NOW

This project is to do with the fabrication of improbable and collapsible objects of knowledge. Here, for the moment, it is articulated around two essays that concentrate each, as far as possible, on a single subject – although in both the topic is vast: to whit, Gay S/M porn and Richard Wagner. In the first case the topic occupies a relatively slight space in the overall discussion to which it has given rise, while in the second it is to be found on every page. In the first I was interested in taking material that interested me to a very different field of historical and cultural studies concerning work and leisure – a borderline of social history and Adornian critique. As we all know S/M sexual activity, and nowhere more so than in Sade or John Preston, is a notoriously leisured pursuit that takes time and often princely sums of money for ambience and equipment; so and in its aptness it got lost, or swamped out by the framing and reframing that was required by cultural studies in its critique of the commodity. At the same time the unfolding of gay and queer studies as a  history or theory of or in some kind of real life and its performance also threatened S/M’s disappearance in a deluge of  disciplinary exegeses. In the second study Wagner is the name of almost anything that can be said about anything, and the proliferation of the word in every form of discursive activity from record collecting to tracing histories of the politics of ‘race’ makes of it the shifting frame or indicator of situations. While the one eschews any musical analogy the other tries to evade implicating itself in any queer theoretical discourse and largely succeeds in doing so: though the way in which it succumbs places a critical bracket around much of queer theory of the performative and so it makes an aggressive inroad at the point where it might well have made none. In this they are not symmetrical, and though both are to an equal extent governed by a post-Adornian anxiety around the emergence of the culture industries they work it through quite differently. They can both, then, be thought of as having a conceptual commonality that splits and fractures as it trawls through possible archives to find itself a figure or a series of figures, and this having in common is only abstract and conceptual and overdetermined though often specific and particular. A number of hyperlinks connect passages in each to the other, and to some other essays, but not always the same one. Each entrains a common and a separate archive of conceptual investigations of materials that suppose ……… and for the moment a small number of links are available to interrupt the already disjointed flow and to follow the drift of concepts between different archives. At the moment a simple topography, but the next stage is a topology of research and writing …