Society urges us to embrace Networking over Contact. 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 of 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 until they are destroyed. (Delany’s main text for these arguments is THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES by Jacobs.) Contact is great for small businesses, and was the primary way folks of older generations found work, not through resumes, interviews, or internships. Contact produces order out of disorder in urban spaces: lots of small businesses mixed with residential spots on a street bordering a public park leads to a safer stretch of city, but this is not how cities are planned by and large, least of all with housing projects. Contact is low-pressure exchanges between classes in public spaces, which leads to material benefits for the underserved, from free lunches to landing an editor job after working at a titty bar. My primary thesis underlying my several arguments here is that, given the mode of capitalism under which we live, life is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication conducted in the mood of good will. The three levels of this question are the epistemic/semiotic level (“How do others know we are gay?”), the ontological level (“What makes us exist as gay?”), and the “sociological sedimenting” level (“How does discourse produce us as gay people?”), which enfolds the other two, since the answers to the question on those levels are sociologically sedimented (or what Althusser would call “interpellated”) as well (189-90). That’s on full display in “Blue” but also present in “Red,” which is a “diachronic” study of the same topic, that is, rather than a lateral exploration of the streets in the first essay, this charts how social practices and institutions have changed over time at distinct levels.Ī thorough walkthrough of these levels comes in Section 10.2 with the single question “What makes us gay?” as the example.
Delany’s two essays hold this careful generosity towards the people who use the services of Forty-second street.
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