SubStance

Here are four ways to start an article. One is to take a keyword and look it up in a dictionary. By engaging its meaning, especially its denotative meaning, the critic can pinpoint a moment and a nexus within a system. Scrutinizing its connotations, its changes over time, or its multiple, if not contradictory meanings, the critic can begin to destabilize that point, not necessarily to deconstruct it, as things would have been said in the seventies, but to problematize it. Thus, to paraphrase Lacan, language is structured like a language, which one might understand (following Derrida's critique of structuralism in "Structure, Sign, and Play"), as meaning that language is unstructured like a language. It is a system that has its quirks, its differences, its nexuses, loci, or points de capiton that shift, shake, rattle, and roll, and despite the best sewing or suturing in the world, unravel.

Another way to start an article is with reference to a specific problematic.¹ Define the contours of a specific situation and begin to see what happens next. Conversely, one could start an article with a global hypothesis and see the necessary matters that may be deduced logically from it; then, engaging possible antitheses, one might construct a more complicated synthesis that reconfirms and surpasses the initial paragraph. And, to be ultra-chic and postmodern, one might start an article by doing a web-based search, using a search engine like Google, which gives more hits than one could ever have imagined.

I have reached four approaches, and that is not enough, for another way to start an article, especially in current academic climes, is with an autobiographical reference. The article then becomes a metonymy of the author, suitable in a postmodern, destabilized world that has abandoned identity politics and absolute hierarchic truths. And yet none of these is the way this article has started, forestalling its subject, thereby not starting the article. For at one point I had started this article each of these ways, yet each was, for the moment or for the strategy, unsatisfactory. Strangely, the autobiographical one was the least unsatisfactory, because it gave me an insight that no other did: it moved me from the unproblematic to the problematic. And this, I thought, was the most [End Page 126] interesting position I could then imagine. The autobiographical position is barely that, for it is a typical experience of anyone of my generation in the United States who has been to or worked in a university. A quarter of a century ago, before the invention of a world in which reality had been systematically replaced by the virtual (i.e., before the invention of that agent of Satan called the Internet), "overload" was a simple concept. As a good student (pace Michel Butor in La Modification), you decided to take an extra course, filled out a form, and some official signed off on the "overload."

I set this academic scene in a mythic 1975 or so, because it was not long after, starting around 1981, that the word overload had a brief, second, problematic life. It was then that a theory of what we now call AIDS developed—a theory of "immune overload." This theory suggested that an individual's immune system, subject to repeated attacks by outside agents eventually broke down or blew up. It was an old theory really—that of the straw that broke the camel's back, or, as the French say, the drop of water that made the bucket overflow.²

Of course the theory, going back to the complexity of public health - in the theories of someone like Auguste Morel - and feeding on the supposed promiscuity of gay men, supported an early demonization of the victims. The theory was wrong; the culprit was something far simpler than the gay life style; the reproduction and effect of humano-immunodeficiency virus was not caused by overload. Quickly, "overload" became a "site infection," an underload; one moment, one point of contact might be enough...