do not involve anal penetration, Delany appends to the end of the novel a 1987 Lancet article entitled "Risk Factors for

Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus Among Male Homosexuals," which he claims is "the last large-scale [...] study to be made widely and publicly available" (xiii) on such "various sexual acts." Though neither the appended article nor Delany in his

"Disclaimer" offers specificity to these "various sexual acts," the reader will realize shortly that the phrase refers to taboos and fetishes, ranging from fellating unwashed genitalia to urophagia to the novel's most taboo-laden scenes of coprophagia.

These multiple disclaimers and paratextualiv addendums serve as red herrings, or, at the very least, distractions, for the reader, though. Unmentioned by Delany anywhere in his text, the novel's opening lines are actually an explicit reworking of the essayist and novelist Harold Brodkey's announcement of his own AIDS diagnosis in the pages of The

New Yorker just one year prior. In a brief article titled "To My Readers," Brodkey writes,

I have AIDS. I am surprised that I do. I have not been exposed since 1977,

which is to say that my experiences, my adventures in homosexuality took

place largely in the 1960s and '70s, and back then I relied on time and

abstinence to indicate my degree of freedom from infection and to protect

others and myself. (1) 143

From this announcement, Brodkey would continue to chronicle his illness for the next three years until his death in 1996; the essays would be collected and published posthumously by his wife in 1996 under the title This Wild Darkness: The Story of My

Death.

Despite Brodkey's narrating of his own death, still in process during Delany's drafting of The Mad Man, Delany was aware of the narrativizing nature of projects like

Brodkey's New Yorker essays: to provide a coherent, cause-and-effect story of the slip from gay sexual liberation in the 1970s to the decimation of the gay community by AIDS into the mid-1990s while simultaneously eliding the queer sexual practices that informed both. Brodkey’s project can be understood directly as partaking in the documentary impulse of memorialization. His memoirs both chronicle the AIDS years and serve as a kind of memorialization of his dying self; the problem, as Delany presumably sees it, is that such memorializing and narrativizing by a now “straight” man doesn’t really give us the full field of AIDS’s impact. The Mad Man, chronicling the life and sexual experiences of John from 1980 to the autumn of 1994, serves as a direct indictment of projects like

Brodkey's; the reworking of Brodkey's announcement in the novel's opening lines combined with the vividly depicted explicit nature of John's sexual encounters in the pages to follow act as a kind of bringing into being the whole sexual field that informs

AIDS, but is so frequently elided from narratives of the Crisis—or, as Delany phrases it, making queer sex acts "possible [...] in a world that largely denies they exist" (159).

Notably, Delany counters the lack of sexual activity in Brodkey’s memorializing text by turning to the epideictic function of literary aesthetics to make these sex acts present; that 144 is to say, Delany turns to the literary as a privileged sphere for bringing into being what is unnamable in the social and political sphere of memorialization.

Delany's disclaimer also belies an explicitly apocalyptic project of the inclusion of these fetishistic scenes, which at one point are reflexively referred to as "an apocalypse of piss and shit" which "transform[s] the cozy clutter of the student and philosopher's cozy retreat and study" (311). It is clear from this characterization that their chaos and seeming randomness is meant to destabilize the intellectualization of AIDS, to provide some bodily and sexual component to the discourses that attempt to narrativize the disease. The novel's explicit preoccupation with the ancient Greek concept of ekpyrosis, a concept attributed to

Heraclitusv and glossed by John as meaning "conflagration" or "apocalypse" (307), advances this interpretation, as the explicitly described apocalyptic nature of piss play and scat are meant to have a corrosive and destructive effect upon the text; that is, the vividly depicted fetishistic sex scenes have an ekpyrotic effect upon narratives like Brodkey’s which elide them. Hasler scrawls the word ekpyrosis in feces in three places in his apartment shortly before his murder (303), which John reenacts towards the end of the novel. As John scrawls the Greek word in shit in a conscious performance of Hasler's final orgy, he reflects that the "all-consuming, all cleansing Heraclitean fire [...] is itself the

Heraclitean notion of change and flux raised to such a level beyond love or rage that nothing can escape it" (480). That is, participating in these fetishistic acts is related to the novel's preoccupation with systems and their ebbs and flows, and whether or not a particular system of thought (memorialization) is useful in determining a cause and effect relationship between phenomena (sex and AIDS). 145

What is it about fetishistic acts in general that makes them so apocalyptically powerful? Why not vividly depict any pornographic sex act? Delany's red herring in his

"Disclaimer" that the purpose of the novel is to explore non-penetrative sex acts "whose status as vectors of HIV contagion we have no hard-edged knowledge of" (xiii) doesn't really get at why they are so powerfully apocalyptic (or why he has included the sheer quantity of descriptions of them that he has). The novel tentatively suggests that the relationship has to do with a reworking of the concept of death. At one point, John surmises that Hasler's engagement in these acts had given him "very different relationships to death and sex from most of us" (106). One of John’s homeless sex partners, Tony, puts this relationship with sex and death more explicitly when he explains why he loves to eat shit so much: "I think it has something to do with death" (326), he muses. Tony goes on to explain that fetishistic acts like eating shit seem to transform one's relationship with one's body, and thus one's relationship with dying:

“When you die, you rot—go back into ook and yuk and decayed shit—

before you just dry up and blow away. That's pretty grim to think about.

So, I guess, somehow, getting into shit, eating and stuff, bein' low-down

and all, that's like getting closer to being dead. Making it more natural,

more ordinary. It's warm, ordinary, pleasurable. It makes life easier—

because it makes the idea of dying, as much as we can really think about it,

easier.” (326)

Contrast these lines, which almost transform shit eating into something poetic, with

Brodkey's treatment of his own impending death towards the end of his memoir. With an arch flippancy, Brodkey renders his own death as meaningless, akin to drying up and 146 blowing away, as Tony would phrase it. "Everyone is more interested in my death," he declares in the final pages. "I cannot be bothered with my death except as it concerns my books. When I write it out like this, it is a pose, but inside me, it is very real very firm, this state, very firm for a while" (175-6). While there is a sense throughout his essays that

Brodkey is making death an ordinary, human process, his intellectual posturing and dense references to Joyce and Kafka have the opposite effect of making death pleasurable and warm. Delany is drawing a parallel between the lack of queer sexuality (and thus queer camaraderie) in Brodkey's memoir and his clinical treatment of death by explicitly reworking Brodkey's essays in The Mad Man's opening lines. Additionally, Delany is critiquing the subjectivity of Brodkey's argument, the way in which Brodkey presents the problem of death as his and his alone.

Bodily fluids, as Leaky, another homeless character, characterizes them, are like presents that link you to me: "Piss, shit, cum, snot, cockcheese—all that stuff: see, that's like a present [...] that comes from inside you. Inside your own body. I mean: how am I gonna give somebody somethin' more personal than my own cum, my own piss, my own spit, my own shit?" (374). In a nearly Kristeavean approximation of these bodily wastes,

Leaky makes clear that they are something deeply personal, that they are, in fact, the self, and that sharing them with another is a way of overcoming the subject/object divide. The apocalyptic nature of the fetishistic sex is all consuming, yes, but its ultimate function is to make us more comfortable with death, to transform it into something generative and pleasurable, and something akin to sex—both of which are absent from Brodkey’s memorializing text. And part of that pleasure in Delany's universe is the intimacy of the union that such acts allow, perhaps more so than "regular" penetrative sex. I argue further 147 that John's recreation of these acts for a reader using vivid description have the same effect; if eating shit is made present for the reader, if the reader's mind is crowded with these fetishistic acts, a pleasurable, intimate relationship with queer sex acts is created in which a fear of AIDS, or even a narrative of AIDS itself, can be denied, or, burnt down in an ekpyrotic conflagration. And if "every line [of the described sex acts] is about the disease" (179), as John argues, then the reader becomes implicated in the AIDS Crisis, and the field that informs it, instead of being a passive bystander, consuming a narrative that is not about them.

The Figure/Ground and παντα δια παντων ("Everything through Everything")

To understand how the vivid descriptions of fetishistic sex combine for an apocalyptic effect of ekpyrotic conflagration, they must be understood as parts of a system, a theme the novel continually reinforces from beginning to end. Or, more specifically, they must be understood in terms of Richard Hasler's fictional poststructural philosophy as kinds of "large-scale, messy, informal systems [that] are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise, hard-edged, tractable systems" (243). The novel's recurring theme of systems and whether they are useful in accurately describing reality announces itself as the name of the first section of the novel, "The Systems of the World."

This phrase is also the title of John's "grand Hegelian" (13) dissertation project before he begins researching the life and works of Hasler, a "six hundred-page tome on psychology, history, reality, and metaphysics, putting them once and for all in their grandly ordered relation" (10). John refers to his early interest in Hegel upon entering graduate school as a

"pristine naïveté" (22) after being introduced to the poststructural philosophy (and sexual 148 encounters) of Hasler, and the phrase "the systems of the world" takes on an ironic tone as he deploys it some thirty times throughout the remainder of the novel, usually after a humorous or unexpected sexual encounter [for instance, after a disagreement with one of the homeless men John is trying to cruise, he remarks, "Such as they were, the systems of the world function, I thought, so that educational gestures of a certain sort are wasted on some people" (63)].

John finds the antidote to such naive thinking through his detective work into

Hasler's murder and his deeper exploration of Hasler's unfinished dissertation, and begins incorporating the dead philosopher’s insights into his own views of the world and sexuality. As such, Hasler's work functions as a kind of virtual blueprint, as described in the previous chapters on Burroughs and Acker. Hasler is first revealed to the reader as a precocious Korean-American graduate student working under Irving Mossman, publishing his first article at the age of 17 and his first monograph, Pascal, Nietzsche, and Pierce at the age of 25, a text that examined the "rhetoric [and] semiotic aspects of the three philosophers" (11), foretelling a preoccupation with the linguistic. After his untimely death at 29, Hasler's unfinished thesis, circulated via Xerox, had begun changing the landscape of philosophy with his introduction of what were termed "Hasler structures" (or

"Hasler grammars") (12), an analysis of language that is essentially modeled on poststructural linguistics. For the first half of the novel, the meaning of the structures/grammars can only be guessed at through the fragments of Hasler's work that

John chooses to share with the reader. A selection of Hasler's Xeroxed notebooks reveal some of his key poststructural insights; fragmented thoughts on art and literature

["...Books against books: Don Quixote, Northanger Abbey, Madame Bovary..." (65)] are 149 buttressed up against contextless poetic lines ["....the captured spume of space foams in our ears..." (64)].

A few more complete entries reveal philosophical preoccupations that will continue throughout the novel, notably a thought on Heraclitus's fragment #41. Hasler includes the original Greek and a translation, and remarks that this might be the epigraph for his own unfinished novel "The Mad Man":

"...Wisdom is whole: the knowledge of how things are piloted in their

courses by all other things, is that wonderful Kentucky classics professor's

translations of 'εν τὸ σοφόν ἐπίστασθαι γνωµην οτεη κυβερνησαι παντα δια

παντων [...] Siebert's translation of Diels, however, gives the fragment as

The wise is one thing only, to understand the thoughts that steer everything

through everything. Epigraph for "The Mad Man": παντα δια παντων..."

(67)

That the epigraph for the virtual story that is meant as an ideal model for the novel we are reading is παντα δια παντων, or "everything through everything," suggests that the

Heraclitean notions of ebb and flow are appropriate models for thinking through how we understand phenomena in the world. That is to say, the chaotic and informal nature of individual phenomena (everything/παντα) must be used to understand (through/δια) the formation of larger structures (everything/παντων), rather than the inverse (structuralist) of using larger structures as the orginating model to then sort and select indivudal phenomena to fit it. The chaos of "everything" makes possible the abiltiy to form structures and sorting mechanisms. 150

The final fragment the reader is presented with gives us the first fully formed philosophical statement of Hasler's (and the novel's) larger poststructural project and makes the Heraclitean fragment's relationship to poststructuralism clearer: "language is a stabilizing mechanism, not a producing mechanism—regardless of what both artists and critics would prefer. This in no way contradicts the notion that the world is constituted entirely of language; i.e., that it is constituted by the structure of its stabilizing forces"

(68). The suggestion in this fragment seems to point to the novel's larger challenging of projects like Brodkey's; to narrate AIDS is to stabilize it, to make it coherent, to enter it into language. When juxtaposed against the Heraclitean fragment, Hasler's philosophy suggests that the chaos of random phenomena actually makes possible such an act of narration. Narration, then, involves selection of relevant phenomena to fit one's grand theory, ignoring or making absent other potentially relevant phenomena. Instead, John

(and Hasler) suggests that we take into account the chaos of "everything" to understand how these systems and narratives are built and operate. Combined with a sense of the ekpyrotic, though, we can see how the chaos of “everything” can also have a corrosive function upon stable narratives and systems.

As Hasler's academic reputation begins to grow thanks to John's research, he is explicitly recontextualized as a poststructuralist in the then-current academy; for example, he is included in an article entitled "Postmodern Masters of the American Academic

World Today" alongside such real-world academic superstars as "Appiah, Baker,

Eagleton, Felman, Gallup, Gates, Haraway, Jameson, Johnson, Rorty, Sedgewick, and

Spivak" (243). A fictional journal article published in Philosophy Today makes clearer the connection between the Heraclitean fragment and Hasler structures and grammars as the 151

"realization that large-scale, messy, informal systems are necessary in order to develop, on top of them, precise hard-edged, tractable systems" (243), and more specifically as a rejection of the structuralist theory that "language was built up from the meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words" (243).

Importantly, Hasler's science fiction short stories enact much of his own philosophical theory in their plots and character relations. John writes in an afterword to an edited collection of the stories "a technical explanation of how actions in general in

Hasler's stories could stand for predicates in particular in his philosophical explorations"

(230), that is, the "informal" logic of science fiction as a genre can contain homologies of actual linguistic structures, serving as a kind of allegory for the ways in which we build our own world. Additionally, Hasler's stories serve explicitly as inspiration or templates for the novel we ourselves are reading. Delany's novel's title of The Mad Man takes its name from a character in one of Hasler's short stories, which Hasler had begun turning into a novel by the same title. John only reveals this information to us more than halfway through the novel:

The reason you haven't encountered more about it here than you have,

however, is that if you were an actual Hasler scholar, familiar with the

manuscripts, you'd pretty much think you knew what the phrase meant—at

least when Hasler used it in his journals, a couple of which entries I've

quoted for you at the end of Part I. (282)

The phrase, John reveals, is actually a kind of subtitle, or perhaps a note, scrawled on the proofs of Hasler's best short story, "The Black Comet." This science fiction story tells of a post-apocalyptic world, and its main character mentions that "he sees a madman 152 staggering and raving in the wreckage" (282-3). The character is minor, though, and John muses that he is "just a sort of narrative decoration, a kind of passing symbol" (283, italics mine). Here, we see the beginnings of Delany’s theory of figure and ground begin to take shape. The character of the madman in this short story is a figure, an ornamental decoration. But, as I have previewed, the figure comes to dominate the ground in this novel, so we might interpret this short story as a kind of virtual space, where the minor figure tells us more about the apocalypse at hand than the “wreckage” of the setting.

We find out soon that "The Mad Man" is actually also an unfinished novel that

Hasler had begun, incorporating his sexual exploits into its narrative. The missing novel remains the absent center of Delany’s novel The Mad Man, and part of John's obsession of uncovering Hasler's final days and death. When the novel is finally "found," John describes the notes as "the way you might imagine the first draft of, well, this book" (455).

That Hasler is both a fiction writer and a philosopher (much like Delany), and that his work is clearly serving as some kind of virtual template for Delany’s novel which we are currently reading (but which is also John’s novel, as he is the first person narrator and reflexively talks about writing what you are reading) shows how Hasler's philosophy/poststructuralism is deeply intertwined with the novel we are reading. That is,

Delany’s novel enacts this theory and that what might appear as a "narrative decoration" in general can be substituted for "predicates in particular" in philosophical investigation.

To enact these philosophical investigations, John begins to adopt this dense logic of Hasler grammars and apply them to the world around him, in particular to make sense of AIDS. Early in the novel, John writes a letter answering Sam (his advisor, Mossman’s, wife), where she asks him about AIDS. He begins writing the letter on October 20th, 153

1984, and mails it "some ten days beyond Thanksgiving" (184). This approximately 72- page epistolary section of the novel both theorizes what is at stake in a representation of

AIDS and enacts this very theory by vividly depicting his raunchy and "perverse" sexual exploits for a straight reader. The lengthy letter serves as a virtual blueprint for how we ought to understand the sexual scenes in the very novel we're reading, as John argues "I don't think anyone can really understand what AIDS means in the gay community until she or he has some understanding of the field and function —the range, the mechanics — of the sexual landscape AIDS has entered into" (179, italics original). The vividly depicted details of his fetishistic exploits alongside his grand theory of how we ought to understand the AIDS Crisis combine to form a narrative that privileges the sexual field, often excised from accounts of AIDS, over discussions of the disease itself. The first forty pages of the letter graphically and vividly depict John's visit to the Mineshaftvi on Wet

Night, a weekly piss play event that "cater[s] to guys with a taste for recycled beer" (111).

He encounters (and tops and bottoms) a variety of men of differing ages, races, and socioeconomic statuses, providing exuberant detail of the "trickle and chatter of spilling urine" (112) in ever-changing permutations of positions, locations and characters. John spares us no detail, describing the sensations of both drinking gallons of piss and pissing on others, the resultant diarrhea he gets, and the soaking of his clothing by night's end. He then turns to multiple descriptions of the time he spends in porn theaters, the myriad characters he encounters there, and the various actions they perform.

John breaks from the lengthy narratives of his sexual exploits to justify their inclusion in his letter to Sam. It is within these pages the reader is given a decoder ring of sorts for making sense of these pornographic scenes and their role in the poststructural 154 systems of the novel. John describes the pornographic passages he has just detailed as

"figures" in a commentary on the misunderstanding of pornography’s role in society. John raises the specter of second-wave feminism's attack on pornography, arguing that they had quite frankly gotten it all wrong. He writes, "Women Against Pornography [...] were unable to grasp and grapple with the pornographic figure—because their true object was the ground that informed it—until they finally wandered away in muddled paranoia to persecute other feminists with better analytical tools than they" (149, italics mine). That is, feminists were mistaken in assuming the problem was pornography itself, rather than some deeper societal problem. A few pages later, John repeats this figure/ground language and contextualizes the scenes he has described for Sam as "figures" which play in and against the larger "ground" of the AIDS Crisis: "[I]n all cases, a dismal, gray, and unresponsive ground is the incompressible template against which they occur, not throwing them into relief so much as providing a necessary obscurity to their outlines, making them bearable, even possible [...] in a world that largely denies they exist" (159).

John suggests that what is he doing by giving presence to these visions is disrupting the figure/ground relationship of the ways we tend to talk about AIDS. In moving "from the narrative totality [he'd] been so far seeking to another, more abstract narrative level that might, finally, be more revealing" (149), John explains how his process of valuing vivid, overly-described sexual acts over the "dismal" ground of the

AIDS Crisis is "certain things and ideas that are present must be said no to" and "certain things that are absent must be hailed and hauled into play" (150).

The play of presence and absence in the novel is accomplished through vivid description. Delany employs what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca term "verbal magic" to 155 act directly upon the reader's "sensibility" (117). That the descriptions of fetishistic sex are dwelt on for such long lengths of description, and rendered in such vivid detail, gives the reader no option but to consider what is at hand (unless, of course, they choose to stop reading). But in reading the description, the reader's mind is perceptually filled and not able to consider other possibilities; as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca argue, "the thing on which the eye dwells, that which is best or most often seen, is, by that very circumstance, overestimated" (116-117). The pornographic visions "assume [...] an importance" (117) that cannot be ignored.

This cognitive limitation seems, though, to be a benefit in Delany's model of figure/ground. After rationalizing his valuation of the pornographic figure over the ground of the AIDS Crisis, John explains how this new valuation has literally reshaped his mind and cognitive process, "as though my whole brain were untying itself, neuron by neuron, thought fragment by thought fragment, if not synapse by synapse—and reweaving itself into a new pattern, in which the heavy, nervous, and interminably obsessive, wheedling fear of AIDS [...] was simply no longer there" (178). Rendering meaning via sexual exploits changes one's vision, making the ground of AIDS absent, or at least distant, from cognition.

Pornographic Presencing through Rhetorical Figures

In his 2001 article "Figure, Ground and Presence: A Phenomenology of Meaning in Rhetoric," Robert E. Tucker breathes new life into Perelman's notion of presence, arguing for renewed attention to the neglected psychological dimensions of the concept.

Tucker argues that Perelmanian presence makes legible a problem rhetors regularly face: 156

"our inability to consciously render meaning in more than one way at once" (397). This problem is, in fact, a solution for Delany: if meaning can only be consciously rendered in one way at a time, then the rhetor can say no to particular things that are present and instead haul into action that which is absent. Tucker goes on to explain how exactly a rhetor can make something more present: they can give something "stand-outness" by

"mak[ing] a particular pattern of meaning 'figural' in the sense of the figure ground relationship" (397). By understanding the object being made important through techniques of presencing as a figure, and occurring within the figure/ground relationship, we might begin to see how Delany's pornographic scenes function like rhetorical figures.

Delany's characterization of the "pornotopic" scenes in his novel as "a set of people, incidents, places, and relations among them" (xiii) in his "Disclaimer" is instructive for how we ought to interpret them. Of course, this could be a value-neutral description, merely pointing out that each scene contains people doing things in places, but there is something curious about characterizing them as a "set." "Set" suggests a certain relationship between the scenes, a certain common characteristic that unites them in some way. If the people, incidents, places, and relations among these phenomena are related, then we might understand differing configurations of them as permutations.

Towards the end of the novel, John references perhaps the greatest philosopher- pornographer, the Marquis de Sade, likening the final orgiastic scene of the novel to reading Sade's works in a philosophy course:

But, as I told my professor, the most impressive thing—and at the same

time the scariest thing—about Sade was the obsessiveness with which he

managed to work through all the combinations and permutations of 157

everyone hooking up with everyone else. If I were writing about sex, I

thought, I just don't think I could do that. Nor do I think I can do it here.

(441, italics original)

The great irony, of course, is that John did do that throughout the entire novel, and he then goes on to describe in great detail the scene before him currently. That John's characterization of Sade's pornographic scenes are "combinations and permutations" reflects Delany's own language in his "Disclaimer" about the pornographic scenes in The

Mad Man—as patterned kinds of figures. In Sade/Loyola/Fourier, Roland Barthes makes quite clear that Sade's pornographic scenes function as figures (though, as I will show,

Delany troubles Barthes’ structuralist understanding by introducing a more poststructural formation). Barthes makes a key distinction in defining the pornographic in Sade, writing that it is not merely attention to "amorous acts" in a given text, but rather the "tissue of erotic figures, cut up and combined like rhetorical figures of the written discourse" (133).

Barthes goes on to clarify that in the Sadian scenes the endless "configurations" of characters and their actions are "strictly analogous to the 'ornaments' collected and named by classical rhetoric" (133). Barthes’s understanding of Sade's "configurations" as the ornamental rhetorical figures of antiquity helps us to make sense of both the excess of

Delany's sex scenes, as well as their seeming artificiality. Barthes characterizes these figures as part of a "Sadian grammar" where the "postures, figures, [and] episodes" function as lexical units (34). Sadian eroticism is, according to Barthes, "truly a formal language" (35), a system in which the parts function according to particular rules homologous with that of language. 158

Jonathan Culler's influential Structuralist Poetics makes use of Barthes' reading of

Sadian grammars, identifying it as a key text of structuralist criticism and understanding of works as linguistic systems. Barthes' structuralist criticism, Culler argues, seeks to show that works of literature embolden the structuralist project because they provide it with "a structure perfectly homological with language itself" (Barthes qtd in Culler 112).

As such, rhetorical figures, as Barthes identifies in the work of Sade, can be decoded.

Culler writes, "The repertoire of rhetorical figures serves as a set of instructions which readers can apply when they encounter a problem in the text" (212). That is, if the reader is able to identify and name anaphora, irony, and synecdoche in the text, they can rest assured that "what seems odd is perfectly acceptable" (212) and merely needs to be interpreted or decoded to make sense of it. Culler is careful to clarify, however, that these figures can't be used as mere decoder rings where one replaces that which does not make sense with something that does: "Our conventions lead us to expect and to value metaphorical coherence," Culler cautions, "and thus to preserve the vehicles of rhetorical figures and structure them while we are investigating possible meanings" (213).

Herein lies the problem with structuralism, as Hasler identifies it: the

"unquestioned conviction that [...] language was built up from meanings and grammatical potentials associated with individual words" (243) has actually gotten it all entirely backwards. Culler takes up this problem in On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (his follow-up to Structuralist Poetics), pointing out that attention to rhetorical figures "is one of the principle resources of deconstruction" (243). Because we use rhetorical figures to help us decode, they offer "primary points of resistance" for the deconstructive reader to destabilize the systems of meanings in a text. In trying to come 159 up with the "best reading" of a figure, as Culler recommends in Structuralist Poetics, the critic depends upon an "inclination to use notions of unity and thematic coherence to exclude possibilities that are manifestly awaked by the language and that pose a problem"

(247). As an example, Culler points to Paul de Man's analysis of rhetorical figures in

Proust in Allegories of Reading; in a section of Remembrance of Things Past where

Marcel describes the summer weather, de Man argues that Proust's writing is metafigural, that it "comments on figural relations" (243). Marcel's description of the sensations of summer weather as "flies who were performing before me in their little concert, the chamber music of summer" (Proust qtd in de Man 14) is metafigural in the sense that "The passage is about the aesthetic superiority of metaphor over metonymy [...] Yet, it takes little perspicacity to show the text does not practice what it preaches. A rhetorical reading of the passage reveals that the figural praxis and metafigural theory do not converge" (14-

15). The figure, in Proust, serves as a kind of virtual device for relating the superiority of a specific type of figuration; it matters not that the figure doesn't exactly align with the definition of metaphor as classically defined. More so, for de Man, the instability of the figure points to moments in the text that reveal their constructedness.

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's characterization of figures in The New Rhetoric is instructive here. In an attempt to rescue rhetorical figures from the historical tendency to label them "mere ornaments that ma[ke] style artificial and ornate," they argue instead that rhetorical figures are actually "a way of describing things which makes them present to our mind" (167). That is, figuration is a presencing technique. Naming and identifying these figures is a useless enterprise, the Belgians tell us, and instead turn to describing how they function in discourse and argument. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca offer a key 160 two-part distinction regarding how figures can be used: 1) "a discernable structure, independent of the content" and 2) "a use that is different from the normal manner of expression and, consequently, attracts attention" (168). Proust's description of the summer weather would meet these two qualifications for a figure. Whether or not the buzzing of the flies aligns easily with classical taxonomies is irrelevant to Perelman and Olbrechts-

Tyteca—what is important is that the figure makes present to the reader what the author is trying to convey.

Delany's figural descriptions of sex align with de Man's analysis of Proust, in as much as they seem to have no hidden meaning to be decoded and function as commentary on the capacities of language to transport meaning and visions to those reading it. As an arbitrary, but representative, example, consider the following paragraph. In the midst of a pages-long description of sex with one of his homeless friends, Crazy Joey, John reiterates and repeats again and again both the impossible size of Crazy Joey's penis, as well as the impossibility of the amount he can ejaculate. He breaks from the monotonous, repetitive narrative of this sexual exploit to offer the following figuration to the reader:

If somebody took a two-thirds-cup measure from the row of decreasing-sized

aluminum cups I have hanging over my sink, filled it half with egg white and

half with heavy cream, mixed them, then—just as if I weren't there sitting in

front of him—flung it on the kid in three tosses—splurt! splat! splop!—that's

what his triple shot was like. (266)

As with Proust's vivid descriptions of the summer weather, the proliferation of figuration in this brief passage points to the metaphorical capacities of language itself. As de Man can find no reason to "decode" the metaphor of Proust's weather beyond the deconstructive act of metaphor bleeding into metonymy, there seems to be no reason for Delany's inclusion of this 161 description other than to make evident the enargeiac capacities of language and the ability of those capacities to coerce the reader into visualizing and experiencing the scene at hand. Not only does the character of Crazy Joey himself seem to be a figure for a particular type of homeless person (a young, working class man in and out of mental hospitals), his impossibly large penis and his need to impossibly ejaculate hundreds of times a day seem to be of a Sadian type, yet there is no corresponding grammatical or lexical unit this description connects us back to. This passage works to further make real and visual for the reader the impossibility of Crazy Joey's cum. Not only is the reader asked to imagine a relatively common and mundane activity (using a measuring cup), they are given concrete, common items with which to visualize it: egg white and heavy cream. The implication, of course, is that we see the color of the cum, we conceptualize its volume, and we hear the sounds it makes (and dare I say, imagine its taste). Then, "somebody" is to imagine throwing this on Joey himself, as though John is not present. Onomatopoetic sounds are supplied to aid our imagination.

Consider what you are not thinking about in the passage describing Crazy Joey's cum—that cum is perhaps the main vector of HIV contagion for gay men. By considering the sight, the consistency, the volume, the color, the taste, the sound, by imagining yourself as the person measuring out the egg and cream, and then tossing it on Joey's chest, your mind is filled. The figuration that allows me to see what John is seeing, to visualize, through metaphorical relations, what John is experiencing, makes the cum present for me. If I am trying to conceptualize what exactly this cum is like, I am probably not also simultaneously thinking about AIDS (or, if I am, the thought of AIDS is at least pushed to the background as the figure before me takes up my cognitive capacities at that moment). If Hasler's work, both academic and literary, serve as virtual templates from 162 which Marr's writing of the novel we are reading draw upon, then his earlier description of

"actions in general in Hasler's stories could stand for predicates in particular in his philosophical explorations" (230) would hold true in the narrative and philosophizing we the readers are reading. That is to say, the actions of Delaney’s novel in general (its pornographic scenes) stand in for predicates (or figures) in general— they do something.

As John comments at one point, the sexual scenes he describes are "arbitrary" —that is, their explicit meaning is somewhat irrelevant to the matter at hand and more important is the meta-commentary they are providing on the relationship of figure to ground, just as the figuration of weather in Proust is, as de Man argues, not really about the weather but about the abilities of figuration in general. They provide a provocative screen that temporarily obscures AIDS and a fear of AIDS while simultaneously reinscribing sexual activity back into, or over, the AIDS narrative.

Apocalyptic Figures: The Case of Piece o' Shit

Given the seeming centrality of these pornotopic figures to the text, all scholarship on The Mad Man commits the very omission that Delany is explicitly critiquing throughout the novel—it omits an analysis of the pornographic scenes which make up the lion's share of the text. Even those who are seemingly focusing on these pornographic scenes talk around them; for instance, Ray Davis bends over backwards to justify talking about Delany's pornographic novels at all, stating first "I want to talk about Samuel R.

Delany's pornography" (162), remarking that "some members of the choir may wish to turn to the next section of the hymnal," before offering a long justification that ultimately ends with the caveat that Delany isn't Playboy and that "masturbation is not the only 163 possible approach to such material" (163). If these explicit scenes have some function in the larger framework of Delany's project in The Mad Man, then an analysis (no matter how uncomfortable) is necessary.

The novel's first extended pornographic scene occurs fairly early in the novel, prior to any of John's philosophizing about the nature of figure and ground and the value of sexual representation. Lasting some 15 pages, the scene marks a radical shift in genre, if not tone, as the novel up to this point has established itself as a melding of the campus novel and detective fiction. Turning from reading and rereading Mossman's letter expressing revulsion over the uncovered facts of Hasler's "most degrading—and depressing—sexual 'experiments'" (22), John departs his apartment for Riverside Drive to reenact Hasler's sexual experiments with the homeless. In yet another commentary on the problem of narrative selection and framing, John remarks, "If you're going to follow someone like Hasler into this, I remember thinking, it would have been nice to have had

Hasler's own account, rather than Mossman's synopsis" (26). To recreate the experience of something he had read about only secondhand, John begins approaching homeless men, asking "Hey [...] you want me to suck your dick?" (26). After humorous exchanges with multiple men who decline, one agrees. John presents this man in detail, relying on the enargaeic capacities of language to make clear to the reader exactly how he looks, to make present both the fantastical nature of his body and to eroticize the conditions of his homelessness: his shoeless feet are enormous, the toes "gray with dirt, looked as swollen as five new potatoes" (28), while his "equally enlarged" hands have "nails [...] like helmets, big across as quarters, curved down over the ends of his weirdly wide fingers"

(29). 164

Entering the sexual act, both John and the homeless man are themselves immediately figuralized. When asked what his name is, John replies, "Might as well call me 'cocksucker' [...] Since that's what I do" (30). As in Barthes's analysis of Sade, John metonymically becomes what he does—all else is irrelevant about him as he enters this interaction beyond his status as fellator. Similarly, the homeless man responds "You call me a piece o' shit and you'll be callin' me a lot better'n what most people done called me most of life" (30). The name seems to figure both his state of homelessness and his sexual predilections that will be revealed shortly. From this point, John will capitalize and turn this moniker into a proper noun, and the reader never learns Piece o' Shit's actual name.

This pattern sets a template for all other figures, homeless or otherwise, that John will engage in sex acts with. Even when the characters' legal names are revealed, they will be referred to by some nickname or moniker that figuralizes an aspect of their sexual identity

(including the titular Mad Man). The bulk of the remaining scene will revolve around repetitive and reiterative statements of the length of Piece o' Shit's foreskin, of how he likes having a finger up his ass, how having a finger up his ass makes him want to piss, pissing gallons, etc.

Interestingly, for both characters this act of sex shuts out the outer world. From the moment of their meeting, Piece o' Shit (who does not identify as gay) remarks upon his preference for "imagination" (29) during such acts. He explains, "Me, you see [...] I ain't no faggot. I'm straight, man. I really like women! [...] But I always had me a good imagination. So if a cocksucker don't mind me doin' a little thinkin', a little imaginin', I sure don't mind no cocksucker [...] nursin' on my fuckin' peter" (30, italics original). John, rhapsodizing over the scents and textures of Piece o' Shit's body, remarks, "The odor of 165 unwashed man filled the space between us—and as his crotch hair beat against my face and nose, in moments I found myself caught in the illusion that that space, that odor, was the universe" (39). Interestingly, this claim becomes textual in the same way that Proust's description of the summer weather does for de Man. For some fifteen pages, the repetitive permutations of descriptions of Piece o' Shit's impossibly long foreskin, the granular, cheese-like quality of his smegma, and the intoxicating scent of his unwashed body for the reader to experience what John experiences; that is, words and text transfer experience from page to mind. Like Piece o' Shit, the reader is more or less coerced into drawing on the collection in their head of what Gorgonzola tastes like, of what a sweaty foot smells like.

John's illusion that his subjective experience of this sex act is "the universe" returns in his second encounter with Piece o' Shit. While the time and date of their first encounter isn't noted with specificity, it is sometime in the fall of 1984, occurring just after John mails his long letter to Sam—some two years after John's first encounter with

Piece o' Shit. This second scene is much shorter than the first, though it contains many of the same, repetitive, figural descriptions of activity. John crawls into a cardboard box that

Piece o' Shit is living in, and begins fellating him. Piece o' Shit's foreskin is remarked upon and metaphorized ["longer than a penny wrapper" and "like the chewy finger on a leather glove" (192)]. John sucks him off, Piece o' Shit pisses in his mouth, he cums, etc.

In this encounter, though, Piece o' Shit falls asleep. As John is trying to figure out why and how he has fallen asleep, John catches sight of something in the headlights of passing cars: Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions. 166

"If you've seen them, they're pretty recognizable" (193), John remarks. He begins pulling back Piece o' Shits clothing, revealing more of the lesions. John turns to techniques of figuration to explain them: "Cancer is the name for the crab. And my first thought was that a handful of quarter-sized sand-dollar crabs had been strewn over his chest and belly" (194). John begins to panic, suddenly fearing for his own life, and he flees the scene. Importantly, though, he is (as we know from the novel's opening lines) seemingly impervious to HIV. He never contracts it, not even from this clear incident of imbibing the bodily fluids of someone infected with the disease. What is remarkable about this scene is that the KS lesions only become legible after the act of sex has finished; during sex, there is no cognitive space for John (or the reader) to consider a possibility of

AIDS because we are too busy imagining Piece o' Shit's extra-long foreskin, the amount of piss he generates, etc. AIDS doesn't exist in the act of sex; only after. But somehow— and this is the magical argument Delany seems to be advocating on behalf of John— removing the fear of AIDS in the first place does something to make one invincible against the disease. The disease is robbed of its representational power and, thus, its real power to infect.

The difference between these two encounters with the homeless figure of Piece o'

Shit, pre- and post HIV-infection, is explicitly pedagogical; John's vision from the first encounter maps over and onto the second encounter so that the Kaposi's sarcoma lesions are quite literally invisible to both John and the reader. John's, and by proxy our, vision has been retrained to not see AIDS or its bodily markings, and thus not to fear its presence. While our minds are being filled with the vagaries of Piece 'o Shit's unusually long foreskin, of the texture, scent, and flavor of his smegma, the lesions are not presented 167 or present —they are made absent by omission, and cease to function in Delany's machinery of an ever-receding background of the AIDS Crisis. That John does not contract HIV from this second encounter with the newly-infected Piece 'o Shit (which we know from the first words of the novel) furthers his already-cited claim that such sexual encounters force the brain to "unt[ie] itself, neuron by neuron" and "reweav[e] itself into a new pattern" where living in fear of AIDS is "simply no longer there" (178).

This is the only intrusion of AIDS into John's immediate experience throughout the novel. Piece o' Shit does not enter the narrative again, as John reflexively comments on the reader's expectation that a character with KS lesions would receive some kind of fitting farewell, a casualty of the Crisis: "I never saw my Piece o' Shit again, which—this early in the book—makes a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion for a character in a novel"

(197). The novel resists the documentary impulse of memorialization. John continues, turning what will be Piece o' Shit's future absence from the narrative into a kind of argument, arguing with uncertainty that "'unsatisfactory conclusions is what AIDS seems to be about" (197). We assume he died, as we know that this early in the Crisis a homeless person would not have fared well. But rather than dwelling on his probable death, the passage ends with a focus on John's not having AIDS, an enactment of his presencing techniques; John leaves the reader reaffirming his "New Power and Strength" (197) that he had written about to Sam in his lengthy letter, a strength that negates the fear of AIDS, and, I would argue, is largely propagated through "verbal magic" that refigures the figure/ground relationship of the Crisis.

168

Figures Against Memorialization

Ekpyrosis finally manifests itself as the inability to discover anything that we have held narrative curiosity about for the duration of The Mad Man’s 500 pages. After all the fetishistic sex that we have endured and had our minds filled with, there is nothing else to be found out. The novel's “denouement” occurs when the virtual blueprint of Hasler's long-lost project “The Mad Man” is found. The ultimate discovery of Hasler's notes for his novel comes very near the end of Delany’s novel, and becomes narratively insignificant, lost among the "apocalypse of shit and piss" of the novel’s final orgy scene.

A friend of Hasler’s, as it turns out, had forgotten she had the note cards; they are mailed to John, a deflating end to the mystery that has plagued the novel from its opening pages.

John begins reading, but describes the plot outlined in Hasler's notecards without giving the reader much to go on.

John instead forces us to imagine what the notes are like, elliptically telling the reader, "The best way I can think of to describe them [...] was that they read the way you might imagine the first draft of, well, this book" (454). That is, Hasler’s virtual novel is identical with the novel we are reading, a kind of blueprint for conceptualizing AIDS narratives. John goes on to compare Hasler’s notecard to Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s

Discourse, giving us but a fragment of the notecards in parenthesis:

Many of them read like Barthes’s Fragments d’un discourse amoureux.

(‘…The sensation is as if [card 9] another language—a metalanguage I

cannot speak—alone might be adequate to describe the ebullient feelings I

have when I am around him, a metalanguage I am always yearning to 169

understand when he is near: the madness of infatuation, of sex, of love.’)

(458)

The virtual text of Hasler's “The Mad Man” is an impossible metalanguage, much like the dense field of figuration we have just waded through in Delany’s text. Tellingly, Barthes understood his own project as “fragments,” describing A Lover’s Discourse as really, a set of figures. Barthes explains,

Figures take shape insofar as we can recognize, in passing discourse,

something that has been read, heard, felt. The figure is outlined (like a

sign) and memorable (like an image or tale). A figure is established if at

least someone can say: “That’s so true! I recognize that scene of

language.” (Lovers 4)

After all, the dense figuration we have been subjected to for 500 pages, was meant to be an act of recognition, given to us in the form of a vivid image. Techniques of presencing, much like in Wojnarowicz’s “filmic exchange,” are meant to force the reader to draw on their own memories and mental images to fill in the “outline,” to “recognize [the] scene of language” presented in discourse. Barthes makes clear the egalitarian nature of this:

“Each of us can fill in this code according to his own history; rich or poor, the figure must be there, the site (the compartment) must be reserved for it” (5). This belated comparison to Barthes’s fragments reveals the entirety of Delany’s book to be an exercise in generosity and queer sociality.

We can make this generosity present through the aesthetic space of the rhetorical figure, which draws on the presencing capacities of language. That this is the opposite of the Brodkey narrative of memorialization that renders with realism the effects of the AIDS 170

Crisis is telling; rather than the cold, calculated logical proofs and rigid realism of the documentary impulse, here imagination is all that exists—and it is filled to the brim. It may disgust us, or it may titillate us, but it essentially is an extended exercise in visualizing and the alternative power of literature to challenge the political and social spheres.

i As a result of the novel’s preoccupation and narrativazation of poststructuralism and deconstruction, I will use a number of poststructural theorists, such as Paul de Man and Roland Barthes, to illuminate the novel’s workings. I deploy these theorists to help make sense of what Delany is trying to accomplish in the novel, not to deconstruct Delany’s text myself. ii For instance, Mary Catherine Foltz focuses upon the novel's scenes of coprophagia, arguing that Delany sets forth "an excremental ethics that proves a pertinent intervention into contemporary practices of waste management" (45), while Michael Bucher and Simon Dickel read the novel's focus on homelessness as part of a larger project of Delany's that "contradicts a broad tradition within Marxist discourse in his class politics" (291). Guy Davidson focuses upon the novel’s countervalences of antisociality and utopia as a dialectical account of commodity culture. iii Tyler Bradway argues that Delany’s novel “engenders queer hermeneutic relations to the crisis that embrace—rather than disavow—its felt history” (53), using affect theory to essentially write the documentary impulse of memorialization into a text from which it is conspicuously absent. Jeffrey Tucker, citing Crimp, Treichler, Watney, and others, reads the novel as a form of activism for “recognizing sexual differences within the African American community, which is fundamental to the formation of appropriate responses— to AIDS” (234); that is, the essay ignores the wild literary nature of the text in favor of placing it squarely in the sphere of social action. iv My use of "paratext" here should not be confused with Delany's own theory of the "paralitery," which I will touch on later in the chapter. As well, the inclusion of a Lancet article as a form of "paratext" departs slightly from the term's originator, Gerard Genette's own definition being "a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that [...]is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it" (2). As I argue above, Delany's use of the Lancet article seems to serve as a red herring, masking his true argumentative purpose of including these scenes of fetishistic sex. v It isn't entirely certain that the theory belongs to Heraclitus most extant texts link the idea to the Stoics, though many scholars agree the concept was brought to them via Heraclitus. G.S. Kirk, in his beloved translation of the Cosmic Fragments remarks, “I do not believe Heraclitus ever conceived of a total consumption by fire,” (286), stating that most scholars have mistaken a reference to the sun as fire. Whether or not Delany's use of the term is historically or philosophically accurate belies that point that he clearly 171

understands the phrase as articulating Heraclitus’s 41st fragment, which will be discussed in the next section. vi The Mineshaft was an actually existing gay BDSM bar in New York City's Meatpacking District, and would close in reality shortly after the 1984 visit by John in the novel. The inclusion of this bar seems to be a direct contradiction of Delany's opening lines of his "Disclaimer" at the beginning of the novel, where he claims "...any of its scenes laid anywhere representing actual establishments or institutions [are coincidental]". 172

Conclusion

The Future of Viral Logics

Beyond Memorialization: Rhetoric, Aesthetics, and AIDS Literature identifies two problems with the way we conceptualize the genre of AIDS literature: 1) we conceptualize it as tending towards mimetic representation of the Crisis only, often as works which have a direct-action activist orientation, and 2) we tend to view it as being only produced, or in reference to, the rough decade of 1985-1995, resigning most works from the period to mere records of the history of what transpired and all future works about AIDS to be backward glancing. Both of these problems combine to form what I have termed the documentary impulse of memorialization, a notion growing out of the cultural studies orientation to the Crisis that demanded AIDS art be engaged in both

“intervene[ing] at the point where meaning is created” (Treichler 31) and “actively participating in the struggle against AIDS” (Crimp, “AIDS” 7).

The documentary impulse finds its origins in the iconic activist-oriented artwork of ACT UP, whose “SILENCE=DEATH” slogan equated not speaking up or being engaged in direct action with genocide. The result was a sense that AIDS art must be engaged in overt, “practical” struggle or it was complicit in the deaths of people with

AIDS. As well, ACT UP’s installation piece Let the Record Show, analyzed in the introduction, created a model for art with a demonstrative function of showing facts, figures, and historical data as a form of evidence for the need for direct action. The coalescing of these two qualities into what was termed the “activist aesthetic” (Watney,

“Representing” 185) eschewed any art that attempted to transcend the Crisis, preferring 173 instead art that either memorialized or recorded the experience of those with AIDS, or both, such as the AIDS Quilt.

This utilitarian orientation to AIDS art and literature continues into the present era of “AIDS amnesia.” Now, AIDS art and literature are largely seen as either “memorials that will help us overcome our traumatized forgetfulness of gay past” (Castiglia and

Reed, Memory, 186) or as the turning of “witness[ing] into an experience of liminality that can be felt [...] by readers” (Chambers xxvi, italics original). Other scholars turn away from humanist and literary/artistic study altogether, finding the “practical and immediate” responses of the social sciences to be superior in addressing the “global crises in HIV/AIDS subjectivity” (Tomso 443).

I have argued that the result of this orientation to art and literature is a subordination of the aesthetic to the demands of the social and political. In advocating a way forward, I have suggested a turn to the epideictic branch of rhetoric, the branch of display and showing forth. Arguing for a turn away from the narrow Aristotelian notion of the epideictic as oratory for praise or blame which makes the branch a "wastebasket for classifying lesser orations" (Rosenfield 133), I have detailed how a performative notion of the branch that is engaged with its literary roots can help us understand how the aesthetic can "work to challenge or transform conventional beliefs" (Walker 115) through its ability to perform and bring into being forms of thought unthinkable under the logical proofs of the deliberative and oratory branches.

Rhetorical techniques of presencing, the techniques for showing forth or displaying these forms of thought, operate by using words to make an idea or image present to the mind of an audience. The experimental AIDS texts I examine employ these 174 techniques of presencing in an effort to bypass the constraining nature of the documentary impulse of memorialization. Beginning with William S. Burroughs, the cut- up method, patterned upon the Word/Image virus’s ability to bring images before the eyes of a reader, is a useful alternative technique to get outside of the controlling strictures of the social and political. Similarly, David Wojnarowicz shows us how an ekphrastic form of writing and revising what one sees can be a way of bypassing the poisoned and dangerous discourses that infect us from birth. In Wojnarowicz’s model of

“filmic exchange,” we find a template for remembering and visualizing things not as they are in the social and political, but as they have the potential to be in the aesthetic.

Offering us a negative vision out of social control in the form of narrative, Kathy Acker shows us how virality is a way of sneaking discourses and concepts into a narrative undetected to eat it from the inside out and rid it of meaning. Samuel R. Delany shows us, as well, how an overvaluation of some aspect (in his novel, graphic pornography) can crowd out the dismal social ground where fear and death reign. Achieved through rhetorical figuration that turns words into complex, vivid images, the rhetorical figure can fill our consciousness so we have no room for the contemplation of the harmful or negative.

Each of these texts deploys techniques of presencing in ways that bypasses the documentary impulse. These techniques of presencing often draw upon AIDS and its attendant discourses to develop an alternative to memorialization and documentation. I have proposed the term viral logics to describe how AIDS can serve as a literary resource for thinking through other social and political problems. 175

For scholars of literature, attention to rhetorical techniques of presencing and their relationship to the branch of epideictic rhetoric has the potential to illuminate how particular works can be persuasive or have a desired effect upon their audience or reader.

That is, it gives literary studies a set of rhetorical tools, long abandoned, for understanding how literature is a legitimate form of rhetorical discourse that holds a privileged place in solving social and political problems precisely because the epideictic stands outside of those branches of rhetoric, making it ripe for imagining alternative visions that are unrealizable using the logical proofs of the deliberative and judicial.

On the other hand, for rhetorical scholars, a more expansive notion of the epideictic branch allows us to see how the aesthetic and literary genres perform and do things with words that are rhetorically unique. A turn to the aesthetic and literary allows us to see how sophistic challenges to civic discourse are part and parcel of our own field.

Expanding the epideictic beyond presidential addresses and funeral orations illuminates how epideictic discourse functions in a variety of rhetorical situations and contexts.

Based upon my analysis in the preceding chapters of this dissertation, I see viral logics as having two major affordances for critics of AIDS Literature: 1) Replication and

2) Corrosion. Replication is a principle of virality that bypasses memorialization and instead focuses on the survival of some idea or memory within the aesthetic sphere. The chapters examining Burroughs and Wojnarowicz detail how an artistic praxis patterned upon virality can teach us how to see anew, as well as how to get beyond the mire of here and now to some other future. Corrosion, on the other hand, as evidenced by the apocalyptic nature of Acker and Delany, offers a useful rhetorical toolbox for wearing away at damaging discourses. The virus and its ability to be invisible and to replicate 176 itself together with its host organism, is a fruitful concept for imaging ways of destroying repressive discourses from the inside out.

I now turn to two final examples of these qualities of viral logics as ways for opening up our conception of AIDS art and literature: Félix González-Torres’s artwork

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA) and John Greyson’s short story “Realism Traps the

Homosexual.”

1. Replication: Félix González-Torres’s “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA)

Minimalist conceptual artist Félix González-Torres’ 1991 installation piece

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) makes clear how replication is a useful aesthetic tactic for imagining oneself as enduring outside of the here and now

(see fig. 6). Portrait of Ross in LA, one of González-Torres’s most celebrated and continually reproduced installations, consists of a pile of candies wrapped in multi-colored cellophane placed on the floor in a Figure 6: "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in LA), Félix González-Torres (Art Institute corner of the installation space. The of Chicago) candy conceptually represents González-Torres’ partner Ross Laycock, who died of

AIDS-related illness in 1991, and as such, the pile is specified to weigh approximately

175 pounds. Viewers are encouraged to take pieces of the candy, and the pile slowly diminishes, reflecting the wasting of Laycock’s body prior to his death. The pile is 177 continuously refilled with the candies by the participating institution, ensuring perpetual life through replenishment (Art Institute of Chicago). In an interview before his untimely death of AIDS-related complications in 1996, González-Torres explained his intentions behind “Untitled,” stating, “I’m giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies” (Spector 150). Here, González-Torres makes explicit the meaning behind the conceptual representation of the candy; by encouraging viewers to ingest the candy or take the candy with them, they themselves function as a means to circulate his work, the ideas his work embodies, and the memory of his partner.

González-Torres’ statements make explicit how a work like “Untitled” circulates in the public sphere with the intent of having a persuasive effect on the work’s viewer/participant. That this circulation depends upon the central conceptual metonymy of the viewer ingesting a piece of the installation meant to represent the body—"this sugary thing," as González-Torres phrases it—is not lost upon art historians. Nancy

Spector understands this erotic ingestion as a kind of “viral” replication of González-

Torres’ art itself, one viewer at a time. She writes in the press release for the 2007 exhibition Félix González-Torres: America, “Though all ‘untitled,’ his works convey meaning through their parenthetical subtitles, which function like whispered cues, subtle guides to interpretation that only imply and never prescribe […] his artistic project was nothing less than to change the world—one viewer at a time” (qtd in Rounthwaite 49).

The metonymy behind the slippage from candy to body is ephemeral for Spector; the means for the viewer/participant to interpret the work are "whispered" and "subtle," and even then their meaning is not fixed. Symbolic, linguistic meaning is not attached to the 178

"sugary thing," but rather exists somewhere in the interaction between each viewer/participant. Despite the lack of fixed, prescriptive meaning here, Spector points out González-Torres' determinism to change the world one viewer at a time, removing the artwork from the sphere of the purely aesthetic and engaging it with a political agenda

—and thus a deeply rhetorical one. This rhetorical artist/artwork-as-virus paradigm is one of the dominant ways in which critics engage with González-Torres’ work because he was so explicit about his intentions. In a 1994 interview, González-Torres explains his

“viral” goal: “I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses are, in other words, replicating themselves; because that's the way the culture works. So if I function as a virus, an imposter, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions” (Kosuth and González-Torres 349). If read alongside the other excerpted interview where he discusses “Untilted” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), we can see how the candy that “becomes part of so many other people’s bodies” proceeds alongside the same logics as González-Torres’ desire to be a virus that

“replicate[s] [him]self together with those institutions.”

2. Corrosion: John Greyson’s “Realism Traps the Homosexual”

John Greyson's 1990 short story "Realism Traps the Homosexual: A

Documentary Novel about AIDS in America" ironically foregrounds the documentary impulse that literature was already bending toward in 1990 in its subtitle. The “novel,” originally read and performed as part of a lecture on "the ideological construction of the computer virus" (226), would be more accurately described as a short story or collage art.

Its short chapters represent an online conversation between the journalist Randy Shilts 179 and the novelist David Leavitt, two prominent gay writers during the AIDS years, who are being observed by an anthropomorphic computer virus named Volodya. The story capitalizes on the linguistic fluidity of virality, combining discussion of AIDS, computer viruses, and images of viruses. The result is a powerfully corrosive figure that is capable of tearing apart and destroying the “clichéd narrative tropes” of writing that "aspir[e] to realism or objectivity” (246).

The real-life figures chosen as the “authors” and subjects of the text that you are reading are clearly meant to represent dominant, documentary forces of discourse on the

AIDS Crisis. Shilts was the author of And the Band Played On, the best selling journalistic tome that gave a comprehensive account of the Crisis from its inception up through 1987. Shilts’s history was lauded for its novelistic qualities by the straight public, but criticized sharply by LGBTQ activists for his homophobic (and ultimately false) portrayal of a flight attendant named Gaetan Dugas as the “Patient Zero” of the AIDS

Crisis; when Volodya attacks what “aspires” to the real or objective, Shilts is a key target because his prose presented falsehoods as journalistic fact. David Leavitt is a gay novelist whose novel The Lost Language of Cranes about a gay man coming out was a bestseller throughout the late 1980s, during which he was named a Guggenheim fellow and a finalist for the National Book Award. However, Leavitt failed to incorporate AIDS into any of his writing throughout the early years of AIDS Crisis until his melodramatic announcement in 1989 in the pages of the New York Times, entitled “The Way I Live

Now,” which detailed his sudden change of heart after reading Susan Sontag’s short story

“The Way We Live Now.” The notion that Leavitt was a leading gay voice who realistically rendered the sorrows of coming out places him in interesting company with 180

Shilts, suggesting a kind of contiguity between sentimental fiction and schlocky journalism.

Volodya introduces itself early in the story, explaining that “History will no doubt forget me […because] my mission was quiet and modest” (232). The virus, for Greyson, is alluring as an agent of chaos quite simply because it is undetectable and forgettable— its invisibility is an affordance for wreaking havoc. Volodya explains its method for doing this: "I worm my way through their prose, subtly adapting as I go, reducing their texts to such an abysmal string of clichés that no publisher would touch them.” Volodya treats the prose like it is code (or genetic material), snipping here and there and replacing phrases and words with something else, employing a kind of aesthetic criticism of their

"derivatory literary styles" and their “over-reliance on predictable narrative tropes” (239).

Volodya swaps out their pretentious turns of phrase, ultimately "turning the fanciful speculation of fiction into the objective observation of fact, and vice versa, undermining the credibility of each convention" (240).

While Greyson doesn’t explicitly acknowledge the influence of Burroughs here,

Volodya is the embodiment of the word/image virus, performing the cut-up method on

“dangerous” texts. Even more interestingly, though it is a computer virus, Volodya takes up the signifiers of AIDS and remixes them into the discourse of computer viruses, at one point remarking, “The computer doctors still haven’t found a vaccine that can identify me, let alone quarantine me” (239).

The piece makes humor out of a dire situation, and pokes fun at its own pretentiousness. Volodya’s work is to no avail by the end of the story; after reading the resultant cut-up text, Shilts’s and Leavitt’s agents sign them to a lucrative contract, and 181 the text, Realism Traps the Homosexual, climbs the New York Times bestseller list. The final lines of the story quote the novel’s description: a book that “captured the realistic character of homosexual expression in this age of viral insecurity” (250).

The two examples of viral texts in González-Torres’s candy spill and John

Greyson’s “Realism Traps the Homosexual” open up the domain of AIDS Art and

Literature by reaching beyond the Crisis. That is to say, they have an ontological investment in AIDS, but it is not their only investment; certainly, González-Torres’s

“portrait” of his lover functions as a kind of memorial, but it is a sneaky one. Instead, we find González-Torres’s work becoming concerned with matters of circulation, institutional replication, and the proliferation of metaphor and metonymy in the meanings of conceptual artworks—all issues that can be articulated in terms of AIDS, but can also be articulated in terms of other problems and topics. Similarly, Greyson’s text, given its subtitle of “A Documentary Novel about AIDS in America” has some concern with the way AIDS is written about, though the topic doesn’t quite reach the surface level of the farcical story. Greyson’s story reveals a concern with style and how the appearance of objectivity can be a dangerous feature if a narrative is biased or outright false. Who, then, determines official narratives for events like the AIDS Crisis?

My notion of viral logics helps us reach a more expanded sense of the genre of

AIDS Literature. By moving away from only mimetic representation of the Crisis for the function of transmitting a historical record or memorializing a death, the Crisis becomes articulable and relatable to a number of other problems. By examining how aesthetic texts 182 draw on the logics of virality, AIDS Literature and Art scholars of the future have the potential to examine works that, on their surface, have nothing to do with AIDS. 183

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