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therefore it could die. Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite (sic): a black hole in the
fabric of the white man’s universe.
CONTAINING THE WILD(E) MAN
UNDER THE SIGN OF WILDE 85
When Wilde’s posing is looked at as a political act that represented an
ontological threat, then the motives, techniques, and circuits of the State’s
interpellation of Wilde as homosexual subject become understandable. By
collapsing subject and object onto the surfaces of his own body, Wilde had
challenged the natural order (and its reflection in the stability of the State) by
sundering the relationship between exteriority and interiority upon which
bourgeois epistemology was based. His imprisonment becomes, then, not the
finite result of his legal inscription, but the ongoing, performative State gesture
of reincorporation signifying the restoration of the fragile unity of the depth
model which he had come perilously close to toppling. Wilde’s imprisonment,
reread as the bourgeois establishment of an interior Homosexual essence meant
to sunder his unified play of surfaces, constitutes the first cultural sign of
homosexuality called into being through the ideological mechanism of the
strategy of containment, without which the juridicolegal labeling process could
not complete itself.
The containment process, meant to offset the cultural instability inaugurated
by Wilde’s transgressive reinscription, consisted of two parts, each drawn from
different sources. The first was sexology’s model of the homosexual type which
provided the frame name needed to initiate the labeling process. As Fredric
Jameson has explained:
To name something is to domesticate it, to refer to it repeatedly is to
persuade a fearful and beleaguered middle-class public that all of that is
part of a known and catalogued world and thus somehow in order. Such a
process would thus be equivalent, in the realm of everyday social life, of
that cooptation…that exhaustion of the novel raw material, which is one of
our principal techniques for deferring threatening and subversive ideas.
(1977:847)
The second part was supplied by Wilde himself whose transgressive signifying
codes of costume, gesture, and speech constituted the “novel raw material” coopted
and placed under the Name-of-the-Homosexual. Without Wilde’s posing
strategies there could have been no labeling process. The legal apparatus was not
capable of such invention. It could only produce an ideological construct, as
Louis Althusser has taught, by replacing the signified of an already existent
signifier:
ideology thus recognizes, despite its imaginary distortion, that the “ideas”
of a human subject exist in his actions…and if that is not the case, it lends