But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.
(Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1 2.3)
My primary thesis is simply that, 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.
My secondary thesis is, however, that the class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world, though it is at times as hard to detect as Freud’s unconscious or the structure of discourse, perpetually works for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed.
My tertiary thesis, to which now and again I shall return, is that, while the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involves specific social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Therefore, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for the establishment of such institutions and practices—a critique necessary if new institutions of any efficacy are to develop. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) can impinge on infrastructure.
LANDLORD/TENANT RELATIONS
We are all aware that landlords and tenants exist in a fundamentally antagonistic relationship with one another. Generally speaking, throughout most of what we might call the middle classes of our society, landlords tend to be somewhat better off financially than their tenants. Certainly the class war is as strong there as between any groups save, perhaps, workers and employers.
With that in mind, here is a tale:
A black woman born in Nottaway, Virginia, my maternal grandmother came from Petersburg to New York City at age eighteen, in 1898, and moved to Harlem in 1902 when it was still a German neighborhood. With my grandfather, an elevator operator in a downtown office building and later a Grand Central Terminal redcap, she took rooms in the first house in Harlem open to blacks, on 132nd Street, between Seventh Avenue and Lenox Avenue. Owned by a black man married to a white woman, the house rented to men and women working as servants in the neighborhood. My grandmother told of returning to her rooms after work, while the Germans, sitting in front of their houses along Seventh Avenue played zithers through the evening.
On Morris Avenue in the Bronx, on Mount Morris Park in Manhattan, on Macdonnah Street and Carroll Street in Bedford Stuyvesant, and on Seventh Avenue and LaSalle Street in Manhattan again, my grandparents lived up through my grandfather’s death at 72 in 1952 until Grandma’s own death at 102 in 1982.
A number of times in the sixties and seventies, Grandma spoke of the social practice in the twenties, thirties, and, in a few places, into the forties, of the landlord’s annual or sometimes semiannual visit to her apartment: my sense was that these visits were notably different from the monthly visits to the landlord to pay the rent—in the days before universal banking.
Expected by both tenants and landlords, the visits allowed tenants to point out directly to the building’s owner any breakages, or repairs that were needed. The owner got a chance to see how the tenant was treating his or her property. By opening the door for less formal ones, these visits established an arena for social interchange. From them, landlords gained a sense of the tenants as individuals. Tenants got a sense of the landlord as a person.
In no way did this social practice obviate the socio-economic antagonism between the classes. But it tended to stabilize relationships at the personal level and restrict conflict to the economic level itself—keeping it from spilling over into other, personal situations.
Yes, there might be a spate of cleaning in the apartment in the days before the landlord came. Certainly there might be a rush of painters and plumbers in that same month—so that, during the visit itself, everyone might come off at his or her best. But the visits meant that in those situations in which there were problems on either side that could be resolved only by the greater forces of the class war itself (an eviction, a suit against a landlord for a major dereliction of necessary repairs), there was nevertheless a social field in which either side could ask for leniency or at least understanding from the other; and often it could be granted. Similarly, either side could personally entreat the other to straighten up and fly right. Many times this was enough to avert major confrontations.
What eroded this practice of landlord visits were, first, the economic forces of the Depression. Pressures on tenants (from the exhaustion of having two or three jobs to the anomie of having no job at all) became such that they began housing extra materials or extra people in their apartments, to the point where a good weekend’s cleaning could not cover over the evidence. Models for bourgeois living standards became less available, as did the time and energy to implement them.
Landlords found themselves unable to afford keeping the facilities in the first-class shape tenants expected.
Tenants began to see the visits as prying.
Landlords began to see the visits as a formal responsibility empty of content and—finally—an unnecessary nuisance, in which they had to listen to demands they could not afford to meet.
Repair work was now delegated to a superintendent, whose job was to carry out those repairs as inexpensively as possible. While more stringent rules were instituted to restrict property-damaging wear and tear, in practice tenants were now allowed greater leeway in what they might do to the house. Older tenants saw the failure of the landlord to visit as a dereliction of responsibility. But younger tenants cited the “privilege” of better-off tenants in more lavish properties, often paying far higher rents, to forego such visits. Why shouldn’t the privilege of the better off be a right—the right of privacy—for all?
For the last twenty-one years, I have lived in a fifth-floor walk-up, rent-stabilized apartment at the corner of Amsterdam and 82nd Street. In that time, the owner of the building has never been through my apartment door. Once, five years ago, he shouted threats of legal action against me from the landing below—threats which came to nothing when, in retaliation, I hired a lawyer. This past February, when what became a four-alarm fire broke out in the building at five in the morning, he visited his property for a brief half hour at 7:30 A.M. and, standing out on the street among the fire engines, declared how grateful he was that no one had been hurt, then—in his shako and (the only man I’ve ever seen wear one) fur-collared overcoat—left. But those are the only two times I have ever seen him in person—or he has ever, I assume, seen me.
On the one hand, when repairs have been needed, and even more so after that brief shouting match in the hall, occasionally I’ve thought that the more personal relations my grandmother maintained with her landlord during the early decades of this century might well have made things go more easily. Were my landlord someone with whom, twice a year, I sat over a cup of coffee in my kitchen, I might have been able to negotiate speedier, and better quality, repairs—repairs for which, often, I would have been willing to share the financial weight; repairs which would have benefited the property itself. And certainly we both might have bypassed the emotional strain of the aforementioned shouting match.
On the other hand, I try to imagine my landlord’s response if he had visited during the first ten months after I had to collapse my Amherst apartment with my New York digs (when I was under precisely the same sort of socio-economic pressures that had eroded away the practice of visits in the first place), and my apartment’s back three rooms looked more like an over-full Jersey warehouse space than a home with people living in it. What if he had come during the previous five years when, regularly, I let friends use the place, two and three times a month, as an Upper West Side party space? (More than half a dozen years after the fact, I still meet people who tell me they have been to “great parties” at “my” house, when I wasn’t in attendance.) During the same period, I let a succession of friends and acquaintances stay there during the 130-odd days a year I was in Amherst, teaching at the University of Massachusetts. Such visits would have curtailed such practices severely—though, in neither case, on my side or on his, was the letter of the law violated.
At the rhetorical level, traces of the social practice my decade-and-a-half dead grandmother spoke of linger in the language, as tenants in the Upper West Side still speak of our landlords’ “seeing to” certain repairs—even though the landlord will not and does not intend to set eyes on anything within the front door of the building—just as the term “landlord” is, itself, a rhetorical holdover from a time and set of social practices when the important things the owner was “lord” over were, indeed, “land,” and the “tenants to the land,” rather than the buildings erected on it.
The betraying signs that one discourse has displaced or transformed into another is often the smallest rhetorical shift: a temporal moment (and a sociological location) in the transformation between a homosexual discourse and a gay discourse may be signaled by the appearance in the 1969 Fall issues of the Village Voice of the locution “coming out to” one’s (straight) friends, coworkers, and family (a verbal act directed toward straights) and its subsequent displacement of the demotic locution “coming out into” (gay) society—a metaphor for one’s first major gay sexual act. Between the two locutions lie Stonewall and the post-Stonewall activities of the gay liberation movement. Equally such a sign might be seen to lie at another moment, at another location, in the changeover from “that’s such a camp” to “that’s camp.” The intervening event there is Susan Sontag’s 1964 Partisan Review essay, “Notes on Camp.” I have written of how a shift in postal discourse may be signed by the rhetorical shift between “she would not receive his letters” and “she would not open his letter.” What intervened here was the 1840 introduction of the postage stamp, which changed letter writing from an art and entertainment paid for by the receiver to a form of vanity publishing paid for by the sender. (There was no junk mail before 1840.) One might detect a shift in the discourse of literature by the changeover from “George is in literature” to “George’s library contains mostly history and literature.” The explosion of print in the 1880s, occasioned by the typewriter and the linotype, intervenes. The shift from landlord visits to superintendents in charge of repairs is signaled by the rhetorical shift between “the landlord saw to the repairs” as a literal statement and “the landlord saw to the repairs” as a metaphor. I say “shifts,” but these rhetorical pairings are much better looked at, on the level of discourse, as rhetorical collisions. The sign that a discursive collision has occurred is that the former meaning has been forgotten and the careless reader, not alert to the details of the changed social context, reads the older rhetorical figure as if it were the newer.
As are the space of the unconscious and the space of discourse, the space where the class war occurs as such is, in its pure form, imaginary—imaginary not in the Lacanian sense but rather in the mathematical sense. (In the Lacanian sense, those spaces are specifically Symbolic.) Imaginary numbers—those involved with i, the square root of minus-one—do not exist. But they have measurable and demonstrable effects on the real (i.e., political) materiality of science and technology. Similarly, the structures, conflicts, and displacements that occur in the unconscious, the class war, and the space of discourse are simply too useful to ignore in explaining what goes on in the world we live in, unto two men yelling in the hall, one a landlord and one a tenant, if not mayhem out on the streets themselves, or the visible changes over a decade or so in a neighborhood like Times Square or, indeed, the Upper West Side. Often, like many contemporary theorists, I have wondered if all three spaces aren’t in their fundamental form, the same.
An important point: I do not think it is, in any way, shape, or form, nostalgic to say that, under such a social practice as my grandmother knew, both landlord and tenant were better off than I am today. The practice was a social arena of communication which, when utilized fully, meant that both landlord and tenant had to expend more time, energy and money in order to maintain a generally higher standard of living by the tenant and a generally higher level of property upkeep by the landlord, restricting the abuse of that property, from which both landlord and tenant benefited. On both tenant and landlord, greater restrictions obtained as to what was expected and what was not. The practice eroded when the money was no longer there, when the time and energy had to be turned, by both, to other things, and when practices formerly unacceptable to both had, now, to be accepted, so that the visits finally became a futile annoyance to both sides and were dropped.
The establishment of tenant associations—at which landlords are occasionally invited to speak and meet with their tenants—begins to fulfill the vacuum in the array of social practices that erosion leaves.
But they do not fill it in the same way.
To repeat: 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. The class war raging constantly and often silently in the comparatively stabilized societies of the developed world militates for the erosion of the social practices through which interclass communication takes place and the institutions holding those practices stable, so that new institutions must always be conceived and set in place to take over the jobs of those that are battered again and again till they are destroyed. While the establishment and utilization of those institutions always involves specific social practices, the effects of my primary and secondary theses are regularly perceived at the level of discourse. Thus, it is only by a constant renovation of the concept of discourse that society can maintain the most conscientious and informed field for the establishment of such institutions and practices—a critique necessary if new institutions of any efficacy are to develop. At this level, in its largely stabilizing/destabilizing role, superstructure (and superstructure at its most oppositional) can impinge on infrastructure.
So stated, these points appear harmless enough. Over the last decade and a half, however, a notion of safety had arisen, a notion that runs from safe sex (once it becomes anything more than using condoms when anally penetrated by males of unknown—or, of course, positive—HIV status, whether you are male or female) and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities, and committed (that is, safe) relationships, a notion that currently functions much in the way the notions of “security” and “conformity” did in the fifties. As, in the name of “safety,” society dismantles the various institutions that promote interclass communication, attempts to critique the way such institutions functioned in the past to promote their happier sides are often seen as, at best, nostalgia for an outmoded past and, at worst, a pernicious glorification of everything dangerous—unsafe sex, neighborhoods filled with undesirables (read “unsafe characters”), promiscuity—and an attack on the family and the stable social structure, with dangerous, non-committed, “unsafe” relationships (i.e., those not modeled on the bourgeois notion of monogamous marriage) held up in their place.
CONTACT/NETWORKING
The practice of landlord visits to tenants in the twenties, thirties, and forties can be looked at as sitting directly between two modes of social practice today. The two modes of social practice I shall discuss and the discourse around them that allow them to be visible as such I designate as “contact” and “networking.” Like all social practices they create/sediment discourses even as discourses create, individuate and inform with value the material and social objects that facilitate and form the institutions that both support and contour these practices.
Contact is the conversation that starts in the line at the grocery counter with the person behind you while the clerk is changing the paper roll in the cash register. It is the pleasantries exchanged with a neighbor who has brought her chair out to take some air on the stoop. It is the discussion that begins with the person next to you at a bar. It can be the conversation that starts with any number of semi-officials or service persons—mailman, policeman, librarian, store clerk or counter person. It can also be two men watching each other masturbate together in adjacent urinals of a public john—an encounter which—later—may or may not become a conversation. For contact—very importantly—is also the intercourse, physical and conversational, that blooms in and as “casual sex,” in public rest rooms, sex movies, public parks, singles bars, sex clubs and on street corners with heavy hustling traffic, and the adjoining motels or the apartments of one or another participant, from which non-sexual friendships and/or acquaintances lasting for decades or a lifetime may spring, not to mention the conversation of a john with a prostitute or hustler encountered on one or another sidewalk, street corner, or in a bar. Mostly, these contact encounters are merely pleasant chats, adding a voice to a face now and again encountered in the neighborhood. But I recall one such supermarket-line conversation that turned out to be with a woman who’d done graduate work on the Russian poet Zinaida Hippius, just when I happened to be teaching Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s Christ and Anti-Christ trilogy in a graduate seminar at the University of Mas-sachusetts: Merezhkovsky was Hippius’s husband, and I was able to get some interesting and pertinent information about the couple’s wanderings in the early years of the century.
I have at least one straight male friend who, on half-a-dozen occasions, has gotten editorial jobs for women he first met and befriended as they were working as topless dancers in various strip clubs that put them on the fringe of the sex workers’ service profession.
Another supermarket-line conversation was with a young man who was an aspiring director, looking for some science fiction stories to turn into teleplays; I was able to jot down for him a quick bibliography of young writers and short stories that he might pursue. Whether or not it came to anything, I have no way of knowing. But it was easy and fun.
Still another time, it was a young woman casting director who needed someone to play the small part of a fisherman in a film she was working on, who decided I would be perfect for it. And I found myself with a weekend acting job.
Contact encounters so dramatic are rare—but real. The more ordinary sorts of contact yield their payoff in moments of crisis: when there is a fire in your building, it may be the people who have been exchanging pleasantries with you for years who take you into their home for an hour or a day, or even overnight. Contact includes the good Samaritans at traffic accidents (the two women who picked me up and got me a cab when my cane gave way and I fell on the street, dislocating a finger), or even the neighbor who, when you’ve forgotten your keys at the office and are locked out of your apartment, invites you in for coffee and lets you use her phone to call a locksmith; or, as once happened to me in the mid-sixties when my then-neighborhood, the Lower East Side, was at its most neighborly and under the influence of the counterculture, a London guest arrived on Wednesday when I was out of town and expecting him on Thursday. Someone living across the street, who didn’t know me at all, saw a stranger with two suitcases on my apartment stoop looking bewildered, invited him in to wait for me, then eventually put him up for a night until I returned.
And finally: my lover of eight years, Dennis, and I first met when he was homeless and selling books from a blanket spread out on Seventy-second Street. Our two best friends for many years now are a gay male couple, one of whom I first met in a sexual encounter, perhaps a decade ago, at the back of the now closed-down Variety Photoplays Movie Theater on Second Avenue just below Fourteenth Street. Outside my family, these are among the two most rewarding relationships I have: both began as cross-class contacts in a public space.
Visitors to New York might be surprised that such occurrences are central to my vision of the City at its healthiest. Lifetime residents won’t be. Watching the metamorphosis of such vigil and concern into considered and helpful action is what gives one a faithful and loving attitude toward one’s neighborhood, one’s city, one’s nation, the world.
I have taken “contact,” both term and concept, from Jane Jacobs’s instructive 1961 study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs describes contact as a fundamentally urban phenomenon and finds it necessary for everything from neighborhood safety to a general sense of social well-being. She sees it supported by a strong sense of private and public in a field of socioeconomic diversity that mixes living spaces with a variety of commercial spaces, which, in turn must provide a variety of human services if contact is to function in a pleasant and rewarding manner.
Jacobs’s analysis stops short of contact as a specifically stabilizing practice in interclass relations—signaled by her (largely understandable in the pre-Stonewall 1950s when she was collecting material for her book, but nevertheless unfortunate) dismissal of “pervert parks” as necessarily social blights—though she was ready to acknowledge the positive roles winos and destitute alcoholics played in stabilizing the quality of neighborhood life at a higher level than a neighborhood would maintain without them.1 She also confuses contact with community. Urban contact is often at its most spectacularly beneficial when it involves members of different communities. I would recommend her analysis, though I would add that, like so much American thinking on the left, it lacks not so much a class analysis as an interclass analysis. But let’s go back to my primary thesis; that’s where the action is.
There is, of course, another way to meet people. It’s called “networking.” Networking is what people have to do when those with like interests live too far apart to be thrown together in public spaces through chance and propinquity. Networking is what people in small towns have to do to establish any complex cultural life today.
But contemporary “networking” is notably different from “contact.”
At first one is tempted to set contact and networking in opposition: networking tends to be professional and motive driven, it crosses class lines only in the most vigilant manner, and it is heavily dependent on institutions to promote the necessary propinquity (gyms, parties, twelve-step programs, conferences, reading groups, singing groups, social gatherings, workshops, tourist groups, classes) where those with the requisite social skills can maneuver.
The benefits of networking are real and can look—especially from the outside—quite glamorous. But I believe that, today, such benefits are fundamentally misunderstood. More and more people are depending on networking to provide benefits that are far more likely to occur in contact situations—and that networking is specifically prevented from providing for a variety of reasons.
I shall now abridge a set of hysterically funny anecdotes about examples of networking that would leave you rolling in the aisles, concerning the various attempts I have seen by young writers at various writers’ conferences to get the attention of the people whom they perceived as powerful, attempts that ranged from displaying real talent in unusual ways to crawling into bed with various and sundry people they feel might do well by them. The final point of all the anecdotes is: none of these efforts worked.
I attend writers’ conferences regularly—and science fiction conventions even more so. The clear and explicable reasons for my attendance are networking’s epistemological benefits. Those networking benefits result from the particularly dense field produced by the networking situation in which knowledge—not social favors—moves with particular speed. (The desire for social favor is the fuel—or the form—which propels that information through the networking field.) At both formal sessions and informal gatherings, I find out about new writers and interesting books. As well I learn about new publishing programs and changes in the business much more quickly than I would without them. By the same token, people find out about what I’m doing and get a clearer picture of my work. Because I’m comparatively comfortable appearing in public and discussing a range of topics from a podium or from behind a panel table, people can get a taste of the sort of analysis I do and can decide whether they want to pursue these thoughts in my nonfiction critical work. Since I am an academic critic as well as a fiction writer—and a fiction writer who works in several genres—this is particularly useful and promotes, in a small group of concerned readers at least, a more informed sense of my enterprise.
I feel my career benefits regularly from the results of my networking. My ultimate take on networking is, however, this: no single event in the course of my career has been directly caused by networking. Nevertheless, the results of networking have regularly smoothed, stabilized, and supported my career and made it more pleasant than it would have been without it.
In general I would say (and I would say this to young writers particularly): rarely if ever can networking make a writing career when no career is to be made. Regularly, though, it can support and make a career function more easily and smoothly.
One does not get publication by appearing in public.
One gets further invitations to appear in public.
Above and beyond its epistemological benefits, networking produces more opportunities to network—and that’s about all.
The writer will do best if he or she has a clear sense of the two different processes.
Briefly, what makes “networking” a different process from “contact” is that the networking situation, unlike the contact situation, is one in which the fundamental competition between all the people gathered together in the group within which the networking is supposed to occur is far higher than it is in the population among which contact occurs.
The competition may be only barely perceptible at any given moment, or, under the camaraderie and good will of the occasion, all but invisible—it is the class war. Like the overriding economic forces of the class war and its effects on the individuals whose lives are caught up in and radically changed by it, they are seldom experienced as a force. That competition is pervasive nevertheless. Because of this the social price tag on the exchange of favors and friendly gestures is much higher here than it is in contact situations.
The people in line with you at the grocery counter are rarely competing with you for the items on the shelves in the way that young writers are competing for the comparatively rare number of publishing slots for first novels that can, under the best of conditions, appear each year. And they are not—at the moment—in competitive relations at all for the favors (whether of data or material help) that the established writer might be able to offer.
I’m now going to summarize another anecdote, famous in the science fiction field, of how in the mid-1950s, Ray Bradbury first came to the attention of readers beyond the boundaries of the science fiction “ghetto” (as it has been called).
Having been published the year before, Bradbury’s second hardcover collection of stories, The Martian Chronicles (1951), was on a remainder table in Brentano’s Bookstore, then on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. In the book-store to buy up a few of the volumes, the young Bradbury struck up a conversation with a man standing next to him. Bradbury pointed out that, at the same time, newspapers and literary magazines ignored all SF books that came in, leaving them unread, giving them, at best, a “Books Received” mention. His volume had gotten almost no reviews in the course of its shelf life.
Bradbury was articulate enough about the situation that the man—who turned out to be the writer Christopher Isherwood—was struck by his argument. A few issues on, in the weekly the Saturday Review of Literature, Isherwood (a regular reviewer for the magazine, who happened to have some say in what books he covered—a rare situation) took it upon himself to review Bradbury’s book of poetic SF tales, so unlike the usual pulp fare of the day. The review was more or less favorable. In the same review Isherwood also mentioned the situation that Bradbury had outlined. The review and the position it adopted became somewhat notorious, and, as the first SF writer to be reviewed in the Saturday Review of Literature (and the last for quite a while!), Bradbury’s career moved to a new level, from which it has never really retreated.
The first thing to realize in the rehearsal of such a mythic tale, is that, in all its elements—the chance meeting in a bookstore, the happenstance conversation with a stranger over the remainder table—quintessentially it’s a tale of “contact,” not “networking.” Also, the contact brought about the reviewing of a book already in print, not the publication of one still in manuscript—as most of the attendees at writing conferences are hoping for.
For precisely the competition reasons I outlined before, this is the sort of occurrence not likely to happen at a writers’ conference, i.e., in a situation set up for networking. Though in the case of science fiction, often with the tale of Bradbury and Isherwood burning brightly in their imaginations, young unpublished hopefuls flock to science fiction conventions in the muffled hope that something like that will happen to them.
In such a networking situation there might well be a panel presentation on the difficulties or impossibilities of science fiction securing good review venues. Such a panel might mean that, instead of flickering as a vague and passing notion, now and again, in the minds of one or three writers specifically faced with it, the problem would, for the next few months be a subject known about by an entire population of writers and readers, who were now also aware of the forces keeping the problem in place. Thus, if a chance to break through it arose, that chance would occur in a field that has been primed to a greater awareness of, if not sympathy for, the problem. (That is the benefit of networking.) Unfortunately today, unclear on the difference between the results each mode fosters, too many people go into networking situations expecting or hoping for the results of contact. Too many people shy away from contact, or condone the destruction of social forms that promote contact because they feel networking will compensate for it. It can’t.
The reason the networking situation is not likely to produce the sometimes considerable rewards that can come from contact situations is because the amount of need present in the networking situation is too high for the comparatively few individuals in a position to supply the material boons and favors to distribute them in any equitable manner. The pleasant and chatty cash bar reception at the end of the first day of panels and workshops at the writers conference, may look like a friendly and sociable gathering, but at the socioeconomic level, where the class war occurs, the situation is analogous to a crowd of seventy-five or a hundred beggars pressed around a train station in some underdeveloped colonial protectorate, while a handful of bourgeois tourists make their way through, hoping to find a taxi to take them off to the hotel before they are set upon and torn to pieces.
As with the practices described by my grandmother of tenant and landlord in the kitchen over a cup of coffee, the social practices and friendly interchanges that not only appear to, but do, fill the writers’ conference reception halls, work to stabilize, retard and mitigate the forces of the class war. In no way, however, can they halt or resolve that war. They can allow it to proceed in a more humane manner, maintaining “war” merely as a metaphor. In such situations, stabilization mitigates for less change in the power relations at the infrastructure level than might happen in a less concentrated and less competitive situation, even while existing social relations, happenstance, and sometimes even merit might appear to be producing the odd “star” or lucky social “winner.”
Two orders of social force are always at work. One set is centripetal and works to hold a given class stable. Another set is centrifugal and works to break a given class apart.
The first set runs from identity, through familiarity, to lethargy, to fear of difference—all of which work to hold a class together. These are the forces that the networking situation must appeal to, requisition, and exploit.
The second set has to do with the needs and desires that define the class in the first place: hunger, sex, ambition in any one of a dozen directions—spatial to economic to aesthetic or intellectual. These forces militate toward breaking up a class, driving it apart, and sending individuals off into other class arenas. This is the level at which, in a democracy, contact functions as an anti-entropic method of changing various individuals’ material class groundings. The reason these forces work the way they do is simply because when such desires and needs concentrate at too great a density in too small a social space over too brief a time, they become that much harder to fulfill—even when you pay generous honoraria to people who might help fill them, to move briefly into that crowded social space and dispense data about the process, without dispensing the actual rewards and boons that those involved in the process seek.
Recently when I outlined the differences between contact and networking to a friend, he came back with the following examples: “Contact is Jimmy Stewart; networking is Tom Cruise. Contact is complex carbohydrates. Networking is simple sugar. Contact is Zen. Networking is Scientology. Contact can effect changes at the infrastructural level; networking effects changes at the super-structural level.”
Amusing as these examples are, it’s important to speak about the very solid benefits of both forms of sociality. Otherwise we risk falling into some dualistic schema, with wonderful, free-form, authentic, Dionysian contact on the one side, and terrible, calculating, inauthentic, Apollonian networking on the other. Such would be sad and absurd. The way to do this is not to install the two concepts in our minds as some sort of equal, objective and unquestioned pair of opposites. Rather we must analyze both, so that we can see that elements in each have clear and definite hierarchical relations with elements in the other, as well as what other elements are shared. But this sort of vigilant approach alone will produce a clear idea of what to expect (and not to expect) from one and the other—as well as produce some clear knowledge of why we should not try to displace one with the other and ask one to fulfill the other’s job.
In terms of the Bradbury tale, Greenwich Village in the ‘fifties was, for example, a neighborhood in which the chance of two writers running into one another at a bookstore remainder table were far higher than they would have been, say, three miles away across the river in a supermarket in Queens.
The same could be said of the Upper West Side, where I managed to snag the information about Zenaida Hippius or, indeed, the Variety Photoplays Theater, where I met my long-term social friend, standing as it did, between the East and West Village.
Were we so naïve as to assert that in networking situations there were selection procedures while in contact situations there were none, we would only be rushing to set up false and invalid oppositions.
But while contact may be, by comparison, “random” (but doesn’t one move to—or from—a particular neighborhood as part of a desire to be among, or to avoid—certain types of people, whether that neighborhood be Greenwich Village, Bensonhurst, or Beverly Hills?), and while networking may be, by comparison, “planned” (yet how many times do we return from the professional conference unable, a month later, to retain any useful idea?), it is clear that contact is contoured, if not organized, by earlier decisions, desires, commercial interests, zoning laws and immigration patterns. The differences seem to be rather matters of scale; the looser streets of the neighborhood versus the more condensed hotel or conference center spaces and the granularity that allows others to dilute the social density with a range of contrasting needs and desires, as well as differences in social skills and, yes, institutional access.
Contact is likely to be its most useful when it is cross-class contact. Bradbury and Isherwood were, arguably, in the same profession, that is, both were writers. But they were also clearly at different class levels: beginning genre writer and established literary writer. Contact begins to be perceived as bad with the suspicion that the person standing next to you at the remainder table or on the supermarket line or at the corner is not another writer, but is probably homeless or notably poorer than you are; that is, someone whose needs are too great to be handled by personal interchange.
Two modes of social practice: I call them contact and networking. They designate two discourses that, over the range of society, conflict with and displace each other, re-establish themselves in new or old landscapes, where, at the level of verbal interaction, they deposit their rhetorical traces . . .
In one nineteenth-century novel that I’ve recently been teaching, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, the two most important relationships for the protagonist, Frédéric Moreau, are definitely contact relationships. Foremost is his relation with Monsieur and Madame Arnoux: In the first chapter he is attracted to Madame Arnoux as she sits on the deck of a ferry leaving Paris for the countryside along the Seine. The meeting is impelled wholly by desire, and Frédéric must put out a good deal of energy to make the contact occur, and stabilize it as a social friendship across class boundaries (provincial bourgeois youth/urban sophisticate adults). The other relation is with Dussardier, whom he meets in a street demonstration, when he and a Bohemian friend, Hussonet—also just met—decide, all-but-arbitrarily, to rescue the young worker from the clutches of the police. Both these relationships have elements of the tragic about them: Frédéric’s inability to possess Madame Arnoux causes him a pain that pervades and contaminates every subsequent love relationship of his life. And Frédéric uses and abuses Dussardier in a positively shameful manner: Frédéric tells his bourgeois friends that Dussardier has committed a 12,000–franc theft (which Frédéric uses as an excuse to borrow a like amount to bail out M. Arnoux’s family) and, because the young man is working class, none of Frédéric’s friends thinks to question this. But when one compares these relationships to two that Frédéric has acquired through networking, they come off pretty well. Compare them with his relationship to Madame Dambreuse, the fantastically avaricious and vicious widow whom Frédéric barely escapes marrying: Frédéric knows her because he is given a letter of introduction by M. Rocque to her husband, the business tycoon M. Dambreuse—pure networking. The other distinctly networking relation is Frédéric’s deeply vexing friendship with Sénécal, the mathematician who believes in a purely scientific politics—to whom Frédéric is first sent by his school friend Charles Deslauriers. In short, his networking ends up aligning him with extremely—even lethally—vicious men and women. Frédéric’s fiancée-through-networking, Madame Dambreuse, delights in the destruction of the social standing of his love-object through contact, Madame Arnoux, when the Arnoux’s personal belongings are sold at auction.
At the book’s end, Frédéric’s networking friend Sénécal runs his contact friend Dussardier through with a sword during a military encounter. Confronted with Madame Dambreuse’s viciousness, Frédéric escapes. But his own ability to love has been sadly, permanently injured. Nevertheless, because the allegory of contact relations vs. networking relations plays out identically with both a man and a woman, it’s hard to avoid the suggestion that the antipathy between friends or lovers acquired by networking and those acquired by contact may well have been a part of Flaubert’s complex structure.
THE TIMES SQUARE DEVELOPMENT
Starting in 1985, in the name of “safe sex,” New York City began to criminalize every individual sex act by name, from masturbation to vaginal intercourse, whether performed with a condom or not—a legal situation that has catastrophic ramifications we may not crawl out from under for a long, long time. This is a legal move that arguably puts gay liberation, for example, back to a point notably before Stonewall—and doesn’t do much for heterosexual freedom either.
This is a rhetorical change that may well adhere to an extremely important discursive intervention in the legal contouring of social practices whose ramifications, depending on the development and the establishment of new social practices that promote communication between the classes are hard to foresee in any detail—though it is not hard to foresee them as, generally and overall, detrimental.
The legal changes were set in place to facilitate the Times Square takeover by the Times Square Development Association.
At a conference at Columbia University sponsored by the Buell Architecture Center (“Times Square: Global, Local,” March 1997), organized by Marshal Blonsky on the renovation of Times Square, the keynote speaker was Marshall Berman. The general sense I received (though it would be stunningly incorrect to call it a consensus) extended from, on the one hand, the view that, outside the general difficulties involved in going ahead with the project, there was no problem at all because the developers and architects were supremely sensitive to the needs of the city and its populace (a position put forward by spokesperson-architect Robert Stern) to, on the other hand, an only slightly less sanguine view (put forward by Berman) that, if there was a problem, we might as well go along with it, since there was nothing we could do about it anyway.
At the Buell Conference a young sociologist countered my suggestion that there were some serious losses involved in the renovation process with the counter suggestion that the new Times Square would at least be safer for women. This is a point I shall return to. But I begin by noting a smaller point she made and the context in which she made it. During the question period after her presentation, she was speaking of the history of New York City’s subway system. She said: “When the subway system first opened, your subway token only cost you a nickel, and the price of a subway token remained a nickel for almost fifty years.”
When in 1904 the Times Square Station of the IRT subway opened, no subway tokens, of course, were used at all. The nickel fare, for which the city was so long famous, went directly into the slot of the subway turnstile.
And down beside the turnstile pressed the coin
Into the slot . . .
“fandaddle daddy don’t ask for change—IS THIS FOURTEENTH? . . .”
wrote Hart Crane, in “The Tunnel,” in 1927, the penultimate section of his great poetic mosaic of American sensibilities, The Bridge. Well, the coin was a nickel and the place you got it was the change booth. I didn’t correct the sociologist when she made her error; my question here, however, a prologue to my discussion of still another venue where networking is eroding contact, is what would the status of such a correction have been, had it been made? What is the status of the failure of someone with the available facts to offer it? Would stating the fact have been a simple and unencumbered rectification of an inadvertent error, and by extension, my failure to state it simply another such error? Would it have been a gesture of nostalgia to an earlier vision of the transportation system? Would it have been the assertion of an authentic image of the past in place of an inauthentic image and thus the failure to state it a momentary triumph of such inauthenticity? Or was it a mild, momentary slip of no particular consequence, so that pointing it out would have been an equally mild moment of embarrassment, which I sidestepped by overlooking it with no harm to the general social good? Or was it a case of a hard-edged objective truth and an equally hard-edged objective falsity, the replacement of one by the other another case of the evanescence of knowledge of the past and the displacement by ignorance based on our assumption of a universal present? Frankly, I believe all of these would have been the case, and what’s more, inescapable. But I also maintain that none of these, for the purposes for our discussion here, are particularly interesting. What interests me, is that the encounter of the two facts represents a rhetorical detail and a rhetorical collision, which is a moment in the process by which one material discourse can be seen to give way to another, to have been revised by, and to have eroded away, another.
The Times Square problem I perceive entails the economic “redevelopment” of a highly diversified neighborhood, with working class residences and small human services (groceries, drugstores, liquor stores, dry cleaners, diners, and specialty shops ranging from electronic stores and tourist shops to theatrical memorabilia and comic book stores, interlarding a series of theaters, film and stage rehearsal spaces, retailers of theatrical equipment, from lights to make-up, as well as inexpensive hotels, furnished rooms, and restaurants at every level, also bars and the sexually-orientated businesses that, in one form or another, have thrived in the neighborhood since the 1880s) giving way to an upper middle class ring of luxury apartments around a ring of tourist hotels clustering around a series of theaters and restaurants in the center of which a large mall, and a cluster of office towers, is slowly but inexorably coming into being.
Let’s speak a bit about the four great office towers that will be the center of the new Times Square.
The generally erroneous assumption about how new buildings make money is something like this: a big company acquires the land, clears it for construction, and commences to build. After three to five years, when the building is complete, the company rents out the apartments or the offices. If the building is a success and all the spaces are leased and the site is a popular one, then and only then does the corporation that owns the building begin to see profits on its earlier outlays and investments. Thus the ultimate success of the building as a habitation is pivotal to the building’s future economic success.
If this were the way new office buildings were actually built, however, few would even be considered, much less actually begun.
Here is an only somewhat simplified picture of how the process actually works. Simplified though it is, it gives a much better idea of what goes on and how money is made, nevertheless:
A large corporation decides to build a building. It acquires some land. Now it sets up an extremely small ownership corporation, which is tied to the parent corporation by a lot of very complicated contracts—but is a different and autonomous corporation, nevertheless. That ownership corporation, tiny as it may be, is now ready to build the building. The parent corporation also sets up a much larger construction corporation, which hires diggers, subcontracts construction companies, and generally oversees the building proper.
The little ownership corporation now borrows a lot of money from a bank—enough to pay the construction corporation for constructing the building proper. The small ownership corporation also sells stock to investors—enough to pay back the bank loan. The tiny ownership corporation (an office, a secretary and a few officers who oversee things) proceeds to pay the parent construction corporation with the bank funds to build the building. It uses the stock funds to pay back the bank. Figured in the cost of the building is a healthy margin of profit for the parent corporation—the large corporation which got the whole project started—while the investors pay off the bank, so that it doesn’t get twisted out of shape.
Yes, if the building turns out to be a stunningly popular address, then (remember all those contracts?) profits will be substantially greater than otherwise. But millions of dollars of profits will be made by the parent corporation just from the construction of the building alone, even if not a single space in it is ever rented out. (Movies are made in the same manner, which is why so many awful ones hit the screen. By the time they are released, the producers have long since taken the money and, as it were, run.) Believing in the myth of profit only in return for investments, public investors will swallow the actual cost of the building’s eventual failure—if it fails—while the ownership corporation is reduced in size to nothing or next to nothing: an office in the building on which no rent is paid, a secretary and/or an answering machine, and a nominal head (with another major job somewhere else) on minimal salary who comes in once a month to check in . . . if that.
Two facts should now be apparent:
First Fact: the Times Square Development Corporation wants to build those offices towers.
Renting them out is secondary, even if the failure to rent them is a major catastrophe for the city, turning the area into a glass and aluminum graveyard. A truth of high-finance capitalism tends to get away from even the moderately well-off investor (the successful doctor or lawyer, say, bringing in two- to four-hundred thousand a year), though this truth is, indeed, what makes capitalism: in short-term speculative business ventures of (to choose an arbitrary cut-off point) more than three million dollars, such as a building or civic center, (Second Fact) the profits to be made from dividing the money up and moving it around over the one to six years, during which that money must be spent, easily offset any losses from the possible failure of the enterprise itself as a speculative endeavor, once it’s completed.
The interest on a million dollars at 6.5 percent is about 250 dollars a day. On a good conservative portfolio it will be 400 dollars a day; and the interest on ten million dollars is ten times that. The Times Square Corporation is determined to build those buildings. The question is: how long will it take to persuade investors to swallow the uselessness of the project for them?
Far more important than whether the buildings can be rented out or not is whether investors think the buildings can be rented out. In the 1970s, three of the four office towers were tabled for ten years, because a few years ago, enough people pointed out the impossibility of renting them, that investors were wary and the project had to be put off. The ostensible purpose of that ten-year delay was to give economic forces a chance to shift and business a chance to rally to the area. The real reason, however, was simply the hope that people would forget the arguments against the project, so clear in so many people’s minds at the time. Indeed, the crushing arguments against the whole project from the middle 1970s were, by the middle 1980s, largely forgotten, the forgetting of which has allowed the project to take its opening steps over the last ten years. Public relations corporations have been given another decade to make the American investing public forget the facts of the matter and convince that same public that the Times Square project is a sound one. Right now, it looks to me as if we can forget how the nickel fare functioned, we can forget anything. The interim plan, which we should also take a look at now claims to gamble on the possibility that the economic situation might be better—at which point the developers will go ahead with those towers, towers which, Mr. Stern has told us, will be built.
Berman’s article in Dissent, which I will refer to, concludes with a P.S.: it begins, “I have just read in the Times of August 1 [1997], about a deal in the works to bring Reuters to Times Square. It wants to build an 800,000–square foot office tower on Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street.” He goes on to say that Reuters is an interesting company (as if it would have anything more to do with the building than, perhaps, rent 10 percent, or less, of its space) and he seems appalled that the awful Philip Johnson plan, designed over a decade ago will be utilized for the construction—as if, for a moment, anyone in a position of power involved in the deal cared. (Millions were paid for it; it must be used.) He concludes by suggesting that people who care about the square raise the roof before the deal gets done. Well, this is a networking situation: consider my roof raised.
CROSS-CLASS CONTACT
From here I want to survey three topics—topics I will look at as systems of social practice related by contact: (1) the public sex practices that have been attacked and so summarily wiped out of the Times Square area; (2) crime and violence on the street: (3) the general safety of the neighborhood—and the problem of safety for women.
First, the street-level public sex that the area was famous for, the sex movies, the peep-show activities, the street corner hustlers and hustling bar activity were overwhelmingly a matter of contact.
Call-boy and call-girl networks, not to mention the various forms of phone sex, follow much more closely the “networking” model. But what I see lurking behind the positive foregrounding of “family values” (along with, and in the name of such values, the violent suppression of urban social structures, economic social and sexual) is a wholly provincial and absolutely small-town terror of cross-class contact.
A salient, stabilizing factor that has helped create the psychological smoke screen behind which developers of Times Square and every other underpopulated urban center in the country have been able to pursue their machinations in spite of public good and private desire is the small-town fear of urban violence. Since the tourist to the big city is seen as someone from a small town, the promotion of tourism is a matter of promoting the image of the world—and of the city—that the small town is assumed to hold.
Jane Jacobs has analyzed how street crimes proliferate in the city: briefly, lack of street-level business and habitation diversity produces lack of human traffic, lack of contact, and a lack of those eyes on the street joined in the particularly intricate self-policing web Jacobs claims is our greatest protection against urban barbarism on the street. Many people have seen Jacobs as saying merely that the number of eyes on the street do the actual policing. But a careful reading of her arguments shows that these “eyes” must be connected to individuals with very specific and intricate social relations of both stability and investment in what we might call the quality of street life. Too high a proportion of stranger to indigenes, too high a turnover of regular population, and the process breaks down. Such lacks produce the dangerous neighborhoods: the housing project, the park with not enough stores and eating spaces bordering on it, the blocks and blocks of apartment residences without any ameliorating human services.
Many non-city residents still do not realize that their beloved small towns are, per capita, far more violent places than any big city. New York has an annual rate of one murder per 108,000 inhabitants. Some large cities have as few as one per 300,000.
In 1967, however, I spent the winter months in a Pennsylvanian town, which had a cold-weather population of under 600. That winter the town saw five violent deaths, homicides or manslaughters.
If New York City had five murders per 600 inhabitants per winter, it would be rampant chaos! The point, of course, is that the structure of violence is different in cities from the structure of violence in small towns. Three of those small-town violent deaths, with their perpetrators and victims, occurred within two families who had a history of violence in the town going back three generations—along with a truly epic rate of alcoholism. A social profile of those families would yield one not much different from the stereotyped pictures of the Hatfields and the McCoys of early sociological studies. The other two violent deaths that winter came when three adolescent boys from comparatively “good” families, bored out of their gourds during two solid weeks of snow, on a February evening’s adventure pushed a car over a cliff. In the car a young couple was necking. The two young people died, but they were from out of town—strangers, not residents and from another town twenty-five or thirty miles away. That particular incident produced an ugly and finally very sad court trial; one of the boys was sent to reform school. The other two got off with strong reprimands. But the town’s general sense was that the victims shouldn’t have been there in the first place. You stay in your own locality. Shut them in too long by the snow like that with nothing to do, and boys will be boys . . .
In a small town the majority of the violence that occurs (say, three out of five cases) does not really surprise anyone. People know where it’s going to occur and in which social units (that is, which two families) 60 percent of it will happen. They know how to stay out of its way. Your biggest protection from the rest of it is that you’re not a stranger to the place; and you should probably stay out of places where you are. Comparatively speaking, the violence in cities is random. No one knows where it’s going to fall, who the next mugging victim, house breaking victim, rape victim, not to mention victim of an apartment fire or traffic accident, will be.
Small towns control their violence by rigorously controlling—and often all but forbidding—interclass contact, except in carefully controlled work situations. The boys of good families who killed the young couple (people in the town would be appalled that today I describe the incident in such terms, though few of them would argue with me that that’s what happened) did not associate with the sons and daughters of the local Hatfield/McCoys. When small towns are beautified and developed, their development generally proceeds in ways that make easier the location, unofficial segregation, and separation of the classes.
Because our new city developments, such as Times Square, are conceived largely as attractions for incoming tourists, they are being designed to look safe to the tourist, even if the social and architectural organization laid down to appeal to them is demonstrably inappropriate for large cities and promotes precisely the sort of isolation, inhumanity and violence that everyone abhors.
The traditional way that cities keep their violence rate monumentally lower than in small towns is by the self-policing practices that come from “eyes on the street” supported by a rich system of relatively random benefits and rewards that encourage pleasant sociality based entirely on contact. That system of random rewards from contact results in everything from basic intra-neighborhood “pleasantness” to the heroic prizes of neighborly assistance in times of catastrophe. But even more important, in a society that prides itself on the widespread existence of opportunity, interclass contacts are the site and origin of a good many of what can later be seen as life opportunities, or at least the site of many elements that make the seizing of such opportunities easier and more profitable.
The small-town way to enjoy a big city is to arrive in town with your family, your friends, your school group, your church group, or—if you are really brave—your tour group, with whom you associate (these are all pre-selected network groups) and have fun, as you sample the food and culture and see the monuments and architecture. But the one thing you do not do is go out in the street alone and meet people. The fear of such an activity in New York City is, for most out-of-towners, one with the fear of bodily contagion from AIDS coupled with the equally bodily fear of hurt and loss of property.
Around 1990, I was returning on a plane to New York from a reading in Boston, with the Russian poet André Vosnesensky. Vosnesensky was staying at the Harvard Club, just a block or two north of Grand Central Station, and was unaware that one could take a bus directly there from the airport and save considerably on the taxi fare.
When we got off at Grand Central, I suggested that he might want to use the facilities at the station. Very worriedly, he told me: “Oh, no. I don’t think we better do that.”
Naively, I asked: “Why not?”
“Because,” he told me, leaning close, “I don’t want to catch AIDS.”
Used to dealing with people who were afraid of touching people with AIDS or eating after them, I was nevertheless so surprised to discover someone who thought he would be at the risk of contagion from using a public urinal, that I was non-plussed. We were to part less than five minutes later—and I have not seen him since.
But rather than take this as a spectacular example of misinformation and/or information, I think it is more interesting to see it as a cross section of the process by which AIDS functions, on an international level, as a discursive tool to keep visitors to the city away from all public facilities and places where, yes, one might, if so inclined, engage in or be subject to any sort of interclass contact.
Paradoxically, the specifically gay sexual outlets—the sex movies that encouraged masturbation and fellatio in the audience, the rougher hustler bars, the particular street corners that had parades of active hustlers—are or were locales where the violence that occurs is closer to the high small-town level than it is to the overall lower big-city level: but, there, to complete the paradox, that violence tends to be structured, rather, like small-town violence. If you frequent the place, quickly you learn from where and/or from whom it is going to come. A stranger or first-time visitor is probably far more vulnerable than a long-time, frequent habitué of the facility: the hustler bar, the sex theater, or the low-life street corner. Someone who visits such places two or three times a week, or monthly, is likely to be pretty clear which person—or prejudicial as it sounds, which kind of person—will likely be the source of violence. That is why prostitutes can work the streets and neighborhoods they do. That is why, gay and straight, so many middle-class and working-class men feel perfectly safe visiting such urban spaces on a regular basis, often several times a week over years, even when, from statistics or just their own observation, they know perfectly well that every couple of weeks or months—in extreme cases two or three times a day—some sort of robbery or fight happens, or bodily injury is done to a customer. In such places, however, the violence is not random. It follows more or less clear patterns that are fairly easily learned. Thus habitués feel—and, indeed, usually are—as safe as most people in any other small-town-structured violent environment. And of course—the one thing Jacob’s analysis leaves out—during the times of non-violence, which still make up the majority of the time, in such locations the same principles of traffic, social diversity, and self-policing hold sway, yes, even here.
Another point that people forget is: public sex situations are not Dionysian and uncontrolled but are rather some of the most highly socialized and conventionalized behavior human beings can take part in.
The sexual activity of the Times Square area (and by that I mean both commercial and non-commercial) has been hugely decried, called awful and appalling by many—including architect Robert Stern. We do not want a red-light district there, is the general cry of planners and organizers. People who utilized, or worked in it, however, are sometimes a bit more analytical than those issuing blanket dismissals. A good deal of what made the situation awful, when it was awful, was not the sex work per se but the illegal drug traffic that accompanied it, that worked its way all through it, and that, from time to time, controlled much of it. The middle 1980s saw an explosion of drug activity, focusing particularly around crack, that produced some of the most astonishing and appalling human behavior I personally have ever seen. Its extent, form, and general human face have yet to be chronicled.
In 1987 I had a conversation with an eighteen-year-old Dominican, who was indeed hustling on the strip. He was worried because he was living with a seventeen-year-old friend—another young crackhead—in a project further uptown.
The younger boy had been regularly selling all the furniture in the apartment, and, when his mother had objected, he had killed her.
Her body, the other boy told me, was still in the closet. The older boy did not know what to do.
I suggested that he tell his younger friend—whom I did not know and had not met—to go to the police.
Some days later, when I ran into the older boy, he told me that is indeed what his young friend had done. The older boy was now homeless.
One would have to be a moral imbecile to be nostalgic for such a situation.
Indeed, the major change in the area over the period between 1984 and 1987 was that professional prostitutes and hustlers—women generally between, say, twenty-three and forty-five, and the men somewhat younger, asking (the women among them) thirty-five to seventy-five dollars per encounter (and the men ten to fifteen dollars less)—were driven out of the area by a new breed of “five dollar whore” or “hustler,” often a fifteen-, sixteen, or seventeen-year-old girl or boy, who would go into a doorway and do anything with anyone for the four-to-eight dollars needed for the next bottle of crack. Some of that situation is reflected in the scream that ends Spike Lee’s film Jungle Fever.
It was that appalling.
It was that scary.
I hope we can look even on that period of human atrocity, however, with a clear enough vision to see (as was evident to anyone who walked through the neighborhood during those years, who lingered and spoke to and developed any concern for any of these youngsters) that this activity clotted in the area, that it grew and spread from there to other neighborhoods, that it reached such appalling dimensions as a direct result of the economic attack on the neighborhood by the developers, Robert Stern’s employers, in their attempt to destroy the place as a vital and self-policing site, as a necessary prelude to their sanitized site.
The old Times Square and Forty-second Street was an entertainment area catering largely to the working classes who lived in the city. The middle class and/or tourists were invited to come along and watch or participate if that, indeed, was their thing.
The New Times Square is envisioned as predominantly a middle-class area of entertainment, to which the working classes are welcome to come along, observe and take part in, if they can pay and are willing to blend in.
What controls the success (or failure) of this change are the changes in the city population itself—and changes in the working- (and middle-) class self-image. Sociologists will have to look at this aspect and analyze what is actually going on.
Let’s return to the question of Times Square as a safe space for women—which some, looking at the new development, have somehow managed to see it as. The first thing one must note is that there have always been women in Times Square, on Forty-second Street, and on its appendage running up and down Eighth Avenue. They were bar-maids. They were waitresses. They were store clerks. They were ticket takers. I do not know much about the female work population of the twenty-story Candler office building on the south side of Forty-second Street at number 220, between the former site of the Harris and the Liberty theaters, but for many years I regularly visited a friend who worked at a translation bureau run by a Mrs. Cavenaugh on the nineteenth floor: and I will hazard that at least 40 percent of the workers there were women. Also, women lived in the neighborhood. Until the end of the 1970s it was a place where young theater hopefuls—more men, yes, than women; but women, nevertheless—lived in a range of inexpensive apartments and furnished rooms around Hell’s Kitchen (renamed, somewhat more antiseptically, “Clinton” a few years back). The vast majority of these women are not there now. And the developers see themselves as driving out (the minuscule proportion of) those women who were actual sex workers.
To see such a development, which makes a city space safe for one class of women by actively driving out another class, as having any concern for women as a class is at best naïve. The Times Square developers’ concern for women and women’s safety extends no further than seeing women as replaceable nodes with a certain amount of money to spend in a male-dominated economic system.
Some of what was in the old Times Square worked. Some didn’t work. Often what worked—about, say, the sexual activity (and, despite the horror of the planners, much of it did: we have too many testimonials to that effect by both customers and the sex workers themselves), worked by accident. It was not planned. But this does not mean it was not caused, analyzable, and (thus) instructive.
The new Time Square is simply not about making the area safe for women. It is not about supporting theater and the arts. It is not about promoting economic growth in the city. It is not about reducing the level of AIDS or even about driving out perversion (that is, non-commercial sexual encounters between those of the same sex who can find each other more easily in a neighborhood with sex movies, peep show activities and commercial sex) nor is it about reducing commercial sex, hustling and prostitution.
The new Times Square is about developers doing as much demolition and renovation as possible in the neighborhood, and as much construction work as they possibly can. Some old-fashioned Marxism might be useful here: infrastructure determines superstructure—not the other way around. And for all their stabilizing or destabilizing potential, discourse and rhetoric are superstructural phenomena.
SUPERSTRUCTURE/INFRASTRUCTURE
There is, of course, an important corollary for late-consumer media-dominated capitalism—which is largely absent from classical Marxism: “Superstructure stabilizes infrastructure.”
Briefly and more dramatically, superstructural forces (personal relations, the quality of life in the neighborhood, the passage of time) may make a small business decide to shut down and vacate to Queens (as my local drycleaners, Habanna San Juan, is currently doing after twenty-five years in three different locations in the Upper West Side—each location smaller than the space before, and the last further from the main thoroughfare than the previous two: there are fewer Hispanics here than before, the Spanish owner is older, he lives in Queens and has been commuting into this neighborhood at seven in the morning for more than two decades and is tired of it). But infrastructural forces will determine whether his landlord has three bids from white-owned businesses for the same space two months before this long-term Puerto Rican dry cleaner tenant leaves—or whether the same space will sit vacant for the next eighteen months with a crack across the glass behind the window gate.
That is to say, infrastructural forces will determine whether most of the neighborhood perceives Habanna San Juan’s closing as another Puerto Rican business going as the neighborhood improves—or as another business-in-general folding as the neighborhood declines.
One of the problems with getting people to accept the first tenet of Marxism (infrastructure determines superstructure) is that we can look around us and see superstructural forces feeding back into the infrastructure and making changes in it. Because we are the “political size” we are (and thus have the political horizons we do), it’s hard for individuals to see the extent (or lack of it) of those changes—we have no way to determine by direct observation whether those changes are stabilizing/destabilizing or causative. And when we are unsure of (or wholly ignorant of) the infrastructural forces involved, often we assume that the superstructural forces that we have seen at work are responsible for major (i.e., infrastructural) changes. Infrastructural forces, however, often must be ferreted out and effects disseminated by the superstructure.
Infrastructure makes society go. Superstructure makes society go smoothly (or bumpily).
In 1992 we emerged from twelve years of a national Republican administration that favored big business—with the result that we now have some very strong big businesses indeed. The argument which the Reagan/Bush leaders used to convince the public that this was a good thing was the promise of tax cuts and the “trickle-down” economic theory. The “trickle-down” economic theory, you may recall, was the notion that somehow big business (especially if deregulated) would be helpful and supportive to small businesses.
It has taken a half dozen years for New Yorkers to learn, at least, what anyone over thirty-five could have told them in 1980 when Reagan was elected: big businesses drive out small businesses. Left unsupervised, big businesses stamp out small businesses, break them into pieces, devour the remains, and dance frenziedly on their graves. Now that we have watched Barnes & Noble destroy Books & Company on the East Side and Shakespeare & Company on the West and, in my own neighborhood, seen the Duane Reade Pharmacy chain put Lasky’s and Ben’s and several other small drugstores out of business, people have some models for the quality of service and the general atmosphere of pleasant interchange to be lost when big businesses destroy small ones.
Small businesses thrive on contact—the word-of-mouth reputations that contact engenders: “You’re looking for X? Try Q’s. It’s really good for what you want.”
Big businesses promote networking as much as they possibly can. “Shop at R’s—and be part of today!” vibrating over the airwaves in a three-million-dollar ad campaign.
In one sense, the Times Square takeover is one of the more visible manifestations of the small having been obliterated by the large. We are in a period of economic growth, we all know. But most of us are asking: why, then, isn’t my life more pleasant? The answer is because “pleasantness” is controlled by small business diversity and social contact; and in a democratic society that values social movement, social opportunity, and class flexibility, interclass contact is the most rewarding, productive and, thus, the privileged mode of contact.
Big business is anti-contact in the same way that it is anti-small business. But there are many jobs—like bookstores and, often, drugstores—that small businesses can fulfill more efficiently for the customers and more pleasantly (that word again) than can big business.
Again, certain benefits from contact, networking simply cannot provide.
An academic who heard an earlier version of this argument told me that it explained a family phenomenon which, in his younger years, had puzzled—and sometimes embarrassed—him.
“Whenever we would go with my grandfather to a restaurant—my grampa had been born and grown up in Italy—within ten minutes, he had everybody in the restaurant talking not only to him but to everybody else.”
The question in his grandson’s mind: “Why do you always have to do that, Gramps?”
The answer he realized, from my talk: how else could an unlettered laborer such as his grandfather, in the 1930s and 1940s, go into a new neighborhood, a new area, and get work?
A reasonable argument might be made that a notable percentage of the homeless population in our cities today is comprised of men and women who grew up in social enclaves that counted on contact relations to provide the prized necessities, jobs, shelter, and friendship—a social practice at which we can still see that they were often quite good—but who were unsuited, both by temperament and education, for the more formal stringencies of networking relations, which include securing work and necessary housing through want ads, resumés, job applications, real estate listings; a mode of social practice which, in urban venue after urban venue, has displaced contact relations (“You want a job? Show up tomorrow morning at six-thirty: I’ll put you to work . . . I’ve got an apartment you can have, in a building I own, for two hundred a month”) till there are hardly any left. Indeed, it is my deep suspicion that the only consistent and ultimately necessary learning that occurs across the field of “universal higher education” toward which our country leans more and more is the two-to-four years of acclimation to the bureaucratic management of our lives that awaits more and more of the country’s working classes—and that goes along with (if it is not the institutional backbone of) Richard Gordon’s analysis of the “homework economy” and the “feminization of poverty,” that Donna Haraway brought to our attention more than a decade ago in her widely read, A Cyborg Manifesto.
Because isolated, low-level, optionless poverty that shifts between poor homes and the very bottom of the job system (where the “system” itself is seen as a fundamentally bureaucratic network phenomenon) has been called “feminized,” one is tempted to call “masculinized” that homeless poverty where one has dropped through the system’s very bottom into a world where ever-shrinking contact opportunities are the only social relations available. One of Gordon’s points was that more and more men find themselves caught up in “feminized” poverty structures. Well, many, many women and children are on the streets barely surviving, suffering, and dying in “masculinized” poverty. I think that the gendering of such states merely overwrites and erases the contextual power divisions and questions of wealth deployment with vague suggestions of a wholly inappropriate, bogus, and mystifying psychologization (men choose one kind of poverty; women choose another; when poverty is precisely about lack of choices)—and so should be discouraged, however well-intentioned it all first seems.
URBAN CONTACT
Here’s a composite entry from my last Spring’s journal (1997).
After a trip to the Thirty-fourth Street Central Post Office to mail a book to a friend, I walked up Eighth Avenue to the Port Authority, where I stopped to speak to Todd—of the spectacularly missing front tooth. His clothes were clean and his shirt was new, but he is still homeless, he explains. (In his middle thirties, he has been for over a decade.) Just come from a stint sleeping on the subway, he asked me for some change to get something to eat. I gave him a handful that probably totaled about $1.75. “Oh, thanks, man,” he said, “now I can go get me some chicken wings.”
I was in the city to participate in a three-day conference at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center: “Forms of Desire.” It’s April, and after the snowstorm on the first, warmer weather seemed to have doubled the daytime Times Square traffic. Ben, gone to vacation with his wife in Germany for the winter, was back setting up his shoeshine stand behind the subway kiosk on the northwest corner. To the southeast, under the Port’s marquee, Mr. Campbell was taking the afternoon shift. And Christos was there, among the pretzel and hotdog vendors, with his shishkebab wagon. (More and more these days he leaves the actual running of the stand to a Pakistani assistant.) Hustlers Darrell and David have not been in evidence awhile now. Back in January and February, I’d run into Darrell a few times, however, either on the corner or coming out of the peep-shows further up Eighth Avenue. Street life wasn’t so good for him, he admitted. But the long-awaited publication of his picture in OUT Magazine, he told me, had opened up some model work for him with The Latin Connection.2 Months ago, someone introduced him to some film makers (pure networking), but the OUT photo (pure contact) apparently pushed them to act on his application a lot more quickly.
I hope things go well for him.
Back in January I saw David over on Ninth Avenue, running after drugs. (“Hey, there—man! Hey, there! So long!”) But not since.
There on the crowded corner, however, Jeff and Lenny and Frank were still hanging out—even while a scuffle between two young men created a widening circle under the Port’s marquee, till a sudden surge of police tightened it into a knot of attention. A policeman sped past me into the crowd, while the woman beside him shrieked. Then, for a solid minute, the knot pulled tight enough to become impenetrable to sight. Moments later, however, the same policeman led away a white kid in a blue checked shirt with a backwards baseball cap and a bleeding face (as he stumbled in the policeman’s grip, he bumped against Christos’s stand), while a Hispanic kid in a red jacket, shaking his head, talked to another policeman. Beside me, tall Frank tells me, “Wow! They got him. They actually caught him. Man, that was cool. I didn’t think they were going to get him. But they caught him!” Like Jeff, Frank, a long-time hustler on that corner, has no brief for violence that might keep his customers away.
The third evening after the conference, at the back of the 104 Broadway bus, half a dozen riders (four middle-aged women, two middle-aged men), each with his or her copy of Playbill, spontaneously began to discuss the matinees they’d seen that afternoon.
In the full bus, the conversations wound on, and I found myself talking to a woman sitting next to me, from Connecticut, who had just come from the theater. It is spring, and New York is full of contact—though I note the conversation in the back of the bus is not cross-class contact, but pretty well limited to folks who can afford the sixty or seventy dollars for a Broadway ticket, and so partakes a bit more of the economic context of networking—the Playbills acting as signs of the shared interest (and shared economic level) characteristic of a networking group. Also, characteristic of networking groups, what circulated among them was knowledge about which actors were good, which plays were strong or enjoyable, which musicals had good voices but weak songs, and which just did not seem worth the time or money to attend.
Let me be specific. In the ten years I’ve known Todd, I’m sure the handouts I’ve given him, a dollar here, two dollars there (say, once a month), easily total 180 dollars or more—that is, over twice the price of a Broadway show ticket. If, on the bus, however, one of the Playbill wavers were to ask me or one of the others with whom she had been chatting amiably, “Say, here’s my name and address. The next time you’re going to the theater, just pick up an extra ticket and drop it in the mail to me,” it would bring the conversation to a stunned halt; and however the theater-going passengers might have dealt with it in the public space of a twenty minute bus ride, certainly no one would have seriously acceded to the request.
That is to say, once again, the material rewards from street contact (the quintessential method of the panhandler) are simply greater, even if spread out over a decade, than the rewards from a session of networking—which rewards take place (I say again) largely in the realm of shared knowledge.
That evening, around 7:20, I got home to comet Hale-Bopp, bright and fuzzy-bearded above the west extremity of Eighty-second Street, against an indigo evening only a single shade away from full black. At the corner, I phoned up to Dennis in the apartment (one payphone was broken; I had to cross over to use the one on the far corner), who hadn’t seen it yet, to come out and take a look. Two minutes later he was down on the stoop; to prepare him, I pointed out a couple of diamond-chip stars overhead. “Now that’s a star. And that’s a star. But if you look over there—”
Without my even pointing, he declared: “Wow, there it is!”—the fuzzy star-like object with it gauzy beard of light fanning to the east (I’d first seen it on my birthday, two nights before, in Massachusetts).
Dennis dashed back up to get his binoculars and to check it out from our roof; I turned up the street to make a quick trip to the supermarket. On my way back down Eighty-second Street, Hale-Bopp created a veritable wave of contact.
First an overheard father and two kids, son and daughter: “Hey, do you see the comet up there . . .?”
“Yeah, I saw it last week.”
Moments later, I pointed it out to a heavy, white-haired plain-clothes policeman lounging in jeans and a blue sweat shirt by the gate at the precinct, who responded: “Do I see it? Sure. It’s right up there, isn’t it?”
Which turned two women around in their tracks, one in a brown rain coat, both in hats. “Is that it? Oh, yes.”
“Yes, right there. My . . . !”
“You can really see it, tonight! Maybe we should go down to the river and look.”
I left the policeman explaining to them why they didn’t want to do that.
Thirty yards further down the block, I pointed it out to a stocky young Hispanic couple who passed me hand in hand: “Yeah, sure. We already seen it!”
And a minute later I pointed it out again to a homeless man in his twenties with blackened hands and short black hair, who’d set his plastic garbage bag down to dig in a garbage container for soda and beer cans. “Oh, wow! Yeah—”slowly he stood up to rub his forehead—“that’s neat!” While I walked on, a moment later I glanced back to see he’d stopped an older Hispanic gentleman in an overcoat with a pencil-thin moustache, who now stood with him, gazing up: “There—you see the comet. . . ?”
With my cane, I walked up my stoop steps, carrying my groceries and my notebook into the vestibule, where I unlocked the door and pushed into the lobby.
How does this set of urban interactions beneath a passing celestial portent differ from similar encounters, on the same evening 100 or 500 miles away, on some small-town street? First, these encounters are in a big city. Second, over the next eight months, I have seen none of the people involved in them again—neither the homeless man nor the Hispanic gentleman, the young couple nor the pair of women, nor the policeman (one among the seventy-five-odd officers who work out of the precinct at the far end of my block, perhaps fifteen of whom I know by sight). Their only fallout is that they were pleasant—and that pleasantness hangs in the street under the trees and by the brownstones’ stoops near which they occurred, months after Hale-Bopp has ellipsed the sun and soared again into solar night. That fallout will remain as long as I remain comfortable living here.
MECHANICS OF DISCOURSE
Not a full year after the CLAGS “Forms of Desire” conference that took place under the auspices of Hale-Bopp and provoked the journal entry above, at the February ‘98 OutWrite Conference of Lesbian and Gay Writers in Boston, Massachusetts, one of the Sunday morning programs began with two questions:
“Why is there homophobia?” and “What makes us gay?”
As I listened to the discussion over the next hour and a half, I found myself troubled: rather than attack both questions head on, the discussants tended to veer away from them, as if the questions were somehow logically congruent to the two great philosophical conundrums, ontological and epistemological, that ground Western philosophy—“Why is there something rather than nothing?” and, “How can we know it?”—and, as such, could only be approached by elaborate indirection.
It seems to me (and this will bring the multiple arguments of this lengthy discussion to a close under the rubric of my third thesis: the mechanics of discourse) there are pointed answers to be given to both questions, answers that are imperative if gays and lesbians are to make any progress in passing from what Urvashi Vaid has called, so tellingly, “virtual equality” (the appearance of equality with few or none of the material benefits) to a material and legally based equality.
During the 1940s and 1950s my uncle (my mother’s brother-in-law) Myles Paige, a black man who had graduated from Tuskegee, was a Republican and a Catholic, and a respected judge in the Brooklyn Domestic Relations Court. By the time I was ten or eleven, I knew why “prostitutes and perverts” (my uncle was the first to join them for me in seductive alliteration; it is not without significance that, in the 1850s in London, “gays,” the plural term for male homosexuals today, meant female prostitutes) were to be hated, if not feared. I was told the reason repeatedly during half a dozen family dinners, where, over the roast lamb, the macaroni and cheese, the creamed onions and the kale, at the head of the family dinner table my uncle, the judge, held forth.
“Prostitutes and perverts,” he explained, again and again, “destroy, undermine and rot the foundations of society.” I remember his saying, again and again, if he had his way, he “would take all those people out and shoot ’em!” while his more liberal wife—my mother’s sister—protested futilely. “Well,” my uncle grumbled, “I would . . .” The implication was that he had some arcane and secret information about “prostitutes and perverts” that, while it justified the ferocity of his position, could not be shared at the dinner table with women and children. But I entered adolescence knowing that the law alone, and my uncle’s judicial position in it, kept his anger, and by extension the anger of all right-thinking men like him, in check—kept it from breaking out in a concerted attack on “those people,” who were destroying, undermining and rotting the foundations of society—which meant, as far as I understood it, they were menacing my right to sit there in the dining room in the Brooklyn row house on Macdonnah Street and eat the generous, even lavish Sunday dinner that my aunt and grandmother had fixed over the afternoon . ..
These were the years between 1949 and 1953, when I—and, I’m sure, many others—heard this repeatedly as the general social judgment on sex workers and/or homosexuals. That is to say, it was about half a dozen years after the end of World War II. Besides being a judge, my Uncle Myles had also been a Captain in the U.S. Army.
What homosexuality and prostitution represented for my uncle was the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure; and the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure was the opposite of social responsibility. Nor was this simply some abstract principle to the generation so recently home from European military combat. Many had begun to wake, however uncomfortably, to a fact that problematizes much of the discourse around sadomasochism today. In the words of Bruce Benderson, writing in the Lambda Book Report 12: “The true Eden where all desires are satisfied is red, not green. It is a bloodbath of instincts, a gaping maw of orality, and a basin of gushing bodily fluids.” Too many had seen “nice ordinary American boys” let loose in some tiny French or German or Italian town where, with the failure of the social contract, there was no longer any law—and they had seen all too much of that red “Eden.” Nor—in World War II—were these situations officially interrogated, with attempts to tame them for the public with images such as “Lt. Calley” and “My Lai,” as they would be a decade-and-a-half later in Vietnam. Rather, they circulated as an unstated and inarticulate horror whose lessons were supposed to be brought back to the States while their specificity was, in any collective narrativity, unspeakable, left in the foreign outside, safely beyond the pale.
The clear and obvious answer (especially to a Catholic Republican army officer and judge) was that pleasure must be socially doled out in minuscule amounts, tied by rigorous contracts to responsibility. Good people were people who accepted this contractual system. Anyone who rebelled was a prostitute or a pervert—or both. Anyone who actively pursued prostitution or perversion was working, whether knowingly or not, to unleash precisely those red Edenic forces of desire that could only topple society, destroy responsibility, and produce a nation without families, soldiers or workers—indeed, a chaos that was itself no state, for clearly no such space of social turbulence could maintain any but the most feudal state apparatus.
That was and will remain the answer to the question, “Why is there hatred and fear of homosexuals (homophobia)?” as long as this is the systematic relation between pleasure and responsibility in which “prostitution and perversion” are seen to be caught up. The herd of teenage boys who stalk the street with their clubs, looking for a faggot to beat bloody and senseless, or the employer who fires the worker who is revealed to be gay or the landlord who turns the gay tenant out of his or her apartment, or the social circle who refuses to associate with someone who is found out to be gay, are simply the Valkyries—the Wunschmadchen—to my uncle’s legally constrained Wotan.
What I saw in the conversation at OutWrite was that the argument exists today largely at the level of discourse, and that younger gay activists find it hard today to articulate the greater discursive structure they are fighting to dismantle, as do those conservatives today who uphold one part of it or the other without being aware of its overall form. But discourses in such conditions tend to remain at their most stable.
The overall principle that must be appealed to in order to dismantle such a discourse is the principle that claims desire is never “outside all social constraint.” Desire may be outside one set of constraints or another; but social constraints are what engender desire; and, one way or another, even at its most apparently catastrophic, they contour desire’s expression.
On the particular level where the argument must proceed case by case, incident by incident, before it reaches discursive (or counterdiscursive) mass, we must look at how that principle operates in the answer to our second question: “What makes us gay?”
There are at least three different levels where an answer can be posed.
First, the question might be interpreted to mean, “What do we do, what qualities do we possess, that signal the fact that we partake of the preexisting essence of ‘gayness’ that gives us our gay ‘identity’ and that, in most folks’ minds, mean we belong to the category of ‘those who are gay’?” This is, finally, the semiotic or epistemological level: how do we—or other people—know we are gay?
There is a second level, however, on which the question might be interpreted as: “What forces or conditions in the world take the potentially ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ person—a child, a fetus, the egg and sperm before they conjoin as a zygote—and ‘pervert’ them (that is, turn them away) from that ‘normal’ condition so that now we have someone who does some or many or all of the things we call gay—or at least wants to, or feels compelled to, even if she or he would rather not?” This is, finally, the ontological level: what makes these odd, statistically unusual, but ever-present, gay people exist in the first place?
The confusion between level one and level two—the epistemological and the ontological—is already enough to muddle many arguments. People who think they are asking question two are often given (very frustrating) answers to question one—and vice versa.
But there is a third level where the question can be interpreted, which is often associated with queer theory and academics of a poststructuralist bent. Many such academics have claimed that their answer to (and thus their interpretation of) the question is the most important one, and that this answer absorbs and explains what is really going on at the first two levels.
This last is not, incidentally, a claim that I make. But I do think that this third level of interpretation (which, yes, is an aspect of the epistemological, but might be more intelligibly designated today as the theoretical) is imperative if we are to explain to a significant number of people what is wrong with a discourse that places pleasure and the body in fundamental opposition to some notion of a legally constrained social responsibility, rather than a discourse that sees that pleasure and the body are constitutive elements of the social as much as the law and responsibility themselves.
One problem with this third level of interpretation of “What makes us gay?” that many of us academic folk have come up with is that it puts considerable strain on the ordinary meaning of “makes.”
The opposition to our interpretation might begin like this (I start here because, by the polemic against it, the reader may have an easier time recognizing it when it arrives in its positive form): “‘To make’ is an active verb. You seem to be describing a much more passive process. It sounds like you’re describing some answer to the question ‘What allows us to be gay?’ or ‘What facilitates our being gay?’ or even ‘What allows people to speak about people as gay?’ Indeed, the answer you propose doesn’t seem to have anything to do with ‘making’ at all. It seems to be all about language and social habit.”
To which, if we’re lucky enough for the opposition to take its objection to this point, we can answer back: “You’re right! That’s exactly our point. We now believe that language and social habit are much more important than until now, historically, they have been assumed to be. Both language and social habit perform many more jobs, intricately, efficiently and powerfully, into shaping not just what we call social reality, but even what we call reality itself (against which we used to set social reality in order to look at it as a separate situation from material reality). Language and social habit don’t simply produce the appearance of social categories: rich, poor, educated, uneducated, well-mannered, ill-bred—those signs that, according to Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, can be learned and therefore faked. They produce as well what until now were considered ontological categories: male, female, black, white, Asian, straight, gay, normal and abnormal . . . as well as trees, books, dogs, wars, rainstorms and mosquitoes.
“Because we realize just how powerful the socio/linguistic process is, we insist on coupling it with those active verbs, ‘to make, to produce, to create’—although, early in the dialogue, there was another common verb for this particular meaning of ‘make’ that paid its due to the slow, sedentary and passive (as well as to the inexorable and adamantine) quality of the process: ‘to sediment’—a verb that fell away because it did not suit the polemical nature of the argument, but which at this point it might be well to retrieve: ‘What makes us gay?’ in the sense of, ‘What produces us as gay? What creates us as gay? What sediments us as gay?’”
The level where these last four questions overlap is where our interpretations of the question—and our answer to it—emerges.
Consider a large ballroom full of people.
At various places around the walls there are doors. If one of the doors is open and the ballroom is crowded enough, after a certain amount of time there will be a certain number of people in the other room on the far side of the open door (assuming the lights are on and nothing is going on in there to keep them out). The third-level theoretical answer to the question “What makes us gay?” troubles ordinary men and women on the street for much the same reason it would trouble them if you said, “The open doors is what makes people go into the other room.”
Most folks are likely to respond, “Sure, I kind of see what you mean. But aren’t you just playing with words? Isn’t it really the density of the ballroom crowd, the heat, the noise, or the bustle in the ballroom that drives (i.e., that makes) people go into the adjoining room? I’m sure you could come up with experiments where, if, on successive nights, you raised and lowered the temperature and/or the noise level, you could even correlate them to how much faster or slower people were driven out of the ballroom and into the adjoining room—thus proving crowd, heat, and noise were the causative factors, rather than the door, which is finally just a facilitator, n’est-ce pas?”
The answer to this objection is “You’re answering the question as though it were being asked at level two, the ontological level. And for level two, your answer is fine. The question I am asking, however, on level three, is, ‘What makes the people go into that room rather than any number of other possible rooms that they might have entered, behind any of the other closed doors around the ballroom?’ And the actual answer to that question really is, ‘That particular open door.’”
It’s time to turn to the actual and troubling answer we have come up with to the newly interpreted question, “What makes us gay?” The answer is usually some version of the concept “We are made gay because that is how we have been interpellated.”
“Interpellate” is a term that was revived by Louis Althusser in his 1969 essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The word once meant “to interrupt with a petition.” Prior to the modern era, the aristocrats who comprised many of the royal courts could be presented with petitions by members of the haute bourgeoisie. These aristocrats fulfilled their tasks as subjects to the king by reading over the petitions presented to them, judging them, and acting on them in accord with the petition’s perceived merit. Althusser’s point is that “we become subjects when we are interpellated.” In the same paragraph, he offers the word “hailed” as a synonym, and goes on to give what has become a rather notorious example of a policeman calling out or hailing, “Hey, you!” on the street. Says Althusser, in the process of saying, “He must mean me,” we cohere into a self—rather than being, presumably, simply a point of view drifting down the street.
That awareness of “he must mean me” is the constitutive sine qua non of the subject. It is the mental door through which we pass into subjectivity and selfhood. And (maintains Althusser) this cannot be a spontaneous process, but is always a response to some hailing, some interpellation by some aspect of the social.
In that sense, it doesn’t really matter whether someone catches you in the bathroom, looking at a same-sex nude, and then blurts out, “Hey, you’re gay!” and you look up and realize “you” (“He means me!”) have been caught, or if you’re reading a description of homosexuality in a textbook and “you” think, “Hey, they’re describing me!” The point is, rather, that anyone who self-identifies as gay must have been interpellated, at some point, as gay by some individual or social speech or text to which he or she responded, “He/she/it/they must mean me.” That is the door opening. Without it, nobody can say proudly, “I am gay!” Without it, nobody can think guiltily and in horror, “Oh my God, I’m gay!” Without it, one cannot remember idly or in passing, “Well, I’m gay.”
Because interpellation only talks about one aspect of “making”/“producing”/“creating”/“sedimenting,” it does not tell us the whole story. It is simply one of the more important things that happens to subjects at the level of discourse. And, in general, discourses constitute and are constituted by what Walter Pater, in The Renaissance, called “a roughness of the eye.” Thus, without a great deal more elaboration, the notion of interpellation is as reductive as any other theoretical move. But it locates a powerful and pivotal point in the process. And it makes it clear that the process is, as are all the creative powers of discourse, irrevocably anchored within the social, rather than somehow involved with some fancied breaking out of the social into an uncharted and unmapped beyond, that only awaits the release of police surveillance to erupt into that red Eden of total unconstraint.
What the priority of the social says about those times in war where that vision of hell was first encountered by people like my uncle, possibly among our own soldiers: “Look, if you spend six months socializing young men to ‘kill, kill, kill,’ it’s naïve to be surprised when some of them, in the course of their pursuit of pleasure, do. It is not because of some essentialist factor in ‘perversion’ or ‘prostitution’ (or sexuality in general) that always struggles to break loose.”
While one thrust of this essay is that catastrophic civic interventions such as the Times Square Redevelopment Program are incorrectly justified by the assumption that interclass contact is somehow unsafe (it threatens to unleash the sexual, crime, mayhem, murder . . .) and its benefits can be replaced by networking (safe, monitored, controlled, under surveillance . . .), a second thrust has been and is that social contact is of paramount importance in the specific pursuit of gay sexuality: The fact is, I am not interested in the “freedom” to “be” “gay” without any of the existing gay institutions or without other institutions that can take up and fulfill like functions.
Such “freedom” means nothing. Many gay institutions—clubs, bars of several persuasions, baths, tea-room sex, gay porn movie houses (both types), brunches, entertainment, cruising areas, truck stop sex, circuit parties, and many more—have grown up outside the knowledge of much of the straight world. But these institutions have nevertheless grown up very much within our society, not outside it. They have been restrained on every side. That is how they have attained their current form. They do not propagate insanely in some extra-social and unconstrained “outside”/“beyond,” apart from any concept of social responsibility—and that includes what goes on in the orgy rooms at the baths. The freedom to “be” “gay” without the freedom to choose to partake of these institutions is just as meaningless as the freedom to “be” “Jewish” when, say, any given Jewish ritual, or Jewish text, or Jewish cultural practice is outlawed; it is as meaningless as the “freedom” to “be” “black” in a world where black music, black literature, black culture, black language, and all the black social practices that have been generated through the process of black historical exclusion were suddenly suppressed. I say this not because a sexual preference is in any necessary way identical to race, or for that matter to religion. (Nor am I proposing the equally absurd notion that race and religion are equivalent.) I say it rather because none of the three—race, religion or sexual preference—represents some absolute essentialist state; I say it because all three are complex social constructs, and thus do not come into being without their attendant constructed institutions.
Tolerance—not assimilation—is the democratic litmus test for social equality.
The Times Square renovation is not just about real estate and economics, however unpleasant its ramifications have been on that front. Because it has involved the major restructuring of the legal code relating to sex, and because it has been a first step not just toward the moving, but toward the obliteration, of certain business and social practices, it has functioned as a massive and destructive intervention in the social fabric of a non-criminal group in the city—an intervention I for one deeply resent.
If the range of heterosexist homophobic society as a system wants to ally itself to an architecture, a life-style, and a range of social practices that eschew contact out of an ever inflating fear of the alliance between pleasure and chaos, then I think it is in for a sad, unhappy time, far more restrictive, unpleasant and impoverishing than the strictures of monogamy could ever be.
The thousands on thousands of gay men, contingently “responsible” or “irresponsible,” who utilized the old Times Square and like facilities for sex, already know that contact is necessary. I would hope that this talk makes clear that it is necessary for the whole of a flexible, democratic society—and I feel it is only socially responsible to say so.
NOTES
1. Astute as her analysis is, Jacobs still confuses contact with community. Urban contact is often at its most spectacularly beneficial when it occurs between members of different communities. That is why I maintain that interclass contact is even more important than intraclass contact.
2. In another form, parts of this paper first appeared as an article for OUT Magazine (“X-X-X Marks the Spot” by Samuel R. Delany, December ’96—January ’97), which focused on street corner life at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. It included photographs of some of the people interviewed by Philip-Lorca diCorscia.