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the plural text of Barthes is a synchronic plurality” (SW 205). Delany’s answer to Barthes can be found in
The American Shore
, which formally resembles Barthes’s
S/Z
but differs from it theoretically in many significant respects. More on this ambiguity in Barthes’s work later.)
    The diachronic, discourse-space model of writing and reading has the obvious virtue of being empirically more compelling than the synchronic-thematic model: it describes a situation that
feels
more like what we do when we read and write. It also has the more subtle virtue of reminding us that discourses are not monolithic structures, despite their pervasive and seemingly systemic influence; it shows, rather, that they arise from and are subject to the rhetorical interventions of the conscientious writer and the sensitive reader. In other words, it reminds us (to paraphrase ethnographer Stephen Tyler) that discourse can always be relativized to rhetoric. 17
    For a gay black man such as Delany—or for anyone of whatever social position committed to a critique of or intervention in a status quo which seems to derive much of its strength from a whole series of discursive and coercive exclusions and oppressions—the recognition of the relativization of discourse to rhetoric is a tremendously empowering political truth. It is empowering in one sense because it reminds us that the pretense to universal authority which Barthes has shown to be the hallmark of the rhetoric of the status quo is just that, a pretense: every utterance, no matter how much it evokes a transcendental system of authority to legitimate itself, can always be traced back to an individual or group with a historically, socially, and materially specific position. It is empowering in another sense because it places the power to revise a discourse back into our hands, with whatever personal or collective energy we can bring to our revisionary project:
    Discourse says, “You are.”
    Rhetoric preserves the freedom to say, “I am not.” (AS 172)
    Delany’s own creative output can be read as a rigorous analysis of the implications of this freedom, as well as an exercising—through the production of radical paraliterary works—of this same freedom. It remains for us to look at the fallout of this prior creative work in the essays to follow.
III
    The moment we turn to consider the essays in this collection, we are faced with a choice: the choice of where to begin. In his Preface, Delany informs us that the essay in the Appendix to this collection, “Shadows,” was actually the first essay to be published, and is itself a preface to “Shadow and Ash,” one of the essays in the collection “proper.” Do weprioritize chronology of publication, then, and read “Shadows” before the rest? (But then we would also want to read “Reading at Work” before “Wagner/Artaud” . . .) Do we wait until we are about to commence “Shadow and Ash,” and then read “Shadows” as a preface to that essay only? Or do we hold to the reading protocol that says an Appendix is only a marginal supplement to a main text—and defer reading “Shadows” until the very end, if we read it at all?
    While we ponder our options, we might want to consider a passage from an essay completely outside this collection (except of course by citing it here I am bringing it part-way in . . .), in which Delany discusses the post-structuralist project of writing against the discourse of unity and totality:
    Under such an analytic program, the beginnings and ends of critical arguments and essays grow particularly difficult. The “natural” sense of commencement and sense of closure the thematic critics consider appropriate to, and imminently allied throughout, the “naturally” bounded topic of his or her concern now is revealed to be largely artificial and overwhelmingly ideological.
    Thus the