Trouble and desire,
or, Delany’s dialectic.
Tuesday September 11, 2001
Still kicking dualisms around. Thinking, for instance, of desire and power:
Say I want you. That gives you some small modicum of power over me.
Say I have power over you. That means I have you, to a certain extent. I won’t yearn for you, or burn for you, or write soggy sonnets for you. I have power (what sort?) over you. I won’t want you; I already have you.
So. No desire.
It’s ridiculously simplistic, and dangerous to carry beyond a certain level of playful gedankenexperiment, but it could be said that power and desire exist, to a certain extent, in a relationship not unlike the relationship of capital and labor: complementary. Where one is, the other is not—but has been, or will someday be.
(One of the things that makes it simplistic is that power is not a thing spent through use, like capital, but rather almost a living thing, that grows with use and withers with disuse: desire sated brings power, or at least returns some modicum of self-control; but a surfeit of power brings new desires.)
Delany’s dialectic appears in an essay entitled “The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire,” (reprinted in Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary; run, don’t walk. I’m serious) a loosely collected sheaf of vignettes and interlogues that has a lot to say about rhetoric and discourse, which, in turn, illuminate quite a number of things about sex and desire. Specifically, in section 7 (“Discourse and Desire”), as he’s discoursing on the experience of being a gay black male science fiction writer talking to straight white male science fiction fans about their troubles with women (which is one of the funnier images I’ve run across in a long while, and one of the many reasons you should run, and not walk), he lays out what he sees as the central problem of dealing with the unapproachable object of one’s desire (whatever that may be): the inability to say one of two simple statements:
“I like you; do you like me?”
(And did you notice we’ve already hopelessly mucked up the simple complementary relationship I established in the opening?)
What’s interesting about this is Delaney goes on to read the statement “I like you” as the desire to be loved; as taking pleasure in imposing your emotions on another person; as, in essence, sadistic. And he reads “Do you like me?” as the desire to love; as taking pleasure in the imposition of the desires of others over and above your own; as, in essence, masochistic.
Any relationship, of course, is a complex and tangled web of snarled and snarling tussles over who, precisely, is on top (or thinks they’re on top), and why, and how: playful, nasty, supportive, backbiting, sexy, vicious, ecstatic, rude or exhausting—in a very real sense, a relationship dies when someone wins once and for all.
If you can ever figure that out, that is.
But while Delaney follows along after those who are out of balance (and we’re all out of balance): those who can say the one, but are wrung dry at the thought of saying the other—
I like you; do you like me?
—I was more intrigued by puzzling out whether or not “love” is a transitive verb. Certainly, if one translates his dialectic in the simplest and most direct way possible: “I like you”; “I wish to impose my emotions on you”; “I love you”—it certainly seems to be. But we all know it isn’t, or rather, it’s both: the masochist can just as easily say “I love you” and mean something utterly different. So to clear up that potentially dangerous semantic confusion, I tinkered with the translation: rather than “I love you; do you love me?” I rendered the dialectic as “I love you; I am in love with you”—and like a bolt from the blue, was suddenly granted insight into the workings of the Great Undergraduate Exit Line:
INT, CAMPUS COFFEE SHOP. Sophisticated but Callow Sophomore lays hand on forearm of Sensitive Young Froshling, who is on the verge of being unable to control an attack of the weepy sniffles.
SOPHISTICATED BUT CALLOW SOPHOMORE:
I love you, I do. I’m just not [dramatic pause] in love with you.
Homework: construct a semantic rectangle using this re-rendered dialectic. Extra credit: poke holes in the entire thing, and demonstrate how utterly wrong I am. And you could really impress me by devising a syllogism and working that old bramantip magic on it.