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“by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed” (RS 235). Only vigilant analytical attention can tease out the myths that discourse has embedded in any given text, precisely because discourse determines the attentional norm:
    For what discourse does above all things is to assign import. Discourse, remember, is what allows us to make sense of what we see, and hear, and experience . . . Discourse is what tells us what is central and what is peripheral—what is a mistake, an anomaly, an accident, a joke. It tells us what to pay attention to and what to ignore. It tells us what sort of attention to pay. (RS 239)
    The possibility of such analysis, on the other hand, resides in language’s tendency towards “unlimited semiosis”—the tendency of linguistic signs and sign-arrangements to carry connotations in excess of the normative meanings to which the discourse is perpetually working to restrict them. Deconstruction and discourse analysis exploit this inherent richness of language by evoking those meanings which the given discourse has systematically relegated to the margins of consideration, thus problematizing the meanings which would at first seemunproblematically and eternally lodged in the discourse’s rhetorical center. Characterized in this way, theory begins to look like more than just a range of analytical methodologies to be applied
to
a science fiction text, or a set of rhetorical tools to apply
within
a science fiction text, but rather like a case of convergent evolution with science fiction in general. If we view them both as ways of reading and writing the silences of objects, texts, and discursive landscapes, then theory and science fiction begin to look like two very closely related modes of inquiry.
    The term “unlimited semiosis” comes from the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce, but the idea as Delany deploys it comes from the post-structuralist critique of the Western discourse of the sign. In that discourse, the relation between linguistic signifier and nonlinguistic (“objective”) signified is presumed to be clear, direct, and unproblematic; by extension, texts are presumed to have clearly delineated, finite, and masterable meanings derivable from their concatenation of signs. In post-structuralist discourse, on the other hand, linguistic signifiers do not point towards a transparently clear objective reality (what Derrida calls the “transcendental signified”), but rather towards one another in a dynamic interrelational process occurring within a larger linguistic/discursive system (“The signified,” explains Delany, “is therefore always a web of signifiers” 15 ).
    By this argument, a “theme”—conceived in traditional discourse as an object-like “thing” which one “finds” in a given text—is actually an artifact of a readerly predisposition to order textual signs in a certain way. It marks a preconception, an effect of discourse; it has, in Delany’s words, “the same political structure as a prejudice.” 16 In order to get around such prejudicial reading, Delany argues, we have to stop seeing the text as a linguistic construct with object-like, synchronic referents or themes hovering “behind” it, to be systematically uncovered in a hermeneutical reading process, and start seeing the text as “a space of discourse—the space in which, at various points and along various loci, discourses (of whatever rhetorical expressions the reader is led to make) may be organized in relation to one another” (AS 174). That is, we must see the text as a contestatory site where various discursive relations are transformed by the reader in an ongoing, diachronic process of reconceptualization and revision.
    (It should be noted here that Delany, like certain post-structuralists, has observed in Barthes a tendency to discuss texts in thematic terms: “Even