3 Model of Form: Samuel Delany as a Theorist of Racial Capitalism

This paper will read the paraliterary writings of Samuel R. Delany as occasions to think about how the literary mediates social form. Reading Delany with and against a set of Marxist debates that have come to be known as “value form theory”, I suggest it is in the very form of literature that we can observe more subtle, granular and quotidian experiences of value’s synthetic, exploitative, differential and expansive processes.

The paper will discuss three individual works of Delany to shed light on three different conjunctural moments in capital’s development. The first will take his sword and sorcery cycle, Nevèrÿon, as a point of departure for observing the capitalist system as it comes into view. I suggest that the cyclical form of the series encodes primitive accumulation as a process that makes history legible. The second will read his novella, Atlantis: Model 1924, as a figuration of America’s early twentieth century combined and uneven development. I show how Delany uses the Great Migration narrative to fictionalise the biography of his father’s move from North Carolina to New York; to hold the disparate economic conditions of the agricultural south and industrial north together in one dialectical image. The final part of the paper will discuss Delany’s, Dhalgren, as a conjuncture that prefigures three contemporary debates: the long downturn; racialisation and surplus populations; and the aesthetics of postmodernism. I argue that it is in the novel’s very formlessness that Delany discloses the racialised nature of the crisis. In each instance I show how the development of value’s web of compulsion produces racialised difference as it ceaselessly compels social life forward, and how literature is uniquely positioned to configure such moments at two levels at once — micrological detail and concrete totality.

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Image credit: Original cover art for Samuel Delany, Dhalgren, 1975.

The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.