"clouds of connotations" vs. "representation"
Delany 200: "Art for me is a system which allows freedom of juxtapositions, suggestions, and interpretation [...] representation is only one of the things that juxtapositions, suggestions, and interpretations working together in a particularly limited--and operationalized--way can bring about."
201: "Traditionally criticism tends to speak of juxtapositions, suggestions, and interpretations as if they followed after representation; as if they were something that grew out of representation. But that is not the case."
"The things alone that differentiate the work of various artists in their representations of this or that object is the analysis of [...] anterior juxtapositions and suggestions that allows representation--the effect of multiple suggestions that we recognize as representation--to manifest."
In fact, "the artist who tries to go straight for representation without the anterior analysis of the suggestions and juxtapositions of the pre-representational condition [...] often we perceive as a hack" (202-3)
in works like Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, Joyce's Ulysses, or Ginsberg's Howl, it is less "what [is] being represented" that is objected to in their obscenity trials and more "the clouds of uncomfortable suggestions and connotations that actually constitute the work"