You are my density...

single paragraph from "Enjoyment (in) Between Fathers: General Chang as Homoerotic Enablement in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" by Evan Haffner:

Despite my apparent limitation here to two kinds of enjoyment -- my reifying the heterosexual/homosexual binary that risks retroactively fixing meaning on what hitherto might have been contingent -- it is imperative not to be seduced into yet another master narrative. It is not a matter of getting to "the real story" or of deconstructing anything purporting to be a real story, but of seeing how the various real stories are mutually enabling and how the space where meaning and identities emerge is constituted. This distinguishes a modernist symptomal reading that purports to uncover "the actual level" of agency from the obscuring symptoms, from a postmodern one in which the relationship between the "actual" agency and the obscuring symptoms is one of antagonism, of mutual enabling, constitution, and necessity. In other words, we cannot, in a modernist manner, separate the (sexual) symbolic practices of STVI from the (impossible total of) cinematic experience of the film. A postmodern logic still does, in some sense, reinscribe a necessary correlation of practices, but the difference from modernism lies in the nature of the relation: it is not one of determination or transparent mediation, but the one's necessity of the Other as medium because it is itself not a reifiable thing that has been clouded over by mediation, but is, rather, universalized mediation. Postmodernism is characterized not by modernism's evaporation but by modernist distinctions that have broken down. Hence critique must stage the historical distinctions in their reified moments before pushing on -- in a mode of inquiry fully conditioned by, but not reducible to, those distinctions -- before pushing on into, if you will, the philosophy of the broken down, of the urge: "The subjective Idea is in the first instance an urge. The specific nature of this urge is therefore to sublate its own subjectivity, to make its first abstract reality into a concrete one and to fill it with the content of the world presupposed by its subjectivity" (Hegel 1989, 783-784). That urge and breaking down is enjoyment and what prevents a pure differantial interstitiality; its figure in STVI is Chang in his obliteration. Chang is the figure of enjoyment's essentialization -- an essential instability. That is, Chang's presence is precisely what enables Admiral James T. Kirk's and First Officer/Science Officer Captain Spock's mutual enjoyment in rooting out the conspiracy and vanquishing him, while at the same time such enjoyment is itself grounded in the relentless, even desperate, pursuit of Chang's destruction and the consequent return to normativity. As a conditioning in-betweenness, Chang figures a differantial idealized contingency (modernist grounding in doubt); as presence, as one who does not just make enjoyment possible but embodies it, makes it appear, makes it present, he is an antidifferantial Father in whom enjoyment is (a postmodern avatar who even ungrounds Cartesian skepticism). This appearance of differance's becoming-dialectical destroys all claim to its pure polysemy, dissemination, and general economy. The postmodern difference is that neither is this postmodern economy restricted in the Derridean sense; it is, rather, finite, but indefinite.

(Footnotes and bibliography omitted.)

ack to Other Cool Sci-Fi Stuff.