Yingling, Thomas. "Aids in America: Postmodern Governance, Identity and Experience." In inside/out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories . Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991: 301-2

Baudrillard reads the media as destroyer of social meanings and as producer of information-as-spectacle and Benjamin marks this distinction as one between information and experience. But at stake in both analyses is history and the dialectic between the subject and her/his culture. Baudrillard may consider the curious passivity of the masses a sign of their denial of their own historicity while Benjamin's analysis is more clearly wagered on classical Marxian claims, but both fundamentally mistrust what Horkheimer and Adorno termed "the culture industry." Benjamin writes, "with the full control of the middle class, which has the press as one of its most important instruments in fully developed capitalism, there emerges a [new] form of communication . . . information." Baudrillardian speculation on the collapse of meaning would reject any appeal to the meaningfulness of internalized process as anachronistic; we will take up below Benjamin's complicated and peculiar use of the term "experience" as a signifier for collective, dialectical knowledge. For now, let us see that information is not so much for Benjamin a representation structured by false consciousness and open therefore to ideology critique as it is a mode of semiotic circulation directly opposed to the cultural and subjective valuation of experience expressed in the following:

Man's inner concerns do not have their issueless private character by nature. They do so only when he is increasingly unable to assimilate the date of the world around him by way of experience. Newspapers constitute one of many evidences of such an inability. If it were the intention of the press to have the reader assimilate the information it supplies as part of his own experience, it would not achieve its purpose. But its intention is just the opposite, and it is achieved: to isolate what happens from the realm in which it could affect the experience of the reader. The principles of journalistic information (freshness of the news, brevity, comprehensibility, and, above all, lack of connection between the individual news items) contribute as much to this as does the make-up of the pages and the paper's style.... The replacement of the older narration by information, of information by sensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience.

Each item, each piece of data refers only to itself; "news" is the reification and sale of event, and this becomes even more apparent when AIDS appears in contiguity to-and hence as the scandal of-a culture of celebrity (the "shame" that inverts its "fame"). The deaths of Rock Hudson, Liberace, William Smith, and Amanda Blake are re ported for their tremendous salability, but no connection between these deaths and the more political or even medical "facts" of the disease are encouraged in the reportage itself. One need not subscribe to a fully Marxian theory of history and culture to recognize that any reading practice failing to link supposedly autonomous events and universes of knowledge-scientific research, op-ed pieces, the visible deaths of stars and the invisible deaths of so many others, public demonstrations, treatment advances, hospital overcrowdings, insurance and legal issues-is condemned to a limited understanding if not to a simple repetition or invocation of myth. Nor ought such issues remain isolated in a frame marked "AIDS": they take place and meaning in more inclusive allegories of value that determine when, how, and if they will signify at all.

But how do we reconcile the fact that the genocide of AIDS continues to take shape in the United States both as deliberate public policy and more privately in the lives and on the bodies of millions of individuals, especially when the invocation of "individual," like Benjamin's appeal to "experience" or "inner concerns," would seem to many to operate within a discredited paradigm of subjectivity that locates meaning in interiority? More generally, what valence do we wish to assign subjectivity in our analysis of AIDS? Diana Fuss succinctly states in her inquiry into identity politics in gay and lesbian culture that "to the extent that identity always contains the specter of non-identity within it, the subject is always divided and identity is always purchased at the price of the exclusion of the Other, the repression or repudiation of non-identity." If identity is not only a fiction but a particularly fragile, chiasmatic, and contradictory fiction at that, what is the value-political, personal, or ontological-of that identity marked "person with AIDS"? Has the prostitute who identifies herself as such merely accepted a false coherency in her life, and is it possible to read the subject marked "person with AIDS" as coherent in any case? Is the man who denies that his HIV positivity allies him somehow with "them" (those "people with 'full-blown' AIDS") both politically reprehensible and accurate in his sense that "person with AIDS" constitutes a distinct category of being?

Carl Gutierrez-Jones,

Department of English

University of California

Santa Barbara, CA 93106

E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu