As many of you know, I have been working on an essay about "Sextext" for some time now. I will post my most recent draft as I complete it, but you can view previous versions here. I am about to submit it for a 4th time to Text & Performance Quarterly (twice to a special issue, then restarted as a regular issue submission.) The following is a draft of my letter to the reviewers. I would appreciate any suggestions to hone my argument for publishing the essay. Thanks!
Letter to Reviewers
At the beginning of A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes,
The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion.
I feel a similar problematic in his essay. While no person “asked” me to write this essay, I have been called by “Sextext” itself. That text very literally speaks to me in ways I cannot fully comprehend and of which this essay is an attempt to address. In considering the many ways I might have begun, I could have written about (1) the authors and what their intentions were, or about (2) how the style of “Sextext’s” prose serves a theoretical purpose, or about (3) reactions to “Sextext” and its disciplinary transgression. But as this essay has gestated in me, and as I have entered and reentered this essay, I have come to find that these purposes are indeed “inextricably mixed together.” Further, like Woolf, I must acknowledge that there is in essence no way to write conclusively of their answers.
First of all, in questioning the authors’ intentions, I believe strongly that they are neither fully knowable or that they are ultimately determinate of the essay’s form and impact. Yet in approaching the second question, intention is one available way to better understand the style of “Sextext” itself and what theoretical work it attempts to do. Yet, third, the reactions to “Sextext” are not only insightful in themselves, but as I explore in the essay, they seem inextricably linked to both the authors’ intentions and the nature of the text’s style itself. These plural purposes are necessary entangled—and I mean that in the fullest sense of quantum entanglement whereby “the objects that make up the system are linked in a way such that one cannot adequately describe the quantum state of a constituent of the system without full mention of its counterparts, even if the individual objects are spatially separated.”[1] Perhaps I could have been a physicist, but as I have been trained in the methods of the humanities, the only way for me to begin answering the call of “Sextext” was to write.
Certainly writing about writing is an ontologically limited act since the constraints of the first writing are complicit in the commentary’s as well. And yet something about “Sextext” seems to speak-without-words. I very literally feel it as I read. My body reacts and participates in the narrative, its gaze, and its desire. Through that I have come to realize that the excesses of the text are far more æffective[2] than the writing itself, and that occupying those excesses is the domain of the performative.
Yet while performance has many abilities beyond the text, it is often stricken with a lack (or loss) of clarity. Now surly part of its very essence is to question the normative value of “clarity” itself, but simply negating it outright is no more productive than negating performance. In a sense, those crude options are the province of “simple” transgression of which my essay argues is deeply limited in its ability to affect change. So living on the border between clarity and performance has been a struggle throughout the life of this essay. In a sense, it is one of the many ways it attempts to perform the practice of edging it describes.
In the present revision I have finally decided to add a descriptive preface. I believe more than the previous introduction, setting it apart from the performative prose serves both purposes of the essay. It gives clearer context, sets a limited goal, and lays out the theoretical landscape that will be explored. Also, where the more direct theoretical and methodological connections to many Text & Performance Quarterly essays had often seemed cumbersome in the performative text itself, I believe I now have found a way to work them in through a new interlude (the Anti-Entremés). I believe these two additions, more than anything else in this revision, helped make the essay more impactful both in the clarity of its performance and its relevance to the journal and discipline. I thank the reviewers for their strong urging to include that.
Next I would like to address a few concerns about the performative elements of this essay. First, the title now excludes explicit mention of edging and intellectual masturbation in favor of simply “On the Pleasure of the (Sex)Text”. This, I believe, goes a long way in setting the tone for the essay. That is, in line with some of the reviewers’ comments, I have attempted to play down elements of “shock” value where the “shock was the limit of their purpose. In particular, this title maintains the textual playfulness (evoking Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text) while more clearly and properly identifying “Sextext” as the object of this essay.
That is not to say that moments of shocking prose are never useful. In particular, the use of the Porter throughout is indeed meant to illicit certain physical and psychological responses from the reader. I cannot think of a way to properly perform “Sextext” without such movements. Similarly, one reviewer mentioned that lacking a more concrete description, the edging metaphor seems only there for shock value. In several places I have further clarified (and concretized) my description of edging. For instance, in the prologue’s footnote I added “Importantly, this practice is not opposed to orgasm, but neither is that its purpose. Rather edging is designed to prolong the moment of pleasure and to experience jouissance not as a climax but as a plateau. For, indeed, where the ‘edge’ of a specific orgasm is is never a stable boundary .” This essay is not a study of edging as a sexual-social practice. I have attempted to come a bit closer[3] to it, but a sufficient exploration of that is beyond the scope and purpose of this essay.
I hope this letter has provided a better sense of the history of this essay, since I realize now that its experiential “evolution” (I can’t think of an equivalent word without the normative connotation of “progress”) has directly shaped its content. Indeed this essay has performed the sense of edging that it discusses. At present it has been submitted three previous times. Each time it was neither accepted nor “rejected”. The state of revise-and-resubmit has thus far been stretched out over a year. It is while operating within this state of uncertainty that the present iteration of this essay unfolds.[4] I do not say that in order to illicit the feeling that the “effort” somehow makes it more deserving of publication, simply that I genuinely believe the metaphor of edging has broad heuristic value, and that this essay really has performed that through its long process of creation.
In closing these comments, I have been compelled to give The Porter a chance to speak, so I will leave you in his capable hands:
THE PORTER
If you accept this essay for publication you will be committing murder. It will die, and I along with it. The imminent plane of edging is a pleasurable site to occupy. But even I grow weary of its limits. I think it is time to leave this world so that I might return somewhere new. Of course, I have been drinking a lot of Cixous lately, perhaps I have let too much of her in. She is such an irrational bitch sometimes. I think I’ll cruise Barthes again, since he got away last time. He writes,
With the writer of bliss (and his reader) begins the untenable text, the impossible text. This text is outside pleasure, outside criticism, unless it is reached through another text of bliss: you cannot speak “on” such a text, you can only speak “in” it, in its fashion, enter into a desperate plagiarism, hysterically affirm the void of bliss (and no longer obsessively repeat the letter of pleasure).[5]
I am no longer sure if that is the sanction of this essay or its death. Perhaps neither. Either way, it is time for me to say goodbye. I have enjoyed our little encounter, such as it is.
[1] Forgive me, but Wikipedia phrased it in the most clear and concise way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
[2] This is what I believe it looks like when affect and effect make love.
[3] I really do enjoy double entendre :o)
[4] Blair, Brown, and Baxter decry that “works published in most of our academic journals display as little as possible the circumstances and activities of their production.” (“Disciplining the Feminine” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, 1994, p. 383)
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