Some of the readers of this journal may be familiar with the following problem, most often encountered in introductory performance⁽²⁾ classes. After hearing an instructor's critical response to a somewhat less-than-satisfactory performance, the student performer plaintively exclaims, "But you don't know how much time I spent on preparing this!" Or: "You're not giving my any credit for my effort." Or: "You don't understand what I intended." The instructor then patiently explains that she can only comment on what she actually saw and heard; that, while adequate preparation is important, it is difficult to "account" for it in the moment of performance; that she cannot be a mind reader, so she must accept the performance as a self-evident indication of the performer's intentions.

It was this argument that immediately came to my mind as I listened to, or read, some of the responses to my criticism of the article entitled "Sextext," which appeared in the January 1997 issue of Text and Performance Quarterly. Since a National Communication Association convention panel was organized in order to continue the discussion of the issues surrounding this article and its publication, and since the article has gained a goodly amount of notoriety within NCA, I'll assume the reader's familiarity with it and forego a summary. After reading "Sextext," and making my personal opinion known on the Internet and in a letter to Spectra, the article's defenders (but not, it is important to point out, its authors) offered the following rebuttals:

        1. I did not understand the author's intention.

        2. I did not seem to fully appreciate the article as a work of fiction.

        3. I did not sufficiently credit the author's efforts.

        4. I was intentionally mis-reading the article as "pornography."

        5. I did not properly account for the editor's theme.

It is my intention to comment, briefly, on each of these in order to offer a few introductory thoughts about larger issues concerning the nature of scholarship within the field of communication.
 
1. The Author's Intention

I don't know what Professors Corey and Nakayama intended. It has been suggested, for example, that the authors intended to write in a highly unconventional, experimental fashion in order to engender precisely the kind of spirited (some might say mean-spirited) debate which followed. The unnamed persona who narrates "Sextext" tells me his aim is "to write aloud desire," and that seems--to this reader--an accurate enough description of the text's thrust. I don't know how one "writes aloud," but that is the apparent intention. But is it enough? By "enough," I mean sufficient to meet the scholarly expectations of its contexts: publication in an academic journal sponsored by a national academic association. Despite its self-reflexive post-structural ornamentation, the announce aim of "Sextext" is quite simple: a performance that hopes to "index" the nature of desire within the context of academic discourse. And so, within the context of academic discourse, I ask: Is this enough? Is it enough to rehearse the self-evident dimensions of a personal desire? Is it enough to repeat commonplace notion that commercial images of males are (consciously and/or unconsciously) homoerotic? And what about the use of the word index? I think I understand the definition of that word--even when used as a verb--but I don't believe "Sextext" provides anything remotely like an index, either of desire in general or gay desire in particular. As a reader, I begin to suspect that "Sextext" is making promises it has no intention of keeping. As I read multiple quotations of Roland Barthes, I presume (á la Barthes) that the "author is dead," and I must as a reader fully participate in this emerging discourse.⁽³⁾ But the reader is excluded, because "Sextext" doesn't partake in discourse, it isn't dialogic. If it is performance, it is a monologue: a self-absorbed, narcissistic, masturbatory aria. If I, as reader, "participate" at all, it is as a voyeur. I don't think this is what Barthes had in mind when he spoke of le plaisir du texte.
 
2. The Article as Fiction

The reader is told, twice, that "Sextext" is "a fictional account of text and body as fields of pleasure." What does this mean? By naming it fiction, is it saved from the rationality of scholarship? In the already problematic world of postmodernism, with signifiers forever liberated from signifieds, what can this label tell us? What can it do? I will therefore guess that its function is a rhetorical strategy, aimed at potential critiques. "Fiction" need not be rational. "Fiction" cannot be expected to be scholarship. "Fiction"--even fiction found within the didactic confines of an academic journal--cannot be interrogated on its intellectual claims. "Fiction"--even fiction that appropriates random writings of Roland Barthes--cannot be scrutinized for its methodology. "Fiction"--even fiction that implies a social conscience--cannot be criticized for its moral ambiguity and ethical uncertainties. For example, fiction need not encumber itself with the anti-erotic practicalities of safe sex. But what is the reader to think when confronted with the tangential footnote about the narrator's dissertation committee? Is it true? "Well, of course not, this is a work of fiction." But the footnote identifies itself as an "authorial comment," and seems to imply a factual reality beyond the narrator's (fictive) awareness. The matter-of-fact, cynical recitation of the committee's lack of ethics is disturbing, and reinforces the reader's already considerable psychological distance from the text's narcissistic persona. Recalling Barthe's pronouncements on such matters only confuses me further. Authorial comment? What does this mean? Should I treat it as part of the text, part of the fiction? If the "author is dead," how can the author "comment"?

That "Sextext" is a work of fiction cannot be disputed. I am not "against" it as a work of fiction--in the same way that I can assert that I am not "against" postmodernism. These are artistic, cultural, political, and historical conditions. On the other hand, I may assert a certain amount of skepticism about post-structuralism, which I take to be a number of different theories seeking to interpret postmodernism. As a work of fiction, "Sextext" appears to reflect many aspects of the postmodern condition. Its placement in a scholarly journal, however, is a post-structural "move," suggesting that this idiosyncratic "way of knowing" may supplant--perhaps even eliminate--the methodologies employed by traditional scholarship. Because it is embedded in the rationalistic tradition, "the way" of traditional scholarship⁽⁴⁾ expects discourse and anticipates interrogation of its claims. As I have indicated, fiction bears no such responsibility; the scrutiny of fiction--or its intellectual defense--resides in the domain of aesthetics.
 
3. The Author's Efforts

Several defenders of the article--but not, thank God, the authors--have suggested that this text considered as a work of fiction, is an admirable attempt to capture Barthes' notion of jouissance. I am told that I have not fully appreciated the text's writing as writing--that is, its stylistic achievements. Earlier, I indicated the persona's avowed intention to "write desire," which may be another way of saying that the text is meant to be a literary representation is neither fair nor entirely accurate. "Sextext" cannot be said to re-present jouissance, except--perhaps--when Barthes alludes to a post-orgasmic "loss." In its finest post-structural moments, "Sextext" is a yearning toward something it claims it can never achieve; and it is in these moments, ironically, that the text's efforts actually represent (at least for this reader) a fleeting glimpse of desire as the effort that will be (always) unrequited. Is this irony intentional? Like the good post-structuralist that he is, "Sextext's" narrator continually bemoans the "failure" of language--using ten pages of language to do so. On practically every one of those pages we read "of the inability to articulate"; that the narrator cannot "find the words to communicate"; that he is "lost for language." These are hollow protests. While I must admit a lack of familiarity with gay pornography, "Sextext" appears to use what I understand to be its vernacular with considerable facility. In its explicit, literal, and detailed linguistic representation of gay sexual activity, "Sextext" achieves a level of articulation and, yes, stylistic richness, its theoretic perspective denies. Such internal contradictions may be aesthetically defensible, but they seem too incoherent as "scholarship."
 
4. The Article as Pornography

In describing "Sextext" as pornographic, I am simply repeating both extrinsic and intrinsic claims made by the article. Certainly, in its more explicit passages, the text bears the characteristics of the prurient fantasy; the ready accessibility of the eager, idealized partner; the exclusion of intrusive detail; the graphic, and obsessive, examination of anatomy; and the larger-than-life orgasmic conclusion. My intention, when pointing to this dimension of "Sextext," is not to construct an argumentative warrant for censorship; rather, in attempting to demonstrate the text's success as pornography, I wish to illustrate the article's categorical irrelevance as scholarship. If "Mark Stark's" exploits constitute communication research, then Marilyn Chambers deserves a Ph.D.

While I am not personally troubled by the existence of pornography as a general, and undeniable feature of human experience, it has been my observation that the concrete, particularized reality of pornography (e.g., child pornography or the exploitation of women) is often problematic. I am, for example, concerned that "Sextext" perpetuates the "naturalized" perception of the gay sexual experience as definitively and essentially pornographic. To my dismay⁽⁵⁾, some of the people who have written to me in support of my criticism of the article have suggested that the sexual activities depicted in the article affirm their perception of gay sex as obscene by definition. My guess is that this is wholly unintentional, but the frankness of the depiction and its use of sexual vulgarisms does tend to victimize the unsuspecting reader; hence our feeling of being cast--unwillingly--in the collective role of voyeur.
 
5. The Editor's Theme

Apparently, the editor's insertion of the unexplained header (Alternatives in Writing About Performance/A Special Issue) significantly alters the nature of this journal and its stated editorial policy (i.e., that TPQ "publishes scholarship addressing the constituitive elements of texts, performers, and audiences as they advance the understanding of performance in the communication process."). I suppose my distinction--that "Sextext" is a performance, and not "about" performance--will seem an unnecessary academic quibble. But it is precisely this work of fiction's self-absorbed introspection which renders problematic an "understanding of performance within the communication process" as constituted in, or emerging from, discourse. While some of us may wish to applaud the narrator's celebration of the emancipated gay ego, I worry about the text's modernist--even Romantic--tendencies: a "triumph of the will," where a sovereign subjectivity performs in masturbatory fantasies. This is a return to the aesthetic of the isolated hero-artist, tortured by his desires yet wallowing in the narcissistic pleasure of his masochism.

In stating these reservations, I realize that I may seem to deny a role for pluralism--that I can't imagine "alternatives" in how we might write about performance. My resistance is directed not toward the possibility of alternatives, but toward editorial practices which seem to privilege particular ideologies⁽⁶⁾ and, in doing so, seem willing to abandon any criteria by which we might judge the intellectual utility of our research. I hope that I've demonstrated that "Sextext" possesses a number of qualities: as fiction, as eroticism, as a reflection of the postmodern condition. But its central paradox, for me, is that these defining elements render it problematic as a means of scholarship.

 
Endnotes

1. This paper, in a slightly different form, was originally presented as part of a panel entitled "What Counts as Scholarship in Communication?: Evaluating Trends in Performance Studies, Autoethnography, and Communication Research" at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, November 22, 1997.

2. By "performance" I mean any sort of performance: public speaking, acting, singing, dancing, etc.

3. My paraphrase of Barthes comes from Image/Music/Text, trans. By Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), especially the essay "The Death of the Author" (pp. 142-148).

4. I am using the word "way" from two perspectives. First, in the sense that "the way" of traditional scholarship employs specific epistemologies (and that these usually rely on logic and rational thought as a common grounding). Second, in the sense employed by the Chinese philosophic tradition when it speaks of the Tao, which can be literally translated as "way"--but can be variously defined as method, principle, attitude, approach, perspective, etc.

5. To the extent that anything I have ever said or written about "Sextext" has encouraged anyone's homophobia, I offer the article's authors my sincere apologies.

6. Readers wishing evidence to support this claim need look no further than--for example--the April 1995 issue of TPQ. There you will find "Toward a Pleasure-Centered Economy: Wondering a Feminist Aesthetics of Performance," an article by Elizabeth Bell which seems a willful misinterpretation of the work of Wallace Bacon. The article so badly distorted Bacon's views that he felt compelled to write a correction (see "The Dangerous Shores--One Last Time," in the October 1996 issue of TPQ), a postscript which would have been unnecessary had the journal's editorial board cared more about accuracy than ideology.