Abject Utopianism and Psychic Space: an Exploration of a Psychological Process Toward Utopia in the Work of Samuel R

ABJECT UTOPIANISM AND PSYCHIC SPACE: AN EXPLORATION OF A PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS TOWARD UTOPIA IN THE WORK OF SAMUEL R. DELANY AND JULIA KRISTEVA

A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program

September 2014 ABSTRACT

Abject Utopianism and Psychic Space: An Exploration of a Psychological Process Toward Utopia in the Work of Samuel R. Delany and Julia Kristeva

Cameron Alexander James Ellis

This dissertation utilizes the psychoanalytic theories of French psychoanalyst Julia

Kristeva as a lens through which to read the novels of American author Samuel R.

Delany. I argue that concepts proper to Kristeva’s work—namely abjection and/or the abject—can provide a way to think what it might mean to be utopian in the 21st century.

Delany’s novels are received historically, which is to say his work speaks from a certain historical and cultural viewpoint that is not that of today; however, I claim that his novels are exceptional for their attempts to portray other ways of being in the world. Delany’s novels, though, contain bodies, psychologies, and sexualities that are considered abject with respect to contemporary morality. Nonetheless, this dissertation argues that such manifestations of abject lived experience provide the groundwork for the possibility of thinking utopianism differently today. Throughout, what I am working toward is a notion that I call Abject Utopianism: Rather than direct attention toward those sites that closely, yet imperfectly, approximate the ideal, one should commit one’s attention to those sights that others avoid, abscond, or turn their nose up at in disgust, for those are the sites of hope for a better world today.

ii PREFACE

Samuel R. Delany, a contemporary American author, literary/cultural critic, and

Queer theorist, is one of the most famous contributors to science fiction literature in the twentieth century. Delany’s work includes many theoretical essays, novels, and autobiographies related to science fiction and queer living. His 1976 novel Trouble on

Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, has been crucial to informing literary critic Tom

Moylan’s idea of the ‘critical utopia.’ This latter concept can be understood as the paradigm for understanding the contemporary utopian imagination.

Julia Kristeva, a contemporary French psychoanalyst, literary/cultural critic, and author, is one of the paradigmatic figures of what is known in North America as contemporary French feminism. Kristeva’s work includes novels, theoretical essays in the fields of semiotics and linguistics, and autobiographical prose related to the phenomenon of borderline subjectivity or liminal states of consciousness. Her 1980 book Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Powers of Horror), revolutionized psychoanalytic theory and practice through her introduction of the concept of l’abjection (abjection) and its relationship to the constitution of modern subjectivity.

To date, the work of these two great thinkers has not been brought together in any systematic scholarly manner. This dissertation is intended to remedy this lack. The critical discussion of Delany’s and Kristeva’s thought that follows is organized around the concept of utopia, which is to say a no place that is simultaneously some, presumably good, place. As a point of departure, I privilege the literary critic and utopian theorist

iii Fredric Jameson’s proclamation that “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism” and that “perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations”

(Jameson, 1996, xii). The argument developed and defended in this dissertation is that the

“weakness in our imagination” is the all but complete foreclosure of what Kristeva calls

“psychic space,” and that a possible utopia today might be the reconstitution of a healthy living psychic space. The concept of psychic space is an ambiguous psychoanalytic concept like utopia; it is a no place but also a space that must be recognized without being reified. A corollary to this argument is that, in keeping with Kristeva’s theory of subjectivity, such a reconstitution of psychic space necessitates a passage through abjection, a psychic-somatic process of separation that is characterized by feelings and emotions of pain and disgust.

Section 1 of the dissertation provides a review of some of the literary and cultural theory regarding utopia, the utopian imagination; special emphasis is given to the status of both under late capitalism. For purposes of thinking about the utopian imagination or a utopian psyche, I ground my interpretive stance within the psychoanalytic context of

Freud’s allegory of the fraternal clan’s murder of the father in Totem and Taboo. By rooting my investigation in this Freudian narrative I associate the desire for a better way of living—utopia—with visceral and psychological disruption, somewhere at the interface of love, murder, and desire.

Section 2 introduces key concepts from Kristeva’s oeuvre that will consistently be referred to throughout the dissertation, including: abjection, jouissance, psychic space, and the sacred.

iv Section 3 provides an experimental reading of some of Delany’s novels not analyzed as much as those novels in sections 4, 5, 6, and 7. By focusing on the visceral qualities and aspects of Delany’s narrations I demonstrate how the concept of utopia and the affective nature of sensation—i.e., that which is on the fringe of language and the symbolic—can be brought together in these novels. As sections 1 and 2 set the theoretical groundwork for my investigation, section 3 sets the critical groundwork, especially for the subsequent literary analyses in later sections.

Section 4 provides an analysis of Delany’s science fiction novel Trouble on Triton

(1976). I argue in this section that Triton can be used to excavate an unorthodox interpretation of a utopian subjectivity; by applying Kristevan themes to Delany’s intentionally unlikeable anti-hero Bron Helstrom I claim that narcissism and a lacking social discourse on love can breed a strange utopian potential within unlikely subjects.

Instead of unearthing a utopian potential through the examination of an inward turn (i.e., Bron’s narcissism), Section 5 finds traces of such a potential through the examination of an outward turn. I look to Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of

Sand (1984b) to demonstrate how Marq Dyeth’s relationship with Rat Korga—his perfect erotic object—can be used as a case study for understanding Kristeva’s notion of ‘love as a modern obscenity,’ but also how this ‘obscenity’ harbours within it utopian energy.

Section 6 brings together three of Delany’s more pornographic novels (i.e., Hogg

[1994b], The Mad Man [1994c], Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders [2012a]) and one graphic novella (i.e., Bread and Wine [1999]) in order to show what abject utopianism might look like in process. Whereas the abject utopianism of both Bron and

Marq is placed in terms of a fixed orientation, i.e., inner and outer respectively, the abject

v utopianism of the characters—and the relationships they participate in—is more fluid and dynamic, thus keeping in step with Kristeva’s notion of psychic space as being an “open system.” The texts considered in this section are also aligned in such a way as to illustrate an arc or trajectory whereby abject utopianism begins quite abstract and theoretical

(Hogg), but culminates in very concrete—average-everyday—material practice (Bread and Wine).

In the 7th and final section I use Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and some of Kristeva’s more recent work on the topic of forgiveness to show that one’s private interior psychic space is never completely co-opted by decadent social forces. By carefully considering the notion of forgiveness, I claim that the individual subject can compensate for the failed symbolic mechanisms of late capitalism in terms of a new articulation of psychic space.

The reconstitution of psychic space, illustrated through references to Dhalgren, suggest that a psyche that forgives itself of violence and transgression sustains a utopian potential

‘inside’ its personal being, a potential that can never be destroyed by outer forces. A set of seven concluding points follows and brings the dissertation to a close.

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to extend my most sincere and humble thanks to my dissertation advisory committee, Dr. Veronica Hollinger, Dr. Charmaine Eddy, and Dr. Davide Panagia whose constructive criticism, insight, and patience have allowed me to grow as a scholar. A special acknowledgement to Veronica: I am so fortunate to have met and worked with such a brilliant scholar and wonderful advisor. I am indebted to the Faculty of the

Cultural Studies PhD program at Trent University for seeing something in me worth investing in; Dr. Alan O’Connor and Dr. Jonathan Bordo for their direction and leadership with respect to the graduate program; Nancy Legate for being the glue that holds things together and for always being accessible; my colleagues and friends in the

Cultural Studies PhD program and the Theory, Culture, and Politics MA program; and to my friends at the Society for Utopian Studies, especially Dr. Clint Jones.

Dr. Michael Horton is hugely responsible for the trajectory I set myself on following secondary studies at Robert F. Hall C.C.S, his influence can never be overstated. To Michael Reist who without ever being a formal teacher for me taught me the spirit of education. Dr. John Russon for his support early on in my transition into graduate studies as well as his remarkable lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit; to the memory of the late Dr. Jay Newman; and Dr. David Castle for encouraging me to stick with the double major.

To my family, I am eternally grateful. To my mother, Heather, and my father

Craig, thank you for your undying support and encouragement throughout the years. I

vii wish to thank Ian Gibson for his friendship as well as close reading and editorial support.

And, of course Natasha (Tash) Dragoun for her love and support since before I started my graduate studies—helped me survive two MAs and a PhD—and without whom this dissertation would not be a reality. My future is brighter because of you.

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of the late Jean Ross (1929-2013),

“Nan.” More than a Grandmother, Nan was my most cherished philosophical interlocutor; a woman, who—without graduating from primary school—I could have endless conversations with about Heidegger, Augustine, Foucault, and Derrida. She always listened, which was probably the most important thing that I could have had. Her traces are woven into every fabric of this dissertation; we began writing it many, many, many years ago at the ROM and the Planetarium.

viii Table of Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………………………….. ii

Preface…………………………………………………………………………… iii

Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………… vii

Table of Contents……………………………………………………………….. ix

Section 1: The Utopian Imagination, Or, The “Unending Labor

Pains” of Our Time...... 1

Section 2: Kristeva, Abjection, Psychic Space, and Utopia...... 33

Section 3: The Signifying Potential of Utopia in Delany’s Fiction…………...... 52

Section 4: The Strange Utopian Potential of a “Wounded Narcissus”

on Triton……………………………………………………………...... 70

Section 5: Love as “Modern Obscenity” in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of

Sand; Or, What’s Wrong With Too Much Love?...... 86

Section 6: On Abject Utopianism in Delany’s Hogg, The Mad Man,

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Bread and Wine……….. 100

Section 7: Conclusion; Or, The Circularity of Forgiveness and Utopia

in Dhalgren……………………………………………………………... 157

Notes ……...... 181

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………... 207

Appendix………………………………………………………………………... 222

ix 1

Section 1: The Utopian Imagination, Or, The “Unending Labor Pains” of Our Time

Lyman Tower Sargent (2010) claims, “People have always been dissatisfied with the conditions of their lives and have created visions of a better and longer life and hoped for a continued and improved existence after death” (4). The yearning for something

“better” and the desire for an “improved existence” are the hallmarks of what constitutes utopianism for Sargent. By including the concept of “death” at the end of his statement,

Sargent tacitly implicates the idea of religion as being somehow closely knit to the concept of utopia.1 In this section I offer an interpretation of the relationship between utopianism and religion2 in terms of how this relationship unfolds from speculations on human pre-history to the emergence of late capitalism. I argue utopianism psychologically pre-dates3 religion but shares a common trajectory; however, during times of crisis (e.g., social as well as personal crises in religious faith), utopianism survives, mutates, and grows in ways that are perceived in terms of what Kristeva calls

“abject.”

Sargent’s statement broadly implicates all historical epochs (i.e., “People have always…”), by which he suggests that utopianism extends deep into the phylogeny of

Homo. One need only think of Freud’s fraternal clan, in Totem and Taboo, conspiring to kill the primal father (Urvater) who holds the monopoly on sexual gratification via his harem (see Freud 1913, 184).4 Freud’s allegory about the fraternal clan suggests that their desire for a better way of living anticipates the emergence of religious subjectivity. Freud tells his reader that as a result of murdering the primal father there developed, in the minds of the fraternal clan, “an inclination, based on veneration felt for particular human 2 individuals, to revive the ancient paternal ideal by creating gods” (1913, 184). Earlier

Freud writes:

For the future no one could or might ever again attain the father’s supreme power,

even though that was what all of them had striven for. Thus after a long lapse of

time their bitterness against their father, which had driven them to their deed,

grew less, and their longing for him increased; and it became possible for an ideal

to emerge which embodied the unlimited power of the primal father against whom

they had once fought as well as their readiness to submit to him. (1913, 184)

The utopian desire of the fraternal clan became reified—which is to say contained, stymied, and/or obstructed—in the “ideal” image of the (dead) primal father, and thus ceased to be utopian desire proper.5 Although it is fair to say that the “unlimited power” embodied in the image of the primal father promised a better way of living for early humans in excess of anything they could ever achieve at a material level, the otherwise rigid symbolic form of the ideal—and its unlimited power—simultaneously represented a limitation in terms of what could be hoped for. In Judeo-Christian terms, the Kingdom of

God awaits believers on the other side of death. However, as Freud suggests, when the boiling blood cools and contemplative thought returns, the nature of the “other side” is ripe for so many philosophical speculations and contestations.

Later in his life Freud published The Future of an Illusion (1927) in which he lambasted religion as more than a mere neurosis, as fundamentally a detrimental

“illusion.” Bluntly, Freud states, “civilization runs a greater risk if we maintain our present attitude to religion than if we give it up” (1927, 45). The “present attitude” to religion to which people held tight was one in which the gods: “even out the defects and 3 evils of civilization, […] attend to the suffering which men inflict on one another in their life together and […] watch over the fulfillment of the percepts of civilization, which men obey so imperfectly” (1927, 22). To some, religion serves as bulwark of civilization; however, this safeguard is double edged. Freud claims: “We see that an appallingly large number of people are dissatisfied with civilization and unhappy with it” (1927, 47).

Whereas the fraternal clan’s bitterness to the primal father lessened over time, so too did the faith people held in the divine status of the ideal image of the father. Empirically, however, this waning of faith in the power and meaning of the image is not linear; history is punctuated with moments of crisis (e.g., religious) in which the status of the ideal image assumes a more decidedly profane quality. In response to such times of crisis when the symbolic codes which give rise to the ideal image of the father begin to falter, the— what I call following Kristeva—semiotic (le sémiotique) drive-energies that compelled the clan to murder the father in the first place remain. These undefined semiotic drive- forces6 manifest in abject ways (similar to bouts of iconoclasm) are what I will use to discuss utopianism throughout this dissertation.

Thomas More and Utopia: Modern Obscenity or Cadence of Crisis

With the publication of Utopia in 1516, Thomas More brought the same utopian drive-energy that plagued Freud’s fraternal clan into the modern age. More’s Utopia indexes one particular moment of crisis in Western history when the murderous semiotic drive-energy, of culture and individual alike, was allowed to escape through the crumbling façade of traditional symbolic religious authority. In this regard, Utopia is an 4 attempt to give form and coherence to wandering drive-energy under a new symbolic regime: the concept of utopia.7

Through Raphael Hythloday, More’s text tells the tale of a sea journey whereby a hitherto unknown island—Utopia—is discovered. Through Hythloday’s account of his adventures, the island is revealed to be far superior to the England of More’s actual historical situation. By juxtaposing this ‘more perfect’ England with his contemporary

England, More was able to critique what he believed to be the many political, social, and economic ills of his day—among which was the declining power of the papacy—and imagine how they might be better structured or ordered.

Despite his secular roles as lawyer and councilor to King Henry VIII (and later

Lord Chancellor), More’s religious commitments cannot be stressed enough. More was heavily opposed to the Reformation taking place in England during his life. One might even choose—as I do—to view his Utopia as an example of Counter-Reformation literature.8 Beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1886 and later Canonized in 1935, More revivified the trope of ‘the unknown island discovered’ that dates back to the Ancient

Greeks.9 This move suggests a valorization More held for the Golden Age of the Greeks and their philosophic and religious interests in that which transcends the mundaneness of the present world. Sociologist and historian Krishan Kumar (1991) comments, “Just as the hidden God, who will always remain hidden, provokes us to try to uncover the veil, to discover perfect truth and perfect morality, so utopia’s ‘nowhereness’ incites the search for it” (3). Piggybacking on Kumar, I suggest that More’s yearning for perfection, or at least for a better way to live demonstrated by the moral and religious philosophers and 5 theologians of the pre-modern world, speaks to a sense of self-surpassing witnessed in utopian thought and purified in religious ritual.

More’s consternation regarding the declining symbolic function of the Divine during his epoch can be gleaned from his desire to reiterate it in another form that was not explicitly religious. He accomplishes this through writing Utopia, a secular piece of social/political/economic satire, but one that sustains a religious sensitivity. More’s proclivities are witnessed through the reports he has Hythloday recite to the fictitious

Thomas More and Peter Gilles concerning the religious institutions and practices on

Utopia:

Their churches … be all somewhat dark. Howbeit, that was not done through

ignorance in building, but as they say, by the council of priests, because they

thought that over much light doth disperse men’s cogitations whereas in dim and

doubtful light they be gathered together, and more earnestly fixed upon religion

and devotion. […] Therefore no image of any god is seen in the church, to the

intent it may be free for every man to conceive God by their religion after what

likeness and similitude they will. (Bruce, 2008, 115-6)

Projected against the rise of world economic trade and the declining powers of the Papacy in relation to the embryonic status of private property and the Nation State, it is not inconceivable that More would find angst in the transformation of religion into Capital.

By writing the ‘secular’ Utopia, More can be seen as exercising a certain level of self- reflexivity: knowing that the old codes of religion are waning in terms of their symbolic strength, he nonetheless utilizes these codes in order to negotiate a new path for utopian drive-energy in the modern era. More’s focus on the churches, art, and rituals is evidence 6 of this. Within the churches of the Utopians, there are no symbolic representations of the

Divine (i.e., no ‘ideal’ images), as a depiction would no doubt stymie the powers of the imagination to dwell within the unknowable and infinite nature of the power that is the

Divine. Likewise, the darkness within which the Utopians pray suggests the primacy

More bestowed upon the timelessness of the eternal present (inner psychic life), compared to the contingent materiality of one’s spatial relationships to the outside world.

The observation above regarding More’s interest in the timelessness of the eternal present is intended to help shape what I understand as the first iteration of the utopian imagination in the modern era. This particular instance of symbolized utopian drive- energy is first and foremost an imaginary exercise, one that I claim is heavily coded in the language of religion that More was committed to, even though aware of its limitations.

Kumar (1991) states, “Utopia describes a state of impossible perfection which nevertheless is in some genuine sense not beyond the reach of humanity” (3; my italics).

Kumar’s assertion captures why More’s Utopia—and any ‘achieved’ utopia generally speaking, must necessarily appear ‘obscene,’ by which I mean a horribly distorted ‘final product’ (i.e., le symbolique) that attempts to contain the primal ‘meaning’ of otherwise fluid drive-energy.10 That is to say, because Utopia is a symbolic code that is historically situated (circa 1516 Europe), it must violate the wild and chaotic disruption that is the essence of the semiotic drive-energy. This is why I consider More’s Utopia to be an example of a “modern obscenity”: the reification of otherwise free and fluid drive-energy

(sémiotique) by means of an impoverished symbolique. Utopia also represents the first modern cadence of a symbolic crisis and consequently an attempt to remedy the rupture in a novel way. 7

The Rise of Sociology, or the Preamble to Permanent Crisis

From More onward, Europe continued to expand its economic horizon, develop its industry, and fortify its secularization. In the wake of these massive cultural changes, certain individuals sought to make sense of the new modern era using conceptual tools

(e.g., philosophic and scientific) that grew out of the Enlightenment era. This field later emerged as sociology, championed by, but not limited to, the work of Auguste Comte

(17-98-1857), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), and Karl

Mannheim (1893-1947). Compared to More’s individually centered imaginative practice, as exercised through literature, the sociologists responded to the industrial/secular crisis of their time with an interpretation of utopia that is more in line with Sargent’s (2010) definition of utopia as “social dreaming” (5, emphasis added). This is not to say that the individual is no longer considered a vital part of utopian discourse; rather, it is the way in which the individual is negotiated within the context of a larger social system that has changed. For example, in Ideology and Utopia (1936) Karl Mannheim proclaims utopia to be a function of consciousness. However, rather than an artifact of religious consciousness, utopia is coded in a much broader and all-encompassing secular concept: ideology.

For Mannheim utopia is a revolutionary ideology, which is to say it is antithetical to the ideology of the dominant status quo. More precisely, “A state of mind is utopian when it is incongruous with the state of reality within which it occurs” (Manheim, 1936,

192). Being inherently conservative, ideologies prevent certain phenomena from existing such that the present system can continue to function unimpeded. This ‘repressive’ 8 system will thereby give birth to its own utopias, which represent the very phenomena that are silenced. In Mannheim’s interpretation utopia is dialectical: historically situated and always emerging out of contemporary material conditions. In other words, the manifest disruptions of the unruly and anarchic drive-energy of utopian desire are recognized as occurring more frequently according to Mannheim. The rapidly expanding and growing nature of modernity stretches and stresses the tethers of modern institutions to their limits such that they paradoxically become weaker as they become stronger.

The status of utopia, as a function of the imagination post-More, gradually assumes a thoroughgoing material basis, perhaps reaching its apogee in Mannheim. This fact can be traced back to the work of Karl Marx and his work The German Ideology

(1932). Herein Marx critiques what he believes to be the far-flung idealist fallacies of the

Young-Hegelians and the wild free fancy of the ‘true socialists,’ or socialist utopians:

Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825), Charles Fourier (1772-1837), and Robert Owen (1771-

1858). Marx attacks these thinkers because their utopian visions are not materially grounded in a scientific interpretation of their present conditions. Marx’s socialist partner,

Frederick Engels, reiterates this point when he states in his book Socialism: Utopian and

Scientific (1882), “One thing common to all three [i.e., Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen]:

Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat, which historical development had … produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once” (33).11 The dialectical interpretation of utopia in Mannheim, and in others (e.g., Ernst Bloch), is foregrounded here in Marx and Engels. For the latter duo, utopianism does not take into account the process of getting from the respective present to utopia. In terms of scientific 9 socialism, which Marx and Engels prefer to ‘utopianism,’ one begins the quest for emancipation at the local economic-social level and then gradually radiates outward. This material praxis viscerally strikes out the idealism that Marx and Engels witnessed, restricting so-called socialist utopians from actually bearing witness to their lofty visions.

In short, what Marx and Engel’s accomplished—spearheading the way for later sociologists—was to move from being primarily concerned with the surface level symbolic aspect of utopia and instead emphasize the material processes (which is to say presymbolic) underpinning utopia.12

In terms of contemporary utopian theory (i.e., mid-late 20th century), Marxism has indelibly left its mark. This is not to say that the imaginary realm has been erased completely, quite the contrary. As with any visceral strike, there is bound to be a scar, a wound, or a trace of the strike. Running parallel to the rise of Marxism in the 20th century was psychoanalysis, which was dominated by the Freudian school and its various Neo-

Freudian offshoots. Despite the fact that for Freud the human psyche is thoroughly rooted in the materiality of the world, psychoanalysis and Marxism remained antagonistic and difficult to reconcile. In The Concept of Utopia (1991), sociologist Ruth Levitas demonstrates this dilemma in terms of the psychological utopias of individual happiness and fulfillment as might be encountered in the work of the Freudo-Marxists of the 20th century, e.g., Wilhelm Reich (1987-1957), Erich Fromm (1900-1980), and Herbert

Marcuse (1898-1979) (see Levitas, 1991, 40). Levitas holds a special affinity for

Marcuse, who advocates—following E.P. Thompson’s “education of desire” and Bloch’s docta spes—the debunking of false needs and the revelation of real needs. Quoting

Marcuse, Levitas writes, “[W]hen all present subjective and objective potentialities of 10 development have been unbound, the needs and wants themselves will change,” and “for the first time in our life, we shall be free to think about what we are going to do” (Levitas,

1991, 142). It is within this primarily Freudo-Marxian paradigm that Levitas sustains utopia as a psychological phenomenon insofar as it is the desire for a better way of living

(1991, 7).

Against the tradition of historically and materially situating utopianism, there also developed, in the 20th century, sympathy for otherwise ahistorical and pan-cultural interpretations of utopia. Frank and Fritzie Manuel expound this position in their book

Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979). The encyclopedia—or Constellations—of evidence that they gather on utopia in this book suggests a sympathy more in keeping with the archetypal psychological theories of Carl G. Jung (1875-1961). Compared to

Freud who asserts his aversion to the idea of a happy society as well as to the ameliorative powers of religious experiences or mystical “oceanic feelings” respectively,13 Jung’s work suggests that these phenomena are not only exactly what modern humanity needs but that they are realizable.14 Manuel and Manuel offer a pseudo-

Jungian interpretation of utopia, claiming that utopia’s ontology relies on the re- working/reconciliation of archetypal structures, as does the analytical psychology of

Jung:

The historical longevity of certain mythic themes in utopia that evoke associations

remote and deeply rooted in Western consciousness can help us to understand the

fascination utopias exerted over the minds of men. […] Although virtually all

utopias deal with major aspects of living, such as work, government, love and

sexuality, knowledge, religion, beauty, the tone and quality of life, dying, each of 11

these subjects has at one or another time preempted a central position in utopian

consciousness and has inspired new forms. (Manuel and Manuel, 1979, 13,15)

Manuel and Manuel openly embrace the timeless and spiritually transcendent aspects of utopia, seemingly returning utopia to where it originated in the modern era with More, to a more strictly contained imaginary place bordering on the psychological and the religious. The Manuels are not alone when they embody utopia in the individual’s psyche-soma; Ernst Bloch, while remaining a devout Marxist, argued that humans are the kind of beings that are driven, and indeed constituted by a utopian Trieb (i.e., drive- energy) in the form of a Hope Principle or Das Prinzip Hoffnung (à la Freud’s Pleasure

Principle).

Recapping what has been said thus far: I have indicated points that mention utopia as a psychological and religious state of mind and as a social practice. Sargent

(1994) argues that there is another “face” of utopia: the literary utopia. I will later return to discuss the literary mode of expression in greater detail, but for now I wish to sketch out a few preliminary remarks on utopia as a genre of literature. Throughout the following discussion I outline how literature came to be a privileged mode for utopian drive-energy to be expressed and how this shift to literature signified the symptom of a permanent crisis of disruption in culture, primarily Western culture, and eventually the entire globe.

Literature and Utopia: “Unending Labor Pains” and Permanent Crisis

As will later be made more transparent in the present section, despite numerous pockets of resistance in the 20th century, conservative ideology spread through so many psychosocial conduits (e.g., technology and media, tourism, gentrification,

Disneyfication, etc.). In “The Future as Disruption” (2005), Marxist literary critic and philosopher Fredric Jameson notes that the political plans for “future change” are foreclosed by the projects and ideologies of ruling-class big business, grounded as they are in the spirit of privatization and the free market. This cultural logic of late capitalism—as Jameson calls it—is sustained in the populous, not so much through belief in the “hegemonic ideology of the system,” but rather by the masses being “convinced of its permanence” (229). In the late modern era, this “permanence” is guaranteed through the virtual erosion of, namely, agency. Jameson queries “what ‘coming to power’ might mean for movements which are not parties and in a situation in which power is a network of cybernetic grids” (213). Indeed, if not totally effacing the lived realities of time and space, the advertising and marketing of the desirability for hyperconnectivity and instant gratification in the late modern era have significantly reduced the once revolutionary potential inherent to the Transcendental Aesthetic.15

All this captures the ‘essence’ of what constitutes the “permanent crisis” which has come to define the contemporary era, known in some intellectual circles as postmodernity. Perhaps no one has done a better job of theorizing the postmodern in the second half of the 20th century than Jameson. Jameson, whose scholarly range spans political theory to literary criticism, argues that the individual subject is no longer 13 alienated but rather fragmented. There is no place of alienation—that is to say, no

‘outside’ relative to the system of Capital—from where one can establish an emancipatory project. “Postmodernism” he writes, “is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which ‘culture’ has become a veritable ‘second nature’” (Jameson, 1991, ix). Compared to the classical Marxian paradigm with its real concrete material world (i.e., base structure of economics) from which emerge the various forms of cultural expression (i.e., superstructures of science, religion, philosophy), the postmodern paradigm proliferates superstructural phenomena past a critical threshold such that people become convinced of the superstructure’s primacy over the properly economic. Furthermore, because postmodern culture is crucially implicated in the mass distribution of the Image through such media as television, a pleasurable distraction distorts the individual’s capacity to recognize that such culture actually derails any hope for a lively and fertile future. This derailment is achieved through the soft and subtle mechanic of ideology. For the Marxian critic, these highly sophisticated forms of cultural expression obfuscate the actual material conditions of the world as well as stifle any alternative to what is on the market and cripple the possibility of revolution.

The severity of the distortion that is specific to the utopian imagination here is captured in Jameson’s statement, “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine any alternative to capitalism” (Jameson, 2005, 199). For Jameson, the future can no longer be imagined in the ‘positive’ or affirmative sense qua Image or blueprint (as with traditional utopias); rather, the present must be viewed as the past of some possible future. Jameson laments the fact that contemporary—particularly Western—culture has 14 become stuck in a perpetual present that echoes Baudrillard’s America as “utopia achieved” (Baudrillard 1986), Fukuyama’s “end of history” (Fukuyama 2002), and

Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” (see Berlinski 2008). The West has become a fully commoditized society, a society of the spectacle encapsulated within an ideology of instant gratification, brought about by “the consumption of pleasurable weekends,

Christmas dreams, and goods purchased weekly in the pleasure-dome shopping malls of suburbia” (Moylan, 1986, 8).16

Jameson’s response to the “permanent crisis” of late capitalism’s continuum is to focus on and develop the concept of “disruption”:

Disruption is […] the name for a new discursive strategy, and Utopia is the form

such disruption necessarily takes. […] The Utopian form itself is the answer to the

universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no

alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself,

and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after

the break. (Jameson, 2005, 231-2; my italics)

If one can no longer imagine (or write) utopia under the cultural conditions of late capitalism, then one must seek to imagine (or write) the “negative dialectic” of utopia, which it to say “We are now asked […] to think another side, an outside, an external face of the concept which, like that of the moon, can never be directly visible or accessible to us” (Jameson, 1990, 25). This is qualitatively different from thinking in terms of dialectics proper (qua Hegel’s Idealism) insofar as negative dialectics ‘negates the negation’; in other words, whereas dialectics emphasizes reflexivity and self-awareness, negative dialectics “reckon[s] that other face into our sense of the concept while 15 remaining within it in the old way and continuing to use and think it” (Jameson, 1990,

25). In contrast to Hegel who posited the Absolute as that Ideal entity that contained all content of the dialectic, negative dialectics (qua Adorno, Horkheimer, and Jameson) views the concept of the Absolute to be historically rooted and thus merely another piece of content proper. This is what Adorno suggests when he claims dialectics to be

“incline[d] to content because the content is not closed, not predetermined by a skeleton; it is a protest against mythology. Mythical is that which never changes, ultimately diluted to a formal legality of thought” (Adorno, 1966, 56). The Absolute has manifested in various ways across history (e.g., Eden, Arcadia, and Utopia), however regardless of the particular manifestation, it is a historically mythical content akin to ideology, which as

Jameson indicates above, is utilized by the ruling class as propaganda for purposes of maintaining the oppressive status quo. The challenge is thus not thinking about utopia, but thinking outside utopia.

As a literary critic, Jameson views literature as being vital to imagining disruption, of “think[ing] the break itself.” More precisely, Jameson looks to science fiction, its form, content and so on, as a genre by which strategies can be utilized that estrange readers from their ‘realistic’ situation. However, the purpose of the genre according to Jameson is not merely to estrange for the sake of estranging, rather it is to estrange as well as affect the reader with an impulse toward something better.17 Jameson has written extensively on the relationship between science fiction and utopian analysis; however his political inclinations align him most closely with the “critical utopian” novels—a sub-genre of utopian literature identified by literary critic Tom Moylan—of the 1970s and beyond.

These novels, like other science fiction texts, are reflexive and self-aware; however, due 16 to their particular historical situatedness, they are politicized in a way that other science fiction texts are not.18 In short, these novels exploit what Jameson calls “disruption” to destroy that traditional utopian form qua Image or blueprint, while sustaining utopia as an open ended project, always imperfect, and never complete or guaranteed.

The critical utopia is part of a lineage of science fiction texts that perfected the literary embodiment of Jameson’s “disruption.” While critical utopian novels did this they tended to emphasize a particular set of disruptions: spatial disruption, temporal disruption, economic disruption, and ecological disruption—all primarily social in scope; and although they exercise the narrative strategies of agency via their respective protagonists, disruption as focalized through the protagonist is not a conventional strategy. This latter phenomenon is what I call psychic disruption. Critical utopian novels proper avoid emphasizing the psychic element of the protagonist because of their overt political function and the fact that the psychic is linked with the otherwise apolitical, inner, private, subject qua individual. As good materialists, critical utopians avoid entering the “tyranny of the subject” because they believe that which Adorno stated echoing Hegel: “Society precedes the subject” (Adorno, 1966, 126). What is of primary importance to the critical utopians is the manner in which subjectivity is crafted and influenced by social institutions and conventions; as such it is strategically inaccurate to search for subversive resources in the subject, because to do so would only lead one deeper into a political black hole. By contrast, psychic disruption, which I will examine in terms of literature and literary characters, is a phenomenon that dramatizes a break in the continuum of late capitalism from within the subject. 17

The phenomenal qualities of psychic disruption that I will develop here and throughout this dissertation are similar in nature to what Julia Kristeva calls “Célinian laughter” or “an apocalyptic laughter,” making reference to the literary work of French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Kristeva describes such laughter as “a horror close to ecstasy” and “a horrified and fascinated exclamation” (1980, 204). Upon cursory examination it may appear strange that I locate a utopian potential akin to Jameson’s

“disruption” in this aspect of Kristeva’s literary criticism, for she does couch her understanding of laughter as: “Black mysticism of transcendental collapse” and “a secular attitude without morality, without judgment, without hope” (1980, 206; my italics).

However, I argue that despite the apocalyptic overtones, this characterization of my psychic disruption is decidedly utopian in scope such that it constitutes the “abject” foundation through which any and all symbolic discourses emerge. I agree with Kristeva insofar as she suggests that any disruption or “gushing forth” “is neither jovial, nor trustful, nor sublime, nor enraptured by preexisting harmony,” which is to say abjection, or the experience of the abject, is not pleasant; however, I disagree with her insofar as she states that such disruption topples into “the effervescence of passion” where—among other objects—collectivity and hope “become drowned” (206). For me, such moments of psychic disruption, or abject utopianism as I later describe it, are unfortunately necessary experiences of psychic pain, horror, and dismay that the subject must pass through if he or she is to have the faintest possibility of shattering what Kristeva calls the “unending labor pains” that characterize the permanent crisis of contemporary culture and thereby sustaining a chance at utopia today.

Looking Backward and Forward at the Same Time: The Critical Utopia and Beyond

To my knowledge Edward Bellamy’s utopian science fiction novel Looking

Backward (1888) is the first instance of utopian literature that explicitly incorporates psychic pain, horror, and dismay into the protagonist’s encounter with utopia. The particular scene in question involves the protagonist Julian West falling asleep in his

Boston of 1888 only to wake up in Boston of the year 2000. Upon waking Julian West is discovered by Dr. Leete who introduces Julian to his future Boston. West is subsequently informed about a few aspects of the utopian future and then breaks for rest. Upon waking again and thinking that what he has experienced was nothing but a dream, he find that he was not dreaming, but that he has really awakened in the future utopia. He then experiences one such instance of horrifying psychological disruption:

… thus in bed staring about, without being able to regain the clew to my personal

identity. I was no more able to distinguish myself from pure being during those

moments than we may suppose a soul in the rough to be before it has received the

earmarks, the individualizing touches which make it into a person […] There are

no words for the mental torture I endured during the helpless, eyeless groping for

myself in a boundless void … In my mind, all had broken loose, habits of feeling,

associations of thought, ideas of persons and things, all had dissolved and lost

coherence and were seething together in apparent irretrievable chaos. (Bellamy,

1888, 50, 51, 53)

Bellamy’s dramatization of the psychological pains of Julian West confronting the future utopian Boston adds a positive spin to the received view of Kristeva’s criticism regarding 19 apocalyptic laughter. Following feminist and political theorist Lucy Sargisson, I consider such experiences to be moments of “life-transforming shifts in consciousness” (qtd., in

Baccolini and Moylan, 17). Furthermore, things like collectivity and “hope” do not become “drowned” in such pain, horror, and dismay, but are rather reconstituted in unexpected ways, many—if not all—in ways that manifest as abject. These moments of psychic horror and revulsion allow for the dominant symbolic discourse to be cleared away such that something radically new is allowed to manifest itself via one’s perceptions of the world.

Julian West’s psychic disruption informs a shift in utopian literature that I think began with Looking Backward. Utopia expanded to become an individually centered process in a way it had never been before (while never rescinding its political efficacy). I admit there are literary utopias that precede Bellamy’s that use the individual’s psychological ‘states’ as the ground for projecting the utopia in question, but they do not incorporate the kind of psychological states such as stress, anxiety, and/or disgust that I find beginning with Julian West. Following the deluge of dystopian literature in the twentieth century that began with the publication of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

(1909), there emerged a new sub-genre of utopian literature in the 1970s: the critical utopia. As a supplement to its received political function, I claim the critical utopia returns to and develops the narrative strategy of psychic pain, horror, and dismay focalized through Julian West in his encounter with utopia as well as those moments of horror utilized in the literary dystopia. Also, the critical utopia openly exploits the private, subjective inner-life of its characters as they experience utopia as a precarious state heavily dependent on their subjectivity and agency. 20

Tom Moylan’s original interpretation of the term critical utopia is “critical” in two senses: a) critical in the Enlightenment sense of critique as well as b) in the nuclear sense of a critical mass necessary to trigger a reaction (see Moylan, 1986, 10). In Demand the

Impossible, Moylan examines Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Joanna

Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and

Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976). Each is an instance of science fiction literature that simultaneously rearticulates the utopian form, albeit in a radically different way compared to how it was in its traditional form up to and including even Bellamy’s Looking Backward. In contrast to the stable state of the traditional utopia, the critical utopia sought to disrupt the stasis of utopia by first and foremost reinstating “oppositional thought” (Moylan, 1986, 10). Moylan’s criticism of the traditional literary utopia, as a form, is that it is uncritical of itself and akin to the totalitarianism of Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of Enlightenment. In the critical utopia, Moylan witnesses an infusion of process—dialectics—into utopia, an “unveiling

[and] debunking, of both the genre itself and the historical situation” (Moylan, 1986, 10).

Flying in the face of a growing cultural amnesia (à la postmodernity), the critical utopia

“restore[s] a sense of the concrete historical situation” (43). This was something that

Moylan felt was greatly lacking in culture (especially American culture).

Antedating Moylan’s genre-defining work, Bülent Somay (1984) emphasizes the distinction between “closed” and “open” literary utopias. Somay asserts, “utopographers from Thomas More to William Morris had constructed their utopias in order to preclude any further change, any inconsistency: the cardinal utopian principle was ‘stability’” (25).

The critical utopia disrupts stability and instead embraces movement and fluidity. Aware 21 of the growing discourse on conservative ideology in the 20th century, Moylan observes that what the critical utopian writers exploit, in order to keep utopia fluid, is ideology itself. These science fiction writers implicate and delineate their characters as struggling with the confines and liberating potentials of the ideology of their current time and place as well as the ideologies of the respective future utopias in the narrative. Echoing

Mannheim, Moylan suggests that ideology and utopia should not be viewed as two separate entities at loggerheads, but rather, utopia should be viewed “as operating within the ideological, both helping it along and pulling against it” (Moylan, 1986, 19). This is what gives the critical utopia its precarious and tenuous qualities. Due to the incomplete separation of utopia from ideology,19 utopia is always under threat of being swallowed up by the dominant powers. This is what imbues the critical utopia with its combative edge: it is the literary embodiment of permanent revolution.20

Two key aspects of the critical utopia, form and content, allow it to sustain its open-ended, fluid, and dynamic structure. Regarding form, Moylan notices that in the critical utopia there is a strong emphasis placed on individual agency. The actions of the individual characters have a two-fold function: a) to combat the ahistorical tendency of the traditional literary utopias and situate utopia as a struggle to be fought for on behalf of the people here and now, and b) to infuse a certain level of self-reflexivity into the texts in order to prevent utopia from closing in on itself. Concerning content, Moylan witnesses the unfolding of very specific historical forces, namely the reawakened oppositional political movements in the United States during the 1960s (e.g., Feminism, ecological awareness, racial, ethnic, sex, and class agendas).21 In this sense, history—the actual political and cultural crises of the here and now—is the content of the critical utopia; 22 therefore, utopia assumes a decidedly Marxist paradigm with the critical utopia. Moylan’s overarching position is that these novels preserve the positive emancipatory potentials of the utopian imagination, while necessarily destroying the genre qua totalizing social blue print.

Abjection, Utopia, and Literature: Coding Our “times of dreary crisis”

Louis Marin’s Utopics: Spatial Play (1984) has proven to be very influential for thinking through utopia, literature, and the ambiguous subjectivity the former implies via the latter. In his book Marin develops a theory of “utopic discourse.” From a close reading of More’s Utopia, Marin argues that through More’s coining of the term utopia, a new method of discourse—and by extension a new consciousness—was made available, an “empty—historically empty—place of the historical resolution of a contradiction […] a ‘zero degree’ of the dialectical synthesis of contraries” (Marin, xiii). Marin suggests that utopia is first and foremost a signifying practice that allows one to dwell or think from within a non-reductive space free from the debilitating and restricting game of polemics, which is to say it resists ideological reification. Utopia embodies a certain type of non- possessive comportment toward the world, one where “[w]e acknowledge this place, rather than have knowledge of it” (Marin, xviii; emphasis added). In Marin’s terms, utopia is a way of being and/or thinking more than the traditional non-existent good- place. Utopia is signifiance.22

Building upon Marin’s idea of utopia as a signifying practice, David Bleich

(1970) states that utopia is the name of a feeling rather than a plan for action (127; my 23 emphasis). Bleich writes from a psychologically sympathetic point of view where

“feeling” could mean both feeling in the cognitive or intellectual sense of the term (i.e., a vague notion, an inkling, suspicion, etc.), or feeling in the physical or affective sense of the term (i.e., I felt x or x felt me). I do not reduce the meaning of feeling to either/or; rather I seek to sustain the inherent ambiguity proper to it. By this I suggest that utopia qua feeling is something that Kristeva might identify with the drive, in the Freudian sense of the term: “The drive is a pivot between ‘soma’ and ‘psyche,’ between biology and representation” (1993, 30). By relying on this quotation to help frame the context of the present dissertation I hope to avoid confusing the reader when I claim that utopia is a dynamic psychic state of being, which is to say it has a definite private, subjective, inner life relative to the individual as well as serving a social function in terms of the individual’s place within a larger social body. Kristeva continues to say, commenting on the drive: “For what we understand by biology is—drives and energy, if you wish, but always already a ‘carrier of meaning’ and a ‘relation’ to another person” (30). Drive- energy, as I referred to it earlier in my discussion about Freud’s fraternal clan and the primal father, is an ambiguous and nonreductive force. It pulsates on the borders of nature and culture, as does the feeling of utopia, according to Bleich.

In this dissertation, I focus on exploring the nature of utopia insofar as it manifests itself at the liminal, borderline, and ambiguous edges of the individual subject, i.e., the psyche-soma (mind-body), and how these aspects of the psyche struggle to connect with the social. The utopian imagination that I conceive of is not so much a utopian imagination as it is a utopian sensibility exercised through a space I call—following

Kristeva—psychic space. Throughout the above utopia has taken on many forms: sub- 24 genre of science fiction, primal founding of religion, social ideal, and (literary) signifying practice. The interpretation of utopia that I develop and defend emerges from interactions and relationships that are understood as abject; those interactions may be self-self, self- other, and/or self-world in nature. Kristeva is famous for stating that “Its [abjection’s] signifier, then, is none but literature”; more precisely, “literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises” (1980, 5, 208). This is a loaded phrase and requires careful and patient examination, for the critical importance of the abject in modern literature speaks directly to a crisis which Kristeva among others diagnoses as specific to the late modern age: an absent notion of the sacred. In the final part of this Introduction I will sketch out the significance of the abject in relation to the sacred in contemporary Western culture, following which an interpretation of literature’s privileged status with respect to the abject, the sacred, and utopia will be offered. (Given that a more thorough analysis of these concepts is found in Section 2, I will keep my commentary to merely introductory remarks.)

The Utopian Imagination Under Late Capitalism and Beyond

In Powers of Horror Kristeva writes, “In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic task—a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct— amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being […] at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject. Great modern literature unfolds over that terrain” (18).

When Kristeva references the “Other,” she is referring to the same capital-O Other of which Lacan spoke. For both thinkers, the capital-O Other can be described, as Adrian 25

Johnston (2013) does, as “the overarching ‘objective spirit’ of trans-individual socio- linguistic structures configuring the fields of inter-subjective interactions.”23 The Other is that “anonymous authoritative power” that coheres an otherwise unruly anarchic primal horde. The Other can take on numerous “Symbolic” forms, such as God,

Nature, History, Society, State, Party, or Science (Johnston, 2013). The concept of the

Other, or a Symbolic order, collapsing is not novel; such a proclamation has roots—at least in the modern era—in Nietzsche’s aphorism “God is dead” in his The Gay Science

(1882). These notions do overlap; however, what makes them distinct is that Nietzsche did not have to worry about certain cultural phenomena such as television, the Hollywood industry, Hippies, the Internet and Twitter, nanotechnology, global warming, 9/11, the

National Security Agency, or Lady Gaga—and so on—the way Lacan, Kristeva and others did throughout the mid to late twentieth century (and into the twenty-first century).

Each of these examples indexes a moment of crisis—acute or chronic—in culture where some Other collapsed; each example, however, also stands in as a placeholder for the

‘gap’ left open following that symbolic collapse. The “crisis” is located in the fact that television, Twitter, and/or Lady Gaga are not strong Symbolic others, but rather vulgar abject symptoms of that which is absent. Appeals to historical relativism notwithstanding, what makes the “crises” of Lacan’s and Kristeva’s time qualitatively different compared to that of Nietzsche’s is that the cultural phenomena that index such broken distinctions have become so ubiquitous and/or democratized that any possible or conceivable “return” to such a clear and distinct cultural milieu is apparently foreclosed.

In The Mark of the Sacred (2008), Jean-Pierre Dupuy states that “The present crisis is one of indistinctness, as it might be said, in the sense that it is marked by a loss of 26 the differences between levels that characterize hierarchy” (7). A culture of indistinctness creates what Christopher Lasch (1979) calls a “new Narcissus,” which is described by

Sara Beardsworth (2004) as “a figure who belongs to the waning of a historical sense of time, the abdication of authority, and the trivialization of personal relations” (60). I am neither arguing that a return to traditional rigid hierarchy is necessary nor that such a state would even be desirable. What I am asserting is that the contemporary cultural milieu is one that creates sick people, especially in terms of the powers (and limits) of their imaginations; that is to say, the limits to their ability to imagine something other than that handed to them by the status quo (see Jameson, above). This culture is one that Kristeva calls abject insofar as its denizens, the “new Narcissuses,” merely waft aimlessly, leading superficial, confused, and pained lives, with no readily attainable resources to help them elevate themselves from it toward something more—something better.

To strive to elevate oneself toward “something more—something better” effectively takes the form of a reach for a new sense of the sacred. By “sacred” I understand, as Török (2011) does in his reading of Clément and Kristeva’s The Feminine and the Sacred (2001), an “unveiling of meaning”; more precisely, the sacred is revealed in moments when “there is a break with mundane perception, as meaning is born on the edge of nothingness” (Török 241).24 Freud’s allegory of the fraternal clan and their murder of the primal father is perhaps the most recognizable form of the sacred to any reader of Freud. Recall that the fraternal clan wallowed in their abject condition of uncontrolled drive-energy until they finally decided to band together and kill the father, who upon his death became more powerful than when living. The creation of the ideal

Image of the father united the clan symbolically in a way that they were not united prior 27 to the father’s death (this is effectively the formation of religion). The ideal Image of the father is “sacred” because it bestows a social symbolic identity upon the clan such that the temptation to further kill one another is repressed, while simultaneously gesturing to— i.e., pushing away or jettisoning—the “sacred,” horrid, and violent event that made such a social symbolic possible. It is important to notice, however, that the Image of the father is not sacred in itself, but rather because it is “haunted” by what Kristeva calls the “mother- image” (Reineke 76).

The sacred is not established solely by an act of sacrifice (e.g., exchange of the father for a totem animal), but also, as Martha Reineke reminds her reader, by the dread of incest (76). As Kristeva says, Freud’s Totem and Taboo speaks to another aspect of the sacred, one “oriented toward those uncertain spaces of unstable identity, toward the fragility—both threatening and fusional—of the archaic dyad” (1980 58). Neither

Kristeva nor I am arguing that a massive bloody catastrophe is necessary as such in order to elevate ourselves toward something better (such a “fulfillment of desire is an impossible return to a pleasure fused with nature” [see Beardsworth, 61; my emphasis]).

What Kristeva and I suggest is that by turning to the cultural resources in art, literature, and the humanities (i.e., cultural products of saints, poets, artists, and philosophers) one can garner an understanding and appreciation for how certain individuals managed to stave off succumbing to the anarchic drive-energies of the abject in times of cultural crisis

(recall More’s Utopia as one example). The cultural products that keep the abject at a safe distance are called “Imaginary Discourses.”25

As the quotation cited above suggests (i.e., literature is the ultimate coding of our crises), Kristeva privileges literature, above any of the other cultural resources cited, as a 28 means of staving off the complete collapse of the self into abjection. Not only is this her preferred strategy for preserving and enriching psychic life and health, but literature also shares distinct features with the sacred/abject mechanism that is implicated in the generation of religious union. She writes, “The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion […] That is perhaps why it is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of religions” (1980, 17). The signifying practice of literary production is not religious per se, it simply shares a common structure with religious practice insofar as both struggle to negotiate the tension between the individual and the social by way of representing the unrepresentable (i.e., deriving an ideal Image out of affective drive-energy).

To Politicize or Aestheticize the “Return of the Religious”?

The very popular contemporary cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek is known for his writings on a renewed Marxist politics, in combination with the ideal kernel of the Christian doctrine, as a way to surface from the über-commoditized culture of late modern capitalism. Žižek has stated, “One of the most deplorable aspects of the postmodern era and its so-called “thought” is the return of the religious dimension in all its different guises: from Christian and other fundamentalisms, through the multitude of

New Age spiritualisms, up to the emerging religious sensitivity within deconstruction itself” (Žižek, 2000, xxix). By “religious” Žižek means uncritical dogmatism; however, he is not defaming religion absolutely, as he believes that Marxism shares a common 29 thread with Christianity and that the two must band together to resist the “fundamentalist freaks”:

The task of today’s thought is thus double: on the one hand, how to repeat the

Marxist ‘critique of political economy’ without the utopian-ideological notion of

Communism as its inherent standard; on the other, how to imagine actually

breaking out of the capitalist horizon without falling into the trap of returning to

the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self-)restrained society … (2000,

16)

The connection with religion, especially the Christian religion, that Žižek finds supportive for his renewed Marxist political agenda is embodied in the figure and story of Paul on the road to Damascus. Paul’s bearing witness to the vision of Christ and the Kingdom of

Heaven is symbolic of a ‘better world’ that Paul understands is—and desires to be—for all. For Žižek, one must repeat the secular Marxian narrative by returning to the ideal kernel of unfulfilled potential in Marx’s critique of political economy and follow it through with the faith or evangelism of the Pauline narrative whereby this vision is preserved with an eye to the salvation of all. What this amounts to is a politicization of the drive-energy that I have been affiliating with the abject via Kristeva in the above.

In contrast to Žižek’s politicization of the abject under the promises granted under a renewed Marxian Communist agenda, Kristeva staunchly defends the opposite, which is to say she advocates the non-politicization of drive-energy. In an autobiographical essay titled “My Memory’s Hyperbole” (1983a), Kristeva writes about her involvement with the Tel Quel group and its—as well as her—relationship with the French Communist

Party (PCF). She recites how the literary savvy minds of Tel Quel were seduced by 30 communist students who believed that “only the socialist Revolution could provide the social setting propitious to avant-garde writing” (see Oliver, 2002, 13). Kristeva’s response:

[I]t seemed to me completely unrealistic from the standpoint of the socialism I had

experienced. I knew to what extent a regime born of a Marxist social mutation

rejected not merely all aesthetic formalism deemed individualistic or antisocial,

but also all individual stylistic experience that could question or explore the

common code and its stereotypes in which ideology must seek shelter in order to

dominate. (see Oliver, 2002, 13)

Kristeva adds that Tel Quel’s dissent from communism and assent to literary aesthetics elicited accusations that stigmatized their “behaviors as ‘religious’” (i.e., in the pejorative; see Oliver, 2002 15). Kristeva affirms, against the tide of the communist students,

“religion […] was not an enemy to flee” (see Oliver, 2002, 16). Whereas traditional politics demands allegiance to the party, religion emphasizes the powers and capacities of the imagination and spirit placing the singular experiences of the individual above that of the collective.26 Kristeva continues: “One thing is certain: it is because we saw what was perverse in our relation to the Communist Party that we kept aloof, from then on, from any other political perversion, even a left-wing one. Our Maoism was an antiorganizational, antipartisan antidote, a utopia in pure form, which had nothing to do with the sects of the left” (see Oliver, 2002, 17; my emphasis). Even though Maoism is considered a political ideology, it is more of an anti-political political ideology given its

“disruptive” emphasis on “antiorganizationalism” and “antipartisanism.” 31

The “permanent revolution” that characterizes Maoism is distilled or sublimated, in Kristeva’s thinking, through literature—as this was one of the chief priorities of the Tel

Quel group. Literature, according to Kristeva, incites “revolution” in society, first at the level of the individual and then radiating outward. If there is a “political” agenda in

Kristeva’s thought, then this is it. Her politics can be described as an iteration of the

“Political Imaginary,” which is to say, a way of practicing politics that is not reducible to administration and bureaucracy. If there is a political value to this dissertation, then it too lies within the domain of the Kristevan political imaginary.

In Powers of Horror Kristeva identifies five authors (besides Céline [1894-1961]) who have utilized so-called non-political literary styles and aesthetics to sustain whatever remnant of psychic life and health they can given their particular historical/cultural crises:

Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Proust (1871-1922), Joyce (1882-1941), Borges (1899-1986) and Artaud (1896-1948). I propose adding another name to this list of authors who write/purify the abject: Samuel R. Delany (1942-present). Just like the authors and their respective texts that Kristeva identifies, so too are Delany and his texts that I analyze in this dissertation proper to a historical period. The texts of Delany’s that I use speak to a relatively contemporary world of which they are a product; however, they are not products of the world now (with the exception of Through the Valley of the Nest of

Spiders [2012]). This being the case, the historical distance between those texts and the present (at time of writing 2014) allow a critical eye to be applied to them such that one might be able to amass some resources that could contribute to a composite of a possible subjectivity that might be considered strategic for application today as we in the present look for utopian ways out of our time of “unending labor pains.” 32

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that “All birth is paid for with death, all fortune with misfortune” (2002, 11). I add to Adorno and Horkheimer’s claim, building upon

Moylan, that utopia is paid for not only with death and misfortune, but also with stress, anxiety, disgust, and countless other psychological disruptions proper to the individual subject under late modern capitalism. Later I will provide an argument for love, loss, and abjection (à la Kristeva) as the privileged “lovehate” sensations important for reconstituting the utopian imagination today. I apply Kristeva’s theoretical framework as a lens through which to undertake an allegorical interpretation of Delany’s science fiction as well as literary pornography in order to develop an understanding of and appreciation for the idea of what I call the abject utopian or abject utopianism more broadly. Abject utopianism is a particular subjectivity that is fundamentally distorted, disruptive, and imperfect (as such a product of late capitalism would be), yet it simultaneously embodies implicit utopian potential.

Section 2: Kristeva, Abjection, Psychic Space, and Utopia

This section introduces key notions, concepts, and ideas specific to the work of

Julia Kristeva that will be utilized throughout the remainder of this dissertation. The reader should not expect a faithful reiteration of Kristeva’s body of work, as such reviews have already been written by scholars in the field of Kristeva studies (see Moi, 1986;

Oliver, 2002). The terms introduced and explained in this section will be developed to meet the scope of this dissertation by being organized around the concept of utopia. To my knowledge, at the time of writing, Kristeva’s work has not been placed in conversation with utopian theory in any substantial form. I contend that her work in the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural criticism, especially pertaining to what she calls “the new maladies of the soul,” speaks to a utopian philosophy that becomes manifest through the reconstitution of what Kristeva calls Psychic Space. According to Kristeva, a healthy living psychic space is made possible only through a historically specific psychological process of subjectification that is characterized by great pain and suffering, but also by joy and pleasure. The suffering is proper to what Kristeva calls l’abjection; the pleasure is proper to what Kristeva calls jouissance. Together, these terms sketch out a particular range of Kristeva’s work that can be used to complement extant critical theory informing utopian studies today.

Semiotic and Symbolic: Post-Lacanian Developments

Kristeva is best understood in terms of her linguistic theory and its implications for subjectivity. Her body of work can be ‘split’ into two parts: the early, more Marxian, writings of the late-1960s through mid-1970s (best represented in the book version of her doctoral dissertation La revolution du langage poétique (Revolution in Poetic Language,

1974) and the later, more properly psychoanalytic, writings that Sara Beardsworth (2006) calls “the trilogy of the 1980s”: Pouvoirs de l’horreur (Powers of Horror, 1980),

Histoires d’amour (Tales of Love, 1983), and Soleil Noir (Black Sun, 1987a).

Respectively, these three latter works address and examine abjection, love, and loss.

Compared to Revolution in Poetic Language’s Marxian emphasis on procès (process) by way of dialectique (dialectics)—i.e., between the grammar of le symbolique (symbolic) and the drives of le sémiotique (semiotic)—her work in the 80s shifts focus onto a constitutive moment proper to subjectivity, an incomplete clivé (split), around which love, loss, and abjection circulate.

For Kristeva, as is consistent with traditional psychoanalytic theory, the individual subject is a split subject. The individual is split into a conscious and unconscious aspect.

This constitutive splitting of the subject perpetually alienates the subject from himself or herself. Alienation is not a bad thing, absolutely; it is what keeps the subject in motion.

The forces of alienation acting on the subject—within and without—are the forces of négativité (negativity). The latter is a Hegelian concept that, when borrowed by psychoanalysis, refers to the everlasting subversion of a static or stable identity.

Négativité operates unconsciously at the level of bodily pulsions (drives); however, these 35 forces can be brought to the subject’s conscious awareness through such contemplative practices as the arts, but especially via psychoanalysis.

Kristeva is part of a psychoanalytic tradition in France that is indebted to the work of Jacques Lacan. Like the way in which Alexandre Kojève introduced France to the work of Hegel, Lacan reintroduced the work of Freud to France intermingled with the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Kristeva is important to the development of psychoanalytic theory and practice because she diverged, quite radically, from the teachings of Lacan, her one time analyst.27 Like Lacan, Kristeva understands the individual subject to be constituted through language, which is to say via the symbolic.

However, unlike Lacan, who thought that the subject was constituted by means of the symbolic and only the symbolic, Kristeva argues that the subject is equally constituted by the ‘other side’ of the symbolic: le sémiotique. The sémiotique is the non-signifying

“baby-talk” proper to the infans (i.e., pre-linguistic infant): babbles, crying, tones, silences, and rhythms. It is that aspect of subjectivity that Lacan thought to be meaningless because it cannot be codified or pinned down by the Law of the dominant symbolic. This should not lead one to think that the sémiotique and symbolique are mutually antagonistic or antithetical. They do, in fact, work together: the sémiotique imbues the symbolique with force and movement such that without the former, all that remains is a dead archive of the symbolique. On the other hand, the symbolique provides the grammatical structures through which the sémiotique can operate.

This relationship is not always harmonious; when the sémiotique fails to connect with a strong symbolic structure (or vice versa), the results can prove wildly anarchic, as there is nothing to channel the drives. This usually occurs in moments of great historical 36 upheaval, whether in science, politics, or art. For example, Kristeva is very interested in the “great upheaval” of the avant-garde movement in art during the early part of the 20th century, but one could just as well consider paradigm shifts in science (à la Thomas

Kuhn) and/or mass protests such as May ’68 or the Arab Spring. Since scientists, activists, and artists are implicated in expressions of the sémiotique, it should be apparent that the sémiotique is not restricted to pre-linguistic phase of development but is present throughout the entirety of the subject’s life. Shirley Geok-lin Lim (1988) articulates

‘semiotic subjectivity’ when she writes:

Self as a semiotic [le sémiotique] principle constitutes the subject; self as

experience in which both agent and receiver act and are acted upon; and self

finally as constituted by the Other, which is the field of the political. Together

they form not layers of a self like the flesh of an onion easily peeled apart but

rather types of chemicals whose different properties bind to produce for each

individual a unique process, reaction, and alchemical substance. (see Smith and

Watson, 444)

The “void” for Kristeva, which Lacan posited beneath language, is full with non- signifying meaning. This point of difference between the two thinkers is important, for it radically sets apart two very different interpretations of the individual subject—analytic practice and ethics—and their respective worldviews.

With regard to Lacan’s view of the individual subject’s inauguration into language or the symbolic, such a move is made—indeed forced—by the split in subjectivity affected through the separation from the pre-Oedipal Mother. This is, in short, castration.

For Lacan, castration is total, complete, and psychically traumatizing, leaving the subject 37 with a constantly plaguing sense of lack: a part of me is missing/lacking and I can never return to, or find, it (i.e., the pre-Oedipal Mother); nor would one want to, Lacan would say, as the death-bearing capacities of the Phallic Mother signify the abolition of my existence. To go beyond the pleasure principle would be to completely give oneself over to Thanatos and the veritable enactment of the death drive. The description above draws a picture for the reader of what constitutes the absolute, impossible, and endlessly painful nature of what Lacan calls jouissance. Kristeva develops a radically different understanding of jouissance and it too has to do with the infans’s inauguration into language or the symbolic. For Kristeva, the subject’s inauguration into language is not caused solely by a painful and traumatizing castration but also by affects of love and pleasure.

According to Kristeva, the pre-Oedipal Mother of the infans lovingly and carefully works with the non-signifying sémiotique speech, gradually bringing it into accord with the symbolic (i.e., making it into language). This process is pleasing and enjoyable for the infans as the pre-Oedipal Mother infuses the infans with creative potentiality via a loving and caring “apprenticeship of language”: “[T]he progenitor inhabits the mouth, the lungs, the digestive tube of her offspring and, in accompanying the echolalia, guides them toward signs, phrases, tales: infans becomes infant, a speaking subject” (Kristeva, 2006, 43-4). Kristeva, too, acknowledges that entrance into the symbolic is painfully enacted through the loss of the pre-Oedipal Mother; she simply claims that this is not exclusively that which accounts for the constitution of subjectivity.

In contrast to Lacan, Kristeva does not view the splitting of the subject from the pre-

Oedipal Mother as total and complete. By virtue of le sémiotique operating at the borders 38 of the self (i.e., between psyche and soma), the law-before-the-law (maternal law) is never truly severed as such; rather, it is conveyed in speech-acts not consecrated by the dominant symbolic (e.g., babble, cries, bellows, nonsense). As such, one is always already in contact with the pre-Oedpial Mother and thus capable of participating in the ecstasy of jouissance. For Kristeva, jouissance is not impossible but rather a possible space of the unknown (a “yet-to-come”). Leon S. Roudiez articulates the meaning of this ecstasy that is ‘beyond’ meaning typically understood by breaking down the French word jouissance into parts: j’ouïs sens = I heard meaning (see Kristeva, 1969/1977, 16). For

Kristeva, jouissance is the intuitive perception of that which is beyond conventional symbolic codification and which ‘speaks’ of a meaning that is yet to come. This notion of the ‘yet-to-come’ qua jouissance is where I see the germs of Kristeva’s greater utopian philosophy.

Abjection as Disruption of “Unacknowledged Suffering”

The sensation of this ‘meaning’ that is yet to come is, for Kristeva, experienced during times when the individual and the social are not in accordance. These times are identified as what Sara Beardsworth (2006) calls “tendential severances”:

[…]where modern institutions and discourses have failed to provide everyday

social and symbolic sites or practices for the adequate connection of the semiotic

and symbolic […] When the semiotic and symbolic are inadequately connected,

the linguistic universe, symbolic bonds with others (communication), and social

bonds are felt to be meaningless and without value. (14) 39

The feeling of meaninglessness and nihilism conjures within the individual subject—who has, for security purposes, turned inward into himself/herself (i.e., primary narcissism)— sensations of disgust and revulsion. Without readily available cultural resources by means of which to express these sensations of unrest (for the sémiotique is always moving), the latter will invariably erupt in wildly anarchic and destructive ways. These outbursts can take the form of vulgar street level anarchy as might be witnessed through acts of vandalism and graffiti, or on a mass scale approximating social uprisings. These actions are not guided by positive visions (in the sense of definite plans or courses of action), but rather are simply base expressions of rejection of the status quo. In short, this phenomenon is akin to, if not emblematic of, abjection.28 Abjection, although unpleasant in every sense of the term, is a necessary process to undergo in order for (a new) subjectivity to become manifest; which is to say, for the “tendential severance” to become reconciled.

The problem Kristeva diagnoses, according to Sara Beardsworth (2004), is that the late-modern individual subject is called upon to perform the impossible; that is, to perform the function of a social institution that can knit together sémiotique and symbolique. This is an impossible task since by definition the individual is not the social; faced with such overwhelming responsibility, the individual regresses into nihilism and despair, which manifests in the form of crippling psychological ills. In place of the dearth of cultural resources necessary to help bring forth such uniting social discourses, Kristeva suggests that the arts and psychoanalysis can be utilized toward this end; for without such resources, individuals wander about aimlessly, with little or no social meaning to which to connect their own ‘bodily meaning.’ An example of this is the riots in London, 40

Summer 2011. Stuart Hall, one of the founding figures of the discipline of cultural studies, quoted in theguardian, describes the 2011 London riots that speak to Kristeva’s point:

Some kids at the bottom of the ladder are deeply alienated, they’ve taken the

message of Thatcherism and Blairism and the coalition […] nobody’s going to

help you. And they’ve got no organised political voice, no organised black voice

and no sympathetic voice on the left. That kind of anger, coupled with no political

expression, leads to riots. It always has. (see Williams, 2012, Online)

This state of being—whereby a disconnect lingers between social meaning(s) and bodily or sensual meaning(s)—Sara Beardsworth calls “unacknowledged suffering”

(Beardsworth 13-17) The rebellious actions of the protesters/rioters are received merely as senseless violence; and this is good for news media and right-wing propaganda.

However, on a much deeper psychological level, Beardsworth, following Kristeva’s critique, would suggest that the violent outbursts witnessed are in fact symptoms of the disconnect between body and social, a disconnect that the individual is unable to adequately amend on their own. When there is no strong social symbolic to meet these private desires, the individual turns into a symptom of social pathology; or, as Kristeva articulates the same point: “Private suffering absorbs political horror into the subject’s psychic microcosm” (1987, 234)

The declining status of the capital-O Other, in this case the State/Politics, is but one symptom that today we live in “a new suffering world” (Kristeva, 1987, 235). These moments of violent outburst are not to be coded in merely negative language, which is to say they are not just “outrageous and monstrous”; by way of the outburst’s abject nature 41 these moments are also productive in terms of what they allow the individual subject to achieve. Kristeva states, for instance, “The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of asocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation” (1987, 235; my emphasis). Riots and violent protests are abject attempts to bring forth—give birth to—a new individual subjectivity from within an undifferentiated collective event. Kristeva articulates the imperfect, messy, and arduous process of this abject individuation in her experience of being forced to drink milk by her parents: “I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself. […] ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit” (Kristeva,

1980, 3). The disgust conjured as a result of being forced to drink the milk is symptomatic of the overbearing and/or oppressive symbolic figures that her parents represented.

Although the reaction in question is reactionary at best, it is pregnant with elusive and subversive tendencies that give birth to new and unexpected subjectivities.

One of the burdens placed upon the subject under late modernity is the responsibility to establish new connections that could possibly lead to a new social symbolic, while knowing that society has ‘advanced’ to the point where such a symbolic is virtually impossible. Keeping in mind that le sémiotique is always pulsating at the edges of subjectivity (i.e., operating at the borders of the individual and society), disrupting the possibility of a stable symbolic, such efforts are perpetually thwarted. “[I]t is a desire for separation, for becoming autonomous and also the feeling of an impossibility of doing so – whence the element of crisis which the notion of abjection 42 carries with it” (Kristeva qtd. in Oliver, 2002, 374). This is not to say that the establishment of such symbolic codes is impossible and therefore hopelessly utopian; rather, the sensations of disgust and revulsion unsettle complacent subjectivity such that the subject is forced into action of some kind. Because abjection does not point to an object as such, but instead pushes away from an existing object, such an experience requires one to remain open to radical possibility as it presents itself en route to

‘nowhere.’ What is offered to the individual subject is a chance to establish a more harmonious balance between le sémiotique and symbolique such that a healthy psychic space can be discovered and sustained for open and fluid dialogue and exchange to take place.

Between Drive and Culture; Or, How does one wager utopia today?

For Kristeva the reconstitution of psychic space amounts to the reconstitution of a better world, and I will be bold and claim such a world to be utopian. Kelly Oliver (2004), philosopher, clarifies the point that “psychic space is not just an inner drama or psychological interior […] Constant and free-flowing negotiations, transference, and translations between the bodily drives and cultural language are necessary to sustain robust psychic space” (217n4); which is another way of saying, as Kristeva does in Tales of Love, “The psyche is one open system connected to another, and only under those conditions is it renewable. If it lives, your psyche is in love. If it is not in love, it is dead”

(1983, 15). The psyche is not the mind or the soul, contained within the strictly narrow confines of the skull and brain of the individual, but is rather an open and fluid exchange 43 of drive-energy between an individual and his or her social milieu. If these open and fluid conditions are not readily available (as Kristeva believes to be the case today, with her diagnosis of the “new maladies of the soul”), psychic space becomes reduced to or reified in terms of drive or culture (i.e., the individual’s body qua somatic symptom or external to the body in culture, namely, the ‘entertainment industry’). By this, Kristeva is claiming that during times of “tendential severance” (see Beardsworth), the ‘closed’ and unhealthy psyche seeks security by turning inward and indulging in the self-gratifying private fantasies of the body, or by cocooning itself in the substitute oceanic feeling provided by culture, namely the entertainment industry. Both of these options are security measures that the psyche enacts in order to protect it from having to take the risk of erecting a new symbolic.29 Such reclusion can also dull the subject to the potential joy and pleasures to be gained through wagering such a risk.

The refounding of an open, healthy, and living psychic space begins with and works through abjection. The jouissance to be gained from having worked through this hardship is akin to “an ‘oceanic feeling,’ as a jubilant osmosis of the subject in the common flesh of a ‘not-yet oneself’ swallowed up in a ‘not-yet world’” (Kristeva, 2006,

8). Just like the process of pregnancy/birth there are no guarantees. The life awaiting the pre-natal being ex utero necessitates a risk, a risk of which the pre-natal being is unaware.

If it were the case that the pre-natal beings could be made aware of the risks of their birth, it is unlikely that such beings would opt to wager such a risk. However, that is exactly the wager or risk that is forced upon the subject confronted by abjection.

One particular historical event that is very important to Kristeva—and that knits together abjection, psychic space, and utopia—is May ’68. “[F]undamentally, I think, 44

May ‘68’s radicalism bears witness to an indefinite sense of mutation in the essence of man, the search for other forms of the sacred” (Kristeva, 2002a, 37). Earlier in the same text: “I am going to use a vocabulary that may shock people […] Infinite jouissance for each person at the intersection of happiness for all… is it anything else but the sacred”

(34; also see “Note” #26 and #27). Kristeva’s notion of a “not-yet-world,” precipitated by the radical wager of jouissance for each person, echoes Ernst Bloch’s notion of the not- yet-conscious developed in the latter’s Principle of Hope. Similarly, Kristeva’s statement that “significance [signifiance] is indeed inherent in the human body” (Kristeva, 1982,

10) seems to reiterate Bloch’s idea that hope functions at the core of what constitutes the human being, much the same way Freud proclaimed the human being to be constituted by the pleasure principle (see Bloch 1954-59). However, in contrast to Bloch, who viewed psychoanalysis as a negation of futurity, Kristeva sees psychoanalysis as one of the few surviving methods available to preserve any possibility of futurity.

May ‘68 was a historical event that witnessed the utopian potential (both constructive and destructive) of confronting/embracing the pure negativity of that which is in excess of the symbolic order. The potential good to emerge from such a radical wager is complicated by the potential harm it can inflict upon both individuals as well as groups. Like the tired-out desire of Kristeva’s “melancholy woman” who knows no bounds, the analysand—once brought to his/her psychic limits—“wants everything, to the end, until death” (Kristeva, 1987a, 86). This desire for everything until death should not be misunderstood as the exsanguination of the powers of agency in the empirical act of dying; rather, Kristeva is using the term “death” metaphorically for purposes of illustrating the level of risk that the individual subject is willing to test in order for the 45 pleasures harboured deep within their suffering to become manifest. Is this not the kind of intensity that we lack today? How does one, today, wager utopia?

Unfortunately, but perhaps not unexpectedly, Kristeva does not offer her reader any ready-made answers. The closest she does come to proffering any recommendation is through her defense of psychoanalysis as a method by means of which the individual subject can return to deeply ingrained psychic traces of abjection and thus work through their own unfulfilled potentialities. Other possible sites for hope include literature and the arts (e.g., painting, sculpture, music). By means of these cultural resources, Kristeva encourages the individual subject to expand the imaginary limitations/horizons of their psyche-soma and by extension increase the sensitivity of his/her affective capacities with regard to his/her own body, others, and the world at large. “I think we all need an experience, by which I mean something unknown, surprise, pain, or delight, and then comprehension of this impact. Is it still possible? Perhaps not […] I prefer to welcome these experiences: I keep my curiosity on call, expectant” (Kristeva, 1996, 11). Kristeva’s cultural theory may appear pretentious, but this would be to miss the intention behind her method. Through her particular recourse to the humanities, her almost religious observations seek to bring the otherwise wildly anarchic sémiotique under control through sublimated practices such that psychic space will remain less volatile, and thus less likely to become reified as either drive or culture. “Theologies and literatures, beyond sin and fiendish characters, invite us to carve out ourselves in a sublime Other—metaphor or metonymy of the sovereign Good” (Kristeva, 1983, 7). Literature—and indeed this is why

I turn to literature in this dissertation—provides a symbolically rich signifying practice by means of which the psyche can rearticulate its topography in a controlled imaginary 46 environment, which is to say, reconstitute its capacities by means of charting unknown psychic lands.

As stated earlier Kristeva argues, “[L]iterature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises” (1980, 208). Literature qua ‘semiotization of the symbolic’ (or, vice versa) is a practice through which jouissance infiltrates that symbolic order. “In cracking the socio-symbolic order, splitting it open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself, and releasing from beneath them the drives born by vocalic or kinetic differences, jouissance works its way into the social and symbolic” (Kristeva, 1974, 79-80). The particular examples that Kristeva uses to illustrate her point, in Revolution in Poetic

Language, are the French poets Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse 1846-

1870) and Stéphane Mallarmé (Étienne Mallarmé 1842-1898). Their poetic works, at the end of the 19th century, constitute a veritable rupture of the dominant symbolic of their time, by most clearly representing the modern form of desire in language. In Strangers to

Ourselves (1991), Kristeva engages with More’s Utopia directly—if for only a few paragraphs—where she lists the various artifacts in More’s work which she calls so much

“negative rhetoric”: the Achoriens are a people without a territory; Adamus is a prince without a people, and the chief city, Amauratum, is a mirage. Kristeva’s point is to affirm that, “surely …we are dealing with a work of the imagination, not a piece of reporting”

(117; my emphasis). Kristeva means to draw her reader’s attention to the psychic meaning of utopia, that utopia is primarily an experience of the imaginary, and more precisely that of the individual. “When one dreams of a happy, harmonious, utopian society, one imagines it built upon love, since love exalts me at the same time as it exceeds or overtaxes me” (Kristeva, 1983, 4). The liminal or frontier zones of the psyche 47 are precarious and sometimes threatening or even dangerous, but given the dire status of the psyche today, it is, as she says, a chance one must take.

Kristeva’s refined engagement with various signifying practices invites others to do the same (i.e., read, write, act, paint, etc.) with the expectation that, through such personal and private engagement, the individual subject will become conscious of something that will affectively increase the psychic range within which they might explore the wonders of the universe. This is, I believe, what Kristeva is hinting at in the quotation borrowed from Reé (1997): “It [Kristeva’s work] was an archeology […] An archeology in search of utopia” (267), and is what Reé meant by titling his paper

“Revolutionary Archeology: Julia Kristeva and the Utopia of the Text.” This form of literary/cultural engagement might, contrary to expanding the range of one’s psychic space, also narrow it through an encounter with something that is traumatizing and that one is not ready to face. Yet Kristeva writes, “However distressing, unbearable, deadly, or exhilarating it may be, this psychic life … allows you access to your body and to other people. […] Whether it harms you or saves you, you are its subject. Our purpose here is to analyze psychic life, that is, to break it down and start over” (1993, 6). This suggests that regardless of the risks—i.e., excessively expanding or reducing psychic space—one must devote oneself to this imperative if one is to have a hope of any sort in today’s late- capitalist cultural climate.

What is abjected … is utopian …

There remain three points of clarification that must be made before moving forward with this dissertation. (1) I have introduced specific concepts from Kristeva’s work (i.e., abjection, jouissance, psychic space, the sacred, sémiotique, and symbolique) and situated them in relation to the concept of utopia. To avoid confusion I want the reader to understand that I do not locate utopia in either a state or phase characterized by the wildly anarchic sémiotique or a state or phase rigidly upheld by an omnipotent symbolique; nor do I locate utopia in the kaleidoscopic delirium of Jouissance or the pure horrid revulsion of a state of abjection; lastly, I do not make pretenses to utopia as an ideal Image qua the sacred. I merely use these terms to sketch out and theorize—by way of literary criticism—the phenomenon of psychic space, the prospect of which today I claim to be veritably utopian in nature.

(2) Throughout the dissertation I alternate my use of the term “abjection.” I understand abjection in two ways: a) abjection qua process, which is to say the action of repulsion away from something disgusting; b) abjection qua environmental milieu, which is to say—for example—the late modern subject lives among so much cultural abjection

(e.g., hollowness, waste, decadence, etc.). When I use the term “abject,” in the sense of the abject, I am referring to a particular figure, object, or quality. It is also worth noting that the mode by which I understand the non-signifying aspects of abjection to manifest is via sémiotique pressures forced upon the edges of the symbolique, seeping or even exploding through the cracks and fissures in ways that appear abject. 49

(3) In terms of my interpretation of abjection, I am taking Kristeva’s argument about abjection (le sémiotique, etc.) outside of the context in which she discusses it, namely the pre-Oedipal mother. Whereas, for Kristeva, abjection is decidedly a horrible, violent, and paralyzing experience brought on by a ‘thing’ that is equally hideous and threatening (notions certainly not conceivable alongside the concept of utopia), I am expanding the range of abjection to include and account for the unexpected positives and pleasures that might spontaneously arise from such otherwise conventional abject horror

(the direction in which I take abjection is more conducive to a novel discourse regarding utopia).

Later in sections 4 and 5, I use the fiction of Samuel R. Delany to articulate various iterations of subjectivity that inform what I call the abject utopian. This figure, developed from multiple character analyses in various works by Delany, is one that struggles to establish a psychic space for itself from within complex and imperfect cultural environments. However, as I will argue, it is the characters’ deviant, abnormal, and sometimes radical dispositions (and the interaction of those characters with their respective environments) that produce radically different or alternative psychic spaces.

These psychic spaces manifest as abject relative to their status quo but are nonetheless utopian in their own right. These psychic spaces are utopian in the way that Susan

McManus (2003) proclaims utopia as “resolutely disruptive, inherently transgressive, profoundly performative, and fundamentally creative” (14). Although I argue that these psychic spaces and relationships are utopian, they do manifest as abject within the context of the culture at large and from which they emerge. Subjectivity is never achievable as such since, as Kristeva asserts, “abjection is above all ambiguity” (1980, 9). The abject 50 utopian is neither subject nor object but rather a pre-egoistic fledgling, teetering on the cusp of undifferentiated psychic/somatic development, and characterized by “the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (Kristeva, 1980, 5). To this end, abjection is a productive concept to work with, despite its abhorrent qualities, and indeed I claim it is couched within a decidedly utopian context. Kristeva says that abjection is experienced when the subject, “weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside” (the result of a weak or declining social-symbolic), “finds the impossible within” (5). The “impossible within” is terrifying and is equally as flawed as a failed external identification in the symbolic.

The characters and spaces in Delany’s novels project radically alternative— abject—ways of living compared to the standardized commodity form of late capitalism.

Insofar as this is the case, these characters mimic Kristeva’s reinterpretation of Albert

Camus’s dictum “I rebel, therefore we are.” For Kristeva, Camus’s reformulation of the cogito with regard to the challenges of modern living becomes: “I revolt, therefore we are still to come” (Kristeva, 2002a, 42). The horribly distorted desires and anticipations of

Delany’s characters anticipate a future world—i.e., a utopian world—made possible by means of a reconstituted psychic space that has its origins in the decrepit, sometimes violent and horrifying, conditions of their contemporary life-world. Indeed, I agree that this is an unorthodox approach to imagining a path toward utopia, but Kristeva’s is a theory that imagines the necessary preconditions in order to maximize any utopian potential (i.e., meaning, language, desire, etc.). In other words, it is only by confronting one’s own “abominable limits” that abjection becomes “an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new signifiance” (Kristeva, 1980, 15; my italics), mimicking 51 the pop-cultural euphemism: ‘no pain, no gain.’ Echoing Jameson’s (2005) claim that utopia is “no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its productions and the very process of construction as such” (217), so too do I understand abjection as not the bodily or psychic state of being in Utopia; rather, it provides a dirty/messy/cumbersome framework for helping to imagine a pathway toward Utopia.

Section 3: The Signifying Potential of Utopia in Delany’s Fiction

I write yearning for a world in which all these stories might be merely “beautiful.”

(Delany on his Nevèrÿon tales)30

Of the fictions of twentieth-century science fiction author, editor, and anthologist

Basil Davenport (1905-1966), Delany says the following:

I respond to them with complete emotional bewilderment as to why anyone could

want to write the particular tales he does—why anyone would use what of the

method as I can divine beneath his web of allusions and reconstructions […]

Davenport brings me again and again to breath-lost awe at the beauties he

manages to construct in that lucid, glimmering language field. (1985, 380)

Later he adds, “The effect for me is totally aesthetic and awesomely pleasurable” (1985,

381). The novels of Samuel R. Delany have had, and continue to have, the same effect on my life. In this section I claim that Delany’s work is outstanding for signifying affects and emotions, i.e., liminal or frontier experiences of the psyche-soma à la Kristeva. Delany’s fictions convey the sense of a renewed psychic space that can be used to rethink utopianism today. Mark A. Tabone (2013) rightly argues that Delany’s works other than

Triton have contributed to the genre of the critical utopia, but have not yet received the same sustained attention—as Triton (186). Furthermore, piggybacking on McEvoy’s

(1984) observation of Delany’s “Desire … to show how people might live in a different society” (52), Tabone suggests, “there is a utopianism intrinsic to Delany’s project as an author that fundamentally shaped the trajectory of his literary career” (186). In what follows I will develop this argument by interpreting various novels from Delany’s oeuvre 53 using a Kristevan hermeneutic, emphasizing aspects of le sémiotique, abjection, jouissance, and the sacred insofar as they gesture toward a novel utopian sentiment.

From the “Need to Believe” to Delany’s Utopian Senses

In her book This Incredible Need To Believe (2006), Kristeva comments on the ability of some writers (e.g., she refers to Proust and Colette) to grasp the dimension of meaning specific to le sémiotique: “At the crossroads between semiotic and symbolic, and via this ‘impudence of enunciation’ that is style, sublimation communicates to the reader the impact of a perception, triggering the effect of a contact with the real. An illumination even. Or an ‘oceanic feeling’” (Kristeva, 2006, 37). In contrast to Freud, who did not think highly of such oceanic feeling, Kristeva champions the cultivation of this feeling qua “prelinguistic or translinguistic experience” insofar as these sensations support belief (the latter being something that Kristeva claims humanity cannot do without). By “belief,” Kristeva is not referring to religious belief proper, but rather is arguing for belief in terms of “the strong sense of an unshakable certainty, sensory plenitude, and ultimate truth […] an exorbitant more-than-life [sur-vie]” (2006, 7). It is my argument here that Delany’s fiction communicates this sur-vie à la Kristeva’s le sémiotique, which I understand to be utopian. In other words, through an examination of various moments and scenarios in some of his fiction in which the limitations of the body’s sensorium are sketched out, one can witness sémiotique (prelinguistic) impulses that gesture to a yet unknown horizon of a new and perhaps better world. 54

Delany’s literary talents “communicate to the reader the impact of a perception.”

A perception of what? I claim that the perception is of a psychological utopia. But this cannot be represented in terms of an image, for utopia is a no place. Certainly the perception that is communicated in Delany’s writing is a perception of that which does not lend itself to representation as such, but which can be felt through representation. In other words, this perception is of the latent content of a dream more so than the manifest content. In literature, these perceptions are ‘sensed’ through the tactile, gustatory, olfactory, oral, and visual experiences enabled by the text. I make the argument that

Delany’s texts are at their core tactile, gustatory, olfactory, oral, and visual (as well and perhaps most importantly, musical, i.e., aural) and semiotic in the Kristevan sense. The sémiotique in Delany’s work speaks to a primordial world-building insofar as the sensations that are found in his works are vested in sensing utopia rather than representing it.

Touching Utopia

In “The Semiology of Silence,” included in Silent Interviews (1994a), Delany begins his interview by saying, “I begin, a sentence lover” (21). Here he explicitly links amorous feelings (i.e., le sémiotique) with the symbolic. “I’m forever delighted, then delighted all over, at the things sentences can trip and trick you into saying, into seeing.

I’m astonished—just plain tickled!—at the sharp turns and tiny tremors they can whip your thoughts across. I’m entranced at their lollop and flow, their prickles and points”

(21). The power of sentences—prose—to “trip,” “tickle,” “prick,” and cause “tremors” 55

(i.e., tactility) is privileged from the start. Closely juxtaposed here is a statement by

Delany that sends my observations cascading into so much analytic pleasure: “Oh, I’ve always been a bathroom dictionary browser” (21). Whether interpreted metaphorically or literally, the association between words and language acquisition, pleasure, and the bathroom—that place where the most basic and unregulated processes of the child’s body

(i.e., expulsion of feces and urine) are regulated by the Mother-of-the-infans—speaks to the status words and sentences have at the limits of consciousness. In other words, what

Delany’s confession suggests is that words and sentences have a meaning for him beyond that of mere information specific to the symbolic realm. Delany’s pleasure is a pleasure in the visceral non-signifying meaning that words and sentences communicate.31

Gustatory, Or, Digesting Utopia

Consider how other than tactility, Delany’s work is about food, gastronomy, and the pleasure of eating. Delany’s first autobiography Heavenly Breakfast (1979; hereafter cited HB), named after the music group and commune to which Delany belonged from

1967 to 1968, is argued by Nyong’o (2012) to be primarily interested in tracking the feminist, anti-racist, and proto-queer possibilities of sexual liberation and communal egalitarianism. Not only can the autobiography be read as describing the transient nature of utopia (qua intentional community), it can also be read as stressing the role poetics play in establishing the rhythm and structure of utopia. Nyong’o’s argument speaks to the musical nature and message of Heavenly Breakfast: “Such possibilities […] arise through ambient poetics rather than self-conscious identity politics” (758). Like poetics, I am 56 equally drawn to other non-linguistic aspects of Heavenly Breakfast, namely the lavish litany of food described as well as how food is implicated in the Heavenly Breakfast commune (here an allegory for utopia):

We averaged five meals a day. Reema and Little Dave did most of the day-to-day

cooking. Eggs, hash, home fries, pancakes, toast from an eccentric pre-World War

II toaster which, were it not watched carefully, would burn four more neat holes in

the oilcloth; apple and pear juice; cabbage squash—zucchini, butternut, and

acorn—collards, spaghetti sauce going for hours; chicken, chops, roasts; and lots

more pancakes […] Maybe twice a week, when the regular cooking flagged, I’d

fix boned ducks stuffed with fruit and sausages, mushroom salad, an array of

curries; sometimes just a stew, hush puppies; lemon-chiffon cake; a platter of

baked bananas with lemon juice, flamed in brandy. (HB, 15)

There are repeated scenarios in Heavenly Breakfast where food makes an appearance in the organization of the commune. There is one particular scenario in which a young mother, Liz, and her two-year-old son, Electric Baby, squat at the commune for a period of time.

The scenario dramatizes the way various regimes of food regulation affect inclusivity/exclusivity of particular social arrangements. The particular scene in question dramatizes a tension between two newcomers to the Heavenly Breakfast (Liz and Electric

Baby, or E; Mother and Child respectively) and Delany, especially pertaining to what food was appropriate for Electric Baby to ingest.32 Electro (as Delany says he referred to the child) was denied a forkful of pork from Snipper (one of the commune residents).

“Liz, sitting on the covered bathtub, reading glanced up. ‘No. He can’t have any of that 57 kind of food. Come on, E. It’s not good for you’” (HB, 29). But Electro kept urging that he was hungry and asking those around him if he could have some of their food. “What did it for me” Delany narrates, “was when Liz, walking to the sink to leave her plate, passed the stove, picked up a chop with two fingers, dunked it in the thinner gravy and took a bite” (HB, 30-31). Liz confesses to Delany, when confronted, that she used to cook macrobiotic food and that “sometimes I slip up and nibble” but “of course I’m more concerned about E. than I am about myself” (HB, 31). Delany somewhat counsels Liz on her behaviour and her decision to withhold certain nutrients from her child and in the end it was concluded that Liz was simply a person who did not particularly enjoy eating.

“[F]rom then on, we fed Electric Baby, and as long as somebody talked to her about it, she didn’t seem to mind. Two weeks later, when they left, he looked a lot healthier” (HB,

32).

Food, gastronomy, and digestion—aspects of le sémiotique—are foregrounded as being essential to the “ambient poetics” of the utopian spirit of music, sex, and alternative world-making that Nyong’o writes of in her article. More important, I argue, is the scene discussed above involving Liz and Electro (i.e., mother-child) and the regulation of food in terms of Electro’s hunger. The proximity of digestive practice and childhood in

Heavenly Breakfast is analogous to the proximity of childhood and the acquisition of language that Kristeva claims is within the domain of maternal eroticism.

Smelling Utopia

A synaesthetic will experience multiple senses as one, for example, seeing sound or hearing scent. The neural information the olfactory receptors send to the brain are closely linked with taste. This is why I treat the gustatory alongside the olfactory here insofar as the latter, too, is expressed through Delany’s writing/text. In Nova (1968; hereafter cited as N), Delany’s science fiction ‘grail narrative,’ one of the characters—a gypsy youth named The Mouse—plays an “instrument” called a sensory-syrynx which when played projects images, scents—an overwhelming sensorial experience—conjuring within the audience sensations bordering on jouissance:

Colors sluiced the air with fungal patterns as a shape subsumed the breeze and

fell, to form further on, a brighter emerald, a duller amethyst. Odors flushed the

wind with vinegar, snow, ocean, ginger, poppies, rum. Autumn, ocean, ginger,

ocean, autumn; ocean, ocean, the surge of ocean again, while light foamed in the

dimming blue that underlit the Mouse’s face. Electric arpeggios of neo-raga rilled.

Perched on the railing, the Mouse looked between the images, implosions

on bright implosions, and at his own brown fingers leaping on the frets, as light

from the machine flowed on the backs of his hands. And his fingers fell. Images

vaulted from under his palms. (N, 18-19)

The experience of scent in Delany’s novels goes beyond this particular excerpt. One might refer to the use of feces, urine, and ejaculate in The Mad Man, discussed in Section

6, to get a sense for how the sweet and pungent, the acidic and salty are vital to a specific world-formation. The style by which these sensations affect the reader is similar to the 59 enumeration of foods listed in Heavenly Breakfast. Delany’s inclusion of the signifier

“ocean” multiple times in the above excerpt from Nova suggests a link between the

“oceanic feeling” or presubjective state of being in the work of Freud and Kristeva and the anticipation of a world yet-to-come that awaits the presubject.

As scent and musicality

The aesthetic love for music and musicality is everywhere displayed in Delany’s writing. Nyong’o has argued for the centrality of music with regard to the spontaneous self-regulating principles of the commune as a functioning organism in Heavenly

Breakfast. Musicality, insofar as it is implicitly utilized in world-construction, is present in many other instances of Delany’s fiction. Consider The Einstein Intersection (1967; hereafter cited as TEI), Delany’s future mythological telling of Lo Lobey and his alien race’s efforts to productively emerge from the detritus of human civilization, long after humans have passed from Earth. The narrative is structured using alternating chapters of

Lo Lobey’s story and Delany’s concurrently written journal entries. While writing The

Einstein Intersection Delany was travelling the Mediterranean. By alternating two forms of writing Delany demonstrates a critical self-awareness with regard to the material roots of his fiction. In one journal entry Delany writes:

Slipped from the night waters of the Adriatic and now we skirt down the strait

toward the Piraeus. At the horizon right and left monstrously beautiful mountains

gnaw the sky. The ship is easy on the morning. The speakers give up French,

English, and Greek pop music. Sun silvers the hosed deck, burns over the 60

smokestack. Bought deck passage; big and bold last night I walked into a cabin

and slept beautifully. Back outside this morning I wonder what effect Greece will

have on TEI [The Einstein Intersection] The central subject of the book is myth.

This music is so appropriate for the world I float on. I was aware how well it fitted

the capsulated life of New York. Its torn harmonies are even more congruent with

the rest of the world. How can I take Lobey into the center of this bright chaos

propelling these sounds? […]

Did Orpheus want to live after he lost Eurydice the second time? He had a

very modern choice to make when he decided to look back. What is its musical

essence?

Writer’s Journal, Gulf of Corinth, November 1965. (TEI, 65)

The connection between multi-sensory experience and musicality—as I have been detailing it thus far—and any possible utopian world-building, as dramatized in Delany’s fiction, might perhaps be more explicitly demonstrated through Sara Heimbecker’s 2008 article on the German composer Richard Wagner and American John Cage. Both Wagner and Cage sought utopian projects through their musical performances. Heimbecker writes, “Wagner’s Musikdrama was designed to be a corrective to what he perceived as broken social, political, and artistic value systems, just as Cage’s multimedia

‘happenings’ were designed to precipitate global mind change” (480).

Similar to the way in which Delany creates a kaleidoscopic sensorial experience in his novels through literary signifiers—resulting, I claim, in a utopian world-view—so too do Cage’s multimedia “happenings.” Heimbecker details one such performance hosted at the University of Illinois’s Assembly Hall, a sport-stadium sized arena, that included the 61 use of 7 harpsichords, 51 tape players, 208 computer-generated tapes, 64 slide projectors

(projecting 6400 slides), and 8 film projectors (projecting 40 films), lasting 4.5 hours. The multimedia happening was intended by Cage to demonstrate the world in which he wished to live: “a world that allowed for personal freedom; a world of abundance; a world in which each perspective differed and all perspectives fared the same”

(Heimbecker, 478). Heimbecker’s interpretation of Cage’s position mirrors the interpretation of Delany that I advance here using Kristeva: any possible Utopia as such will not emerge from specific partisan politics but rather the political as such. I understand the political to differ from politics insofar as the latter is predicated on identity and static concepts as they are in the present. The political is not predicated on identity or any static concepts rooted in the present; rather, the political is outside (i.e., ou-topic) of now, in no particular place. It signifies a pure dissension from the status quo and gestures toward the pure potentiality of another better world to come. Delany’s signification of the senses by means of their inherent poetic musicality conveys this to the reader.

To Speak or Not to Speak Utopia…

The world-building capacities of the newborn infans are expressed through the echolalia of the pre-linguistic phase. It is important to notice that the non-signifying verbal and bodily gestures of the pre-linguistic phase are not meaningless babbles or prattle; rather, they anticipate the shores of a world the fledgling infans is always already constructing. Delany highlights the force these presignifying expressions and gestures hold with respect to the world into which it is born: “[T]hey’re questions, exclamations, 62 protests, incantations, and demands” (Delany, 1994a, 21-2). It is in this way that orality factors into Delany’s texts. For Delany, orality—speech-acts and utterances—is dialectically connected to that which is not spoken. In another autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988; hereafter cited as M), Delany recites a dream he had when he was young. He recalls sitting on a blanket in a field with a boy who was cross-legged, bare foot, and of the same “racial make up.” After Delany says “Hello,” he states that the boy’s “mouth moved a little, but there were no words” (M, 98). The boy could not talk.

“He touched his throat and smiled at me with the pleasure of not having to explain […]

Without words, he told me his name was Snake. Bad people had cut his tongue out, and he’d been afraid no one would understand what he was saying again” (M, 98; my italics).

Delany affirms that the boy in the dream “doubled me and split something off from me, as though my self (itself) had been split by an astonishing gap” (M, 98). The gap opened by the split in Delany’s subjectivity as represented in the barefoot, tongueless boy speaks to two voices: one mundane, one utopian. By this I mean that the words that the boy cannot speak are the words that cannot be heard by denizens of the here and now; those who are captured by—and can only operate according to—the dominant symbolic forms of discourse. These silent, unheard words anticipate a language to come, a language that

Delany is, in his oneiric state, capable of hearing in its absence. Because silent, the world does not exist as such; however, the reader is informed that the boy took pleasure in not having to explain his silence. He knows the world of his perceptions exists, even though it is veritably ‘nowhere’ to be seen.

In terms of his fiction, The Jewels of Aptor (1962; hereafter cited as JA) demonstrates how the ‘powers of silence’ are sometimes congruous with the powers of 63 horror (see Kristeva’s Powers of Horror). One character, a small four-armed thief known only as Snake, is recruited by a captain to retrieve the jewels that she desires and which are imbued with revolutionary power. Snake speaks no words but is telepathic. Geo, another member of the recruited team, says to a giant bear-like creature named Urson,

“Snake has seen into human minds, Urson. He’s seen things directly that the rest of us only learn from a sort of secondhand observation” (JA, 37). At the beginning of the novel, which functionally amounts to a Prologue, the reader is made aware that something horrible has occurred. No explicit details are provided save that a woman is taken down to the sea after being made to watch a film: “I think it was pretty awful. I think it was terrible. Why did you show it to me? He was just a little boy. What reason could they possibly have had for doing that to him?” (JA, 1). The event in question turns out, in the end, to be the de-tonguing of Snake who has—telepathically—heard the voice of the goddess, Argo. Snake’s interpretation of the Divine as communicated through the voice of Argo is fundamentally at odds with others who claim to have likewise heard it.

Whereas other interpreters infer “the revelation of a concrete God” (JA, 162), Snake’s vision did not result in “the terrifying sealing up process of a more or less active and competent, if not healthy, mind” (JA, 162). Snake’s witness to the Divine was akin to a

“disruption” in Jameson’s sense of the term—a permanent “gap” as referred to in

Delany’s retelling of his dream in Motion—that resists concretization and yet provides a vision full of renewed promise. In the narrative of Jewels, this absent/present vision is embodied in the placement of the City of New Hope, “a dream materialized [but] which sits in ruin now on the far shore [of Aptor]” (JA, 101). 64

In place of Snake’s ability to speak the message of the Divine (i.e., Argo), Delany infuses the world surrounding the characters, as they embark on their journey, with the utopian potentiality of speech/orality. References to tongues are scattered throughout:

“Tongues of light licked the black rock” (JA, 122) and “It was early enough in the morning so that the sunlight lapped pink tongues over the giant urns along the edge of the path” (JA, 124). Extra-linguistic entities such as the sun and color speak with vibrancy, or at least are interpreted as speaking a kind of language that the vast majority of individuals are incapable of hearing. Might the subject appropriate for utopia—the abject utopian— be the subject who can hear this silent voice and see this absent vision? Might the subject appropriate for utopia be a threatened subject, at risk of having his or her tongue cut out so as to be prevented from sharing this (un)sharable message?

An Eye for Utopia; Or, Seeing Nowhere

Finally, the Visual assumes a precarious place in Delany’s writing, especially in terms of its utopian potential. Again, the gesture to the visual dialectically implicates that which is not visible. To illustrate this point I wish to draw the reader’s attention to

Delany’s trilogy, The Fall of the Towers (1963-65; hereafter cited as FT). The story is about a civilization emerging from the ashes and fragments of that which preceded it. An evil entity—The Lord of the Flames—which cannot be seen, threatens the empire of

Toromon with impending war. The first lines of Book One—“Out of the Dead City”

(1963)—suggest to the reader that the story is just as much about colour and the power of 65 the perception of colour (or the powers of vision more broadly) than it is about apocalypse and salvation:

The green of beetles’ wings…the red of polished carbuncle…a web of silver fire.

Lightning tore his eyes apart, struck deep inside his body. He felt his bones split

and clutched the stomach of his coveralls, doubling around what would be pain.

But it was gone. He was falling through blue smoke, cool as brown ice.

[…] Sand saddled away from him. Black hair fell over his eyes; he shook

it away and sat back on his heels.

The sky was turquoise. The horizon was too close. The sand was more like

lime…(FT, 3)

The “green of beetles’ wings…the red of polished carbuncle…a web of silver fire” mantra is repeated throughout the trilogy. Typically it accompanies the visionary experiences of protagonist Jon Koshar when he is ‘contacted’ by a triple-lobed intelligence that slowly reveals to him, “Your mind must acclimate to us slowly. You live in a bound, circumscribed, and isolated world, and if we broke on your consciousness all at once, you would be too ready to dismiss us as a psychotic fantasy” (FT, 66). This message is later revealed to be the proper way to win the war. Jon is told at one point that he is an agent of this “consciousness” and that part of what constitutes the proper means of winning a war against that which one cannot see is an intuitive telepathic communion with things. The tri-lobed consciousness continues:

We both can touch the perceptions of life forms on various worlds; this involves a

good deal more work and energy than travelling from one side of the universe to

the other, for we must convert our own vision in which neither time nor space are 66

of much importance […] where the experiences of one individual can create

emotions and ideas unknown to the mind and heart of another. (FT, 66-7)

Contrary to this vision-inspired method of combating the apocalypse, another character in the trilogy, Tel, despite all good intentions, is fighting the war with his comrades in a more traditional way mimicking trench warfare. He and his troops enter into enemy territory, “beyond the barrier” (FT, 201), where no human can go due to the extreme levels of radiation separating it from the rest of the universe. It is a desolate place, and yet it is only desolate and meaningless if that is what one ‘sees.’ I claim that the proverbial wasteland “beyond the barrier” is emblematic of utopia. This is demonstrated in a scene where Tel is conversing with his compatriot in the military enterprise, Lug, about each other’s home. Lug looks around: “‘No sun,’ he said. ‘No moon. Home is where I live, and then there is the rest of the wide world. But where is this?’ He glanced forward through the mist. ‘Noplace’” (FT, 209). Delany’s decision to include the signifier “Noplace” is significant. Lug sees simply a barren war ground, whereas in every small and seemingly insignificant fragment there is the potential of seeing, and thus cultivating, a world (a home qua Bloch’s “Heimat”) such that a veritable utopia (i.e., no place) can be ushered in. The challenge is to see the then in the now.

Vision is implicated in another of Delany’s novels, this time one of his later mainstream novels, Dark Reflections (2007; hereafter cited as DR). The story follows an

African-American poet, Arnold Hawley, backwards through his life. At the beginning of the novel, Hawley is about to be awarded the Proctor Prize for Poetry, but is otherwise a lonely man on the cusp of old age and fearful of it. Moving backward in time the story 67 traces his emotional life as he becomes married to a troubled woman and further back to his youthful experience with a black photographer of eroticism.

As I have argued regarding The Fall of the Towers, Dark Reflections is a book that tells a different story than the one on the surface. Dark Reflections is a book about the potential of lost vision. By this I do not mean the power of having gone blind or of never having vision because of some congenital abnormality; rather, by lost vision I am referring to the excessive amount of information that the human sensorium witnesses but does not process at a given time. The overflow of information must be ignored or filtered out (e.g., repressed into the unconscious). Delany illustrates this point in Dark Reflections during the segment of the story that tells of Hawley’s encounter with an erotic photographer during the former’s youth.

Following an incident where Hawley fails to tip a deliveryman (Slake Bowman) adequately, he seeks out the young man’s residence (also partly because he is sexually aroused by the man). It turns out that the boy lives with another mate (Joey Salieri, the photographer) on “Paradise Hill, over where it crosses Eighteenth” (DR, 232). While over at the house, Hawley stumbles across “sixty or seventy framed photographs” that he initially interprets as exploitative and intended for blackmail: photographs of men in erotic, sometime compromising positions. “Slake Bowman was in more than half—in all but two, he was naked […] In them all were other men, also naked. All were flagrantly entwined in lascivious and—for the moment Arnold looked—incomprehensible acts: white men, colored men …” (DR, 251). Hawley’s uncritical, yet honest, reaction is to accuse the two (Salieri especially) of being blackmailers, and he runs from the scene.

Some thirty years later, in 1988, Hawley is walking through the West Village “3 days 68 beyond June’s Gay Pride Day” and sees in the window to the Oscar Wilde bookstore, “a display of three oversized photography books—all featuring male nudes” (DR, 285).

Hawley notices the name printed in white letters across the display: ‘SALIERI.’ Picking up the book Hawley reads the inside flap:

…Boston photographer Joseph Salieri (1929-1975) ... is one of a number of mid-

century photographers who pioneered the serious homoerotic photograph. At the

time he took them many of his pictures were considered pornography—and were

even sold as such—but in more recent years people have begun to appreciate their

extraordinary composition, as well as the astonishingly fresh vision of an all-but-

utopian joy… . (DR, 286)

At the time when he was young and in the presence of Salieri and Slake, Hawley did not know that he was part of the fabric of a revolutionary moment (“What’s revolutionary is that they’re happy”[DR, 290]). Only later, and apparently by random happenstance, is he made aware of this revolutionary potential which was initially lost on him. In one moment, Hawley’s proverbial ‘stimulus shield’ is punctured and his entire worldview, psychic space, is recast. The revelation brought to life through Hawley is not apocalyptic yet is nonetheless powerful enough to cause an entire phase shift in his comportment toward the world (i.e., affectively alter his psychic space). “When the keystone of a life structure that you have erected turns out to be a falsity falsely fixed, the whole does not necessarily collapse to the concrete in a cloud of steel, masonry, and glass […] When a keystone is dynamited free, while it may not crumble the world, it makes things shift”

(DR, 287, 293). 69

Dark Reflections furthermore expresses the sémiotique via vision and eyes, through the many bouts of crying that Hawley experiences. “It isn’t fair, he kept thinking, as he hiked along. It isn’t fair. When you get this old, every little thing makes you cry. It just isn’t fair…” (DR, 99). Later on: “[A]gain Arnold began to cry, from the frustration of having to stand there so long, from trying so many times to get the thing to let him in— from again missing his train!” (DR, 113). And finally: “Before tears spilled down his cheeks, the sadness subsided…” (DR, 195). In terms of style, these recurring tears symbolize a silent excess of unfulfilled potential of vision. That is to say, the recurring tears of Hawley are significant of that which he witnessed (i.e., Salieri’s photography) but had not yet come to recognize (i.e., its utopian potential qua joy). Because of this, his body excessively secretes lacrimal fluid—silent language of the body—awaiting reconnection of the utopian sémiotique with the symbolique. Hawley’s tears can be interpreted (and indeed this point is important to my overall position regarding the subject appropriate for utopia qua abject utopian) as implying that we all cry when our current vision of the world does not cohere with that of our body’s vision. The discord is expressed through a silent language of tears. Tears, however, act as a constant reminder that the body’s vision of a better place is always promised and never abandoned. Only when we cease to cry will there cease to be a utopian potential.

Section 4: The Strange Utopian Potential of a “Wounded Narcissus” in Triton

Having provided many examples of where le sémiotique can be felt or sensed in

Delany’s work and how it serves to convey a sense of utopia specific to the subjective psyche, I now turn to one of Delany’s better-known science fiction novels, Trouble on

Triton (1976; hereafter cited as T). Triton, like the other science fiction novel of Delany’s

I use in section 5 (i.e., Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand [1984]), can be read as a late modern “tale of love.” I place the latter phrase in scare quotes to draw the connection between Triton (and Stars) and Kristeva’s Tales of Love (1983), a study of the history of discourses of love (both social and imaginary) from the Greek, Roman, Christian and medieval eras up until the modern era (e.g., Plato, Ovid, Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux,

Romeo and Juliet to Baudelaire, Stendhal, and Bataille).

Triton is firmly established and well received within the utopian literary canon, mainly due to Tom Moylan’s recognition of the text’s “critical” use of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia in order to destroy utopia as a genre and blueprint while preserving it is a dream, desire, and/or potential. Unlike the other three critical utopias that Moylan examines in his book (i.e., The Dispossessed, The Female Man, and Woman on the Edge of Time), in Triton “the impact of the revolutionary person on the establishment and/or survival of utopia is not of central importance; rather, […] the emphasis is on the impact of the revolutionary system on the individual” (Demand 161-2). Supplementary to

Moylan’s reading, the interpretation of Triton that I offer here is the following: Triton’s

“revolutionary system” is partly characterized by an absence of a social discourse of love; and it is because of this lack of a discourse of love that the novel’s anti-hero Bron 71

Helstrom can be read as a psychically impoverished sufferer and not merely an unlikeable male chauvinist as he is currently received.33 In other words, despite the utopian social arrangement of Triton,34 the emphasis on desire, pleasure, sex, and not love, allows for

Bron’s horribly flawed and generally unlikeable character to be re-interpreted as one possible iteration of an abject utopian.

Triton: Utopia without Love?

Triton is the far-future story about “the misadventures of Bron, the un-political anti-hero, who rather than helping to achieve or preserve the alternative of Triton resists it and remains a damaged self, a male supremacist and solipsist, unable to get beyond his early socialization on Mars” (Demand 163). The reader is made aware of the incredible range of possibilities that the advanced technology on Triton allows for; these possibilities mainly reside within the domain of sex and sexuality (e.g., there are “forty or fifty sexes” [T, 99]), but generally speaking Triton’s social structure is established in such a way that anyone can openly and equally have any desire met. Moylan observes, “To be sure, it is mentioned that marriage, prostitution, and money are all illegal; whereas drugs, sex, and religion are permitted”; there is, however, strictly speaking an “absence of sexual or other taboos” (Demand 167 and 169). This ensures a free flow of desire and pleasure, or what Wendy Gay Pearson refers to as the “unstable aspects of a life that seems to be lived in a kind of permanent jouissance” (Pearson, 469). The only desire that cannot be achieved or met on Triton is Bron’s raging heterosexuality. 72

Bron lives in what is functionally a utopia, and yet he is miserable, even with the endless choices for alternative ways of living that are literally right in front of him. Why is this? “Gone is the factor of internal, hereditary, or moralistic repression or guilt – arrived is a society with the economic/technological/ideological/psychic freedom to distribute the surplus capital, labor, and libidinal energy among all the people for maximum human fulfillment” (Demand 172). Unable to see himself critically and self- reflexively, Bron ignores the attention and support of the friends and acquaintances whom he does find on Triton and who try to get him to open up to the utopian diversity on the tiny moon. “[R]ather than turning to the values and social structures of the new society,

Bron,” already seeking salvation on Triton from the Old World, “simply uses the technology of that society to escape one more time” (Demand 177). Granted that

Delany’s intention behind using Bron as a hilariously comedic foil is to emphasize the non-sexist, non-racist, and non-oppressive Triton, perhaps the reason why Bron is unable to accommodate himself to life on Triton is because his psyche is sick—in the clinical sense—from lack of love. I think that if Kristeva were to read Triton, she would take some pity on poor Bron in terms of the devastatingly impoverished nature of his psychic life. Assuming that as a male prostitute on Mars Bron was not raised within a milieu of love, I want to turn to a critique of the social arrangement, structures, and relationships on

Triton to demonstrate how they too lack a code of love which does not help an already damaged subjectivity. Contrary to the critical reception of Bron as “hopeless,” I affirm that Bron is an iteration of an abject utopian, a “wounded Narcissus” wandering in search of love.

“New Maladies” on Triton

In New Maladies of the Soul (1993), Kristeva discusses the emergence of what she calls “new patients” who show up on the analyst’s couch as a result of living in late modern society. Her argument is guided by the premise that late modern societies do not provide adequate cultural resources that allow for the fortification of the individual’s private psychic life. Instead, she claims, these societies are primarily interested in the social realm and how individuals, insofar as they form society, can be best administered to maximize society’s efficiency. Kristeva writes:

I am picturing a sprawling metropolis with glass and steel buildings that reach to

the sky, reflect it, reflect each other, and reflect you – a city filled with people

steeped in their own image who rush about with overdone make-up on and who

are cloaked in gold, pearls, and fine leather, while in the next street over, heaps of

filth abound and drugs accompany the sleep or the fury of the social outcasts. (27)

The denizens of such a city, Kristeva holds, are not healthy or even remotely happy, but rather efficiently harnessed by the forces of the market and the consumption of the Image; hence the repetition of “reflect,” qua mirror, suggesting a stagnated psychic development roughly aligning with Lacan’s mirror stage and the narcissism that it falsely props up.

People are sick in such a city (psychically and physically, too) according to Kristeva because they live their psychic lives bound to the surface image (symbolic) of themselves and others, with virtually no attention paid to what is beneath the surface of the mirror. It is, however, precisely what is “beneath” the mirror image, or what she calls the

“previous-to-the-mirror-stage development,”35 that is important to cultivate and develop 74 in order to be healthy and happy. Although not the “sprawling metropolis” of which

Kristeva speaks, Triton can be analyzed in terms of such a metropolis in order to tease out certain implications for how advanced modern societies can potentially affect the utopian status of the individual.

Delany’s Triton and Kristeva’s sprawling metropolis are both heterotopias, which is to say they are both “a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault 1967, 24). Although Triton is a literary construct and

Kristeva’s sprawling metropolis is speculative (but perhaps identical to the actual material conditions of the present in many cities), both fit Foucault’s description of a heterotopia; both fit the scope of the “space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space” (Foucault, 1967, 23). That is to say, Triton and Kristeva’s sprawling metropolis are two different places where subjectivity is distorted, by which I mean social identity contorted and implicated in unexpected ways that simultaneously inhibit and prohibit certain subjective capacities. Depending on context, personalities multiply rather than reduce, and everybody has a place (whether they like it or not), even the “social outcasts” in Kristeva’s city.

Granted there are specific economic and cultural factors that bind people to certain undesirable places in the contemporary world, perhaps especially in cities (e.g., those who dwell among filth and drugs do not necessarily do so out of preference but are rather driven there by circumstance), in Triton such heterotopic spaces are provided such that if one chose to, one could easily have access to such a place. This aspect of Triton—the 75 point that there is a place for every “type” of individual—is a feature that I see as being similar, but not identical, to the city of which Kristeva speaks and which she correspondingly deems unhealthy.36 In such a city or society, Kristeva says, there would be nothing to do but “buy and sell goods and images, which amounts to the same thing”

(1998, 27). This is not to suggest that Triton operates based on a market economy similar to the one Kristeva refers to above, but Triton’s society of ‘post-scarcity desire’ does come close. One particular way in which this is the case is how the seemingly endless opportunities to have one’s desire sated does not make one happy but rather miserable and frustrated. Bron (“a [self assured] reasonably happy man” [T, 1]) can be used to explore this phenomenon in some depth, that is: how a society supposedly curtailed toward individual well-being can in fact cause the individual greater pain. During one of

Bron’s many rants about how odd he finds Triton, he expresses how strange is the fact that there is a ready-made social outlet for everyone, even for the person who wants to manacle eighteen-year old boys to the wall and pierce their nipples with red-hot needles:

And if you’re just not satisfied with the amount or quality of eighteen-year old

boys that week, you can make an appointment to have your preferences switched.

And while you are at it, if you find your own body distasteful, you can have it

regenerated, dyed green or heliotrope, padded out here, slimmed down there […]

And if you’re just too jaded for any of it, you can turn to the solace of religion and

let your body mortify any way it wants while you concentrate on whatever your

idea of Higher Things happens to be, in the sure knowledge that when you’re tired

of that, there’s a diagnostic computer waiting with soup and a snifter in the wings

to put you back together. (T, 100) 76

Bron’s perplexity at the extreme scenarios available on Triton is grounded in his inability to confront, and work through his own “previous-to-the-mirror-stage.” The fact that he has not reconciled himself to this aspect of his psyche is no direct fault of Triton’s (it was the social structures of the Old World, specifically Mars, that distorted Bron’s psyche— namely his job as a prostitute); however, considering that Bron fled to Triton with the faint hope of a better life there, the fact that Bron eventually “brings out the worst in this imperfect best of all possible worlds” (Demand 163) suggests an alternative thesis: perhaps another compounding factor contributing to Triton’s “imperfection” is the lack of love necessary to meet Bron’s misfit needs and wants.

When I mention Bron’s “needs and wants” I am drawing attention to an aspect of

Triton’s society that Bron finds repugnant, namely that everyone on Triton knows what they want and that he does not. Bron says, “[T]hey make it so easy for you – all you have to do is know what you want” (T, 98). Later he adds: “…the kind, and how much of it, and to what extent you want it” (T, 104). Bron’s disaffection with the plurality and difference on Triton conveys his distaste for the social structure, one that he symbolically abjects through his refusal to participate. Bron is by no means an ‘open system,’ which characterizes a healthy living psychic space. Kristeva writes:

Held back by his aloofness, modern man is a narcissist who may suffer, but who

feels no remorse. He manifests his suffering in his body and is afflicted with

somatic symptoms. His problems serve to justify his refuge in the very problems

that his own desire paradoxically solicits. When he is not depressed, he becomes

swept away by insignificant and valueless objects that offer a perverse pleasure,

but no satisfaction. (1993, 7) 77

Those who hope or seek to escape the opulence and misery, Kristeva affirms, must create a personal psychic life. That is to say, one must ‘listen to’ and cultivate one’s own bodily rhythms and demands, and not the rhythms and demands of the dominant logic that one passively internalizes throughout the course of one’s lived experience. Bron is right in not easily allowing his body’s own rhythms and demands to be normalized with the rhythms and demands of Triton; however, his disgust at those same rhythms and demands (or

Triton) viz his abjection of them signifies an underlying non-reconciled aspect of his own condition that is yet-to-come. In other words—and paradoxically—because there is such an apparent disconnect between Bron and Triton, this gap allows the necessary affective distance through which a potential harmonization of rhythms is possible (not necessarily probable) between Bron and Triton, thus holding out hope for the birth of a new subjectivity, a new psychic space for Bron.

The Unlicensed Sectors: Abjected Places or Pathetic Fallacy

Chan (2001) claims, “if in a certain sense utopia is about the erasure of social difference … then heterotopia is the maintenance of social difference, a ‘resignation’ to its inevitability” (205). The maintenance of social difference is illustrated in Triton through what the reader is told about the cityscape and environment:

[I]t [Triton] is presented as the historical result of a social evolution from the

corruption and oppression of the old worlds. It is a complex and living society

with grimy, littered streets, strange religious sects, the destruction and death of 78

war, and the persistence of unhappy individuals [e.g. Bron] whose lives do not

fully correspond with the intention of the utopian society… . (Moylan, 1986, 164)

The ongoing war between Earth and Mars (the ‘old worlds’) and the ‘new worlds’

(represented by the moons and satellites from Jupiter outward) conveys the sense of abjection proper to Triton. The dramatization of Triton as sick and rotting in parts is a strategy on Delany’s part to disrupt the discourse on utopia, or as Moylan claims, to preserve utopia by destroying it. One particular feature of the topography of Triton that depicts this idea is the “unlicensed sectors.” The unlicensed sectors are places on Triton

“in which any behaviour is tolerated” (Moylan, 1986, 167). This is not to suggest that

‘oppressive’ laws are enforced in the ‘licensed’ sectors (for Moylan does tell his reader that “marriage, prostitution and money are all illegal; whereas drugs, sex, and religion are permitted” [Moylan, 1986, 167]) but only to further erode the rigors of Law that fortify the free-flowing pleasure guaranteed on the rest of Triton. What is interesting about the unlicensed sectors is that they embody a spatial analogue of the abject, a seedy inversion of the already inverted laws of Triton.

The reader is informed that many on Triton choose to live in the unlicensed sectors, whereas some choose to go there “only occasionally, when they felt their identity is threatened by the redundant formality of the orderly, licensed world” (T, 8). The unlicensed sectors can be viewed as the apogee of the radical social inclusion and accommodation on Triton, something of which Bron has no healthy conception (this is why he is constantly pushing Triton away to no avail). Bron’s abjection of the Old

Worlds in favour of Triton—and then later the abjection of Triton itself—is somewhat offset by his attempted seduction of the very thing he abhorrers, the Spike. The Spike, 79

Bron’s off and on ‘love’ interest in Triton, is a denizen of the unlicensed sectors, and in many ways these spaces mirror her psyche or are focalized through her character. Firstly the unlicensed sectors cater to spontaneity and anarchic behavior; it is also where she and her theatrical troupe perform. Secondly, like the abject, the Spike/unlicensed sectors disrupt conventional symbolic coding. The Spike/unlicensed sectors expose Bron to the extreme unmitigated, “shocking, fascinating, confusing, and horrifying” (Pearson, 464; my italics) world of Triton. That is to say, the Spike unexpectedly confronts Bron by way of the unlicensed sectors, literally and metaphorically, as the embodiment of radical dissent, or the unwelcome presence of the abject. If the Spike/unlicensed sectors represent the abject,37 why does Bron react with sexual excitement rather than visceral horror, especially with respect to the Spike? Because according to Kristeva, the abject is alluring just as much as it is revolting. Hence the latter’s statement that the victims of the abject are, more often than not, its greatest admirers.

Just as much as the abject remnants of the Old World order are focalized through

Bron’s horribly flawed abject character, so too are these characteristics inverted and

‘projected’—in the psychoanalytic sense of the term—onto Spike and the unlicensed sectors. By trying to eroticize the abject, he at least makes a wrong step in the right direction, and thus one might be able to witness the tiniest kernel of utopian potential in

Bron. But the reader must not forget that Bron’s abject quest remains a “quest for happiness” nonetheless. Compared to the denizens of Triton for whom the post-scarcity technology is a normalized means to a readily attainable end, for Bron the technology remains tangled up in the fantasy of escape (Demand 177). In other words, Bron’s abject nature is an unwelcomed reminder that true happiness is not possible independent of 80 repression and guilt (i.e., unhappiness). Žižek (1999), echoing the thought of Wendy

Brown (1995), states:

“[T]he first reaction of the oppressed to their oppression is that they imagine a

world simply deprived of the Other that exerts oppression on them – women

imagine a world without men, African-Americans a world without whites […] The

mistake of such an attitude is […] it fails to examine the way the identity of its

own position (that of a worker, a woman, an African-American…) is ‘mediated’

by the Other” (Žižek, 1999, 79).

With respect to Triton, Bron is the “Other” that is wished away, contextualized by the war that is on-going between the inner old worlds and the outer satellites. I am not claiming that Bron’s “hardheaded, insensitive, ungenerous, and pignoli-brained” (see Moylan

1986) heteronormative chauvinism is a kernel of utopian potential in-itself; rather, I am arguing that his inability to break the cycle of repetition and his concomitant unhappiness dramatizes the reserve of failed hope and the ever-withheld promise of another possible better way of living, even relative to that which is the alternative (Triton). Bron’s distorted and flawed character resists homogenization and complacency with the New

World order, rejecting the tensionless, unobstructed flow of libido characterized as unproblematic and easy on the utopian Triton. Triton, as such, is founded upon anti-

Oedipal ideology, but as Žižek reminds his reader, “anti-Oedipus is the ultimate Oedipal myth…” (Žižek, 1999, 80). Bron is a wounded narcissus in search of love, but is fated to remain unsatisfied due to the absence of a code of love on Triton, as the social structure of the latter is primarily curtailed to the unobstructed and non-repressive flow of desire. 81

Moylan points out that virtually all the characters that engage Bron at various points in the novel are “self-actualizing” and/or “successful utopian citizen[s]” of Triton

(Demand 179). Bron is, however, far too caught up in “self-absorption” to be “human and responsive” (Demand 179), which is to say he is too narcissistic to function in a healthy loving relationship. I acknowledge Delany’s utilization of Bron as a phallic narcissist, which is to say a person who takes his or her ego to be the most important and desired of all love-objects; however, my critique of Triton is founded on an interpretation of Bron as a character regressed into primary narcissism: the stage of psychic development in which the infant is unable to distinguish and separate object-libido from ego-libido.38 Bron is this kind of narcissist, or, what Kristeva calls “the new kinds of patients we have now”

(Oliver, 2002, 345).39 As stated earlier, I do not wish to come to Bron’s bedside defense; I merely wish to tease out the consequences and implications for thinking utopianism through Triton if Bron is read through this particular Kristevan lens.

Bron’s precarious relationship with the Spike/unlicensed sectors is an interesting case study that clearly illustrates the unrecognized and unfulfilled utopian potentials or energies proper to Bron. In anticipation of the final break-up scene between Bron and the

Spike, Bron one last time professes his love for the (impossible) object of his desire— however distorted his notion of love is—requesting that she abandon her work with the theatre, to “Join your life to mine. Become one with me. Be mine. Let me possess you wholly” (T, 176). The Spike rejects him, again, explaining to him her need to live her own life and work on her own terms. Moylan is correct in stating that “These archaic, twentieth-century, male chauvinist attitudes do not appeal to this emancipated utopia woman” (Demand 182); however, I think that there are two registers through which one 82 can interpret the Spike’s rejection of Bron, the first from a queer-feminist40 standpoint and the second from a post-Lacanian psychoanalytic/therapeutic standpoint. Regarding the first standpoint, I have no issue. Regarding the second standpoint, I think the Spike’s rejection overlooks the severity of Bron’s social-psychological malady. In her break-up letter to him the Spike writes the following:

Maybe you weren’t cuddled enough as a baby. Maybe you simply never had

people around to set an example of how to care. Maybe because you quote feel

you love me unquote you feel I should take you on as a case. I’m not going to.

Because there are other people, some of whom I love and some of whom I don’t,

who need help too and, when I give it, it seems to accomplish something the

results of which I can see. Not to mention things I need help in. In terms of the

emotional energies I have, you look hopeless. (T, 193)

The Spike’s letter to Bron mimics Lacan’s approach to the analysand. Recall for Lacan that the self or ego, à la the Mirror Stage, is a “function of misrecognition”

(méconnaissance) that is propped up by means of the desire of the Other, which circulates via language. Lacan’s belief that the analysand cannot be “cured” manifests itself in his analytic practice by means of silent responses to his analysands. Lacan thought that by not responding to the needs and the desires of the analysand (i.e., remaining silent), the therapeutic session would be more effective compared to a session that heavily implicated the speech of the analyst. “Responding to the subject’s speech—even and especially in an approving manner—often proves, by its effects, to be far more frustrating than silence”

(Lacan, 1953, 207). For Lacan, the words—rather than silence—of the analyst merely provide the groundwork for the analysand on which the latter “stakes the monument of 83 his narcissism” (Lacan, 1953, 206). In other words, by entering into the transference,

Lacan understood the analyst to be making the analysand sicker. This is the theoretical edifice upon which I think the Spike’s answer to Bron has been interpreted.

In contrast to Lacan’s “dark and silent”41 analytic demeanor, Kristeva argues “it’s of no use with narcissistic patients […] People come to you because they know that you can give them something that they have never had” (Oliver 2002, 345). It is not that I am claiming the Spike must be a practicing analyst, but rather that Bron is in serious need of aggressive psychotherapy. Kristeva is close enough to Lacan’s teaching to deny the fact that the analysand can be cured; however, she clearly is more sympathetic to the therapeutic function of the transference relation. “[P]atients are more and more narcissistic,” Kristeva states, “for different, perhaps sociological, reasons, because of the family, different difficulties of child-mother relationship, different causes” (Oliver 2002,

345). This is what the Spike writes to Bron in her break-up letter. The difference between the Spike’s/Lacan’s view and Kristeva’s is that for the latter Bron is not hopeless. What

Bron needs—granted he is not exactly receptive to advice—is a new imaginary discourse

(see “Note” #27), an inner psychic life derived from his own drive-energies and nurtured by an Other. This amounts to a plea for the importance of the transference relationship which, according to Kristeva, is vital for the production of new imaginary possibilities:

“in every transference there is something new that happens, it’s particularly true with a narcissistic person” (Oliver 2002, 345). This is not to say that The Spike ought to have acted as a martyr for the sake of Bron, giving him one more chance at love; rather, the dynamics of their relationship that become apparent throughout Triton emphasize the 84 importance of having and cultivating an inner imaginary discourse and how important love is to the production and maintenance of a healthy psychic life.

Bron’s obtuseness notwithstanding, the reader must not be too hard on him.

Toward the end of the narrative when Bron seeks out refixation,42 the reader bears witness to a cry for help. In most readings, Bron races to refixation in order for him to become his ideal object of desire (i.e., passive heterosexual female)—circumventing the impossible nature of finding ‘her’ on Triton. However, this is only one interpretation. On another level, Bron’s racing to the refixation technology can be read as a desire for a new and different imaginary discourse (although his confusion inevitably leads him to choose the same heteronormative logic that plagues him and from which he is essentially running), one that typically would have been negotiated with a psychoanalyst. However, psychoanalysts interested in the love transference are nonexistent on Triton, and so Bron is at the mercy of technology that is only vested in the interests of desire, which is to say the technology is intended to ease the flow of desire, not to generate an imaginary discourse of love. Kristeva distinguishes desire and love in the following: “For me desire doesn’t involve idealization” (Oliver 2002, 347), implying that love does involve idealization—at the imaginary level—with the goal being that a richly developed inner imaginary will resonate with the social symbolic in a way that both mutually inform and enrich each other. However, because Tritonians are only interested in desire, because they

“know what they want,” there is no need for cultural resources such as analysts to help develop and fortify an imaginary discourse of love.

To reiterate, I understand and appreciate that Bron is intended by Delany to be a hopeless, unlikeable character; but again I claim, Bron is not so much hopeless as horribly 85 distorted, lacking a psychic space of his own, and perhaps most importantly—in the words of Kristeva, is “an exile, deprived of his psychic space, an extraterrestrial with a prehistory bearing, wanting for love. An uneasy child, all scratched up, somewhat disgusting, without a precise body or image, having lost his specificity, an alien in a world of desire and power” (1983, 382-3). Contrary to Moylan, I do not view Bron simply as a “dystopian protagonist” where radical utopian discourse is only present in its absence, “in Bron and his failure to thrive in that utopian alternative” (Demand 194);

Bron is also an example of an abject utopian, an individual subject who possesses utopian potential but, given the social/political/historical conventions in which he finds himself, is unable to fully realize those potentials. Bron’s abject utopian potential remains permanently in crisis just like Kristeva’s notion of the late modern subject. Bron’s distorted utopian abilities are rooted in a lack of love, and there is no code of love on

Triton.

Section 5: Love as “Modern Obscenity” in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand;

Or, What’s Wrong With Too Much Love?

In contrast to Bron who suffers from too little love, Marq Dyeth, the protagonist of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (hereafter cited S), suffers from an overabundance of love. Why is this a problem? What is wrong with too much love? I read

Stars as an allegory of Kristeva’s notion of love as the modern obscenity, by which I mean that Marq’s voluptuously intense—and brief—sexual relationship with Rat Korga can be interpreted as a symptom of contemporary late modern society’s impoverished discourse of love and overzealous dependence on insufficient social symbolic structures

(e.g., government, law, administrations, and bureaucracy). However, rather than Bron who abjected the obscene to protect himself from it (retreating into primary narcissism),

Marq gives himself over absolutely to the obscene—Rat Korga (see “Notes” #12).

Despite Marq’s highly specialized vocation as a cultural translator—evidence of his advanced aptitude for symbolic signifying systems—Marq is shown to have an overdeveloped symbolic configuration which leaves him unable to properly mourn loss when it occurs. Being able to properly mourn loss—especially loss of love—is imperative, I claim, to the promise of being appropriately disposed to the onset of utopia.

This requires being able to open oneself to the tremulous, uneasy, disruptive forces of the sémiotique and arduously seek to develop the anticipatory symbolic potential inherent therein. As such, I posit Marq as another iteration of an abject utopian, one who due to the internalization of an overly dominant symbolic system cannot renew his discourse, imaginary or otherwise. 87

Infotopia or loss of loss

Stars tells the far-future story of an Industrial Diplomat (ID), Marq Dyeth, who is introduced to his “perfect erotic object” Rat Korga (with a precision of seven decimal places in one direction and nine in the other [S 166]). Korga is miraculously discovered to be the lone survivor of the annihilation of his entire world, Rhyonon. The destruction of

Rhyonon was brought about by the socio-economic crisis referred to in the story as

“Cultural Fugue”: “a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface” (S 66). Because of his miraculous survival, Korga becomes a desirable object to everyone, a kind of commodity fetish; but he is intended for Marq. Upon being introduced to Korga there ensue many polymorphous experiences—mainly sexual but also political, existential, and poetic—whereby Marq and Rat are reciprocally enlightened to various aspects of the universe, through each other’s body. So intense is the sexual experience between the two that, Carl Freedman (2000) writes, Delany “invent[ed] a new language—almost literally—to convey the sexual solidarity” (162). Consider the following excerpt:

We lay on the bed; and his hand on my chest was a stone outcrop on uneven

giltgorse. His rough hair, with something reddish in it, was the hue of split tolgoth

pith…. My own breath against his neck came back to strike my face like a

hotwind eroding the pre-historical escarpments of the oest to their characteristic

roundness. The line between his arm and my chest was the crevice of some 88

sunken –wr, the near bank, mine, heavy with growth, the far one, his, notably

sparse. (S 197; my emphasis)

Although Giltgorse is a kind of mossy substance, tolgoth a variety of tree, oest is a cardinal direction, and –wr is similar to a swamp—and therefore they do not serve as poetic language within the story’s narrative—Delany’s creative genius is to use this alien language in an attempt to “represent that which lies at the very frontier of representability” (Freedman, 2000, 162). This has led others like Deirdre Byrne (1999) to claim that the apparent “revolutionary energy” in Stars operates at the level of text, by way of Kristeva’s sémiotique. For Byrne, the sémiotique can be traced throughout the various relationships among power, language, and meaning in the novel, particularly with regard to how they are productive of sexual difference, something Freedman (2000) calls one of the novel’s “strongly utopian achievements” (162).43

However, juxtaposed with the affective poetic language of Stars is a great amount of non-affective information. The very fact that Marq and Korga’s erotic suitability for one another is coded in terms of decimal places should attest to the significance of numbers, data, and statistics—codes and the symbolic. Contrary to the cyberpunk novel—

William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984; note same year as Stars)—Stars “offers an alternative vision to the stylized malaise of cyberpunk that bears pondering in our globalized present” (Youngquist, 2009, 63). That is to say, in contrast to the cyberpunk tendency to represent the dystopic prospects for a society completely dominated by vast quantities of information, Stars suggests some of the genre’s more utopic possibilities.

However, against Youngquist’s affirmation of Stars as an example of an “infotopia,” I make the argument that the vastness of the information available in the universe in Stars, 89 and especially how Marq has internalized this information for purposes of his job as an

Industrial Diplomat, renders the subject ‘sick’ in terms of his or her capacity to successfully mourn moments of loss, which is imperative for being able to move on in one’s life toward something better.

Marq and Korga’s relationship abruptly comes to an end later in the narrative when Korga is scheduled to make an address to the people of Velm, Marq’s homeland.

The social fanaticism for Korga as the survivor of Cultural Fugue reaches such a hysterical level that the stability of Velm is brought to a liminal state of crisis, bordering on its own cultural fugue. Leading up to this moment the GI system, the universal infrastructure that facilitates the flow of information across galaxies, becomes overwhelmed with mass hysteria about the discovery of the sole survivor of Cultural

Fugue and Korga becomes the obsession of all. Just before Korga addresses the hysterical masses, Marq looks out over the crowd and recognizes what is happening to his world:

And I realized what Rat and I were gazing down over: the upper park levels of

Morgre, their rails crowded with women, then women behind them, and behind

them more, standing by the pole lights, gazing toward Dyethshome. I glanced

down. Below the dark domes just at my feet (the court roofs), figures crowded the

forecourt. On the rollerway up between the cactus, figures milled and pushed and

jostled. I gazed down at it all from some two hundred meters; above the roofs of

our cooperative, the city before us was an astonishing playroom toy. (S, 309)44

Korga triggers the mass’s hysteria such that Marq’s world is pushed to a threshold that could potentially result in its own cultural fugue. Despite the advanced state of the information web that connects and shapes the society of Stars, sufficient cultural 90 resources are not readily available in order for sublimation to keep such hysteria under control. As a result, in order to salvage Velm, the Web—the administrative agency that was responsible for locating and extracting Korga from the wreckage of his imploded planet—led by Japril, removes Korga from Marq’s world and by extension Marq’s life.

This loss leaves Marq suspended in a depressive phase that he attempts to work through in the “Epilogue” of the novel, although I claim he does so unsuccessfully.45

Velm’s liminal state of crisis, bordering on its own cultural fugue, is an instance of pathetic fallacy whereby the environment assumes the emotional qualities of the protagonist, here Marq, and thus can be interpreted as a projection of Marq’s own personal crisis, perhaps bordering on ‘personal fugue’ (this is, of course, compounded by the tacit anticipation of Korga’s impending absence). Throughout the novel, glimpses are provided into Marq’s character that suggest the world of “progressive nonidentitarian” and “universe of difference” (Freedman, 2000, 161), in which he resides, lacks the symbolic resources that would allow him to make sense of a signifying offense or assault.

This is because Marq is too tightly integrated into the symbolic system of cultural codes and statistical information and not enough with the non-signifying rhythms and tones that are necessary for affective symbolic expression. This scenario depicting Velm’s hysteria reaching critical mass provides an example of what Kristeva calls the “fragmentary phenomena” of signifying systems, which “underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures” (Kristeva, 1974, 16). Such moments of ‘carnival,’ for example, are only Fugue-like in that they spell the catastrophic end of one signifying 91 system, while simultaneously unleashing so many heterogeneous drive-energies as they work toward the establishment of a new symbolic system.

The abject nature of cultural fugue is comparable to the abjection Korga endured as a slave. Korga’s abject history is pre-symbolic in a) the literal sense of how the novel is structured (it is part of the “Prologue”), and b) Korga is described throughout the novel as something that will not fit into the system (i.e., abject). Upon being salvaged from the wreckage of his planet, Korga is un(re)presentable and/or horrifying. The Web ‘cleanses’ him through the addition of artificial limbs and a cybernetic eye, among other modifications. Following this procedure, Korga can make the transition, precarious nonetheless, into the symbolic order of Marq’s world. However, such a transition is never complete. The damage inflicted by the “synapse-jamming” (Korga’s intellect has been retarded by means of a technique known as Radical Anxiety Termination—which, as the name suggests, provides for Korga’s pejorative title ‘Rat’—that literally jams the synapses in the brain, rendering the subject appropriate for slavery), compounded by the fugue which he has endured, leaves Korga unable to be fully integrated into the universe by way of the General Information (GI) system and the Web. Regarding the arduous adjustment that Korga is likely to face, Marq responds to Web-agent Japril’s briefing:

“Coming from a completely destroyed culture into something as complex as the Web, not to mention other worlds, and without the help of GI—that could be hard” (S, 153).

Despite the aesthetic and medical surgeries that are employed to rehabilitate Korga, he remains a body that will never fully be part of the universe, symbolically consecrated by

GI. He will always be the outsider, the foreigner, the alien, and the individual who was salvaged from the detritus of a failed planet. 92

The different effects that these separate histories have upon the respective psychic life of each individual is interesting. During a banquet meeting between the Dyeth family and their bigoted acquaintances, the Thants, the latter’s repressive dogma (especially regarding the pride Marq takes in ‘difference’) causes Marq to exclaim, “those idiotic statements—they made me feel as if I were living on some world out of history where all that we do here was against the law” (S 311). Marq feels accused and assaulted by the

Thants’ recalcitrance to his embracing of radical difference in the universe, but really this is not an assault on him, even though he believes it to be such. The bigotry of the Thants’ is actually an assault against Korga. The latter explains, “They didn’t make you feel that way. That’s the way they made me feel. […] You didn’t grow up on a such a world. You didn’t spend your childhood and make your transition to maturity on a world where bestiality and homosexuality were legally proscribed. So you do not possess the fund of those feelings to draw on. I do” (312). The “fund of feelings” that Korga speaks of has been interpreted by Carl Freedman in terms of the “idiotic world out of history” (2000,

161), that is, the present world in which we live now (analogous to Korga’s Rhyonon), with all its bigotry, repression, and hatred; that is to say, all that Marq’s world considers abject and repugnant in society and culture. However, it is exactly this experience of abject world history that allows Korga, not Marq, to properly register and overcome such a verbal assault. Not only does Korga have a supplemental encyclopedic (symbolic) knowledge of GI provided to him by the Web, but he also has the pre-encyclopedic

(sémiotique) pain and suffering of his time on the abject Rhyonon. Since he has survived the abject status of a voiceless slave on Rhyonon, whenever an assault ruptures his 93 symbolic ego (e.g., the Thants’ bigotry regarding difference), he will always triumph over abjection, despair, forlornness, and depression because he has done so before.

Marq, on the other hand, has never had to endure abject pain and/or suffering but instead was raised within the context of an information-dense and symbolically robust universe. However, his never having had to experience such pain and/or suffering means that he has no affective, visceral resources—that is to say, sémiotique resources—as part of his subjectivity such that he can overcome symbolic assault. Hence why he takes the slander of the Thants’ so personally, when in fact it should not affect him. Because Marq has grown up, and lives, in a universe dominated by the symbolic, when a rupture occurs in his ego he has no sémiotique to help him overcome it. He is thus akin to a child who is separated prematurely from the pre-Oedipal Mother. Due to this, his psychic life is incomplete. Never having had to endure loss, which is essential to proper and healthy subject formation according to Kristeva, Marq seeks to re-live (for the first time) a presubjective relationship with the pre-Oedipal mother through his sexual partnership with

Korga.

The pre-Oedipal relation with the Mother is a relationship that is at once one that is pleasurable and painful insofar as it demarcates the limits of subjective emergence; that is to say, just as it promises subjecthood, it also threatens to annihilate that very subjecthood. Such ego-effacing forces are witnessed in the extreme erotic interludes between Marq and Korga. For example, in the chapter ‘A Dragon Hunt’ (see S, 239-257),

Marq coordinates an outing for Korga and himself that includes a pseudo-transference experience via the capture of “dragons.” The dragon hunt is described as follows: Using non-fatal weaponry—i.e., radar bows—a hunter takes aim at a dragon such that, “The 94 radar bow hooks on to a pretty complete mapping of the dragon’s cerebral responses and, after a lot of translation, plays it back on your own cerebral surface” (S, 248). Following the triggering of Korga’s bow, Marq releases his as well, and the reader is granted access to Marq’s experience. The reader later finds out after that Rat experienced the same thing

(I quote at length here to preserve Delany’s poetics):

Why do dragons fly, I mean according to them? Dragons and their hunters know

the nerve endings concentrated in the flesh below the joint of the wing and body is

of the same order as those in the human genitals or the lining of the human ear:

the stimulation of rushing air excites them—the sensation dying at precisely the

rate … to make the wings flap enough for lift-off. A permanent around-the-body

high? Fly! I flew. […] I rose, torn from the dust-bound males. My breast crawled,

anticipating descent. Sex and hunger sweep round in the human body, through the

day, failing and driving like entailed tides, peaking together, or ranged in

opposition: the drive that drags and pummels a dragon’s body toward the behavior

humans mistake for sex is almost three times as strong, far more pervasive, and

concentrates in such different parts of the body … that humans, become dragon,

sometimes cannot recognize it for hours. (S, 247)

Rat Korga so nearly and completely approximates Marq’s perfect erotic object—i.e., the pre-Oedipal Mother—that Marq undergoes a functional pre-Oedipal de/subjectivization.

This de/subjectivization is a co-joined experience where the physical boundaries between

Marq and Korga disappear, or at least become blurred, beyond all recognition. The libidinal ‘permanent around-the-body high’ produced by means of the dragon- transference is symptomatic of that which is beyond what humans (i.e., Marq) are capable 95 of registering—for it is previous to the symbolic. However, this therapeutic attempt essentially fails, because the pre-Oedipal relationship can never be recreated, only represented through the process of signifiance. Marq’s inability to represent such pre-

Oedipal drive-energies is clearly evident in his inability to mourn the loss of Korga in the

Epilogue of Stars.

Avilez GerShun (2011) argues that Marq’s experience of Korga’s absence signifies a privileged private insight into the nature of the universe, as if to suggest that

Marq will be okay having been allowed to experience some form of ideal love through

Korga. The Web officials try to keep Rhyonon’s Cultural Fugue secret, even going as far as to erase or suppress information from circulating throughout the Web. But why?

GerShun posits that Korga embodies an abject kernel of knowledge that the Web does not want released. “Rat Korga, as a survivor of the catastrophe, literally incarnates a forbidden, unspeakable knowledge” (GerShun 130). Korga stands in as a metaphor for the

“social upheaval and chaos” that plagues late modern civilization and subjectivity. He embodies the unimaginable cultural difference proper to the universe of Stars that Marq is called to manage, while simultaneously remaining aware of the impossibility of being able to do so. This knowledge threatens to rupture the dominant social symbolic structure as well as the incomplete and fragile psychic life that Marq possesses.

My reading of Marq’s loss of Korga is less affirmative than GerShun’s suggestion that because of Korga, Marq now has a new lease on life; rather, I claim that Marq’s reaction to Korga’s absence is symptomatic of what happens to the individual in a culture that is strong on symbolic discourse and weak on developing and fortifying pre-signifying sémiotique forms of expression. In what I interpret as a reactive defense mechanism 96 following Korga’s extraction by the Web, Marq insists to Japril, “besides the coordinates the Web lays out for us, I have my own map of the universe” (Stars, 341–42; cited in

Alviez; my italics). This ‘map’ is made up of “information to confound the Web and not to be found in any of its informative archives” (Stars, 342; cited in GerShun 131). Marq compensates for his incomplete and weakened psychic life by conjuring up a psychic object (i.e., the map) that the reader is led to assume his relationship with Korga allotted him. However, the resources necessary to fortify a healthy psychic space cannot be discovered in one person or object, they must also be socio-cultural in nature.

In Black Sun, Kristeva provides an excerpt from one of her clinical sessions with a woman named “Anne” to demonstrate the importance for analysts to “interpret the voice,” that is “to extract the infrasignifying meaning of depressive discourse that is hidden in fragments of lexical items, in syllables, or in phonic groups yet strangely semanticized” (1987, 55). This woman prone to frequent bouts of melancholia sat before

Kristeva wearing a bright blouse with the word “house” printed across it countless times.

The patient spoke of worries concerning her apartment, her dreams of buildings, as well as her childhood home that was later lost by the family. Kristeva tells her that she is in mourning for a house. When the woman responds that she does not understand (“I don’t see what you mean, words fail me!”), Kristeva observes “The object of her sadness [i.e., a house] is inscribed in the pain of her skin and her flesh, even the silk of her tight-fitting blouse. It does not, however, work its way into mental life, it flees speech, or rather,

Anne’s speech has abandoned sorrow […] in order to build up its logic” (1987, 53-54).

Kristeva’s patient is analogous to Marq following Korga’s absence: he flees the sorrow of 97 confronting the loss itself and instead figuratively patches up the wound with the object of his new map.

GerShun continues, adding, “As with his private information about the cosmos,

Marq creates his own personal constellation of knowledge and feelings as well as a hermeneutic for making sense of the world” (2011, 131). It may seem as though it is a positive vision, one that should be embraced; however, such a ‘mental map’ merely props up an unhealthy psyche, one that Kristeva says is characterized by “melancholy jouissance” (1987a, 102), the act of creating a representation that overcomes melancholy while simultaneously sustaining its trace (128). Marq knows that he carries within his body the traces of a lost object that he has never properly mourned. He declares this to

Japril, agent from GI:

You’ve blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely

eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the

mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It’s as though I cannot

even remember what I once desired! All I can look for now, when I have the

energy, is lost desire itself—and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. (S 343-

The Epilogue to Stars, the section of the book from which the above quotation is excerpted from, is titled “Morning.” This is significant for reasons that have to do with the narrative, or the time at which the Epilogue is being written, literally during the morning of a journey that Marq is taking on route to another job. There is, I claim, a second meaning to the Epilogue’s title; the Epilogue is also about the challenges Marq encounters “Mourning” the loss of Korga. The fact that Marq can only “look for … lost 98 desire” is problematic. It suggests that Marq’s mourning is complicated by a lack of love as a social discourse in the universe of Stars.

In fact, when asked by Japril if he “love[s]” Rat Korga, Marq interrupts her to say,

“Love…? […] Japril, it’s idiotic! I was only with him for the single turn of a world between its suns—a third of which time I slept. And in the time I was awake, I wasn’t in any state near level-headed or responsible enough to negotiate the rapids of desire at the confluence level of love. In love? How could I know?” (S 344). Marq recognizes that love is separate from desire but that somehow the two connect. Using Kristeva, I interpret this mechanism to be depicted in the sémiotique/symbolique chiasm. And yet he is relatively dismissive about his capacity to discern whether or not he was in love with Korga. This I take to be less a comment on Korga qua sacred object of affection, than an indication that in the universe of Stars, to quote Kristeva, “Love has become the modern obscenity”:

“it’s more obscene than sex, you can talk about sex and violence and that’s OK; everybody knows that exists, but love is too strange” (see Oliver, 2002, 350; see “Notes”

#12). The reason, I argue, that Marq cannot answer the question Japril poses to him regarding his “love” for Korga, is that he cannot answer the question because the symbolic resources do not exist in his hyper connected universe of information to serve as a conduit for semiotic processes. He is physically incapable of signifying his desire (i.e., sémiotique) in the form of love (i.e., symbolic).

However, this is not to say that Marq is a lost cause; in fact it is because he is an individual aware of his situation as a “most ordinary of human creatures […] an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason”

(S 344), that he qualifies, in my interpretation, as an abject utopian. In one of his final 99 exchanges with Japril, Marq inquires, again with respect to the question of his love for

Korga: “But given the situation, is it so much to have wanted time enough to find out?” (S

344; my emphasis). Marq’s speech, which anticipates a possible horizon of love ‘given time,’ speaks to so many of what Kristeva calls “convulsive excesses of individuals in the modern megalopolis” (see Oliver, 2002, 20). To be aware of love is to “represent inordinate ambitions” within oneself, the sémiotique processes that form and shape the quest for such limitations of being, “limits, which have become the reality, the tel quel, of our time” (Kristeva in Oliver, 2002, 20). With this speech, Marq divests from adherence to a culture (given the irony of his job as a translator of cultures), and forges a path for himself as an abject utopian, forever approaching the horizon of lost love.

100

Section 6: On Abject Utopianism in Delany’s Hogg, The Mad Man, Through the

Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and Bread and Wine,

This section concretely works out the idea of abject utopianism by mapping the dangers, risks, and vulnerabilities that plague the utopian psyche at the intersection of various loving relations. Whereas sections 4 and 5 negatively critiqued abject utopian psychic space (i.e., in terms of how psychic space is affected by social systems that do not or cannot support a discourse of love), I now strive to positively critique abject utopian psychic space in terms of social systems that are in the process of developing various discourses of love. The social systems that are analyzed in this section illustrate abject utopian psychic space in its raw and organic form, which is to say abject utopianism en procès. The novels examined dramatize how the emergence of a psyche appropriate for utopia is contingent on an unmitigated confrontation with the abject milieu into which it is born and within which it grows; therein must it find new and unexpected ways of seeing hope for a future in the cultural wasteland of today.

This section makes the move from Delany’s science fiction to his literary pornography. Delany’s literary pornography is exemplary for characterizing abject utopianism because his characters are exposed to extreme sexual acts that sometimes are openly embraced and at other times unsettling; his characters struggle with themselves at their most vulnerable moments; the sexual acts are extremely fecund for theorizing a subjectivity that is neither one nor the other (neither subject nor object, neither inner nor outer); and lastly, the fetishes proper to his characters (e.g., shit, piss, snot, garbage, rancid socks, etc.) speak to how individual subjects seek to foreground new loving 101 relationships using the waste and detritus that the current system rejects, forgets, or represses. In short, the characters of these novels risk a dangerous leap of faith toward another way of living by means of their radically alternative psychic space.

The texts to be analyzed are arranged according to year of publication, except for

Bread and Wine (1999), in which case the 2013 edition is used.46 I begin with Hogg

(1994b) in order to establish the presymbolic logic proper to Kristeva’s post-Lacanian notion of the imaginary. This will inform all subsequent textual analyses in this section. I argue that Hogg can be read as demonstrating the greatest level of risk and danger proper to an abject utopian psyche. By working through the three subsequent texts—The Mad

Man (1994), Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), Bread and Wine—a grand narrative overarching some of Delany’s work can be posited whereby the extreme abject utopianism witnessed in Hogg gradually works at expanding and enriching the psychic space of the individual such that, with each text analyzed, the individual subject comes that much closer to recognizing the rebirth of utopia. Incidentally, Bread and Wine represents the lowest level of risk and danger awaiting the abject utopian psyche.

Hogg embodies the apogee of risk that might befall an abject utopian psyche. I attempt a careful and considerate interpretation of the silent protagonist, Cocksucker, whose asymbolia and borderline ego loss places him at the ultimate threshold of subjectivity that might threaten a radically open psyche chancing a better way of living.

Next I consider The Mad Man, a novel in which John Marr, the novel’s protagonist, is embroiled in a philosophical quest for self-knowledge. The risk here is in obeying the imperative to Know Thyself and to seek this knowledge in an impossible object of desire.

The novel represents an affective expansion of the abject utopian psyche by virtue of John 102

Marr’s access to intellectual and cultural resources while simultaneously still being mired in a (sub)culture of the abject. Third, I consider Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, a story that dramatizes the next qualitatively advanced stage characteristic of the abject utopian psyche’s journey toward utopia. The story follows Eric and Shit, two garbage men from the ‘utopian’ community of Diamond Harbor, from their late teens into their nineties. Although the open relationship between Eric and Shit is tested, and at times revealed as precarious, the novel helps develop the concept of abject utopianism as communally oriented practice; that is, in terms of a concrete understanding of ‘place’

(albeit an ‘impossible place’). Fourth and finally, I turn to Bread and Wine: An Erotic

Tale of New York, the graphic novella Delany co-produced with artist Mia Wolff about his relationship with the homeless man and his current partner, Dennis Rickett. This short piece, because of its use of text and image, represents the most simplistic and ideal— easy—literary embodiment dramatizing that of which the abject utopian psyche is capable. This text demonstrates the inner peace and outer peace possible via an open encounter with abjection, as well as the harmony made possible between individuals through love.

(a) Hogg

Delany’s violent pornographic novel Hogg (hereafter cited as H) harbors an ideal kernel of utopian hope within its text. Hogg is situated at the beginning of my arrangement of texts because it represents the most extreme in terms of the level of risk that might threaten the open system of subjectivity I claim is necessary for enacting a 103 utopian psyche today. Although not exclusively, I focus my criticism on the silent protagonist known in the novel as Cocksucker. Drawing upon Kristeva’s theory of the imaginary and le sémiotique, as well as the abject, I claim that Cocksucker is, in spite of his precarious and passive subjectivity, an exemplary allegorical figure upon which to model the abject utopian psyche.

Hogg as utopian limit text

Hogg fits McGraw’s (1984) taxonomy of so many “limit-texts”: “avant-garde texts which coincide with times of abrupt change, renewal, or revolution in society” (145-

5). Delany wrote the book and completed it just prior to the Stonewall riots in New York

City. Delany’s situation as a gay black man during the sixties, seventies, and eighties in

America speaks to the “times of abrupt change” necessary for the production of such a limit text. Jeffery A. Tucker (2004) argues that the character Hogg (the decrepit and violent trucker responsible for the majority of the atrocities of rape and murder in the novel) “gave expression to the author’s hostility toward a heterosexist society, an anger that had no socially constructive outlet prior to the modern Gay Rights movement” (4). In contrast to Tucker’s otherwise sympathetic reading of Hogg, Michael Hemmingson

(1996) observes that Hogg is the “embodiment of what our society can turn people into, the decaying condition of the human soul” (126). In both instances, Tucker and

Hemmingson can be read as intuiting from Hogg a silent utopian cry from Delany, which affirms there has to be a better way to live. 104

The silent utopian cries that I suspect here, expressed through the orgiastic and often violent sex as well as murder in the novel, are akin to Kristeva’s neglected semiotic

‘content’ ripe for an outbreak in distorted and destructive forms when a strong social symbolic with which to identify is absent.47 Despite the apparent chaotic nature of le sémiotique, the reader must remember that such forces are not absolutely destructive but rather ambiguous; they simultaneously enact creation and destruction. The creative aspect of le sémiotique is similar in scope to what Stephanie A. Smith (2007) identifies as

Begeisterung, a term specific to German Romanticism that pertains to the mad enthusiasm “that carries a writer/artist through the lunacy of what he or she is attempting”

(564), perhaps to speak the unspeakable. In an interview with T.K. Enright in 2004 on the topic of Hogg, Delany says, “It was Blake who said the Road of Excess leads to the

Palace of Wisdom” (see Freedman, 2009, 126). Likewise, Girard in Violence and the

Sacred (1972) claims that “Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred” (31). Could the ruthless violence, brutal sex, and murder of Hogg be Delany’s expression of a yearning for a new notion of the sacred? Could the virtual silence and blatant apathy of

Cocksucker, with respect to the horrors to which he bears witness, represent the preverbal stages of a new psyche, a utopian psyche capable of salvaging itself from the utter abjection of contemporary culture? To all of these questions I respond in the affirmative.

The Abject Utopia of Silence, Apathy, and Drifting.

Hogg tells the story of Franklin Hargus, a dirty (both physically and mentally) truck driver, who never showers, who shits and urinates in his pants while driving the 105 truck he operates, and who is contracted out as a “rape artist” for disgruntled ex-lovers wanting violent acts carried out upon certain individuals (e.g., wives, women, and children). In the opening scene of the novel the reader is introduced to the silent eleven- year-old boy, the narrator of the text, known only as Cocksucker. He is performing oral sex on strangers in the basement of a shelter where he is living. There he encounters a man, Hogg, who takes a liking to him and who subsequently assumes the boy for his own pleasure. Hogg takes the boy on his journeys to witness and participate in his contract brutalities. Where one might expect Cocksucker to respond in a shocked or overtly reactive way during any one of the horrifying scenes to which he bears witness, he cannot help but want to do nothing but suck Hogg’s penis, as well as eat and drink the latter’s feces and urine.

There is a long sequence during the latter third of the novel when Cocksucker is misplaced from Hogg’s possession and instead comes under the ownership of a black tugboat captain known as Big Sambo. Through Big Sambo, Cocksucker encounters two garbage men, Red and Rufus. Cocksucker spends time with these three, walking around the docks and, of course, participating in various ‘more domesticated’ sex acts. Later he is found by Hogg and is remitted to the latter’s ‘ownership.’ While travelling in Hogg’s truck, the reader is made aware that Cocksucker prefers the environment of the docks and the company of Sambo, Red, and Rufus. Cocksucker seeks to return to the latter arrangement and sets out planning how to do so. In a final scene, again lecturing

Cocksucker, Hogg suddenly pauses and asks, “What’s the matter?” Cocksucker neutrally responds, “Nothing” (H, 219). 106

There are a number of points of entry into a discussion of the utopian potential of

Hogg. I want to first address Cocksucker’s silence. I contend that silence is utilized in

Hogg as a rhetorical strategy whereby revolution is anticipated in the form of a new language. That is to say, because silence is an inversion of the symbolic, it is aligned with the ambiguous forces of le sémiotique. In the “Poetry Project Interview,” included in

Delany’s self-help book for creative writers About Writing (2005), Delany is asked by the interviewer to define “silence.” Delany responds, “I won’t try … because silence – at least in the way it interests me – is one of those objects that resists definition” (308). He does, however, provide some ‘descriptive statements’ so that it might be more easily recognized the next time it is encountered. Delany mentions that, today, silence is a) in a beleaguered state; b) is the necessary context in which information can signify; c) is the opposite of noise; d) seldom if ever neutral; and e) is pervaded by assumptions, expectations and discourses. Deeper into his response Delany observes that since Richard

Wagner, silence has been considered “the proper mode in which to appreciate the work of art” (309). This, Delany adds, “aligns art more closely with death: it moves us formally toward a merger with the unknown” (309) Despite Cocksucker’s participation in the horrible acts of rape and murder committed by Hogg and his partners in crime,

Cocksucker’s embodiment of silence suggests that he is the locus of hope within such abject social arrangements. Since for Delany silence as such resists definition,

Cocksucker can likewise be read as incapable of being defined in terms of the dominant symbolic.

With regard to Delany’s account of silence’s privileged acquaintance with death,

Cocksucker’s silence may also speak to the inability of an old and dying symbolique to 107 speak the “language” of an ever-shifting sémiotique. As Kristeva stresses, the forces of le sémiotique press the individual subject, such that these perpetually shifting presymbolic forces need new social symbolic structures with which to connect, and through which to

‘speak.’ Cocksucker might be part of Hogg’s gang, but he is not with Hogg’s gang. His silence disposes him to being symbolically disaffected enough such that if a better opportunity were to present itself, he is not precluded from entering into that new social arrangement. In fact, this is exactly what is alluded to at the end of Hogg when, after being taken back by Hogg, Cocksucker fantasizes about returning to live with Sambo,

Rufus, and Red in the docks. If it were the case that Cocksucker was fully engaged and enmeshed in a symbolic relationship with Hogg and company, he would be unable to disentangle himself from the tethers of desire that bind him to that symbolic order. In

Hogg, violent or not, the remarkably active sexual life that Cocksucker enacts actually protects him from the determinism of the prevailing symbolic, insofar as he is sustained in a fluid sémiotique state of open exchange, not tied down to one particular arrangement.

For Freedman (2009), sex possesses revolutionary—disruptive—potential in terms of its ability to sustain an open system with the world around the subject via others. “Only the strongest egos can occasionally break through this mental stricture—at the behest of sex, say—and even that usually leads to a restructuring of an ethical discourse” (Freedman,

2009, 126). This is, however, not a given, as some sexualities can become bound up with one part of the world, thereby dissipating its revolutionary potential. The strongest egos

(in Delany’s sense) are the ones that resist this ‘one-ness’ of sex and sexuality; but sustaining a multiplicity of sexes and sexualities necessitates vulnerability and/or risk. 108

This is the potentiality of le sémiotique, the subversive dynamism inherent to the structure of the ego.

This brings me to the second point I wish to address with regard to the utopian potential of Hogg: Cocksucker’s apparent apathy. Delany remarks that Hogg attempts to blur the ready-made categories of “victim” and “monster” by telling the story from the perspective of the people caught up in such acts (Delany, 1999a, 307). This is one of the virtues of violent literary fantasies, particularly pornography, which speaks to the utopian potential of the genre. Speaking on the topic of female S&M paperbacks, in her essay

“Pornography for Women by Women, With Love” (1985), Joanna Russ states, “[I]t seems to me that such fantasies may be a kind of half-way house out of violence rather than into it” (91). The same analysis can be applied to Delany’s Hogg. Later in the same essay, Russ—now speaking about the raw sexual and emotional starvation of which certain S&M fan-fiction writes so openly—states that such literature forces the reader to question established notions of identity: “[W]ho is the man and who is the woman, who’s active and who’s passive, even who’s who, cannot even be asked” (1985, 96). Literary pornography, and perhaps pornography broadly speaking, entails this deconstructive critique of identity, acting toward undermining stable social arrangements and hierarchies. Writing on the topic of cinematic pornography, Delany makes the argument that the latter is far less sexist than non-pornographic commercial cinema:

[T]hey have a higher proportion of female to male characters; they show more

women holding more jobs and a wider variety of jobs; they show more women

instigating sex; they show a higher proportion of friendships between women; and 109

they show far less physical violence against women than do the commercial films

made for the same sociological audience. (Delany, 1999a, 66)

While this latter critique of pornographic cinema does not necessarily reflect or represent the ‘structure of feeling’ specific to Hogg, it does nonetheless speak to the deconstructive mode in which the narrative of the story functions: dislodging preconceived notions of what it is to be an “active” agent.

With this in mind, I return to Hogg and Cocksucker’s apparent apathy. I claim that

Cocksucker is indeed not apathetic, but instead actively engaged in feeling his way toward a better world. This is pursued by means of what I call a power of passivity. When

I refer to “passivity” I am making reference to the hitherto undervalued side of a dichotomy proper to phallogocentric Western metaphysics that has privileged activity. As such, I understand activity to have been aligned with le symbolic and passivity with le sémiotique, insofar as le sémiotique has historically remained unacknowledged.

Cocksucker’s ‘apathy’ is apparent only because he is constantly juxtaposed with the overbearing verbosity of Hogg. Hogg’s constant orations and pontificating on various matters render Cocksucker virtually powerless. Consider Hogg’s following soliloquy to

Cocksucker proclaiming the underlying ‘morality’ of the atrocities of which he has been part:

It’s a good profession, boy,” Hogg said. “Like the man says, ain’t nothin’ you can

do in this world today – go to the pictures, buy some food, or even throw away the

package it come in – that don’t bring somebody closer to hurt. At least this way

you know that you ain’t makin’ your money by makin’ them pictures or packages.

And when you’re hurtin’ someone, you’re hurtin’ ’em. You look ’em right in the 110

eye and do it […] You ain’t droppin’ no bombs on five hundred people you ain’t

never seen. You ain’t signin’ no papers that’s gonna put a thousand people who

ain’t never heard your name out of a house and a job […] you got more sense of

duty than they do.” (H, 47-8)

Hogg argues that his actions are morally justified compared to the rampant automation and herd mentality that drive the majority of acts in contemporary culture. However, the reader must not be lured into assuming that Cocksucker is a passive receptacle into which

Hogg’s propaganda is deposited. Cocksucker refuses to engage the symbolic speech act of his master. By not participating in symbolic exchange, Cocksucker is active in resisting

Hogg’s ideological hegemony. He does not echo the master’s discourse to the master.

From this it follows that an averbal individual subject does not recognize the master as master, and thereby disorganizes the dominant structures of power.

Delany comments that, “Hogg has his monologues; but has he ever really listened to anyone in his life?” (see Freedman, 2009, 142). In contrast to Hogg, Cocksucker can be read as actively listening, especially for the proper moment to present itself when the dominant symbolic (focalized through the character of Hogg in my reading) is at its weakest. This moment of weakness is when Hogg pauses his rant to Cocksucker in order to ask the latter ‘what is the matter?’ At this moment the power relation involutes in favour of Cocksucker. Cocksucker’s reply “Nothin’” can be read as the single most promising speech act in the entire novel, for it contains within it a double edge: in one sense it speaks to Cocksucker’s own utopian horizons, signified by a return to Sambo,

Rufus, and Red; in another sense, it masks this emancipatory potential from Hogg, so that the latter will never suspect it when Cocksucker chooses to leave. Delany regards this 111 subterfuge to be part and parcel of the empowerment language allows the individual subject: “That language can be used to dissemble—and particularly to dissemble to adults who, at the moment, would seem—like Hogg himself seems, just then—to be sincerely concerned for you” (Freedman, 2009, 143). By choosing this moment to interject into the symbolic realm, Cocksucker begins the process of carving out a space for himself within the extant symbolic realm that had previously been foreclosed to him. Delany states that

“part of this is, of course, the project of the novel—that is, the absence of any view of such a space” (qtd. in Freedman, 2009, 141), whether it is what he calls “relational space” or “negotiating space,” or what Kristeva calls psychic space.

The dialectical turn implicit in Cocksucker’s apathy is to be viewed in the third point I wish to address: Cocksucker’s drifting. I claim that such aimless drifting is capable of demonstrating utopian properties, in terms of its affiliations with abjection and borderline ego loss. Turning to her commentary on the “exile” or “deject” in Powers of

Horror, Kristeva outlines how living at the edge of such borderline states can bring forth unexpected returns: “A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines […] constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. […] He has a sense of danger … but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved” (1980, 8). For virtually the entire narrative, Cocksucker is a passenger on Hogg’s truck, seemingly going with the flow of the open road. Kristeva bestows the grace48 of utopia upon those who drift, for they are the ones who are, in the fashion of Oscar Wilde, always arriving on the shore of a new land.49 112

In terms of how Hogg signifies “the ultimate coding of our crises” (Kristeva,

1980, 208), it allows the reader to simply drift along with Cocksucker amid the most horrid, disgusting, and abject squalor of late modernity. In other words, in a world in which any positive alternative is foreclosed in light of market forces (recall Jameson), the reader of Hogg is allowed—in fact encouraged—to just let go, and abandon him or herself to the extreme risk of non-agency. Through abandoning the goal-directed energies of the psyche, one loosens the borders of the ego enough to allow radically unexpected alternatives to infiltrate psychic life (e.g., Sambo, Rufus, and Red for Cocksucker); but in order for this to occur, the painful breaking down of the ego must be dramatized, and this is focalized through Cocksucker. Cocksucker’s narrative is a painful allegory of every individual’s psychological journey toward utopia. More precisely, and in accordance with

Kristeva’s position, Cocksucker’s narrative is the story of the necessary affective experience that late modern humanity will have to endure if it wishes to be saved from the contemporary cultural crises of the Western world. I do not mean that such an experience necessarily entails the participation in acts such as murder or rape, as these are metaphors within the novel of some of the most atrocious crimes against humanity. As metaphor,

Cocksucker’s experience conveys the psychic state of development—i.e., presymbolic and semiotic—that is necessary in order to re-boot both personal and cultural utopian imaginations.

Cocksucker remains silent throughout the novel, right up until the very end of the story. Likewise, he appears to have no willful or active agency or subjectivity of his own.

He is silent/presymbolic and constantly engaged in sexual acts with Hogg including eating and drinking the latter’s excretions, which is to say he is directly connected with 113 the presymbolic. Cocksucker is the infans. His silence is also important in a more psychoanalytic context. Cocksucker’s first speech-act, “Nothin’,” signifies his entrance into a symbolic realm, and by extension his acquisition of agency and subjectivity. But how is this made possible? Consider Cocksucker’s experience with Big Sambo, Rufus, and Red during his time away from Hogg at the docks. The reader is led to believe that during the last sequence of the novel, where Hogg enquires into Cocksucker’s state of mind, that the latter is planning his return to Sambo, Rufus, and Red. He has found a relationship that he Loves (big ‘L’, to signify Law). However, according to Kristeva, such symbolic Love identification is only possible because of the presymbolic imaginary love

(small ‘l’, to signify the law-before-the-Law) of Kristeva’s adoption of the ‘imaginary father’:

One is thus led to conceive of at least two identifications; a primal one, resulting

from a sentimental … archaic, and ambivalent affection for the maternal object …

and the other, which underlies the introjection into the ego of an object itself

already libidinal […] The first is closer to depersonalization, phobia, and

psychosis; the second is closer to hysterical lovehate, taking to itself the phallic

ideal that it pursues. (Kristeva, 1983, 33)

Hogg functions in terms of Kristeva’s imaginary father (a loving and non-castrating version of Freud’s father of individual prehistory) insofar as the imaginary father preserves the horror and unruly drive-energies that are vital to the erection of a figure that one can also love (à la the symbolic realm).50 One may object to this interpretation of

Hogg insofar as his raping and murdering is exactly the embodiment of the castrating father. I am, however, thinking more in terms of Hogg’s relationship to Cocksucker, 114 which, despite its social distortion, is one of personal presymbolic love; violent, murderous, and chaotically libidinal, but no less loving.

Cocksucker could not make the transition into symbolic ‘Love’ (i.e., to desire

Sambo, Rufus, and Red), without the presymbolic ‘love’ of Hogg. The challenge for humanity today is to find a ‘loving father.’ But in a post-secular society, this challenge becomes all the more difficult. This simultaneous source and inhibitor of desire is implicit to the generation of a new utopian frontier. Kristeva writes, “You see it today with the resurrection of the sacred. Look at those crowds at World Youth days in search of a good father, kneeling before the Pope who enables millions of people…to ‘fix fatherhood,’ i.e. to console themselves in the shelter of a paternal figure who is neither absent nor tyrannical but simply present and loving” (Kristeva, 2002a, 23). Finding such a loving father is not guaranteed and, in fact, requires a certain amount of drifting, wallowing in abjection—aimlessly—before a loving father presents itself. Thus, echoing Kristeva’s commentary on the Exile (“the more he strays, the more he is saved”), one can read into such aimless drifting a definite utopian potential similar to the notion of the lotus in

Henry Miller’s Sexus (1965) referenced in the introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s

Anti-Oedipus (1972): “If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit” (xxiii).

Delany’s pornographic novels, even at their most vulgar and unpleasing, are

‘works of love’ (à la Kristeva’s Tales of Love). Pornography is, at times—and I believe this is how Delany is using the genre—a way to explore and question the ‘nature’ of desire, both from an individual as well as social standpoint. Internal to this examination are the questions, ‘what is desired?’ and ‘why?’ Returning for the moment to the critical 115 utopia, the reader is encouraged to recall that utopia is never guaranteed, but rather something that must always be worked toward. Moylan declares that in the critical utopia, utopia is preserved as an impulse, dream, and/or desire. What I take from Moylan, on the other hand, is that not only is the utopia to which the desire is directed impure, so too is the impulse/dream/desire for utopia itself. Like Kristeva’s commentary on the literary genius of Proust, Delany “can also give us a glimpse of the way that a psychic life can possess and expose its own unprecedented complexity: a life that is at once painful and ecstatic, sensual and spiritual, erotic and pensive” (Kristeva, 1994, 198). The desire for utopia is not pure; it is fundamentally impure. The impulse is violent, aggressive and reparative. The dream segues seamlessly into a terrifying nightmare, and back again.

At its core utopia is fundamentally sadomasochistic, emblematic of the trace of the “lovehate” identification that primary narcissism leaves upon the psyche of the infans- turned-speaking-being. As Kristeva writes, extrapolating from Proust, “Time can only be truly regained if it recuperates this sort of violence—a violence that is essentially one of archaic loss and vengeance. What gives me pleasure and abandons me also kills me, yet I am capable of putting to death that which gives me pleasure” (1994, 181). If utopia is never guaranteed, like the critical utopians argue, then it is not solely because desire can be hijacked by corrupt corporate powers, but also because that desire is constitutively distorted from before the beginning.

116

(b) The Mad Man

The Mad Man (hereafter cited as MM) occupies the intersection of three thematic axes in Delany’s criticism: sex, death, and philosophy. Part pornographic novel, part murder mystery, and part philosophical expose—in the tradition of Sade and Bataille—

The Mad Man tells the story of John Marr, a gay black Ph.D. student in philosophy, conducting research for his dissertation based on the biography of Timothy Hasler, a young and prolific “philosopher extraordinaire” in epistemology and symbolic logic

(MM, 9), who at the age of twenty nine (in the autumn of 1973) “was stabbed to death in—or just behind—a bar off Ninth Avenue at Fiftieth Street, in New York City, shortly after two o’clock in the morning” (MM, 12). Nothing other than this rough outline is known of Timothy’s murder: no suspect, no motive, and no leads. Initially, Marr becomes interested in Hasler because of the latter’s philosophical work in the areas of linguistics, semantics, and logic, but later he becomes committed to discovering the truth behind who killed Hasler and why.

Delany’s The Mad Man signifies the next level of psychic expansion out of abjection toward utopia, while still being firmly mired within said abjection. Accordingly,

John Marr is cast as an exemplary model for sketching out the kind of psychic space I claim is ideal for the subject I call the abject utopian; this is because, even though heavily mired in abjection, John has access to certain symbolic resources (i.e., his pursuit of a

Ph.D.) that allow him to translate the otherwise horrific affects of the abject into something more productive. In what follows I provide an exegesis of The Mad Man that is structured around an analysis of knowledge and jouissance; more precisely, the 117 jouissance of the Other. I take for granted the assumption that Timothy Hasler represents

John’s impossible object of desire. However, in contrast to Lacan’s interpretation of jouissance I do not claim that transgressing the ‘bar’ of the barred subject (S) is equivalent to death; rather, I affirm, following Kristeva, that John’s extreme sexual forays flay him open and lay him bare to a knowledge of himself previously unknown. By transgressing his own psychosomatic limitations, John fashions an enriched psychic space made possible by means of what Kristeva calls the imaginary father, the “potential presence” inherent to the psyche of the infans that puts loving idealization at the heart of ego formation (see Beardsworth, 2004, 281n10). Such is the abject utopian potential of

Delany’s The Mad Man.

Knowledge, Jouissance, and the Academic Novel

I begin this portion of the present section by exploring how the narrative plot of

The Mad Man is in keeping with Lacan’s interpretation of knowledge and jouissance.

First, however, it is necessary to point out what Delany says with regard to the nature of his novel:

[T]he most important genre—or subgenre—it takes to itself is the ‘academic

novel.’ And, as academic novels go, it’s a pretty scathing one. It’s a novel that

allegorizes—if you want to read it that way—the situation our contemporary

graduate students (who, in most major research universities, teach 50 percent or

more of our university classes) have to endure to survive. (Delany, 1999a, 312) 118

The “situation” that Delany mentions is specific to contemporary graduate students pertains to everyone living under late capitalism. I am referring to the internalization of the desire to consume and produce more than can be reasonably expected. The system, as such, does not actively enforce this desire on students; the mentality, which is an impoverished scholarly mentality, is unconsciously internalized from the cultural logic of late capitalism, which is always already in perpetual excess of itself. The prospective title for his dissertation, The Systems of the World, gives voice to John Marr’s overly ambitious desire to produce more than is reasonable. John Marr says, “[I]n my senior year, two fluke seminars on Hegel—one on The Philosophy of History, one on The

Phenomenology of Spirit—had pushed me on to graduate school on another coast, naively certain my thesis would be a six-hundred page tome on psychology, history, reality, and metaphysics, putting them once and for all in their grandly ordered relation” (MM, 10).

John’s desire to write his dissertation on something so all encompassing is symptomatic of others in the field of academia living under the conditions of late capitalism. However,

John Marr’s story is not specific to intellectuals and scholars but, I claim, to all those living under the conditions of late capitalism who wish to achieve the virtually impossible, but who lack reason why they wish for this impossible.51

In Seminar XX, Lacan addresses the desire to know that which is beyond our means. Commenting on this part of Lacan’s work, analyst and critic Bruce Fink states,

“We find the pleasures available to us in life inadequate, and it is owing to that inadequacy that we expound systems of knowledge—perhaps, first and foremost, to explain why our pleasure is inadequate and then to propose how to change things so that it will not be” (see Barnard and Fink, 2002, 34). John initially intends The Systems of the 119

World to be his title, but the project is later said to be abandoned because, according to

John, “a six-hundred-page tome about everything of philosophical interest was less likely to be considered a work of serious philosophy than a self-help manual starting off: ‘It’s important to feel really good about yourself'” (MM, 10). Perhaps especially today, such a lengthy and ‘systematic’ work might be received by others in the field—especially one’s supervisors and superiors—as self-indulgent and/or acritical prattle. In response to this,

John internalizes the position that “there must be something better” and that someone else must be in possession of it. This is what Lacan calls the jouissance of the Other.52

Fink adds that as much as an individual subject seeks the jouissance of the Other, there is always a greater, more perfect, embodiment of jouissance held by some other

Other. “In the end, we wind up giving it [i.e., the jouissance of the Other] so much consistency that the jouissance we do in fact obtain seems all the more inadequate”

(Barnard and Fink, 35). The goal of Lacanian analysis is to have the analytic subject

(analysand) recognize that their desire for the desire of the Other is fundamentally distorted, and to appreciate that the jouissance of the Other is mere fantasy. To neutralize this desire would be a form of achieved utopia (on par with Nirvana, Ecstasy, and so on); however, such final attainment is impossible according to Lacan, seeing as humans are creatures whose subjectivity is constituted through language. “Monkeys may show signs of such exuberance at various moments, but they do not create logics, mathematical systems, philosophies, or psychologies” (Barnard and Fink, 34). The utopian end would be to know that there is nothing to know.53

John Marr erects his own impossible object of desire in Timothy Hasler. The reader of The Mad Man is informed of Hasler’s numerous impressive publications 120 including sixteen referenced academic articles, a book on the rhetoric of Pascal,

Nietzsche, and C.S. Peirce, as well as his six science fiction stories [and two fragmentary and unpublished SF stories] that significantly informed his academic philosophical work.

Hasler’s life becomes the guiding beacon for Marr’s own personal narrative. Marr says early on in the text, “Maybe, I thought, if I studied Hasler, I might learn what it was to be a real philosopher” (MM, 15). Initially, Marr is introduced to Hasler’s work by a professor friend of his, Irving Mossman, who is working on a biography of Hasler. Marr inherits the work of his professor friend when he receives a letter, and accompanying archival and other unpublished material of Hasler’s, explaining why he, Mossman, can no longer continue on with the project. Mossman writes:

I now know, from Hasler’s journals [...] Hasler must have been indulging in the

most degrading—and depressing—sexual “experiments”: bums on the New York

City streets, homeless alcoholics in Riverside Park, white, black, or Hispanic

winos lounging about on the island in the middle of upper Broadway, about whom

his only criterion could have been, as far as I can make out, the dirtier the better...!

Really, John, I have to consider seriously whether Timothy Hasler is the man I

want to be writing about. (MM, 22)

Not only is Hasler a figure of excessive knowledge but he is also a figure who embodies—even when dead—the knowledge of unspeakable pleasures. John’s inheritance of Hasler’s manuscripts, and Mossman’s letter, mark a turning point in the narrative where John decides that he is going to follow through with Hasler’s biography.

His research method becomes one of mimesis; which is to say, in order to ‘know’ Hasler, 121

John strives to emulate the latter’s philosophical/sexual ideal. His emulations draw him into sexual experiences that put pressure on the limits of his psychic space.

Soon following his initial discovery of Hasler’s own sexual experiences, Marr encounters a homeless black man named Leaky in Riverside who encourages Marr to have sex with him. During an instant where Marr performs oral sex on the homeless man,

Marr’s mental narrative escorts the reader through his experience of the moment in which he finds himself: “The odor of 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. [...] I’d kind of lost track of the world...” (MM, 39). These moments, whereby the liminal zones of the psyche are exposed, recur throughout the story as Marr’s sexual adventures expand (or degrade

‘lower and lower’), paralleling his investigation and explorations into Hasler’s death.

Hasler as Imaginary Father; Or, The Loss in Place of Lack

John and Leaky strike up an open relationship with one another that weaves in and out of the text throughout the duration of the novel. John continues to find new leads with respect to his research/investigation into the events surrounding Hasler’s death, which expose him to scenes and situations where he is coaxed into extreme sexual acts with other men. One such experience takes place at a gay bar called the Mineshaft, which hosts a Wet Night “catering to guys with a taste for recycled beer” (MM, 111), sponsored by the Golden Shower Association. The Mineshaft, it turns out, is the very same bar outside of which Hasler was murdered. It is important to take note of the fact that as John 122 pursues ‘the Hasler question,’ he and Hasler overlap or blur boundaries. That is to say,

John relives Hasler’s experiences and, in a sense, becomes his own impossible object of desire. This is a point that I wish to exploit for purposes of my argument. I claim that

Hasler is not in fact an impossible object of desire in the Lacanian sense, who imposes the limitation on John’s jouissance; rather, Hasler signifies a presymbolic psychic entity proper to John that Kristeva calls the imaginary father. In what follows I argue this assertion by way of Kristeva’s critique of Lacan’s notion of the imaginary.

Guy Davidson’s (2008) article on Delany’s The Mad Man is important for setting up my argument regarding the significance—i.e., utopian significance—of Hasler in terms of John’s psychic structure. Davidson reads The Mad Man as a utopian novel insofar as “certain modes of urban queer eroticism might be seen as embedded alternatives to dominant modes of late capitalist sociality” (13). Following Ernst Bloch, this interpretation commits Davidson to viewing Delany’s novel as dramatizing “the

‘future-oriented’ potential within Eros – or within certain kinds of Eros” (14). If there is any utopian potential in the novel it is to be found in the sexual act itself. In many scenarios of The Mad Man, sexual acts assume very extreme forms. In a sense, one would be justified in suggesting that the type of sexuality proposed in The Mad Man speaks more to the theories of sexuality expounded by the theorists of the anti-social turn in queer studies.54 However, I disagree with this, as does Davidson who argues that The

Mad Man “nevertheless deploys a category of imaginary space” (Davidson 17) and as such, resists any dramatization of apocalyptic sexuality by being reduced to the self- annihilating jouissance of the Real. 123

Davidson claims that, “In The Mad Man, intimations of utopia are experienced as a result of really good sex” (21). Davidson recognizes that these intimations—in the

“psychophysical intensities” experienced by John Marr during the sexual act—are intensified during climax. These intensities give way to epiphanic insight whereby one is

‘opened up to’ or enlightened, by way of the sexual act, to a germinal stage of “a collective extension of the individual experience of satisfied desire, a bridging of the notionally private experience of sexual feeling and the public experiences of urban identity and interaction” (23). What this implies is that flirting with, and even falling into, the jouissance of the Other does not annihilate subjectivity but instead expands it in new and unexpected ways. The penetration of the ‘bar,’ which separates the individual subject from the jouissance of the Other, is characteristic of Kristeva’s revaluation of Lacan’s notion of the imaginary. Indeed, Kristeva applauds and credits Lacan’s analysis of the splitting of the subject; however, she criticizes his claim that ego formation is strictly dyadic. According to her, Lacan’s account of the mirror stage—whereby the function of the imago is necessary and sufficient for the formation of the ego—does not take into account the conditions necessary for the infans to want to identify with the imago (Other) in the first place. By way of this critique, Kristeva answers her own question whether ‘the mirror stage, in fact, does not emerge out of nowhere’ (see Kristeva, 1983, 22).

Sara Beardsworth states that, “Kristeva turns up new features of the narcissistic structure that put into question the valorization of true object choice, governed by societal or moral demands, over narcissistic destiny” (2004, 63). In contrast to the traditional psychoanalytic picture of narcissism (i.e., a primordial ego that takes its undifferentiated state with the pre-Oedipal Mother to be itself and in which it falls in love, or, an ego that 124 takes itself as the ideal object of libido that has been withdrawn from another object)

Kristeva posits the advent of the presymbolic “third”: “Its peculiar function in the transference relation points to an elementary—prelinguistic—idealization of otherness that is quite different from the mirror imago, and therefore distinct from the appearance of lack” (Beardsworth, 65). This presymbolic third is the imaginary father, such that in order for the impact of a social symbolic to have any meaning for the struggling/emerging individual subject, there must be a corresponding presymbolic entity—sémiotique—to which the former might have any possibility of registering in the psyche. In other words, without something in the subject’s psyche with which a symbolic code can strike a cord and resonate, no meaning is possible for that individual subject in terms of its relationship to the social. Kristeva stresses “the need for the nonsymbolic dimensions of subjectivity—including the imaginary father—to take on some kind of symbolic form

[…] Without this, they remain a neglected semiotic ‘content’ ripe for an outbreak in distorted and destructive forms” (Beardsworth, 70).

This is why the extreme sexual acts of The Mad Man sustain a utopian potential and are not reducible to an apocalyptic anti-utopianism proper to anti-social queer theory and why the utopian function herein differs from Lacan’s. Davidson writes:

For Delany, in this novel at least, desire is not as it is for Lacan, necessarily

thwarted because it is fundamentally the pursuit of an illusory state – the plenitude

of the preoedipal. Delany’s account of sexuality is much more celebratory and

affirmative. For … Delany grants such an experience to John Marr on more than

one occasion; and unlike the imaginary plenitude of the preoedipal, this seems to

be the real thing. Even if the satisfied desire and human connection that feature in 125

the novel’s descriptions of sexual contact are only momentary, they are concrete.

This utopia, unlike Lacan’s is not entirely make-believe. (2008, 25)

John is able to be pressed to his absolute psychic limits and not succumb to the annihilating forces of the jouissance of the Other. John’s healthy psychic life is dramatized in concrete form through his relationship with Leaky. Complementary to

John’s otherwise logical and systematic world-view is Leaky, a liminal subject par excellence. Leaky has been brought up in an incestuous family that engages in bestiality among other ‘marginal’ practices. Leaky does not see this as bad. Contrary to Marr, who views much of what Leaky reports of his childhood as child abuse, Leaky affirms his upbringing in proto-Nietzschean fashion, as something beyond the moralism of Good and

Evil. Leaky tells Marr:

You wanted to know about me? This is the fuckin’ truth, nigger. Don’t talk about

no child abuse. I was raised by my daddy and a nigger what he met in reform

school. And if we didn’t have the same mom, why’s he gonna go tellin’ me shit

like that? Huh? And they beat off—all the time, just about. And so did I, once I

learned how! They ate their own goddamned cum – ‘cause they thought it made

you strong, or something. And they taught me to eat mine. And I still eat mine,

too—unless I’m givin’ it to somebody else to eat for me ... that I like enough to

give it to. Piss, shit, cum, snot, cockcheese—all that stuff: see, that’s like a

present, little guy. 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 shit? (MM, 374) 126

Leaky does not recognize any boundary limit between his body and the environment to which it is so intimately connected (and I think ‘intimately’ here is to be interpreted literally, which is to say, Leaky believes he has a sexual relationship with the world).

Leaky’s interpretation and understanding of his body, although criminalized and pathologized by many in contemporary society, gestures toward a new utopian body—if not subjectivity—where one might appreciate the seemingly innocuous fluids as gifts, more precisely, gifts to be shared. John’s openness to the radical difference embodied in

Leaky is reminiscent of Delany’s own utopian project of “contact relations” (see subsection “(d)” later in the present section) and is anticipatory of a world where cross- class and cross-cultural relationships are free to proliferate and simply dwell within the pleasure they produce.

The qualitative richness of John’s psychic life is portrayed in how open and fluid his body and mind are to difference and contradiction, especially in terms of his partner

Leaky: “Though I love him, Leaky and I disagree about the way the systems of the world work as much as two people possibly can. But you have to tell me, then, why we only do anything you could call arguing maybe twice a year; and when we do, it usually ends with my getting pissed on—in the bathtub (yawn!)” (MM, 498). What John is expressing is his wonder at how two seemingly incompatible individuals, from two completely different sub-cultural backgrounds can live a happy and enjoyable life, in almost utopian effortlessness.

Marr’s psyche is abject in the sense that it struggles to productively work with shit and waste, both bodily and socially, and in terms of his budding relationship with Leaky.

Mary Catherine Foltz (2008) claims, “we desperately need ‘corrupted’ subjects like Marr 127 who show us through their desire for waste a pleasurable way to interact with that which we may previously have deemed abject” (54).55 Similar to the present dissertation, Foltz is working with the concept of the abject in a novel way compared to its root in Kristeva’s

Powers of Horror; however, it is important to distinguish Foltz’s position from the one I defend: whereas Foltz suggests that the abject is inverted in The Mad Man (i.e., something pleasurable instead of disgusting and/or painful), I emphasize the utopian potential of the abject, or that which is disgusting/or painful.

Marr’s psyche is utopian for the same reason Alterman (1977) claims: “We must read it [Marr’s wonder via sex] as a symbolic response to the experience of coming awake in a new world of wonder, of making love, and being loved, for the first time”

(28). This utopian interpretation of Marr, and the small and intimate community he founds in The Mad Man, echo the utopian commentary of Oscar Wilde (1891), who stated that a map without the island of Utopia is not worth looking at for it leaves out the very place to which man is constantly arriving. Abject sexuality is one means by which an individual can arrive at the shores of a new land—glimpse a vision—and then depart, only to return again.

John risks knowing that which initially presents itself as an impossible object of desire, such that if he were to get too close to it—similar to Icarus flying too close to the sun—he would be burned up and annihilated. However, such turns out not to be the case.

Instead John is able to discover—via his extreme sexual encounters, i.e., jouissance— new structures to his psyche, structures that allow him to expand his psychic space and enhance his psychic life in order to sustain a utopic relationship with the embodiment of difference (Leaky) in a world that would otherwise bar him from such happiness. 128

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spider (hereafter cited as TV) tells the story of the shared life of two gay men, Eric Jeffers and Morgan Haskell (a.k.a. Shit), as they age from seventeen and nineteen years of age respectively into their early nineties. The novel begins in the year 2007 with Eric living with his stepfather (Mike) in Atlanta but anticipating a move to live with his mother (Barb) in Diamond Harbor, a town on the coastline of southern Georgia, for a year. His stay ends up exceeding the originally agreed upon year due to the relationships he strikes up with two men during a rest at a truck stop just outside of Diamond Harbor that Eric knows is notorious for serving as a hub for gay men to engage in sex. Here he meets (and has sex with) Shit, Shit’s father Dynamite, and their close friends Jay and his adopted son Mex. Following a sex scene, which has Eric climaxing 5 times, Eric and the gang go apparently separate ways until Eric reaches

Diamond Harbor, and it becomes evident that the same gang are well known to Eric’s mother, as they frequent the café/diner—the “Lighthouse Coffee, Egg & Bacon”—where she works as a server. The relationship between Eric, Dynamite, and Shit is quick to evolve, so much so that the latter asks Eric if he would like to join them as a fellow garbage man in Diamond Harbor, which Eric readily accepts.

The social structure of Diamond Harbour is such that a Chamber of Commerce has been established by, and in the name of, Robert Kyle III—a black gay philanthropist—who has created a utopian community where black gay men, and some white, can live a safe and protected sexually fulfilling life, have access to a healthy salary 129 for various jobs, as well as support key gay cultural sites and activities. There is also a ferry to transport residents back and forth to nearby Gilead island (Jay and Mex live here). While a resident of Diamond Harbour—now living with Dynamite and Shit—Eric grows extremely close to Shit, sexually and emotionally, and the better part of the remainder of the story details their personal forays together, sexual and otherwise, in private as well as in the company of others, far into old age.

Aside from certain details that I will elaborate upon below, it is not unfair to say that nothing really happens in the novel, just a lot of sex as Eric and Shit grow old together. Delany focuses his narration of their shared life by exploring in long, elaborate, drawn-out prose the small things specific to one’s lived experience of the world. Many large-scale world events occur and pass without registering so much as a mark on either

Eric’s or Shit’s memory. If Through the Valley is a utopian novel—and I argue that it is— it is not because there is some punctuation that demarcates a crossing over into utopia so much as there is, as Christian Haines claims, a slow and painful slouching toward utopia, focalized through the welling up of potential in a life, especially Eric’s life.56 In this section, I work through a few of the narrative elements of the text, focusing on certain key moments in Eric’s life in Diamond Harbor in order to flesh out an understanding of the precarious yet strong psyche Eric demonstrates as radically open to and worthy of utopia.

The Thing and Infinite Utopias

First I would like to draw the reader’s attention to the significance of telling the story of a utopian community from the perspective of its garbage men. Diamond Harbor 130 is the utopian community it is partially because of the garbage and/or flow of waste by which it is sustained. In this sense, Delany writes Through the Valley from the perspective of the abject. More importantly, this perspective shows the potential for alternate modes of living that dwell within those places that the dominant system of capital discards. As such, the abject can be witnessed as vital to the project of imagining new utopias under the conditions of late capitalism. This interpretation of abjection, in relation to urban planning and development, has historical roots illustrated in The Production of Space

(1974) by Henri Lefebvre. Here, the latter writes of the cultural significance of the mundus:

a sacred or accursed place in the middle of the Italiot township. A pit, originally—

a dust hole, a public rubbish dump. Into it were cast trash and filth of every kind

[...] It connected the city, the space above ground, land-as-soil and land-as-

territory, to the hidden, clandestine, subterranean spaces which were those of

fertility and death [...] The pit was also a passageway through which dead souls

could return to the bosom of the earth and then re-emerge and be reborn [...] the

mundus terrified as it glorified. (242)

Lefebvre’s notion of the abject mundus is similar in scope to the life-world that Eric and

Shit, along with their other lovers, inhabit in Diamond Harbor. They are a part of the abject as much as the abject is a part of them. It is their home. I claim that Diamond

Harbor stands as a sign of hope for an otherwise culturally bankrupt landscape, which is the rest of surrounding America. Diamond Harbor and the subjects that live there represent a generative and productive potential characteristic of Kristeva’s idea of the semiotic Chora. For Kristeva, this is the form that the pre-Oedipal Mother assumes—the 131 maternal matrix—and what allows for all else to be placed and take place. The Chora does not have a proper place of its own, and because of this it is unrepresentable. Kristeva writes, “Discrete quantities of energy move through the body of the subject who is not yet constituted as such and, in the course of his development, they are arranged according to the various constraints imposed on this body – always already involved in a semiotic process – by family and social structures” (1974, 25). The subjects of Diamond Harbor,

Eric perhaps most explicitly, are subjects that are not yet constituted as such, which means that their subjectivity is intimately tied to the placeless-place which gives form and coherence to their future, but which itself cannot be represented. This place is Diamond

Harbor.

The interpretation of Diamond Harbor as a metaphorical projection of a Chora place is given deeper meaning insofar as what makes Diamond Harbor what it is are the experiences of those who live there. Delany’s detailed focus on the small things, the fleeting imperceptible moments in life, emphasizes how unrepresentable these moments are, and thus, how unrepresentable Diamond Harbor is in itself. Another way in which

Diamond Harbor is similar to the maternal Chora is made plain by the fact that it is the place in the story where Eric meets with his mother. In a sense, Eric’s journey to

Diamond Harbor can be read as a hero’s pilgrimage to the ‘mother land,’ a place of rebirth or a homecoming significant of regeneration. Like Kristeva’s Chora, Eric’s mother is not vocal, which is to say symbolically active in his life. She is indeed supportive of him, desiring the best for him as any loving parent would for their child. Because of this characterization I interpret her to be in keeping with Kristeva’s conception of non- signifying meaning, acting through affect rather than discursively, and so on. 132

Alternatively, Barb functions akin to the Thing (das Ding) that Kristeva, distancing herself from Lacan’s usage of the term, claims as “the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion, seat of the sexuality from which the object of desire will become separated” (1987a, 13). Accenting Barb are other characters (namely Clem and Ron, see below) who attempt to influence Eric as they speak around or “circumambulate”57 Barb, her co-worker and boyfriend respectively. The first example is from Clem who, after hearing that Eric wants to stay in Diamond Harbor and be a garbage man with Shit and Dynamite, expresses disbelief that he would desire such a life:

“Well, it’s good honest work [garbage man]. I’m not sayin’ it isn’t. Still, it’s not

the most respectable job you could have. And Morgan [Shit] and his uncle ain’t

the most respectable people in the Harbor. It seems to me –” Clem went through

expressions and settled on a smile that Eric wondered if it wasn’t for some all-

purpose explanation – “you’d want a job where some nice young ladies might

look at you and say, well, what a fine young fellow he is. He’d make a real good

provider—you know: someone with prospects. A good person to start a family

with. I was only wonderin’ why you’d wanna work with someone livin’ over with

all those ... strange people—in the Dump[.”] (TV, 101-102)

These sentiments are echoed by Ron when he asks Eric, “Aw, come on! You want nice things, don’t you? To have a nice house? Nice clothes? Be friends with nice people? Go to nice places—well, that’s a little hard to do if you’re a ... refuse maintenance engineer”

(TV, 132). Both Clem’s and Ron’s moralizing rants parrot the oppressive climate of heteronormativity and economic idolatry proper to late capitalism. Against this tide, Eric 133 chooses to become non-productive, jamming the circuitry of capital by circulating the non-commodity that is (unspeakable) love and joy. During Ron’s rant the narrator tells the reader, “it was all he [Eric] could do not to say, I wanna stay in the Dump and fuck and suck myself silly!” (TV, 134).

In a dump no less! I want to advance a theory as to why Eric actively seeks to live unproductively and instead spend virtually every moment of his life fucking and sucking in a vocation typically looked down upon by the better part of society. In other words, why does Eric actively seek to dwell amongst the abject? The argument that I advance is that Eric has cultivated a remarkably rich and erotic relationship with refuse and waste, that which is essential for becoming a subject in the first place. This aspect of Eric’s subjectivity can be interpreted from the very manner in which Delany crafts the structure of his novel. The first seven chapters of Through the Valley are marked starting at G and working in reverse order to A. After chapter A there is chapter 0 and then each subsequent chapter moves numerically from 1 to 133. There is no extant criticism of this particular narrative structure of Through the Valley; however, I suggest that the significance of the first seven chapters being G, F, E, D, C, B, and A—all musical notes—is significant for representing Eric’s pre-Oedipalesque subjective formation. The point in the narrative at which the transition is made from ‘musical notes’ to cardinal numbers roughly aligns with Eric’s arrival and settling in Diamond Harbor, and his decision to assume a particular identity and symbolic role within the social realm.

Consider the fact that between 0 and 1 there is a theoretically infinite range of numbers (i.e., 0.01, 0.001, 0.02, 0.002, etc.). This is true with regard to the range between

1 and 2, 2, and 3, and so on throughout the book. As such, the events that take place 134 within each chapter are not finite or isolated moments; rather, they are infinite in their own right, inexhaustible down to the smallest minutiae. However, and perhaps most importantly, these ‘symbolically’ arranged/aligned moments of infinity form an experiential continuity with the apparent abject musicality of Eric’s pre-Oedipal constitution. The infinite range that exists between chapters 0 and 1 also exists between 0 and A; which is to say there is no complete break or severance between Atlanta (i.e.,

Eric’s pre-Oedipal phase) and Diamond Harbor (i.e., Eric’s “new” symbolic phase). This speculative interpretation of Delany’s formal style in Through the Valley can be utilized as an opportunity to flesh out how Through the Valley “represents the ultimate coding of our crises” (Kristeva, 1980, 208) in terms of the utopian potential of the abject.

If, as Kristeva argues, le sémiotique is the revolutionary aspect implicit to any signifying system, then the revolutionary potential of the ‘musicality’ of Eric’s early life as a developing subject is continuous with his arrival in the new symbolic of Diamond

Harbor. In other words, the subject of the ‘new’ symbolic (e.g., utopia, represented by

Diamond Harbor) is always already embodied in one’s ‘old’ abject subjectivity, the pre- subjectivity one rids oneself of in order to emerge into the ‘new.’ What this means is that, contrary to what people might think of themselves under the conditions of late modernity

(e.g., that resistance is futile; that revolution is totally preempted by big business and capitalism), utopia is embodied within the very fabric and tissue of one’s body: dangerous, threatening, volatile; however, in order to access it and trigger this potentiality, one must be daring enough to risk everything by immersing oneself in that which is considered, by the masses, to be obscene and abject. For Eric this is captured in his wanting to become a garbage man: a curator of the abject.58 135

Small Joys and Minor Utopias

The non-communicable or unspeakable nature of the love and joy that Eric and

Shit experience together is witnessed, I argue, not in big grandiose moments but rather in the small moments, or moments that appear to some as generally meaningless. I call these small moments, and the joys they give birth to, minor utopias. In Through the Valley,

Delany is making a very valid point regarding the forces of late capitalism on the individual subject, namely, that it is becoming increasingly difficult for the individual subject to recognize and experience the infinite joys in those things that are small and otherwise unappreciated. Today, expressing this sense of wonder is treated with reactionary hostility, prejudice, or is even pathologized by those who buy into the ideology of the status quo. Take, for example, the scenario in Through the Valley when

Eric gives Shit numerous pairs of socks, after discovering that the latter did not have any to wear (partially by choice, partially because he did not know any better):

Shit never actually said thank you for them.

But once Eric had given them, he’d smile at Eric off and on through the

rest of the month with what looked to be a species of incommunicable joy. [...]

That smile and Shit’s playful, plentiful sex were clearly Shit’s way of

saying thanks at an intensity that was as luminous as it had been on the first day.

Sometimes, watching Shit sitting on the bed’s edge, taking them out or putting

them away, Eric felt he could hear Shit thinking: I got socks to wear! I got socks!

Then he’d grin at Eric again as if he’d just received them. (TV, 159). 136

Shit’s positively joyous reaction to the socks is not psychotic or schizoid in any pathological sense. It is emblematic of an ability to ‘see,’ or be affected by, aspects of the world (here socks) that other people are unable to see (e.g., see joy in the socks). Shit’s reaction might be viewed as akin to what, following Deleuze and Guattari (1980), is called a “Heavenly Nuptial”: finding within a person, or some object of the person (e.g., socks) the “multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature” (35). It is a case of finding and appreciating, within the smallest and most insignificant objects, a beauty that is not perceptible to the vulgar empirical eye.

These multiplicities themselves are hitherto undiscovered minor utopias at which no one has ever arrived before. In keeping with my claim above, that the numerical chapters of

Through the Valley represent many infinities placed alongside one another, the awareness of minor utopias as being immanent to these infinities imbues the concept of utopia with a radically immersive experiential quality. Utopia becomes, not so much the recognition of the future latent in the present, but rather the present itself, that from which we have been alienated by the forces of late capitalism.

What I am calling minor utopias reside in people and everything in nature, or the universe at large. This point is further illustrated much later in the story when Eric and

Shit live on Gilead Island, working as handymen for a lesbian art settlement (at this point

Eric and Shit are roughly in their mid-70s). At one point Eric looks out across the horizon and states, “And, Lord, that is beautiful. But every once in a while, I am allowed to see just a bit more of what glimmers and casts its reflections and images beyond it” (TV,

632). Eric demonstrates the utopian value of the contemplative mind, a meditative cultivation of the present, a centeredness in the moment such that utopia is not hijacked in 137 the name of a future social communalism. Instead, Eric’s utopian psyche speaks to the fantasy of what Roland Barthes (1976-7) calls a “utopia of idiorrhythmic Living-Together

[…] an ideal (happy) manner of figuring, of anticipating the subject’s optimum relation to affect, to the symbolic” (130).59 Insofar as Barthes refers to the utopia of idiorrhythmy as a fantasy, there is no harm in suggesting that Delany’s Through the Valley dramatizes such a fantasy in the form of Eric coming to Diamond Harbor and dwelling within what is a veritably established utopia of affects.

Neither New Jerusalem nor Lost Eden: The Risk of the Impossible Present

By affirming Through the Valley to be portraying an established affective utopia of the moment, I am not claiming it to be effortless and facile. There is an incredible amount of vulnerability and pain that Eric is opening himself up to through his radical commitment to the infinite present moment. However, the pain that Eric risks is not so much neutralized—he does register and feel various sorts of pain—as it is affirmed as part of his utopia properly speaking. In a sense, the pains that are part of his life spent in and around Diamond Harbor with Shit and company speak to the pre-Oedipal status of the infans where pain and pleasure are undifferentiated with respect to one another.

Because pleasure is intimately part of pain for the pre-Oedipal infans, the social-symbolic subject will be driven to find pleasure in moments of pain, even if unconsciously. One moment of pain, which is the result of Eric’s affirmation of the infinite present moment, is the existential angst he feels when he recognizes large swathes of time have passed him 138 and Shit by without any of the major events—which have marked that time for the rest of the planet—leaving so much as a trace on their psychic space.60

By committing oneself fully to the moment, one’s affective experience is qualitatively enriched to such radically high levels of enjoyment, while being quantitatively depressed in terms of the time allotted to experience such enjoyment.

Colloquially, one hears oneself and others utter the phrase, “Where does time go?” and

“Time goes by so fast!” and indeed it does. So much passes by in the blink of any eye, yet the individual subject is forced to confront these conditions of modern living. Even within the proposed affective utopia of Diamond Harbor is this the case. Delany is keen to demonstrate the vastness of that which is left out of experience, no matter how committed one is to the moment. “Odd, Eric thought, how time’s machinery moved moments out of initial wonder into the everyday to the blurred recall of the blurred—” (TV, 436). These lost moments and experiences become the lost islands that capture and sustain the promise of hope unfulfilled, or what could have been, and what still might be. These lost moments, when affirmed in terms of an affective utopia of the infinite present, cannot but be viewed as anything less than reservoirs of hope, shrouded in painful pleasure or pleasing pain.

Approximately half way through the story, the narrator reflects on the fragile constitution of time and the pain of fleeting moments:

“[M]emories were displaced before or after this—now—singularized point...

But, thus, the middle years of many not committed to chronicling their

own lives’ folds and foreshortenings produce the effect by which the recent past

rushes by far faster than the past of our childhoods. 139

Over time, Shit and Eric were no more exempt from this than anyone

else.” (TV, 431)

In other words, one is called—ethically one might say—to militantly chronicle the infinite moments; which is to say, cultivate an awareness of every possible minute element within which one is immersed so as to maximize the joy infusing one’s being.

And one might think that in a book in excess of 800 pages, the author would have drawn together a narrative proclaiming the joyous and rewarding culmination of a life lived so faithfully to the present; however, such is not what happens. To the contrary, Delany demonstrates that, even in a lengthy tome such as Through the Valley, before one knows it Eric and Shit are 85 and 87 respectively. This stage of their life together is introduced by the line, “It wasn’t a full year later that Eric made the transition into relative sexual inactivity. He was eighty-five when he’d noticed that, along with his erections, his orgasms of every three weeks, or month or so had...well, stopped” (TV, 756). This is a tragic moment in the narrative; it marks the threshold beyond which an abject void confronts those who have committed themselves to a life of dwelling in the present.

As they wrestle to come to terms with the rate at which time passes them by

(“How fast are we moving through this stuff called time, anyway...?” [TV, 789]) Eric and

Shit struggle with the materiality of their bodies, distorted and ravaged by the forces of time. The reader is told—in one of the more beautiful passages in the novel—“Eric put his hand on Shit’s thigh and looked up at the boy’s eyes to which something had...happened, that had discolored them and made them tear—made them...old. The flesh underneath Shit’s leg was wrinkled; what lay across the top was smooth” (TV, 759).

Unexpectedly, Shit breaks his hip, is hospitalized, released, then later on severely 140 dislocates his hip again causing him to be hospitalized longer. This time, he will not return. During this time Eric, too, develops ailments of his own: a non-curable form of dementia.

While in hospital, Shit is paid a visit by a pastor, Brother Lucas, because his prognosis is terminal. Brother Lucas asks Shit if he would speak about what he remembers as being the most important things he has done in his life. Shit responds,

“Now what kind of question is that? I ain’t nobody special. Why you askin’ me? See, you wanna be askin’ that to somebody like Eric. He’s real smart and can read and write [Shit cannot]—he reads all that philosophy stuff, and busts his ass helpin’ people and tryin’ to understand stuff and make it all make sense. He’s a special person” (TV, 791). Here,

Shit’s mentality is such that he believes that his life is not recognized as a valid life insofar as it has not been punctuated or consecrated by notable acts of valor and prestige

(i.e., philosophy, charity, etc.). All Shit can do is make repeated reference to his self- confessed perverse sexuality as being the only thing he ever did of any worth, and which he does not consider to be that much: “Bein’ a pervert was the only way I ever learned anything worth knowin’” (TV, 792). This is a very sad moment in the story, because it demonstrates how what I call the fertile innocence of Shit’s abject way of living—as an uneducated, illiterate, perverse garbage man who likes to drink his partner’s piss, use snot-play during sex, and play with his socks—can be made into an internalized and deformed psychic object by the crass judgment of others that would claim that such a life is unworthy. However, I claim that Shit’s experience of the assorted minor utopias that

Diamond Harbor has allotted him and Eric suggests a variety of paths toward a better way 141 of living, the joys of which the many ‘judges’ have foreclosed by virtue of their mainstream—non-abject—lifestyles.

Soon following this scenario, Shit dies. It is also around this time when the reader is made fully aware of the extent to which Eric is affected by his advancing dementia.

Upon returning from Shit’s burial, in the company of his now closest friends, Eric lets on that he cannot wait for Shit to return home from the hospital because he [Shit] makes good coffee. He thinks that what they have returned from is burial of Shit’s dad,

Dynamite. When prompted by his companions to the contrary, Eric reflects, “Shit’s dead, and I am the terrified boy, who everybody knows has ... some god awful habit he’ll never break. Remembering his forgetfulness [...] he thought: Shit’s dead—but he didn’t die today. When? I don’t remember. Two days ago? Five days? Does this mean I’m doomed to live through this again and again?” (TV, 797). And moments later he muses, “And what do I got left to expect? Oh, Lord, he thought. What’s there to do, other than wait, to get through this awful day? So I can start another one, without sex, companionship, or love...” (TV, 800). I do not believe that there is a moral to this story that Delany wishes his reader to take away absolutely; however, if I am to read a moral into the story it is the following: by committing oneself wholly and completely to the infinity of the present moment, one opens oneself up to limitless pleasures at the risk of reaching one’s end at an unexpectedly accelerated pace. In other words, if one is prepared to bear witness to the utopia of the present (i.e., the minor moments formerly alienated by the forces of late capitalism), then one must equally commit oneself to the forces of pain and suffering accelerated by the sacrifice of time in the name of the present. 142

If there is a redeeming element in this risk, and I believe there is, it is inherent in the very act of giving oneself entirely to the moment. That is to say, because of the positively endless amount of sex that he has with Shit and company, Eric fosters and sustains an erotic relationship with the world as a whole. By this I mean that by making love to Shit everywhere and under so many varying conditions, Eric has essentially fortified his psychic life such that he is attached not to ‘Shit the person’ but rather ‘Shit the haeccitas.’ What this means is that Eric has developed his relationship to Shit, and by extension the world, such that his psychic life is in tune not with an eroticism limited in scope to a finite object of desire—i.e., ‘Shit the man’—but rather toward the “non- qualitative property responsible for individuation” (see Cross, 2010)—i.e., ‘Shit the erotic potential.’ Eric is properly suited to sustain a relationship with the minor utopias of the infinite moment even after Shit’s death because he has programmed his body to be sensitive to an eroticism that is universal and not particular. This is not to say that Eric merely uses Shit as a means to an end, i.e., as a conduit through which to become one with the cosmos; rather, Eric elevates Shit’s particularity to the status of the universal by finding the universal potentials within Shit and their sexual relationship. As such, even in his unfortunate yet inevitable declining state, Eric cannot help but be optimistic—and I would argue utopian. I believe this utopianism is captured in the ‘dying’ moments of the novel while Eric is sitting by a window in his house looking out over the ocean. “So, in minutes, Eric slept [...] and woke, thinking, in the dark, No. I have a bit more time. He relaxed before the rumoring sea” (TV, 804). Ending here, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that Eric feels he has a bit more time. Recall that the chapters of

Through the Valley harbor infinity within their apparently finite range. Might not the 143 seascape that Eric looks upon be symbolic of the infinity to which he is still committed, full with its infinite pleasures? Is Eric’s not a utopian psyche that might be valued today when so many seek to surface from the refuse with which we are all covered?

Might affect be a language? Or, Who would risk Utopia?

Steven Shaviro (2012) considers Through the Valley to be utopian’ because of its ability to convey a way of making the world a better place through gradually increasing one’s positive/productive affective capacities (i.e., notably through sexual and social relations with other men, women, animals, and dirt):

In all these settings, Eric and Shit do their work; they find both sexual (with other

men) and simply social (with women) ways to associate with others and feel some

sense of community; they have lots of fun (or sexual/sensual enjoyment); and also

they strive to help other people when necessary, and to be kind to others, as much

as possible. As Spinoza might put it, they work toward ever greater compositions

of positive affects. (see Shaviro’s “The Pinocchio Theory”, online)

The radical sexualization of relationships (i.e., to self, other, nature, etc.) in Through the

Valley is intended, I believe, to be ‘radical’ for purposes of what Roger Bellin (2012) calls “libidinal estrangement”: “the novel’s alienating effect bears on its reader’s desires, not his rational mind.” For Delany, I take it that sexuality is a positive, and not a threatening or dangerous, mode of engagement by which to gradually affect a utopian potential in the world. This is because the sexual drive operates, as Kristeva demonstrates, at the intersections and borders of biology and culture (or society), which is to say 144 sexuality is not solely a private endeavor. It immediately engages the individual subject in a society. One could use this interpretation of sex and sexuality in Delany’s novel to reinterpret Kristeva’s idea of the subject-in-process as something more akin to what Honi

Fern Haber (1994) calls the “subject-in-community”:

[E]very view is the viewpoint of some formed or forming vocabulary, a

vocabulary which is both the product and effect of some community. And since

any community is subject to re-perspectivizing and deconstruction, every

vocabulary is malleable and hence potentially powerful. Empowerment, then

comes about as the result of the struggle of subjects-in-community. (123)

Like Delany’s and Kristeva’s, Haber’s position is one grounded in language and communication and the struggle to make this language connect with others. But what language is, or what it might be, is always in question and never guaranteed. A search for the perfect language? This is Shaviro’s point (and Delany’s as well, I think): that the affective qualities of the body, as exercised specifically through sex, can function as a more direct, honest, and meaningful form of language, and can potentially put the individual on the path toward utopia. But this requires an unfathomable risk on the part of the individual subject, one many might not be willing to hazard.

(d) Bread and Wine

Bread and Wine (hereafter cited as BW) is—I claim—a utopian graphic novella. It is a short piece that tells the story of Delany’s meeting, courting, and sexual relations with the homeless man, and his current partner, Dennis Rickett. I utilize Bread and Wine at 145 this point because the form and content of the story completes the trajectory, or arc, of the argument that I have been shaping throughout this section: beginning with Hogg which showed the most arduous and difficult means by which abject utopianism can be shaped and molded by love, and after detailing how precarious it is to try and sustain a psyche healthy enough for utopia amid different social contexts, Bread and Wine demonstrates how simple, easy, and uncomplicated—that is, “utopian”—creating something “better” out of the abject can be. Because the novella is ‘short and sweet,’ with little or no character development (compared to the previous three novels in this section), it is perfect for my purposes here. As well, it dramatizes the ideal basic relationship that is at the heart of a new politics—a micropolitics—that is not reducible to bureaucracy and administration: a politics based on contact relations, or between people and not governments.

The graphic novella is utopian because it dramatizes, in graphic literary form, the social phenomenon Delany calls “contact relations,” the social philosophy that I claim represents the highest stage to which an abject utopian psyche can reach living under late capitalism. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999b) Delany states, “Given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when the greatest number of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in a mode of good will” (111). In

Cruising Utopia (2009), Muñoz observes Delany’s critique of “Times Square’s alternative erotic economy of public sex as the primary example of contact relations” (53) in his own attempt to rethink how sex and sexuality might enliven a utopian project today.

Although Bread and Wine tells a specifically erotic tale to illustrate contact relations, by 146 no means does Delany think that sex is the only mode through which the utopian impulse of contact relations can be enacted. As was shown to be the case in the previous texts examined, sex is the most significant mode, but it is not the only mode.

Contact relations are not feel good neo-liberal gestures such as tossing a quarter to the homeless, nor can it be reduced to mere acts of charity, or a ‘good deed’; rather, it is a specific comportment toward the world and others that constitutes a radical divergence from how society is currently arranged. To evoke Kant, by enacting a singular contact relation, one affirms a universal utopian ideal that requires one commit oneself to a permanent world-view of open acceptance. In terms of the notion of psychic space that I have been developing, contact relations stand for a utopian harmony between inner and outer, individual and community.

Dennis as Stranger to Delany’s Self, Ourselves?

A good theoretical model for understanding the above proclamation regarding contact relations, utopia, and the universal is found in Kristeva’s book Strangers to

Ourselves (1991; hereafter cited as SO). In Strangers, Kristeva lays bare her psychoanalytic theory for how society might become a better place. She targets the fear that many in society harbour within themselves with regard to the stranger, the foreigner, the alien, and the homeless street beggar. Kristeva argues that by reconciling ourselves to the idea that the stranger is always already inside of us, the stranger is thereby no longer sustained as an external threat. That is to say, that which we take to be categorically external to our being is actually a very intimate and internal part of who we are. I should 147 take this time to refresh the reader’s mind: when I use the language of ‘internal’ and

‘external’ with regard to the self and subjectivity, I am using that language heuristically; for example, if I state that the stranger is not external to me but rather intimately internal,

I am claiming—as Kristeva does—that the stranger is internal to me in a phenomenological sense proper to psychic space. As historically dated as he is, R.D.

Laing’s chiastic depiction of the psyche is still sound. In his The Politics of Experience

(1967), he writes: “My psyche is my experience, my experience is my psyche” (21). One must learn to recognize that the other (e.g., the stranger) is actually a vital part of one’s psychic space, which is to say, vital to the open system that one is. This prevents one’s psychic space from closing up or being reduced to the purely internal or external.

Echoing Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (1973), which tells the fable of a group of citizens who leave their utopian land after being made aware of the atrocious cost of their happiness, the motivation driving Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves is the idea that a utopia must be universal or not at all. That is to say, it is for all or none. The scope of a universal project, and the work that would be entailed in order to achieve it, is so staggering that such endeavors are written off as hopelessly utopian. However, Kristeva affirms the absolute necessity of pursuing such universal goals today, asserting that although these ideals seem unreasonable they must be risked: “As a still and perhaps ever utopic matter, the question is again before us today as we confront an economic and political integration on the scale of the planet: shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others without ostracism but also without leveling” (SO, 1-2; italics added). Kristeva’s book spans ancient to post-Enlightenment eras detailing moments when the stranger or 148 the foreigner provided the impetus to other forms of social organization. Through learning to embrace the other, the stranger, the foreigner—the thing that one otherwise fears or abjects—one is forced into radically different ways of living. To clarify: Kristeva is not suggesting that the alternative modes of living offered by the stranger are to be exploited in terms of ‘multiculturalism,’ where the stranger or foreigner is reduced to a neo-liberal object of exchange; rather, Kristeva claims that the encounter with the stranger offers the possibility of new modes of living in terms of different economic relationships that are not consecrated or endorsed by the automatic mono-logic of the market. To echo Laing, these encounters act as correctives to the “unbelievable devastation of our experience” (1967, 27).

Two Readings: (1) Text

Without proclaiming Delany to be a neo-Hegelian, I argue here that Bread and

Wine dramatizes the power of bearing witness to the universal in the form of the particular. By this I mean that the structure of the contact relation—and one’s concomitant openness to such a relation—implies openness to a universal utopian vision.

In Bread and Wine, the universal is focalized through the character of Dennis. A semiotic reading of the ‘semiotics of the universe’ and Dennis in the pages of Bread and Wine will reveal this to be the case. My reading includes both text and image. Regarding the textual reading, Delany states that Dennis used to sell books on 72nd street in New York City.

Delany first encounters Dennis, embodiment of the universal, when browsing the latter’s book display. Claiming not to have the money to purchase one of the books Dennis was 149 selling on the street corner (and promising to pay Dennis later), Delany returns with the proper funds only to shock Dennis, who assumed he had been had. After exchanging pleasantries, Delany writes, “Then, I began going down to look for Dennis in his doorway

[where he slept on the street] and to hang out with him for the odd hour. […] Sometimes, standing around on the street, we’d have coffee. […] Sometimes we’d have a beer” (BW,

6). Delany tells the reader, “…we talked about our mutual sexual preferences—what we did and didn’t do in bed with other men. […] We both agreed they sounded complimentary. I told Dennis that since I was a kid, I’d been sexually attracted to guys with big hands and who bit their nails badly—and that’s what I’d first noticed about him”

(BW, 8). Delany later asks Dennis if he would be interested in joining him at a hotel for a few days together, to “spend some time, and see how things work out” (BW, 9). Dennis agrees. There follows a sequence where the two stay at the Skyline Hotel. A graphic scene conveys to the reader how foul smelling Dennis’s socks are when he undresses to have a shower: “The inner pair of socks had simply decayed around his feet” (BW, 15).

After the shower, the two give in to their desires and have sex, “… for a couple of days”(BW, 19).

Following their first sexual encounter the two men lay in bed and talk, “or Dennis talked…And I listened” (BW, 22). Delany recites the story of how Dennis ended up living on the street. He used to work with his alcoholic, truck driving, father—whom he loved greatly—all through his early twenties. One time when Dennis was out at a bar, his father left to go find him and when he stepped from behind a parked garbage truck, “a van swerved from around the corner… struck him, killed him” (BW, 22). When Dennis got home, his mother, also an alcoholic, accused him of being responsible for his father’s 150 death: “Your father just got killed—looking for you! Where were you?” (BW, 23). This primal scene cascades into a life style of Dennis drinking heavily, becoming involved with a “fat, nymphomaniac girlfriend” (BW, 23), and later becoming permanently estranged from his family: “… and Dennis was living on the street” (BW, 23).

In Strangers, Kristeva discusses what she calls the ‘dark origins’ characteristic of every foreigner: “His origin certainly haunts him, for better and for worse, but it is indeed elsewhere that he has set his hopes, that his struggles take place, that his life holds together today. Elsewhere versus the origin, and even nowhere versus the root […] He is from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world, cosmopolitan” (SO, 29-30).

Kristeva’s words help shape a context for understanding Dennis to be the focalization of true universal utopian hope or potential qua stranger. Although Kristeva does not refer to the homeless as “foreigners” (although I understand the connection to be implicit for her) she does mention “orphans”; Dennis’s estrangement from his family places him in this category. Dennis’s ‘dark origins,’ losing his father and subsequently his mother, are specific to setting him on a path toward being a citizen of the world.

I intend to excavate the figure of Dennis, embodiment of the universal, in order to find the utopian redemption nestled deep within the life-history of one person. Kristeva writes, “To be deprived of parents—is that where freedom starts? […] A strange light then shines on that obscurity that was in you, both joyful and guilty, the darkness of the original dependency, and transforms it into a solidarity with close relatives of earlier days, henceforth forfeited” (SO, 21; italics added). As with everyone, Dennis’s dark origins imbue him with a feeling of loss, yet a loss that can be regained. The orphan (here

Dennis) is provided with a challenge to affirm loss such that that original love can be 151 found again—as always promised—in the future. The encounter of Dennis and Delany signifies the transformation of his dark origins into the promised land of nowhere, his

Blochean Heimat.

Dennis’s encounter with Delany has another significance that is also in line with

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic framework. There is a scenario in the latter half of the story where Delany narrates being sideswiped by a truck racing around a street corner, at night, in the rain. He is left unconscious and with a broken rib. In terms of Bread and Wine’s narrative, Delany’s unfortunate encounter with the truck fulfills the repetition-compulsion whereby Dennis’s father was fatally wounded in a similar situation. However, in this repeated scenario, “the father” does not die; instead his symbolic status is confirmed in the form of a resurrection, embodied in the figure of Delany. In proto-Freudian/Lacanian fashion, the real father dies only to assume a more powerful spot in the life of the subject

(Dennis), a symbolic role. The symbolic father becomes the site where hope is transferred and purpose can be regained. The relationship that one holds with the symbolic father becomes likewise the focal point around which, to echo Freud, all community

‘originates.’ Kristeva gives form and coherence to this process in terms of how it functions at the level of one’s psychic space: “I must come to terms with it and, with that unassuaged sense of hunger in the body […] must accept the idea that our ‘we’ is a stirring mirage to be maintained at the heart of disarray, although illusive and lacking real strength” (SO, 23). In Bread and Wine, Delany is the symbolic father as well as the

“stirring mirage” in Dennis’s “heart of disarray.” Kristeva articulates the confusing state of “disarray” from which a subject (Dennis) struggles to separate itself enter into the promised land of “we,” visible in the “mirage” offered by the loving father (Delany). 152

(2) Image

In terms of a reading based on image, Bread and Wine offers the following insights into the universal utopian power of contact relations focalized through Dennis.

Following the scenario where Dennis recounts losing his father and mother, the reader is told (textually) that, “At one point,” as the two men lay in bed at the Skyline Hotel after having sex, “we watched silently, almost in awe a PBS TV show on the formation of the

Universe with spiraling, flaring images of planets, comets, and stars” (BW, 26). On the other side of the semiotic coin, the reader is told (pictorially), via Wolff’s illustration, a slightly richer and more detailed story. On page 26, the graphic shows Delany and Dennis laying naked on bed sheets. The reader looks from behind the headboard toward the foot of the bed, approaching the vanishing point at the center of the horizon. The center of the horizon shows a white rectangle, the television, with images of the universe inside the boundaries, or on its screen. But more important are the images of the universe that explode toward the reader in excess of the television screen, enveloping the two men by means of a nova (see Figure 1). Here the program on the origin of the universe takes on a greater significance. Wolff’s depiction of the universe exploding from the television and enveloping the two men is, partly, a critique of the limitations of power of the Spectacle as outlined by Guy Debord (1967). “The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (Thesis 4). Wolff shows the reader how Delany’s crossing class boundaries in terms of contact relations shatters the confines of the “society of the spectacle” and opens human relationships to a 153 better, universal, way of being. This universal condition is foreshadowed by the pictorial representation of the borders of the spectacle—television or the image, which is the hallmark of contemporary late-capitalist culture—being exploded.

The second reading of the universal based on image follows Delany’s accident.

Recovering at home, Dennis, Delany’s—then young—daughter Iva, as well as colleague and friend John all watch a documentary on penguins—again on PBS. Delany’s textual narration mentions that “The images of ice and bird and snow…began to recall planets and galaxies and comets” (BW, 41-42). On page 42 Dennis is depicted sitting cross- legged on the floor, but appears as though he is floating in space like “Star Child” in

Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (see Dennis, Figure 2 and 2001’s “Star

Child” Figure 3a and 3b). In 2001, David Bowman, the main character, is transformed into the Star Child entity. I claim that the image of Dennis sitting on the floor is analogous to the Star Child floating in space, and consequently represents a vision of

Delany’s utopian horizon in the present. On the two following pages—43 and 44—this point is fleshed out.

Page 43 fantastically depicts Delany and Dennis holding hands among a group of penguins in the Antarctic (see Figure 4). Keeping in mind Kubrick’s image of the Star

Child, what I understand this image to be showing the reader is the feeling granted to

Delany and Dennis through their shared experiences. In the novelization of 2001 (1968)

Arthur C. Clarke describes Bowman’s experience as he tumbles through the “Star Gate”:

“Then he remembered that he would never be alone, and his panic slowly ebbed. The crystal-clear perception of the universe was restored to him—not, he knew, wholly by his own efforts. […] the cold, dark waste of cosmic dust which he had once feared seemed no 154 more than the beat of a raven’s wing across the face of the Sun” (Clarke, 1968, 295-6).

Notice that Bowman’s experience includes no longer fearing the cold dark cosmic dust. In terms of how I have been utilizing Kristeva in this section, through Dennis, embodiment of the universal, Delany no longer fears the universal, or, that which constitutes his and everyone’s foreignness. By placing Delany and Dennis on a “cold, dark waste of cosmic dust” (i.e., the Antarctic) but in good spirits among its inhabitants (i.e., the penguins),

Wolff shows the utopian potential of Delany’s notion of contact relations as embodying a universal condition of a society to come.

Overcoming Universal Fear; A stranger utopia within…

Recall that according to Moylan, Delany’s contribution to the critical utopia as a sub-genre was the latter’s adaptation of Foucault’s idea of the “heterotopia.” Recall: heterotopia is a specific utopian paradigm that disrupts the idea of utopia as a totalizable and universal project. Compared to the traditional literary utopia, heterotopia projects a fragmentary utopia always already in process, imperfect, flawed, and/or obscured. But might Delany’s appropriation of heterotopia in his work—especially Triton and Stars—be a defense against that which he fears most, that is, the universal? Perhaps. In any case, I think that in Bread and Wine, by means of the illustrations, the fear of the universal is effectively overcome insofar as the universal condition of a society where class is no longer a concern can be witnessed in its entirety. Page 44 ends the “erotic tale” with an illustration of Dennis’s hands lovingly resting on Earth (see Figure 5). The significance of this image speaks to the positive universal vision embodied in contact relations as being a 155 key to ushering in a utopian epoch. Dennis’s arms reach toward Earth from outer space as if to be placed upon the surface of the globe the same way a Church Father might place his hands upon the head of a parishioner during a blessing. The power invested in these arms of Dennis, which Delany as his partner embraces as lived flesh, is the promise of a utopian world of love for all.

The forces required for such a world to be made manifest are not fantastical, rather, they are material forces in the here and now, implicit to the psychic space one creates and allows oneself to inhabit. Readers of Bread and Wine are encouraged to consider the wonder in Delany’s smile, in Dennis’s eyes, their embrace, the trees, the wind, the snow, in everything; to carry this wonder inside their person and awaken into the world again with a renewed image of tomorrow—today. In a short essay included in

Starboard Wine (1984a) titled “The Necessity of Tomorrows,” Delany comments on the significance of the language of science fiction and its generic ability to force one to ask or pose the correct questions. Delany states the following, which I take to be in agreement with my reading of Bread and Wine:

We need images of tomorrow […] Without an image of tomorrow, one is trapped

by blind history, economics, and politics beyond our control. […] Only by having

clear and vital images of the many alternatives, good and bad, of where one can

go, will we have any control over the way we may actually get there in a reality

tomorrow will bring all too quickly. (Delany, 1984a, 35)

Bread and Wine is a light piece of pornographic writing by Delany, only insofar as it focuses on his sexual relations with Dennis and illustrates Delany’s belief that sexuality is the primary mode of enacting contact relations. It also represents the lowest level of risk 156 proper to a psyche struggling to abject itself from the dystopic conditions of late capitalism. There is not much risk in extending one’s hand or gaze to meet that of the other, e.g., the stranger, the foreigner. This is perhaps why the story itself reads as if effortlessly ideal. It demonstrates that a different and better society is possible starting from a single unexpected ‘contact’ that radiates outward.

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Section 7: Conclusions; Or the Circularity of Forgiveness and Utopia in Dhalgren

In Black Sun, Kristeva reports what Dostoyevsky wrote in his journal following the death of his first wife, Marya Dmitriyevna: “To love man as oneself according to

Christ’s instruction, that is impossible” (1987a, 195). For Dostoyevsky, Christ is the

“spectacular ideal to which man aspires,” and in this regard is a truly utopian ideal.

Dostoyevsky continues on to add that following Christ, “it appeared clear as day that the superior and supreme development of the individual … the complete development of his

Self – was in some way to obliterate that Self, giving it wholly to each and everyone […]

This is supreme happiness” (qtd. in Kristeva, 1987a, 278). The Christ figure is an important metaphor for Kristeva, the psychoanalyst. For Kristeva, Christ is a utopian figure not because the ideal he embodies is impossible to attain as it is for Dostoyevsky; rather, Christ is a utopian figure because of the universal ‘forgiveness’ that he bestows upon the individual subject.

Through forgiveness of Original Sin—with which, according to Christian doctrine, each individual is born—the individual is able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and be with the Lord God. In concrete terms, forgiveness allows the subject to become the kind of subject appropriate for a specific heavenly symbolic life. Without forgiveness, such symbolic belonging would be foreclosed to the individual, leaving the latter in an isolated and dystopic state of being. In the contemporary world, with its rampant nihilism and waning adherence to traditional forms of institutional faith (e.g., religion), where does forgiveness come from? Who forgives whom? What is forgiveness? Might utopia be a new heaven? Might forgiveness be a way to access utopia? This concluding section 158 discusses how in the absence of a strong social symbolic of forgiveness, the individual is called upon to bear the responsibility of deriving new ways of forgiving himself or herself. I further claim that this new manifestation of forgiveness is semiotic, self- reflexive, and is essential to the constitution of the abject utopian psyche that I have been developing throughout my various textual and theoretical analyses. The concluding discussion below will focus on Delany’s science fiction novel Dhalgren (1974; hereafter cited as D) and Kristeva’s theory of psychoanalytic forgiveness.

I leave this novel to my conclusion, and thereby grant it a privileged spot in

Delany’s oeuvre, as well as the structure of this dissertation, because of its complexity, the challenge it poses, and confusion it stirs. I focus on the circular narrative structure of

Dhalgren; more precisely, the moment in the story when Kid, the story’s anti-hero protagonist, leaves Bellona only to reenter by means of an uncanny exchange with a newcomer to the city. It is in this moment that I bear witness to an act of forgiveness proper to Kristeva’s interpretation of subjectification and the constitution of a healthy living psychic space.

Dhalgren: Structure, Style, and Re/birth.

Dhalgren is written in the form of a circular narrative, mimicking Joyce’s

Finnegans Wake (1939). Beginning with the second half of a sentence (“to wound the autumnal city” [D,1]) and ending with the first half of the same sentence (“Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the hills of vapor and light, beyond Holland and into the hills, I have come to” [D, 879]), Dhalgren tells the story of a young anti- 159 hero/protagonist named Kid, his aimless journey around an isolated and post-apocalyptic inner city in the middle of America called Bellona, and the effect his adventures have on relationships, identity, and the imagination. Kid arrives in Bellona without any memory of his past, who he is, what he is, or any sense of where he is going. He comes across a journal that contains diverse entries including poetry, list of names, and text from the book “Dhalgren” that the actual reader may or may not hold in his or her hands while reading. The Kid is reminiscent of other Delany protagonists insofar as their particular narratives are never really completed. There is always something lacking, which speaks to the structural/post-structural philosophical discourse that Delany was immersed in during his writing in the 1960s and 1970s. More precisely, the Kid’s efforts to make sense of himself and his world reflects Delany’s experiences, having inherited a black ancestry and the oppression of being gay during the pre-Stonewall era.

In her psychoanalytic study of Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon series61 and its main protagonist Gorgik, Arlene R. Keizer (2012) introduces the following insight that I believe can be applied to a reading of Dhalgren and Kid: “Delany is able to represent the way life is transformed for the analysand, how the texture of everyday struggle changes through the process of deep reflection, through flashes of memory, and through ‘living in- between regimens of truth,’ in the attempt to reconstruct a broken or warped part of one’s psyche and habitus” (689). Keizer’s analysis is an attempt to unpack what she believes to be a Freudian narrative in Delany’s sword-and-sorcery Return to Nevèrÿon series. Her thesis is that Delany’s narrative dramatizes the potential for a “desire without a shadow of coercion” (see Delany 2012b, 177) Delany (2012b) responds to Keizer’s article stating that he does not believe such a “utopian turn” to be “possible [or] useful” (771), by which 160

I suspect Delany simply wishes to resist being labeled utopian in the uncritical and blind sense of the term.

However, Delany’s objection does not entirely dismiss a psychoanalytic, or utopian, interpretation of the subjectivities expressed in his fiction. Referencing the work of critical theorists Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, John Rieder (2007) states that “[t]he science-fiction construction of an impossible subject […] is thus utopian not so much in the politically oriented sense […] as in a more purely philosophical one: it devises a place that cannot, or perhaps only does not, exist in order to think about what does or can” (p. x). Kid’s namelessness speaks to an impossible subjectivity—a utopian subjectivity— insofar as it resists homogenization with the surrounding environment. Commenting on the nameless and genderless protagonist of Jeannette Winterson’s novel Written on the

Body, Leigh Gilmore (2001) writes, “In one direction, if one believes that name has been lost, then its former presence registers as that which one formerly possessed or knew. The

‘lost’ name becomes the pretext for nostalgia […] In a different direction … the absence of a name does not signify loss, but a successful evasion of the fixity implicit in naming”

(133). Kid’s namelessness and amnesia provide the literary aesthetic sufficient for Delany to construct such an “impossible subject,” impossible because such a subjectivity is forever on the margins of the symbolic and thereby never completely consecrated as such.

In terms of this dissertation, this is akin to the Kristevan sujet-en-procès, which I have posited as utopian.

The impossible subjectivities that inhabit Bellona (especially Kid’s) have been critiqued as symbolizing the contemporary crisis in representation proper to late modern society mired in the culture of the Spectacle. Concomitant with the novel’s circular 161 structure, these impossible subjectivities are thought to speak to a permanent crisis from which one cannot hope to escape. Haslam (2006) has observed that the city of Bellona in

Dhalgren (which has no power/electricity to broadcast signals of any kind) offers “a symbolic description of the lack of the power of representation; Bellona is an (inner) city rendered powerless to represent itself to the larger (outer) nation, which controls the power of representation itself. Unable to excite the energy of the outside perception,

Bellona and its inhabitants ‘dull’ to a blank, a void that the nation ignores” (84). In contrast to this nihilistic interpretation of the impossible subjectivities and narrative structure proper to Dhalgren, I read the novel as a narrative of hope in terms of Kristeva’s notion of “natality” derived from her reading of Hannah Arendt.62 In this sense, my reading is in line with Comer (2005) who argues:

In its fragmentation Delany’s text represents, internally and externally,

subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a “subjectivity” whose assimilative

powers have been overwhelmed by the experience of the death of the other,

exposing it to community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking

about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject and the

subject’s myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or (communal)

relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes above all a

“novel” which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always coming and

never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others. (173)

Many devices internal to the text support Comer’s observation of the motif of re/birth in

Dhalgren and how it is effected. Robert Elliot Fox (1996) argues that the loops of chain with prisms, mirrors, and lenses that Kid dons until the ‘end’ of the story are “an analogue 162 for the structure of the novel itself. The book (the experience) is a ‘you-shaped [w]hole,’ in that it is, finally, what you make of it; the chains loop around a person’s body, making a ‘you’-shape. The book itself is a loop, whose end is its beginning” (133). Fox’s observation of Kid’s chain of prisms, mirror, and lenses likewise demonstrate what

Teresa L. Ebert (1980) calls “Delany’s technotopia,” or “the process of using the aesthetic function of technology to vividly render the multiplex and uncertain landscape of the postmodern imagination” (97).63

Dhalgren, Re/birth, and Forgiveness; Or, Is there a beginning?

While I acknowledge the conceptual challenge that such a circular narrative poses for the reader-critic, I push back with an interpretation that suggests that although there is no beginning proper to Dhalgren (and hence no end proper), there is a privileged moment in the text which is important for articulating its utopian potential. The moment in question occurs in the final five pages of the text.64

Kid and his small gang notice a stranger approaching the bridge leading into

Bellona: “She squinted up at us: a dark Oriental, with hair down in front of her shirt (like two black, inverted flames)” (D, 875). The stranger affirms that she is entering; Kid responds that he is leaving. Kid informs the stranger, “You know, it’s dangerous in there!” (D, 876). The stranger later responds, “Is there anything you can tell me? I mean that might be helpful? Since I’m going in?” (D, 876). Kid replies with the following,

“‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sometimes men’ll come around and tear up the place you live in.

Sometimes people shoot at you from the roof—that is, if the roof itself doesn’t decide to 163 fall on you. Or you’re not the person on top of it, doing the shooting—’”(D, 876). The incoming stranger later asks, “Do I need a weapon?” (D, 877), which Kid tacitly affirms by giving her his Orchid (a weapon worn around the wrist that has blades that sweep up in front of the hand). Kid says: “We got ourselves in enough trouble with this […] I don’t want it with me anymore” (D, 877). Further on in their exchange, the stranger comments on the Orchid’s appearance: “Ugly thing. I hope I don’t need you” (D, 878), to which Kid simply says, “Hope you don’t either” (D, 878). This moment—the exchange of the

Orchid and perhaps most importantly Kid’s ‘blessing’ that the incoming stranger will not have to use it—signifies an act of psychoanalytic forgiveness proper to Kristeva’s notion of the subject-in-process and the healthy living psychic space of which it is characterized.

However, because the orchid is a weapon, implicated in violence and assault (whether it is for defense purposes of otherwise), I claim that what is actually being forgiven is the violence necessary to maintain the possibility of utopia qua “open system,” even amid an apparently “closed system” such as Bellona.

This point can be interpreted through Delany’s use of mythology in the construction of Dhalgren. The decimated city where the story takes place is known as

“Bellona,” which is the Latin name of the Roman goddess of war (see Hamilton 35).

Likewise, Kid’s ‘name’ shares affinities with “the goat,” a figure associated with the

Greco-Roman gods Pan, Bacchus, or Dionysus (see Hamilton 44). These gods functioned as agents of the wild—often violent and sexual—side of human nature. My argument is in accordance with Nietzsche’s privileging of the Dionysian, such that these gods—by virtue of their violence—are vital to the preservation of a future. Matter never settles or stagnates and motion never stalls, but is rather always torn asunder and given new life in 164 the destruction of that which preceded it.65 My decision to interpret this necessary violence in terms of forgiveness is intended to give this violence a meaning beyond the sheer materiality of its occurrence, or as Kristeva would say “to give meaning beyond nonmeaning” (Rice 2002, 281). In other words, forgiveness can be viewed as a potential cultural resource from which a new imaginary discourse on violence might be possible today. The symbolic exchange of the Orchid provides the utopian frame through which the violence needed to preserve the future within the closed system of Bellona is to be viewed. By being acknowledged on both sides, Kid and the stranger use the signifier

‘hope’ (i.e., “hope I don’t…” and “hope you don’t…”) to give verbal substance to the symbolic gesture.

In her book The Colonization of Psychic Space (2004), Kelly Oliver outlines

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretation of forgiveness and why it is vital to the constitution of subjectivity. Oliver places Kristeva in conversation with two other major thinkers who have been essential to the development of the concept of forgiveness,

G.W.F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida. Kristeva’s theory of forgiveness draws upon both philosophers while differing insofar as Kristeva incorporates the notion of the unconscious. With respect to Hegel, “particularity” requires forgiveness. Oliver observes that for Hegel, in order for consciousness to assert its own particularity within the social order it must assert itself violently against the established symbolic order, which is to say,

“The agent’s trespass is precisely the individuality with the particularity of action that it engenders” (Oliver, 2004, 182). In order for this trespass to be amended such that the social structure is not permanently disrupted, a ‘judge’ must ‘forgive’ the individual who

‘confesses’ their trespass and who is later reconciled with the social. “The dialectic of 165 forgiveness and confession produces a subject who transgresses the community to become an individual and through that process realizes the necessity of belonging to the very community that it transgresses” (Oliver, 2004, 181).

The dialectic of confession/forgiveness is, as Oliver later recognizes in Derrida, an

‘impossible exchange.’ One reason Derrida finds this to be the case is because the judge who must forgive the trespass of the individual is herself an individual. The judge cannot forgive something that she herself is guilty of as well (i.e., participating in the evil of finitude or particularity). For Derrida, the problem extends beyond this. According to him, Hegel’s dialectic of confession/forgiveness “assimilates difference and puts forgiveness into an economy of exchange” (Oliver, 2004, 183). Derrida claims that

Hegel’s logic of forgiveness is flawed. There is no forgiveness; forgiveness is impossible.

There can be no ‘authentic’ forgiveness for or from any one particular figure; authentic forgiveness must stand wholly outside of any possible encounter. Oliver makes an attempt to defend Hegel against Derrida’s accusation, suggesting that “for Hegel, it is the operation of the dialectic itself and not the individuals involved that forgives. Strictly speaking, the agency of forgiveness lies neither within the judge nor within the actor but rather within the dialectic movement between them” (Oliver, 2004, 184). Here in Hegel’s dialectic, one can begin to read the version of forgiveness that Kristeva will build upon via her use of the unconscious.

Notwithstanding Oliver’s defense of Hegel, Kristeva’s theory of forgiveness can be read as a blend of both Hegel’s and Derrida’s interpretations, which is to say her theory incorporates the negativity inherent to the fluidity of the dialectic in Hegel as well as sustaining the impossible alterity proper to Derrida’s account. The interjection of the 166 psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious allows Kristeva to bridge these two theories. As

Oliver observes, “The psychoanalytic model undoes our intuitive sense presumed by

Derrida and perhaps by Hegel that forgiveness requires someone who forgives, a sovereign agent” (2004, 186). Like Hegel, the Kristevan subject transgresses the dominant social symbolic through a psychic revolt (“Intimate Revolt”), which is nothing akin to vulgar street-level anarchy, but rather a philosophical process of questioning the established order that promises the re/birth of something new and fresh, something lively.

For Kristeva, Oliver observes, “We enter the social order as individuals through questioning; as children, we continually ask why. It is through the question that we fully enter the realm of meaning” (2004, 186). More explicitly, in terms of Kristeva’s account of the structures of primary narcissism, development of the infans into a speaking symbolic being necessitates a psychic matricide, following which one is perpetually seeking forgiveness in the symbolic realm.66

First-person subjective forgiveness is essential for Kristeva because it is one particular path by which to escape the nihilism brought on by the “tendential severance” between semiotic and symbolic of which Beardsworth writes. Considering that there is no longer a strong religious symbolic by means of which the individual can be ‘forgiven,’ the individual subject is pressed to come up with new ways to enact this specifically social ritual. As a desperate recourse, the individual’s semiotic drive-energies become personal resources utilized to work toward a new forgiving symbolic. “That is, the motor that drives forgiveness and recognition is neither intersubjective nor conscious. Rather, the action takes place on the level of unconscious semiotic energy, as it makes its way into language. Although language […] is still the vehicle through which confession and 167 forgiveness takes place, the agent of forgiveness is unconscious” (Oliver, 2004, 187; my italics). In Kristeva’s interpretation of the psychic structures of the infans, forgiveness must have an imaginary place in the primary structures of narcissism. Without this imaginary presymbolic forgiveness, the fledgling/emerging subject would have no chance at symbolic subjectivity because it would be impossible to recover from the trauma of separation, via matricide, from the pre-Oedipal Mother.67

Kristeva and Forgiveness: a concrete utopia?

In an interview with Alison Rice (March, 2002), Kristeva defines forgiveness more precisely as “to give meaning beyond nonmeaning” (281).68 By this she is referring to the ‘healing’ potential of the analytic setting, especially with regard to the powers of interpretation. Kristeva gives the example of a young woman coming to analysis and sharing her dreams while being unable to “speak of the deep source of her depression”

(Rice, 2002, 281). Kristeva claims, “She received my interpretation as forgiveness, as meaning for her suffering” (Rice, 281). “Meaning” for Kristeva is to be found in the presymbolic “intonations, metaphors, affects, the entire panoply of the psychic life, with which the psychoanalyst works” (Rice, 282). This meaning is meaning insofar as it gestures beyond the stammering repetition of the symbolic in which the depressive analysand is unable to find meaning. Through fleshing out an imaginary discourse with the analyst, meaning is restored to the apparent non-meaning of the analysand’s depression. Kristeva privileges the analytic setting in terms of the ability to experience, or relive, genuine or authentic forgiveness. This sets her against thinkers like Derrida who 168 think forgiveness must be public in order to address global atrocities such as the

Holocaust and Apartheids. However, the subject necessary to posit a forgiving act with respect to either of these kinds of events is, for Derrida, impossible, thus rendering the latter’s account of forgiveness hopelessly utopian. Kristeva’s position is partially informed by her stance on the status of late capitalism and the all but complete collapse of the public sphere: “It is true that everything moves from system to system. But one cannot revolt against systems. I think that the possibility for individual revolt still exists. […]

Indeed, I think that the only space of honesty possible is the individual space” (Kristeva,

2002a, 113). Only within the protective and secure space of the analyst’s clinical setting can desires and drives be explored and forgiven such that subjectivity can be restored, reborn, and released in the world anew. For Kristeva, the subject necessary to enact forgiveness is never impossible but is rather concretely and materially situated in the here and now.

The individual can, Kristeva believes, enact forgiveness for himself or for herself, perhaps insofar as they might engage in the arts, which also exhibit the semiotic drives that Kristeva imbues with meaning beyond non-meaning. Echoing her claim that literature is the ultimate coding of our crisis, Kristeva asserts, in her interview with Rice

“[W]riting is nonetheless a way of coming out of the trauma, of forgiving oneself or the other and translating it for someone else. This constitutes a distancing from the place of the crime through sharing” (Rice, 287). One witnesses a form of this self-reflexive forgiveness in Dhalgren in the form of the Kid’s poetry, the writing and rewriting of his book, and how these performances factor into the constitution of his subjectivity. Robert

Elliot Fox (1996) states that Kid, who “cannot simply write himself,” in lieu of his 169 experiences in Bellona, “has to rewrite himself, which is one reason why it all comes around again. (The emphasis on revision in Dhalgren, especially with regard to Kid’s poems, reinforces this notion)” (131-32). Not only are Kid’s writings expressive of an unconscious enactment of forgiveness, such that he can sustain the possibility of surviving Bellona and perhaps start afresh somewhere someday, but in the very gesture of handing over the Orchid to the incoming stranger Kid silently acknowledges/forgives the trespasses that she/he will have to commit in order to become one with Bellona, in order to survive Bellona, and perhaps start again.

I say “she/he” above when referring to the incoming stranger rather than strictly

“she,” as the text would otherwise suggest, because following the Orchid exchange, there is a long disorienting paragraph whereby the transition is made to the ‘beginning’ of the novel where it later becomes apparent that Kid is the one who has entered Bellona. This is one of the ‘magical moments’ in the text, which I choose to read in terms of a chiastic intertwining between Kid and the stranger, a blending of male and female, inner and outer, self and other, sémiotique and symbolique. Actually, I claim, the stranger literally is

(always already) in Kid, insofar as Kid is a stranger to himself à la Kristeva’s text of the same name. This chiastic intertwining of Kid and the stranger is analogous to the chiastic intertwining of the symbolic and semiotic in Kristeva’s work. In this context, I understand the exchange between Kid and the stranger to be an example of the Kid emerging out of the abject wasteland of Bellona (i.e., a fledgling symbolic being), forgiving himself in advance (literally before the story ‘begins’) in the form of the stranger. This exchange at the novel’s ‘end’ is really the beginning before the beginning such that Kid might be able to become a subject in his own right, a subject made possible by means of a transgression 170 he will necessarily commit. Stylistically, the transgression in question is indicated by the

‘cut’ separating the former and latter part of the sentence that bridges Dhalgren’s beginning and end: “I have come to / to wound the autumnal city” (D, 879, 1; emphasis added).

Using these observations, it is appropriate to reiterate one of the guiding principles of this dissertation, namely, Kristeva’s utopianism. In light of the above remarks on the nature of forgiveness and its connection to the re/birth of subjectivity, it seems necessary to supplement said commentary with one final qualification. In her interview with Rice,

Kristeva refers to Derrida’s conceptualization of forgiveness as “extremely generous, a little utopian” and that it “presupposes the existence of extremely flexible and evolved individuals, which is unfortunately not the case” (283). My understanding is that Kristeva sees Derrida’s vision of forgiveness as utopian qua abstract utopia, i.e., in the Blochean sense: even if such a utopian state of affairs could be imagined, it could never be effected.

This is what Derrida’s demand for an absolute and impossible forgiveness in the public realm necessitates: a hopeless dreaming for that which can never be. In contrast to this hopeless utopianism, Kristeva offers what Bloch calls a concrete utopia: simultaneously anticipating and affecting the future.69

Kristeva’s utopia is not an impossibly hopeless one, but rather an actually attainable material, as well as imaginary, state of being whereby psychic space is opened up to the potentialities of the world in a way not allowed under the conditions of late capitalism. A glimpse into her idea of such a utopia is found in Revolt, She Said (2002a), a short composite of interviews. In one interview titled “The Sacred,” she states, “We are in a period that resembles somewhat the end of the Roman Empire, where the utopia 171 according to which the whole world would be capable of self-interrogation, of self- questioning and of a free life, is in the process of disappearing” (113). Such a statement leads one to surmise that Kristeva anticipates the return of such a utopia, a utopia that she believes psychoanalysis can help bring forth. And just as much as Kristeva believes culture and civilization to be reaching its end, so too does she see a future. Elsewhere, also referring to the end of the Roman Empire, she writes:

Back then, however, a new religion was emerging, one that was already

astonishing, though its arts and splendors had yet to come. Today I am not certain

that a new religion is arriving or that this would even be desirable. But I think we

all need an experience, by which I mean something unknown, surprise, pain, or

delight, and then comprehension of this impact. Is it still possible? Perhaps not.

Perhaps charlatanism is today’s currency, and everything is both spectacle and

merchandise, while those we call marginal have definitively become excluded. In

this context, obviously, one had to be very demanding, that is, disappointed.

Personally, once over the disappointment, I prefer to welcome these experiences: I

keep my curiosity on call, expectant. (1996, 11)

Learning to cultivate a sense of awareness in the present and being affectively open to difference, regardless of how potentially painful, threatening, and dangerous, i.e., abject, is one of the only remaining paths toward utopia available under late capitalism. Only through sustaining and enduring a genuine encounter with the abject—within and without—will society emerge from so-called terminal stages of capitalism, like the citizen’s of Oran in Camus’s The Plague (1947). Perhaps one day, society will carry on like Camus’s narrator following the end of the plague: “Calmly they denied, in the teeth 172 of the evidence, that we had ever known a crazy world in which men were killed off like flies, or that precise savagery, that calculated frenzy of the plague, which instilled an odious freedom as to all that was not the Here and Now,” only to later reminisce that,

“Far more effectively than the bands playing in the squares they vouched for the vast joy of liberation. These ecstatic couples, locked together, hardly speaking, proclaimed in the midst of the tumult of rejoicing, with the proud egoism and injustice of happy people, that the plague was over, the reign of terror ended” (242).

Conclusions

I draw this dissertation to a close by bringing it back around to where it began, with Freud. In 1926, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Freud was introduced as the person who had discovered the unconscious. Freud corrected the speaker who was introducing him, saying “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied” (Freud qtd. in Trilling, 1950, 34). Through an application of some of

Kristeva’s key psychoanalytic concepts—especially abjection—to a reading of the sexually charged work of Samuel R. Delany, I claim to have ‘discovered’ the way in which these two figures and their work can be brought together to help reimagine utopianism for the twenty-first century. While not rejecting ‘the social,’ by assuming the psychoanalytic position I ground the kernel of utopianism today in the subjective experience of the individual, or what I have called the abject utopian: moments, acts, and 173 gestures of psychic disruption that manifest as, and are culturally and socially received as, abject.

By placing the abject and abjection in the context of a utopian analysis I do not invert abjection, thereby turning it into something wholly positive; I sustain the jarring, sickly, repulsive aspect of the abject but stress how such disgust can effect revolutionary potential against a social-cultural realm that appears to be foreclosed by the dominance of capital. This argument is in keeping with certain recent queer, feminist, and cultural criticism. By arguing that the individual subject’s abject qualities, practices, views, and struggles can be exploited through psychic rupture—and utilized against the dominant symbolic of late capitalism—I am in agreement with Halberstam’s (2011) idea of the

“queer art of failure.” Although she does not use the term abject specifically, she claims that “[u]nder certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3); which is to say, many of the ways of being in the world that are received as abject and undesirable.70

This sentiment is echoed in Sara Ahmed’s (2010) cultural critique of the imperative to be happy, especially the happiness promised to those individuals who seek to live their lives the “right way.” To the contrary, happiness and hope can be found in those individuals who challenge and are challenged by the dominant discourse’s imperative to happiness. Love’s Feeling Backward (2007) anticipated this notion, by deeply exploring the “utopian desires”—as she identifies them—“of ruined or failed sociality” especially how they relate to the “collective project of queer studies and [are] integral to the history of gay and lesbian identity” (3, 22, 3). Finally, the utopian 174 implications extrapolated from my criticisms of Delany’s literary work mimic Elizabeth

Freeman’s idea of “queer temporalities” in her Time Binds (2010): “textual moments of asynchrony, anachronism, […] delay, ellipses, flashback […] repetition, reversal, surprise,” as so many points of resistance against “a vision of time as seamless, unified and forward moving” (xxii). The following are seven points that succinctly encapsulate the key arguments of the dissertation:

1. In my analysis of Triton I focused on Delany’s intentionally unlikeable character

Bron Helstrom. As strange as it may appear, against the received view of Bron’s

ironic function within the narrative, I exploit his abject profile (“the misfit man

from Mars who fails to rise to his full potential in utopia and who indeed brings

out the worst in this imperfect best of all possible worlds” [Moylan, Demand,

163]) as fertile ground in which is planted an unlikely utopian seed. Bron’s

inability to move beyond his own narcissism was viewed, using Kristeva, with

sympathy, insofar as I view Bron as a horribly distorted—i.e., wounded—

narcissus in search of love. Bron’s inability to ever achieve love is looked upon

with a kind of affective grace such that the impossibility of love becomes the

psychoanalytic precondition for its possibility. Also, I see in Bron the abject and

decaying remnants of the Old World in which he is born and raised (i.e., the same

world of which the author of the present dissertation is born and raised). I claim

that there is a virtue to holding onto this abject shadow of the future past, just

enough so that one never forgets what one is pushing away from and what one

might be moving in to… 175

2. Perhaps less controversial is my reading of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of

Sand. Against my reading of Bron as abjectly utopian because of too little love, I

argued that too much love could invert and morph into an unrecognizable—yet no

less utopian—obscenity if an adequate social symbolic is not present. By this I

mean that an advanced—precise and calculating—social symbolic like that found

in Stars is desirable, but if it cannot accommodate le sémiotique it is

fundamentally inadequate. Regardless, and in spite of the insufficiency of the

social system, Marq is fully open to the possibility of the “perfect” even when

others view the perfect as abject (i.e., Rat Korga). In fact, unlike Marq’s passive

role in being presented with abject love, perhaps actively seeking out love objects

that are not acknowledged by the dominant symbolic can be viewed as an abject

utopian practice in itself; such ‘seeking’ actively disrupts the standardized and

commoditised versions of ‘love’ that are aggressively marketed to the populous in

the ‘purified’ form of online dating services. Such abject—or obscene—love

would require a radically reconfigured social structure (i.e., a utopian social

structure) to accommodate these new forms of social relations…

3. With my examination of Cocksucker in Hogg I advanced a rather challenging

suggestion, namely that passivity and silence can be viewed as emancipatory,

empowering, and utopian—the latter, albeit, in an explicitly abject way. Against

the grain of Audre Lorde’s 1977 affirmation “Your silence will not protect you”71

and the motto of ACT UP activists in the 1980s “Silence = Death,” I suggest that

in certain circumstances, many of which may not appear as evident at the time,

silence can protect oneself (i.e., one’s psyche especially) and in in place of ‘death’ 176

can very much “… = Life.” There is decidedly a “power of passivity” and of

silence, a power that carries with it utopian potentials…

4. John Marr, in The Mad Man, presents the reader as a character who breaks from

his academically fascist psychic life (i.e., his desire to write “The Systems of the

World”) through gradually increasing flirtations with the abject by way of his

sexual forays. If another world is possible, it is not a world that can be worked

toward by means of rigid, academic, knowledge; rather, it is a world that is the

inverse of the “systems of the world,” which is to say one that—in contrast to

knowledge properly speaking—can only be accesses through liminal experiences

where both the creative as well as destructive forces of Eros can freely operate.

Pushing oneself away from one abject into another abject (deemed as such by the

dominant symbolic) is one way of cultivating or sustaining the revolutionary

potentials of the abject such that the system never closes up, but remains fluid and

dynamic, always receptive to change…

5. Eric’s insertion into the culture of Diamond Harbor illustrates the intimate bond

between psyche and place, a kind of psychogeography, or psychotopography of

abject utopianism. Diamond Harbor is an impossible place, which mimics that

impossible subjectivity that the abject utopian seeks to transcend. In substitute for

the futuristic anticipation of the New Jerusalem or the nostalgic longing for a lost

Eden, Diamond Harbor represents the utopian ‘now’ from which modern Western

humanity has been alienated by the forces of late capitalism (despite capitalism’s

ideological claim to the contrary). The impossible now that Diamond Harbor

represents is recognized for what it is because Eric has a mindset that is not 177

enamoured with the logic of the market, culture of the Spectacle, or even what

Elizabeth Freeman (2010) calls “chrononormativity”: “the use of time to organize

individual human bodies toward maximum productivity” (3). My decision to

utilize the notions of psychogeography and psychotopography is intended to

suggest that one is capable of performing such a prospectus on their own psychic

landscape that in effect amounts to a psychic decolonization of psychic space. By

taking inventory as to how one’s psychic landscape is spatialized, one can then

begin the process of terraforming that psychic space to become a denizen of the

impossible now, an abject utopian…

6. Delany and Wolff’s portrayal of ‘contact relations’ in Bread and Wine

demonstrates that average everydayness with which utopia is always already at

one’s fingertips. Delany’s happenstance encounter with Dennis, homeless man

turned life partner to Delany, illustrates the fact that utopia is on the street corner,

focalized through the destitute, homeless, the abject of society, which is

correlatively one’s own unconscious (see Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves). It

also recovers Judith Butler’s interpretation of abjection, such that I see both

Butler’s and Kristeva’s utilization of the term as being complimentary rather than

antagonistic. From an interview with Costera and Prins (1998), Butler affirms

what I consider her utopian interpretation of social abjection: “The discursive life

Abjects lead is a shadowy life, a life that has yet to qualify as legitimate and

thinkable” (277, 281; my italics). I stress “has yet to” for purposes of emphasizing

that the future belongs to those who are abject or who have wholly confronted and

worked through abjection, their own as well as that of others. Those who are 178

authentic Abjects do not have clear and distinct direction or visions; they wander.

Kristeva’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the social Abject is another way

through which to analyze the subjective Abject: “[T]he more he strays, the more

he is saved” (1980, 8). Straying or wandering embodies the utopian virtue of

abjection…

7. Finally, there is Dhalgren’s Kid. Kid’s own life project is intimately implicated in

the narrative structure of the text of Dhalgren itself; as such, I choose to view the

circular narrative as hinting at a circular structure to subjectivity, one that because

of its circularity is constitutively revolutionary (in the fashion of Kristeva’s sujet-

en-procès). For me, this circular subjectivity is coded in terms of

forgiveness/transgression/forgiveness/transgression, and so on. It is important to

read the exchange of the Orchid weapon between Kid and the newcomer to

Bellona at the end (?) of the story as an act of (Kid’s) self-forgiveness, which is to

say the self’s forgiveness of itself. In other words, the exchange of the Orchid

represents forgiveness (i.e., forgiveness proper to the individual’s psyche) and

stands for a peaceful harmony within the subject amid apparent chaos and

desolation outside the subject.

This suggestion was prompted by the fact that orchids native to the

Mediterranean are depicted on the Ara Pacis in Rome; and although there is no

consensus on the symbolic or religious significance of the orchid (see Lobelli,

2012), one can reasonably speculate that it has something to do with the inner

harmony and peace that might prove appropriate for a subject appropriate for

utopia amid social conditions that do not necessarily favour the promise of 179

utopia.72 In a secular era such as the present, which struggles with the notion of

the Divine and the beatitude of forgiveness that was once the responsibility of

certain social symbolic structures (e.g., Church), perhaps forgiveness has shifted

to being a necessary aspect of one’s own subjective psychic life in order for one to

forge unexpected and abject gestures toward utopia.

Across all of these critiques of Delany’s work pulsates the significance of Kristeva’s notion that “literature as such, represents that ultimate coding of our crises” (1980, 208).

Cheney (see Delany 1977), commenting on Delany’s mastery of the language of science fiction and other literary skills, remarks to what great extent Delany’s writing does what

Kristeva suggests literature does; that is, guard against apocalypse and annihilation. “We should all be ‘self-conscious about the act of communication,’ because to be anything else—to be complacent—is to relinquish power and opportunity and to give in to the ocean of expression that threatens ever and again to drown us” (Cheney in Delany, 1977, xxix). One must not mistake Cheney’s remarks as affirming the work of Delany as a site of salvation (as Kristeva says Joyce’s Finnegans Wake achieves through “the rhetoric of the pure signifier, of music in letters” [1980, 23]); rather, Delany’s codification of the abject is more in line with Kristeva’s reading of Céline who, although he also encountered rhythm and musicality as the only way out, “become[s], body and tongue, the apogee of that moral, political, and stylistic revulsion that brands our time”; “The enchantment” of which, Kristeva adds, “will have to wait for some other time, always and forever” (1980, 23).

I want to draw this conclusion to a conclusion by starting again: Gunjević in Žižek and Gunjević (2012) tells of the Croatian-Bosnian writer and political activist Predrag 180

Matvejevic’s discovery of the cocci in the latter’s book on the city of Venice, The Other

Venice (2007). Matvejevic writes, says Gunjević, about “a long neglected dump for a pottery workshop. Broken shards of pottery, fragments of what were once beautiful vases and dishes, were discarded there. These rejected pottery pieces are called cocci, and inventive Venetians built them into their homes and the foundations of palaces” (24).

Gunjević says, “[t]hese fragments, shards, bits that can be retrieved from the mud, grass, and sand of the shore, washed by the waves of time and tossed by the sea, represent my vision of theological discourse. What we used to think of until recently as rejects and trash can serve in building social relations and the world around us in an altogether new way” (24). I italicize “theological discourse” because in contrast to Gunjević, such

“rejects and trash” (i.e., the abject) represent my vision of a new utopian discourse, more precisely, an abject utopian discourse. Gunjević later adds, “We cannot know how many exquisite cocci still lie buried for us to uncover” (25). I have found a few more fragments, shards, and bits, necessary for the movement toward a new understanding of utopia in the works of Julia Kristeva and Samuel R. Delany.

181

Notes

1 This observation is contingent on religion being the predominant social discourse for working through moments where death and finality are evident; utopia is evoked, here, in the spirit of transcendence, which is to say transcending the finite.

2 By “religion” I understand the materially grounded symbolic codification as well as expression of so-called sacred experience. I do not mean to establish a dichotomy by setting religion against utopia as if to suggest that religion is the immature and antiquated expression of immaterial hope or desire that mature and secular material utopianism has supplanted in the modern era; rather, religion and utopia simply share overlapping aspects—material and phenomenal—and a considerate and sympathetic meditation on this relationship needs to be actively engaged in today.

3 One could also say “precedes” if it sounds less discreet or finite and more continuous and organic.

4 It is important to qualify how I am using Freud here. I am not appropriating him with the understanding that myth and allegory are history or proof of certain phenomena, whether psychological or material; rather, I find certain theoretical and critical resources in Freud’s allegory that I believe are helpful when trying to make sense of utopianism today.

5 The ideal image of the father represents the limitation of a particular historical instantiation of utopian desire. The image itself is stagnant utopian desire according to my interpretation of iconography. Iconoclasm, the destruction of notably religious iconography and culture, would be indicative of utopian desire reclaiming its fluid and 182

open structure. I will later connect this dialectic of static and fluid utopian desire with

Julia Kristeva’s conceptual understanding of sémiotique and symbolique.

6 Throughout the dissertation I use the terms drive-energies and drive-forces somewhat interchangeably. The decision to use whichever term is dependent on the context of the idea in question: if I use “energies” I am speaking abstractly; whereas, if I use “forces” I am speaking concretely in terms of the impact those abstract energies incur.

7 Derived from three Greek terms (eu meaning good-, ou meaning no-, and topos meaning place: a good-place that is simultaneously a no-place) More’s new symbolic code imposed a novel regime upon this murderous as well as reparative drive-energy, a code intersected by three axes, I would argue: a) politics; b) letters (i.e., literature); and c) free fancy (the imagination). The marriage of utopian drive energy with “letters,” or literature, in the modern era will be made more explicit through my adoption of

Kristeva’s idea that “literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises”

(Powers of Horror, 208).

8 Although this dissertation does not examine this point in detail, shadows of it linger in the recesses. I suspect that there is a strong religious spirit infusing the core of utopia and/or utopianism. In other words, I believe utopia to be a remnant of religious faith in an otherwise secular world that has coopted the concept for its many political agendas (but at the same time I can appreciate religion as one particular offshoot of humanity’s utopian desire). And while I acknowledge that utopianism is broadly used today to include all imaginations that anticipate a better way of living (e.g., religious, political, or otherwise), I do think that there is a fundamental difference between the core essence of a political imagination and a religious imagination; and despite its inclusivity, 183

the concept of utopia is heavily skewed in favour of a political imagination. This point is later touched upon in the subsection of the present Introduction titled “To Politicize or

Aestheticize the ‘Return of the Religious’?”

9 Perhaps the best known is Plato’s Atlantis and/or Euhemerus’s Panchaea.

10 Although the concept of the obscene has a rich etymological history that includes the Latin obscaena (offstage), derived from the Greek root skene—relating to that which happened offstage in Classical theatre/drama and was so offensive as to deeply wound the moral integrity of the crowd—I use the term, here, in a way that blends specific instances of a lack of satisfaction in some phenomenon with the repugnant unease and discomfort conjured by the psychoanalytic uncanny. When I say that utopia is an instance of the modern obscenity, I am referencing utopia in the traditional sense qua fixed and finite state of being. The obscenity of utopia in this instance is the bounded and even suffocating sense of being trapped within a determined symbolic order completely—and this is important to my interpretation of the obscene—disconnected from any sémiotique drive-energy. Perhaps this is a virtue of the critical utopias of which Moylan writes; they clearly implicate a symbolic detail of ‘utopia’ but are constantly gesturing to, or including, moments of pain and struggle (i.e., le sémiotique) that are necessary for the existence of the symbolic as such. I must stipulate, however, that I do not intend on being categorical by means of my use of obscene; rather, I am simply working with concepts in a bric-à-brac fashion, or in a way that I think is helpful for imagining utopia differently and productively today.

More strictly, however, obscene is to be understood as acts or objects that exist or occur without any acknowledgement or consecration from the dominant symbolic. That is 184

to say obscene acts and/or objects are phenomena that are characterized by pure materiality and visceral drive-energy. Due to the fact that these phenomena completely lack the meaning granted by a social code, let nonetheless exist within a social setting, they disrupt and disgust those agents firmly committed to the dominant symbolic and therefore are interpreted as “obscene.” The fact, however, that these phenomena are interpreted as obscene by the moral majority does not mean that these acts and/or objects are void of meaning; the obscene is pregnant with a plethora of meaning that is always already in excess of the symbolic (I will rely on this version of obscenity or the obscene when I discuss Marq and Rat’s relationship in Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand in

Section 5).

11 1882 refers to the First German edition.

12 Here I stress the temporal or chronological underpinnings of utopia because one of

Marx and Engels’s contributions to modern utopianism was the introduction of historical materialism, by which I mean the setting in motion of that which was hitherto conceived of in terms of the fixed and/or the static. Marx and Engels are conventionally understood as being anti-utopian insofar as their materialism always contextualizes a state of being as a contingent historical moment, which is to say a state of being that is not absolute and thus not possibly utopian. Granted for them the moment does not exist independent of time but is rather consistent with the ‘flow of time,’ I do not see this as anti-utopian but rather anticipating the perpetual deferral that partially characterizes utopia qua critical utopia. Furthermore, by stressing the material processes I am attempting to draw the reader’s attention away from the strictly symbolic or conceptual notions that structure utopia and direct that reader toward the material aspects of what allows for the symbolic 185

as such. More precisely, it is an exercise in itself to think the symbolic and the material together rather than as separate concepts.

13 For example, see Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion.

14 This is often thought to be the main point of contention between Freud and Jung; the former being the rational scientist and the latter the mystic. Jung is sometimes associated with religious thought and thinking insofar as he, like the religiously inclined, posits the existence of a transcendent entity that can indeed be known or apprehended albeit through non-conventional (i.e., non-materialist) means.

15 Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic is noted as revolutionary here because of the implications Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology had with respect to his political philosophy qua the transcendental subject. For Kant, the transcendental subject is a enlightened subject, the revolutionary powers of which Kant advocated in his essay

“Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) [Beantwortung der Frage:

Was ist Aufklärung?]. Kant’s affirmation “dare to use your own reason” posited the subject as a public subject with revolutionary potential when facing the received power of archaic institutions and oppressive early modern ideology (e.g., Church, State, etc.).

16 For other critical commentary on the postmodern condition and how notions such as time and space are affected by the rampant rise in technology and dissemination of the

Image, see Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1969), David Harvey’s The

Condition of Postmodernity (1990), and Paul Virilio’s Open Sky (1995).

17 It is perhaps the literary critic Darko Suvin who has made the greatest contribution to the debate on utopia as a literary sub-genre of science fiction. Suvin’s argument is similar to that of other literary critics (e.g., Tom Moylan and Fredric Jameson): “Strictly 186

and precisely speaking, utopia is not a genre but the sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction” (Suvin, 1979, 61). Science fiction is, as Suvin claims, much ‘wider’ than utopia proper. Science fiction is aimed toward the exploration of phenomena such as the radically other (i.e., the alien) or novum, technology and its impact on the human condition, and time. Utopias on the other hand are strictly social in scope: “utopia is always aimed at human relations” (60). Utopias are not Robinsonades, by which I mean narratives of a world (ideal or otherwise) wherein only a solitary individual is implicated; rather, utopias are oriented formally toward examining a more perfectly organized community. Where a broad understanding of science fiction might be able to conceive and allow for a story to be told completely from the solipsistic world view of a protagonist, such a formal composition cannot count as utopia, for according to Suvin no utopia can exist within the mind or experience of a single individual.

Central to Suvin’s position on both science fiction and utopia is the idea of

‘cognitive estrangement.’ This is the literary technique that Suvin claims sets science fiction apart from mainstream fiction. The alien body, novum, a strange piece of technology, a future planet Earth or an alternate or parallel universe all serve to estrange the reader by forcing them to ‘think’ or ‘imagine’ that things could have been different, could be different than they are at present, and might be different than is otherwise expected in the future. In the twentieth century, science fiction and utopian literature tended to dovetail. This became especially apparent with the rise of the ‘critical utopia’ in the 1970s. The trope of ‘the unknown island, discovered’ became antiquated and as a result utopia was displaced in both space and time. 187

Suvin’s argument places an incredible emphasis on cognitively estranging affects.

Recently, this interpretation of science fiction has been estranged itself. This critical turn is greatly indebted to the work of Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., especially in his book The

Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2011). On the ‘beauties’ he writes, “They are riven, indecisive, chaotic, sometimes corrupt, always ludic. They are beauties of a mind incapable of making itself up […] As its name implies, science fiction is an oxymoron. It invokes and delivers dichotomies, insoluble dilemmas, deceptive solutions. It manifests worlds upon worlds that are too contradictory to exist” (8). Csicsery-Ronay’s method challenges Suvin’s insofar as the former emphasizes the power of science fiction to effect a transformative experience in the reader by affecting said reader on the sensational and emotional registers as well as the rational and cognitive registers.

18 Influenced as these texts are by the “oppositional politics” of the 1960s, the novels literally “protest against mythology” in their time, such that they rupture the container of utopian “content,” which is—as Adorno claims qua dialectics—not closed. This is of course contrary to the traditional form and content of the literary utopia.

19 I italicize this phrase because it foreshadows much of what will be discussed in later sections regarding Kristeva and her interpretation of ‘abjection’; the separation of the infant from the mother which is always an incomplete separation. In this sense, I suggest that abjection – as an interpretive/critical tool – can be observed operating in

Mannheim’s dialectical logic of utopia/ideology.

20 Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is perhaps the greatest literary embodiment of utopia as permanent revolution. This is so partly because of the literary structure of the novel (i.e., events told through alternating chapters: even-numbered chapters taking place 188

on the anarcho-syndicalist moon, Anarres, and the odd-numbered chapters taking place on the functionally capitalist home planet, Urras). The two flanking chapters include events that take place on both planet and moon, suggesting that the book itself is perpetual, the end sliding into the beginning ad infinitum. Permanent revolution is also implied in the content of the dialogue: Takver, the main character Shevek’s partner, says to Shevek upon his return to Anarres from Urras, “…we’ll go live in the mountains if we have to. There’s room. There’d be people who’d come with us. We’ll make a new community. If our society is settling down into politics and power seeking, then we’ll get out, we’ll go make an Anarres beyond Anarres, a new beginning.” And later, she says: “If you set out to. You always get to where you’re going. And you always come back” (379), suggesting that the search for utopia is always on-going. Le Guin’s subtitle to her book,

An Ambiguous Utopia is meant to capture this critical appraisal of utopia. It is also a crucial point for establishing the context for my choice to utilize the novels of Samuel R.

Delany, beginning, as I will with his novel Triton subtitled An Ambiguous Heterotopia.

21 At the Society for Utopian Studies conference in Toronto in 2012 there was a panel specifically focused on discussing the ‘critical utopia.’ Tom Moylan did not present as part of the panel, however, he did sit as a discussant. During his response to the panel

Moylan stressed this latter aspect of the critical utopia (i.e., its specificity to a particular era proper to the United States). Moylan was not claiming the sub-genre in the name of the entire world, but pointing out the birth of a new way of imagining utopia. Moylan acknowledged that his classification does not take into account, for example, French or

Japanese ‘utopian’ writing, but at the same time he did not see this as a limitation to the 189

critical utopia. If anything, the possibilities harbored within these various embodiments of world literature would only offer up even more ways of imagining utopia.

22 “Signifiance” is a technical term, especially with respect to the work of Kristeva and this dissertation. Here I use Marin to usher in the notion of utopia as a signifying practice mediated between the individual’s body and the social milieu by various extant symbolic codes.

23 For further exegesis see Johnston’s entry on Lacan in Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy (online).

24 Török goes on to add, correctly, that for Kristeva as well as for Clément the sacred strictly speaking is a phenomenon that defies definition; however, Clément and Kristeva claim it is a phenomenon experienced primarily by women, namely during the process of giving birth. In one of her letters to Kristeva, Catherine Clément writes, “Woman, a being on the borderline, biology and meaning, is likely to participate in both sides of the sacred: in calm appeasement, where nativity finds assurance in eternity … but also in the rending of the sacred cloth, where language and all representation are lost in a spasm or delirium”

(Feminine and the Sacred 15-16). This is not to suggest that men do not or cannot experience the sacred; they do, in moments of “spasm or delirium” specific to their own biology and socio-cultural situation.

25 Similar to Jameson’s assertion that today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine an alternative to capitalism, and that perhaps this has to do with a weakness in our imaginations (paraphrased), Kristeva asserts that today we lack imaginary discourses for many things, e.g., love. Imaginary discourses are manifested in the “creation of moments of iconicity, quasi hallucinations, fictions which blur the 190

contradistinctions between true and real, spirit and body, in a plausible way” (Kearns

116); which is to say, imaginary discourses are the infusion of the semiotic (le sémiotique) into daily life. Normally these imaginary discourses function in terms of societal ritual (see Kearns) and this tends to give imaginary discourses a religious connotation. However, one must not be too quick to label imaginary discourses or

Kristeva fundamentally religious proper at heart; Kristeva—and I assume this position throughout the entirety of the present dissertation—looks to religious cultural production

(e.g., writings, art, mystical experience, and so on) for resources that may help contemporary society work through daily life, which is characterized by a lack of imaginary discourses. The ‘ideal’ (utopia?), for Kristeva, of these researches would be that new imaginary discourses might evolve such that le sémiotique and le symbolique are brought together in what would functionally amount to a better world than there is at present. I think the reason why Kristeva is sometimes confused for being a “religious” thinker—even though she is decidedly not—is because for her the generation and proliferation of these new imaginary discourses would evoke a kind of collective feeling of jubilation that is conventionally associated with religious experience, or moments of

“spasm and delirium.” Incidentally, a more appropriate label, if one had to use one, for

Kristeva is that used by Catherine Clément to refer to her colleague: Christian atheist.

26 That is not to say that religions do not exhibit ‘herd mentality,’ but only to suggest that religion offers a social structure that is more sympathetic to the private psychic life of the individual. This emphasis on the ‘private psychic life’ of the individual should not be confused with the private moment of contemplation when a citizen steps into the voting booth to cast her ballot in a mature democratic society; it is simply meant to draw 191

attention to the sympathy with which religion, more so than politics in general, provides resources and support during moments of psychological crisis, angst, doubt, and so on.

27 As with the work of Kristeva, I will not attempt an encyclopedia-like recounting of the work and theory of Lacan. Such work already exists and is very thorough; see

Ragland-Sullivan and Bracher (1991), Fink (1995), and Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin

(2002).

28 In one of its manifestations, abjection is the pure repulsion and pushing away from something that one violently dislikes, which is to say abjection is reactionary and not affirmative at its core in Kristeva. The subjectivity of her subject-in-process is therefore a subject that is constituted on the basis of pure negation. Phenomenologically the subject- in-process may experience the world in ways that can be described as affirmative and productive but, under the ‘surface’ of the ego, negative—or, negating—forces fueled by distaste and repugnance drive the subject. This does not, in any sense, imply that the subject-in-process is morally corrupt or motivated by dodgy forces; rather, it merely sheds light on the intersubjective context within which conflicts and desires arise. For

Kristeva, the hope would be that once the subject becomes aware of the fact that his/her desire is negative and motivated by the psychological forces of abjection then s/he will be better situated to make sense of his/her life experiences and projects. In terms of understanding how this knowledge of abjection informs the political nature of the social uprisings mentioned in the main body of the text, Kristeva’s theory suggests the following: It is therapeutic to abandon thinking of the future in purely positive and constructive way such that we can get what we want. The subject of late modernity, according to Kristeva, is not a subject who wants; rather, s/he is a subject who detests and 192

rejects. Typically thinking in terms of the latter is considered pessimistic and thus dismissed and degraded, which is to say devalued; the alternative of thinking positively and being optimistic is not yielding the kind of world that we want. As such, the challenge is to embrace the abject aspect of our subjectivity and learn to think and act with it productively. This would effectively amount to thinking and acting in ways that are considered inappropriate and/or obscene at times; however, I hold that these are the only remnants of utopianism in today’s late modern capitalist society.

29 See above, the example of the London rioters—individually together—attempting to achieve such a symbolic. However, there is also the way in which one might strive to lay the foundations for a new symbolic that is more in line with Kristeva’s aesthetic inclinations: art, in particular literature. For example, Samuel R Delany’s production of his literary works can be interpreted as an attempt to stamp out a new social symbolic; and Delany’s method is no less “violent” or transgressive than that of the London rioters, at least at the level of signification (physically, perhaps, the rioters have him beat).

30 From “Appendix B: Closures and Openings” in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985).

31 This I claim despite the fact that Delany says “I read for information. Clearly, forcefully, and economically given, information constitutes my greatest reading pleasure”

(see About Writing, 45). My argument is that he is much more sympathetic to le sémiotique than his commentary suggests.

32 I spend the time going through this example because it speaks to Kristeva’s observations regarding the importance of the pre-Oedipal regulation of the body of the infans. The infans, here personified by Electric Baby, is caught in the intersection between biology (represented by the mother, Liz) and culture or society (represented by 193

Heavenly Breakfast, the ambassador in this situation being Delany). I extrapolate an understanding of how the mapping of the body of the infans, through the regulation of food consumption, can be used in order better understand how one is symbolically consecrated and welcomed into utopia as opposed to being left out.

33 It should be emphasized for clarity: I am not trying to defend, redeem, or salvage

Bron’s character so that the reader no longer views him as Delany originally intended. I am simply using the Kristevan interpretation of subjectivity and psychic life to tease out or unpack another understanding of how utopianism can be thought using this incredibly influential novel by Delany. I recognize in advance that the interpretation I advance here might not be welcome by many critics.

34 “Sexuality on Triton is unfettered by taboos other than lack of consent. […]

Complete sexual freedom, the absence of connection between sex and procreation or between sex and marriage or prostitution, and full psychological therapy and physical rearrangement of the mind and body for anything from minor dysfunction or depression to total sex or gender change, all combine to allow a variety of guilt-free sexual activities”

(Demand 171).

35 This is also the generative field of le sémiotique; for further reading on this concept, refer to Oliver, 2002, 336.

36 The point that I am making here rests upon a very fine distinction between Triton and Kristeva’s “sprawling metropolis.” Although I refer to both as heterotopic spaces, it is clear enough that they are not the same (i.e., Triton is post-scarcity whereas Kristeva’s metropolis is certainly not; the latter may exude the simulacra of post-scarcity, but in all probability it is just an excrescence of ideology). When I refer to both spaces as 194

heterotopic, I am identifying the fact that both are characterized by a plethora of ambiguous spaces and/or marginal spaces. Granted Triton as a whole can be view in these terms—e.g., because it is a moon, it is itself marginal relative to the ‘mainstream’ planets—it is the Unlicensed Sectors on Triton that dramatize this “ambiguous” aspect.

Compare the Tritonian unlicensed sectors with the ambiguous and marginal zones one is likely to find in Kristeva’s sprawling metropolis: spaces of the homeless, illegal immigrants, the inhabitants of slums (see Dehaene and De Cauter 5). These places signify the disintegration of society; the unlicensed sectors do not. Sites such as those listed above mark the “grimmest symptom of a postcivil urbanism which follows the disintegration of the state” (Dehaene and De Cauter 5). Whereas the unlicensed sectors mark a mature advancement in the development of modern society, my interest in considering the sprawling metropolis of Kristeva a heterotopia is because whatever their socio-political status these ‘abject’ marginal zones are important to revealing and understanding the “process” of social ordering (see Law 1994). This is what Hetherington

(1997) considers the most defining feature of a heterotopia, and how we should look at modernity: “not as a social order, as has tended to be the sociological convention, but as a social and indeed spatial ordering” (ix). Kristeva’s metropolis, despite its clearly non- heterotopian aspects, does possess some merit with respect to the concept and this is the line along which I pursue my argument in this section of the dissertation.

37 When I say that the Spike represents the abject I am referring primarily to how she appears to Bron, from his perspective. More precisely, the Spike is only abject in light of

Bron’s reception of her; to any other denizen of Triton she would not appear abject, nor would she represent the abject in any way. However, for Bron the Spike—as well as her 195

theatrical presentations—is akin to the women artists of the late 1980s through 1990s, whose work was both “condemned as filth and lauded as groundbreaking”: Cindy

Sherman, Kiki Smith, Karen Finley, Judie Bamber, Jeanne Dunning, Millie Wilson,

Alison Saar, and Moira Dryer to name a few (see Leisha Jones, 2007). These artists

“challenge not only the practices of cultural and physical abjection, but also the practices of abjection internal to the politics of the phallic economy that reigned ever-present in the

1990s art world […] These women emerge as the sometimes-subjects of art in a doubling of absence and presence: their bodies are absent from the regulatory schemas that dominate the presence of the bodies of women in artworks, while remaining present through abject eruptions of deterritorialized flesh” (Jones 2007, 70). That is to say, these women and their works of art can be viewed as rupturing the phallic hegemony of the art world—and by extension socio-political world in general—that seeks to keep women subservient to men. Since such a phallic economy does not exist on Triton, the Spike and her art work cannot be viewed in the same way, i.e., she and her work are not abject relative to Tritonian society as a whole; rather, it is only relative to the gaze of Bron and his oppressively unwelcome heterosexism that she and her work represent the abject.

With respect to Bron, the Spike disrupts the former’s received view of things and how they should, and instead enact the “performing of difference” and push back against those heteronormative forces as critique (see Jones, 70).

38 This is typically defined as the sexual desire for an other and the desire to protect and care for the self.

39 From an interview “Julia Kristeva in Conversation with Rosalind Coward.” The interview took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London at a conference on 196

Desire in which Kristeva participated. It was published in the Institute of Contemporary

Arts Documents in 1984 in a special issue on desire (Oliver, 2002, 298).

40 By “queer feminist” I understand a feminist philosophy that closely approximates

“third wave” feminism insofar as the former distances itself from the latter in terms of identity. For purposes of the point made here, queer feminists reject any notion of essentialism to the feminine (or masculine) as well as any notion of identity (regardless of how radical or dissenting it is) in favour of a philosophy that is inclusive of non-binary genders (something “first wave” and “second wave” feminism struggled with in the drive for feminine recognition and equality) and a radical opposition to patriarchy that can be exercised by persons of any gender. For further resources on queer feminism, see queerfeminism.com/resources/ . Web 12 Jun. 2013.

41 For further reading see “Conversation with Rosalind Coward,” p. 345, in Oliver

2002.

42 “Refixation” is a procedure that exists on Triton that is capable of changing a person into whatever sex s/he choses, bodily and psychologically. Bron is originally a male with a heterosexual psychological orientation. He undergoes refixation to become a female with a heterosexual psychological orientation. However, one could just as easily undergo refixation to become a female with a homosexual psychological orientation, or any one of the other sexual possibilities apparent on Triton. When a person has used up their desire to be that sex, he or she can simply undergo refixation at any time and become something else.

43 Delany, Byrne writes, “enacts the different relationships to ‘power, language and meaning’ that Kristeva identifies as constitutive of sexual difference. In this respect, Stars 197

in My Pocket like Grains of Sand gestures provisionally towards a future where the mechanisms that generate and regulate desire and gender could be, if not transcended, shown to be contingent and, therefore, subject to re-visioning” (162).

44 The repeated references to women in this excerpt need to be clarified. It is a literary strategy that Delany deploys at the level of the text. In the universe of Stars, ‘she’ is the pronoun for all sentient individuals of whatever species who have achieved the legal status of ‘woman.’ The pronoun ‘he’ refers to the general sexual object of a woman.

(See S, 73)

45 In particular, I find important the Marq’s philosophical musings while aboard a ship en route to another job. Marq’s ruminations resonate with the language of the depressive whose faith in the meaning of things is radically sundered by the experience of a loss of love:

To leave one part of a world in order to visit another is to indulge in a

transformation of signs, their appearances, their meanings, that, however violent,

still, because of the coherence of the transformative system itself, partakes of a

logic, a purely geographical order, if not the more entailed connections lent by

purely ecological or social factors: here they do it one way, there they do it

another – with no doubt as to the identity of the antecedents of both ‘its.’ But to

leave a world, and to leave it at dawn, thus delaying all possibility of what one

might learn in a day, is to experience precisely the problematics of that identity at

its most intense: to see that identity shatter, fragment, and to realize that its

solidity was always an illusion, and that infinite spaces between those referential

shards are more opaque to direct human apprehension that all the star-flooded 198

vacuum […] To leave a world at dawn, however, is to know how much you want

to remember; and to realize how much, because of the cultural and conceptual grid

a world casts over our experience of it, we are victims to that truth against all will,

once we tear loose from it into night (S 337-8).

46 Bread and Wine originally appeared in 1999.

47 This point is paraphrased from Beardsworth, p. 70.

48 My decision to include the notion of grace to further develop Kristeva’s possible contribution to the concept of utopia is indebted to Ruth Levitas’s utopian interpretation of the idea in her new book Utopia as Method (2013). Significantly influenced by Ernst

Bloch, Levitas states, “The longing for Heimat and for the fulfilled moment can also be understood as the quest for a (sometimes) secular form of grace” (12). Noting that grace has both secular and religious meanings (e.g., social conventions of “gracefulness,”

“graciousness,” and graces which refer to God’s divine intervention and that are outside the range of active human agency, respectively), Levitas argues for an existential interpretation of grace. Following theological critic and philosopher Paul Tillich,

Levitas’s infuses grace with utopian potential: “Grace […] entails connection, acceptance, reconciliation, wholeness…” (13). In terms of Hogg, I claims that grace fits within the context of Cocksucker’s “drifting,” which is to say his openness to a moment that might allow for reconciliation and wholeness. In other words, rather than curse and disavow his disorderly (abject) condition, he is emblematic of following the psychoanalytic path, waiting for a moment to present itself whereby something horrid and ugly can be changed into something beautiful. Note: I am not equating the sacred in Kristeva with grace in

Levitas or elsewhere; my intention is to simply bring these two concepts together to 199

further sketch out the range that this once sacred terminology can attain in terms of discussing utopia today.

49 This notion is paraphrased from Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism

(1891). See Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism and Selected Writings (2001), edited by Linda Dowling, pp.125-162.

50 Alternatively, but not mutually independent, Hogg can also be interpreted as functioning for Cocksucker as Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic Chora. Although it may seem difficult to accept Hogg as the embodiment of a loving nurturing maternal matrix, he is, for Cocksucker, “the metaphysical process that puts us [Cocksucker] in contact with the ‘demonical’ element in nature…and the historical process of social production”

(Kristeva, 1984, 35). Thus, with regard to the emergence of Cocksucker’s psychic life,

Hogg is simultaneously a maternal Chora (i.e., a figure that foregrounds a materialist understanding of the origins of language and the subject [see Margaroni, 2005, 89]), as well as an imaginary father that preserves the imaginary space necessary for the possibility of establishing symbolic relationships.

51 One example of this can be witnessed in a study released by the Children’s Digital

Media Center@LA that demonstrated the link between changing values on popular

“tween TV” and the personal values of those very same tweens. Study authors Yalda T.

Uhls and Patricia M. Greenfield found that in 2007 “fame” was the number one (#1) value communicated to preteens aged 9-12, compared to other values such as

“community feeling” and “benevolence” which ranked # 11 and # 12, respectively.

Greenfield notes, that “The rise of fame in preteen television may be one influence in the documented rise of narcissism in our culture.” Building upon this, I speculate that for this 200

generation of “tweens,” fame has come to be that which they desire without any knowledge of why they desire it. Because of the overtones of narcissism I claim that it is because there is an absence of a strong social symbolic that would otherwise give form and meaning to such ideals (e.g., fame); but at present, these “goals” are hollow and death bearing.

52 See Lacan’s 1958 lecture titled “The Signification of the Phallus,” included in

Écrits, where he describes the jouissance of the Other in the following way: “Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfaction it calls for. It is demand for a presence or an absence. This is what the primordial relationship with the mother manifests, replete as it is with that Other who must be situated shy of the needs that Other can fulfill. Demand already constitutes the Other as having the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs, that is, the power to deprive them of what alone can satisfy them. The Other’s privilege here thus outlines the radical form of the gift of what the Other does not have— namely, what is known as its love” (579-80).

53 In no way does this proclaim Lacan as a utopian, for such an “end” is impossible seeing that one can never escape the talons of desire and language.

54 Arguably the two most famous proponents of the anti-social thesis are Leo

Bersani and Lee Edelman. Bersani’s Homos (1995) and Edelman’s No Future (2004) have been vital to the development of this aspect of queer studies. Edelman criticizes the

American, especially, “cult of the family” and the way in which children via heterosexual reproduction have become a substitute for the redemptive potentiality that religion once fulfilled. Despite social progress that attests to the contrary, Edelman argues that such a social agenda tacitly marginalizes gay and lesbian—queer—desire(s), or those desires 201

that exercise the nonreproductive aspect of Eros. Edelman’s is a thesis that built upon

Bersani’s, who attacked what he witnessed as the postmodern normalization of homosexuality into culture as mere lifestyle, something that he considered a neoliberal attempt to quash the revolutionary potential of queer politics. Bersani writes, “There are some glorious precedents for thinking of homosexuality as truly disruptive—as a force not limited to the modest goals of tolerance for diverse lifestyles, but in fact mandating the politically unacceptable and politically indispensible…” (76). The queer is fundamentally “disruptive” and not merely “tolerant.” Because of this, Bersani and

Edelman champion queer divestment from the heteronormative culture that is blind to queer desire and form an anti-social turn; a social-political stance that fundamentally disregards (hetero-) social structures, lives for the ‘now’ and abandons faith in the future, which is—according to the latter—not for queer desire anyway.

55 In the same article Foltz speak of Delany’s ‘excremental ethics’ as articulated in

The Mad Man:

Refusing the standard liberal discourse that bemoans the litter of consumer

culture, bleeds sympathy and longs for the re-incorporation of the wounded city

scavenger, and sterilizes and disembodies the extreme ethics of deceased

philosophers (like Foucault), Delany reveals the pleasure of reveling in the

flotsam of late capitalism. For him, ethics is not prohibition, nor does it revolve

around the normalizing impulse [...] Instead, Delany’s ethic of waste calls for the

late capitalist consumer to turn to the landfill, to eat of the leftovers, to enter the

anus, and to do something different with shit. (43) 202

Implied in this ethics is the invitation to a better way of living. Rather than lament the death of the symbolic (and by extension hope) Delany actively encourages—and dramatizes in his fiction—an experimental and loving relationship to the detritus of culture. Instead of giving up and proclaiming the social and/or ontological matrix closed,

Delany’s characters plunge into the refuse, the forgotten, the wasted, the aesthetically marginalized (i.e., abject) for a way of living with it rather than against it.

56 Personal communication at the 2013 conference of the Society for Utopian

Studies, in Charleston, South Carolina.

57 I am borrowing “circumambulate” from Lacan. See his Seminar VII for a discussion of das Ding (the Thing) around which, Lacan posits, the split subject forever circumambulates.

58 Becoming a “curator of the abject,” as I claim Eric does, is a metaphor for how I understand the psyche of the abject utopian to be constituted. It is a way of perceiving all matter, organic and inorganic, that surrounds one’s person. It is analogous to Jane

Bennett’s account of the waste (i.e., glove, pollen, rat, cap, and stick) overlaying a grate to the storm drain to the Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore: “As I encountered these items, they shimmied back and forth, between debris and thing—between, one the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects. […] I glimpsed a culture of things irreducible to the culture of objects. I achieved, for a moment, what Thoreau had made his life’s goal: to be able, as Thomas

Dumm puts it, ‘to be surprised by what one sees’” (see Vibrant Matter, 4-5). Partly what I 203

understand Through the Valley to be accomplishing between its front and back cover is to reconfigure the reader’s sense of wonder and fascination at what one sees in average everyday life, be it waste in gutter, or wherever. Reinvigorating some energy within the waste that has come to inundate contemporary culture—and which has in many ways dulled the mass’s receptiveness to the likelihood of any attainable change—is one of the first steps (“baby steps” à la le sémiotique) necessary toward radically changing the present world for the better.

59 Barthes references Carrière in the notes to his lecture on the Monastic life from which his concept is derived. “The monasteries of Mount Athos can be divided into two kinds. Those called coenobitic, in other words communal, where all activities—meals, prayers, and labor—are undertaken collectively. And those termed idiorrhythmic, where each individual literally lives according to his own rhythm. The monks have their own individual cells, where (other than at particular times of celebration in the year) they take their meals and are permitted to keep any personal items they owned at the time of taking their vows.” From Carrière, L’Été grec, p. 40. Barthes says that Idiorrhythmy is ‘My

Fantasy’, however, he demonstrates through various textual analyses (e.g., Thomas

Mann’s Magic Mountain and Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe) certain examples of imaginary characters working through the establishment of their own utopia of Living-

Together through the harmonization of their individual rhythms. I claim that Delany’s

Through the Valley can be read as another iteration of Barthes’s literary taxonomy insofar as Eric is found to dwell within an already achieved state of idiorrhythmic utopia in

Diamond Harbor. 204

60 For example, the ‘Wonder Decade’ of the 2030s witnessed liberal women presidents in both the United States and the Federation of African Republics, the World

Passport becoming a common form of identification, Europe, Africa, and most of

Western Asia adopting a single currency, and a trifecta of three small nuclear devices being detonated in Los Angeles, Mumbai, and São Paulo (aka. ‘the Three Bombs’) (TV,

583-5).

61 See Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Neveryóna (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and Return to Nevèrÿon (1987).

62 I recognize Kristeva’s reading of natality derived from Arendt’s work as precisely an exercise in how Kristeva approaches texts (e.g., philosophy, literature, and/or politics), which is to say the notion of natality is Kristevan and in no way a position proper to

Arendt’s politics proper. Regardless, by natality I understand—as Kristeva does while reading from Arendt’s The Human Condition—“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin…” (see Kristeva, Hannah Arendt

1999, 8; or Arendt’s The Human Condition 1958, 247).

63 Teresa L. Ebert calls Delany’s Dhalgren a piece of metascience fiction. As Ebert claims, metascience fiction “moves beyond thematic extrapolation and formal mimesis in order to celebrate the fabulatory human imagination in-and-for-itself. In metascience fiction the entertainment or story-telling function that dominates traditional science fiction is backgrounded, and the literary and aesthetic functions are foregrounded” (92-

93). It is a method by which aspects of the postmodern are used against its own cultural climate so as to preserve a political efficacy that has otherwise appeared to be absent. For 205

a wonderful analysis of the political import of the postmodern, see Hutcheson’s The

Politics of the Postmodern (1991).

64 I am referring to the 1980 Bantam edition, pp. 875-9.

65 Recall Tom Moylan’s idea that the critical utopia participates in this positive reclaiming of violence and destruction insofar as the critical utopia “destroys” the traditional utopia in order to preserve it as dream and desire.

66 See Kristeva’s book Melanie Klein (2000), especially pages 57-81, for a discussion of Kleinian accounts of guilt and reparation in the child.

67 See Kristeva’s book Hannah Arendt (1999) for a discussion of forgiveness in terms of Arendt’s notion of public life; especially p. 236: “Faced with the inexorable mechanization of daily life, forgiveness and the promise render ‘a sort of judgment’ that, in the end, is tantamount to a wager on our capacity for rebirth.”

68 See Kristeva’s “Mon journal de la semaine: Diversité dans la tempête.” Libération

1-2 Jan. 2000. Web. 19 Dec. 2001. http://www.liberation.com/quotidien/debats/janvier00/20000101a.html.

69 See Ruth Levitas’s chapter ‘Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and

Concrete Utopia’ pp. 65-79; 67, in Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (1997) eds. Jamie

Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan.

70 I do not wish to be read as using the term abjection too loosely here with my reference to Halberstam; I merely recognize the phenomena that she lists are experiences that are conventionally abjected in the sense that one would typically wish to avoid them in the course of developing one’s life. I fundamentally believe that these are not abject in the pejorative sense of the term, rather—and this has been partly the purpose of this 206

dissertation—they are wonderfully painful experiences that contemporary society needs to find positive ways to engage with, as opposed to the merely reactive and fearful ways in which we conventionally act.

71 See Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in Sister

Outsider: Essays and Speeches, pp.40-44.

72 The Ara Pacis Augustae (Latin for “Altar of Augustan Peace”) is an altar dedicated to the Roman goddess Peace (Pax). The altar was built to remind Romans of the competence and achievements of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Most importantly, the sculpture on the outside of the monument emphasizes the importance of peace within an empire (see Zanker, 1990, 122-3). In terms of my reading of Dhalgren, Bellona is a kind of allegorical empire, struggling to maintain peace; and Kid’s exchange of the Orchid with the new comer reaffirms this peace, in an act of forgiveness of all that has happened and all that will happen again, for the first time. 207

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222

Appendix: Images from Bread and Wine (1999)

Figure 1 223

Figure 2

224

Figure 3a

Figure 3b 225

Figure 4 226

Figure 5