Rustle in the Bush

 I will respond in kind to the book format: a memoir of my reading experience and then an analytic look at the theory it takes to describe the social relationships developed in the memoir. 

The first part I had a hard time with. I had never read Delaney before, and his crisp prose made it clear he was a science fiction writer, as he approached the city with an eye of somebody conscious of a tight machinery at play (As is the case with SF’s future technology, engineering, and politics) which sometime times shared SF’s fault of an overstimulated imagination, giving out shades of K-Mart style writing, counting random objects as though their significance laid in their number and detail. On the other hand, this problem helped to form a responsible objectivity that the scene needed in order to be described not wholly as “perverse” and Romanticized, but as straight personal detail (As he says Pg.146; “Fictive rhetoric tends to reproduce its own form”. And as an imaginative yet realistic work, Delaney comes back to battle this tendency with the second half of the memoir (Pg.58-End) I was glad to not see any Miller/Bukowski ‘dirty realism’; and as we start to move towards a definition of porn, the aforementioned begin to look as if they have more moments where their ‘art’ becomes more clearly pornographic than the image I immediately fought against. I believe the narrative failed to address the passion in the change of the half century and I often felt bored, “Yes another time you were pleasured in the theatres, another goofy character” and as if Delaney missed an opportunity to build enough tragedy to convince us his second essay is instructive enough to take as much time as it does to read. I believe that some of the force is taken out by starting in media res (Turns out he knows so too, Pg.132); and it’s not wrong to think, especially after reading of many interesting folks (and Delaney himself) that are simply hard to sympathize for, with jokes and vernacular not being enough to share in a sense of destruction. Nonetheless, he captures important dynamics in these experiences and brings out their fullest consequences in small moments of impactful prose, like a Henry Miller (Incidentally, an influence on Delaney). Often these have to do with the small community established in these neighborhoods. Moments that stuck with me:

(Fashioning selfhood through sex and sex’s essential importance for doing so along with the benefits of sexual variety -pg.45-46-; his honesty of the relationships true nature -from Pg.56- “Not love relationships…not business… of mutual pleasure which did not involve life commitment” without an accusative eye. The object of desire in Pornography for straight men (As target audience) detailed on page 79. The lovely Dewers -pg.- 54-56)

 The most important takeaway is that there is an aesthetic/sensual economy (A logic of sensation, ie social relations) at work here in these spaces that does not operate off of the same social logic that operates the cities new changes in that, “The competition there was between us was a sign of how little competition there was”(79). The possibility to learn from this is detailed in the second half. He covers what he calls his ‘epistemological and ontological grounds’ there. Why and how the theatres come and leave, and what things were there and happened there, and what we should take from them in terms of, “Crime and violence on the street, the public sex practices that have been attacked and so summarily wiped ou of the Times Square area, and the general safety of the area – along with the problem of safety for women.(153).

The preface actually gives us a jargon-free summary. ‘My argument’s polemical thrust is toward conceiving, organizing, and setting into place new establishments—and even entirely new types of institutions—that would offer the services and fulfill the social functions provided by the porn houses that encouraged sex among the audience.Simple enough. And he gives us the means through which he gets this done in the preface page XXV:

Dismantling discourses (Figured in the illusion of safety via “perversion” (187-193), analyze their material underpinning (Both the construction minimum for profit for the 42nd street corporations (149-152), the landlord/tenant relationship, (114-118). All of which is sustained by a dialectic of contact and network where the implicit discursive structure of contract and network is mediated by ideologies of pleasure demonstrating how the aesthetic (Superstructure) can impinge on infrastructure (Epistemological and ontological); a reversal of the usual Marxist trend he explicates this from Pages 161-164.

The second essay is very 1998, very-Post-Marxist, quasi structuralist (But at least he’s honest and says its sociology; a lot of Deleuze fans claim they’re doing Philosophy when all they really do is bad anthropology and sociology). It sounds like marginal Deleuze/Guattari rhetoric. In fact, his premises two, and one sound like they are trying to lift D&G’s notions of reterritorialization and deterritorialization, which are the two social forces at work (Delaney) which become mediated through either contact or network. And these concepts are used in many different areas, notably politics and literature, in their book Toward a Minor Literature about Kafka .

These are Delaney’s metaphysics, the reason he calls himself a ‘Marxian not a Marxist’, there could be a whole study done on this connection. As well, he picks off Foucault but at last cites him for what he calls the Epistemological (Rhetoric) and Ontological (Infrastructure) elements of his study. In fact his reversal of superstructure impinging on infrastructure pretty much falls into the genre of study that Foucault starts in Discipline and Punishment, in which the ideology of progress and humanity (As social progress) operates on the same level as Delany’s “Safety”. So with Foucault we aren’t being pedantic and trying to reinstate tar and feathering because it turns out modern prisons and public spaces really formed as a kind of discipline, but rather how a critical look shows how the successful (contact-based) relationships were obfuscated in the name of progress of man or city safety.

Oh yeah! And it’s about class. This can’t be underscored. It’s just so implicit I didn’t mention it.

If y’all see this, maybe give me a chance to speak about the books Connection is Everything and Unflattening to see how networking and intra rather than interclass contact is presenting itself here at Rutgers-Newark in my HLLC’s Social Justice Program.