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It would be hard not to notice the numerous rapid descents in the Dark Knight which, while uncommon for filmic representations of superheroes, seem particularly frantic and well done. I would argue that this is indicative of the film’s content as well as its form: the Dark Knight is not so much the recognizable ‘descent into madness’ but more the repetitive chaos that threatens the apathetically sane post-capitalist world. [Spoilers Follow.]
Let us make a decision - cut one half of the vicious fluid from the other - for our purposes slime is an organic substance and is different from waste in that waste is what the organic sheds to shed whereas slime harbors a stronger claim to the core of the organism - it’s functions or its essence itself. The beginning of slime is the beginning of life itself - the clutter of pools, some millions of years ago, in which nucleic acids danced and chained together birthing life itself. Amniotic fluid, stolen by Victor Frankenstein by the bucket full (in the most true film adaptation), the glistening trails left by verminous life forms and so forth. There is the move from slime as the trace of life (either as primodrial or putrefaction) to the innocous artificial slime, that is, the stain of life instead of its trace. This domestication of slime, in its severe popularity, seems to coincide with the environmental upshot of the late 1980s and early 1980s - no doubt fueled by the Chernobyl incident, the Antarctic Ozone Hole, as well as the spill of the Exxon Valdez. The cultural explosion seems apparent in the likes of Captain Planet, TMNT, Toxic Avengers, The Stuff, and various Nickelodeon compounds such as Gak, Floam, Goooze, Skweez, and Sqand. Artificial slime would not meet our first definition but to call it sludge would suggest a disintegration of the organic or inorganic and not a purposefully created non-Newtonian fluid.
Might this creative sludge be akin to a zombie populism - a deterritorialized flesh a la Hardt and Negri. As Steven Shaviro wonderfully illustrates, capital has claimed, and will not let go of the monstrousness of things. This is why, in the best zombie narratives, exemplified by Romero’s work, humans are always more of a threat to one another then the zombies, simply because they cling to what capitalism has taught them. We could also later their use of the Golem in relation to characters such as Swamp Thing and The Heap and Man Thing.
We can relate this view of politics back to the explosion of the environmental concern of the late 80s and early 90s - particularly in relation to Captain Planet. Created by Ted Turner, the show was a strong supporter of globalization and NATO as the singular governing body (obviously with the United States as the unofficial center). While writers such as Mike Davis (Planet of Slums) has pointed out globalization’s output of ecological disaster, the moment of Chernobyl and Exxon Valdez, signaled the beginning of the end for the USSR. Limp leadership and the failures of Afghanistan and the like, were evident of the eminent collapse and hence, it was a no-brainer that a logic of the global in the sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ and globalized markets, would be wed.
Thus we have the move from the slime that promises either life or death to the slime that gives us the always-already cohesive - that no matter how much one prods the material, it strengthens for the worse. In essence, globalization marks the deterritorialization of the monstrous social - where the more one struggles to escape the faster you sink. Instead of situationist recuperation, we have a meta-recuperation - where the excess of capitalist recuperation is posited as an escape from banality and this escape is codified in terms of new pleasures - Zizek’s supereogic demand of ‘Enjoy!’
Opposed to this false hope of futurity we have the equally misguided false nihilism, of Badiou’s image of the punk rocker who screams no future! Zizek’s Bartleby politics may error towards such useless negativity or may even equate if such a refusal is seen as anything other than a ‘clearing of the field.’ Lee Edelman’s No Future, is a perfect example of how a ‘politics of the Real’ can be misleading. Edelman seems to either conflate or confuse the Real Real and the Imaginary Real - the Real as disgusting void and the real of the narcisstic self, the in oneself more than oneself. How can a politics recognize a horrible sameness, a stupid materiality (such is the meaning of the word golem taking into its various interpretations in Hebrew) without resorting to defeat or romancing an unbearable life (fleshy zombic multitudes somehow outside capital) or blank futurity found in ‘the children are our future’ which is oppressively heternormative and, biological true.
To return to our divided slime that is the trace of life (the zombic) and the promise of life (the baby’s face) how might we bring this to the Real or bring the Real to them without creating a facism of the face (a la Edelman) or a hollow utopian creature (a la Negri and Hardt)? If Zizek represents a more nuanced version of the first then it would seem that Badiou would fall in line with the latter at least in terms of ostensible negativity and positivity. But, in terms of pragmatism, both of these thinkers are consistently critiqued for being too obtuse when it comes to politics coming into practice. While I believe there is some use in synthezing the two in a kind of looking awry at the event, the longevity of Zizek’s disruptive negativity seems to falter as does the murk of Badiou’s pre-Evental time.
Assuming that we are only ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ can there be a politics which is true to our finitude without falling into a hip nihilism which only engenders narcissism or, even worse, Randian objectivism? The closing pages of Nihil Unbound, leans towards what might be a politics, in that, jumping from Freud’s theory of the drive as repetition, there is an inherent will-to-know in humans that is, contrary to most of the universe, negentropic. As mentioned in the last piece, Brassier ignores half of the equation - the axis of alteration - the way in which the external world, whether this externality is something happening to the subject (from the physical outside) or an inexplicable unconcious thought causes a somatic state which is then connected to a consciously experienced externality. We could say that the synchronic axis of alteration is akin to Badiou’s evental politics whereas the axis of iteration is bound to Zizek’s politics of the act.
Bruno Bosteels puts it best when he says the political difference of psychoanalysis and Badiouian politics is “a vanishing apparition of the real as absent cause (for Lacan) or a forceful transformation of the real into a consistent truth (for Badiou).” However, as Zizek notes here, it is not simply that the break of the act for Lacan is the Truth opposed to Badiou’s fidelity to the event as truth, but that, for Lacan, truth lies after the fact in the response to the act. For Lacan (and ZIzek) truth is a form of already existant fiction whereas, for Baidou, the event is absorbed into a new structure. Zizek critiques Badiou for separating event from being and that keeping the multitude from the crystallizing one of the event, he maintains a naive oppositional stance - the building of a new structure intsead of an internal rupture.
To return us to slime, Badiou’s politics is the very move from the biological to the synthetic that is, politics is forgoing the trace of life, whether rotting or promising, whereas a psychoanalytic politics embraces the excess of the slime as life, as life being naturally unnatural - hence the negentropy of the drive along the axes of iteration and alteration. The quick political jump, which is the error, is to then proscribe a politics which happens by the very nature of the fleshy multitude, the slime of being. The question becomes: how does one account for the genesis of the multitude in a non-vitalist way, in a philosophically realist way, that does not occlude the possibility of politics? While speculative realism provides a step in the right direction, it that it illustrates the radicality of thought by ‘immanencizing’ the transcendental by binding it to the object, this remains a strong articulation of what Freud called material truth without giving any weight to historical truth - the truth of the unconscious, of affect, of implication.
Brassier, in his texts prior to Nihil Unbound, suggests that Laurelle’s non-philosophy, taken as philosophy, gives as a possibility of thinking capitalism as a decision - that the pre-capital can be thought. While the objects of a pre-capitalism (objects including subjects can be thought) one cannot simply remove the noetic trenches that capital has dug in our gray matter: our relation to capital centers on whether surplus value is Real, ontological or experiential. If capital invented surplus value, if it serves as its objet petit a (as Zizek argues) then how do we account for Harman’s discussion of object’s inherent allure? Or does this equate an excess that is hidden in the object versus an excess that is exuded by the object - that is, since Harman’s allure centers on the hidden depths of the object, can we separate capital’s surplus value as the possibility of the social, the social itself as object? Where Marx stated that the glow of the object relied on the suppression of its material history, the invested labor, doesn’t Harman’s objective allure have to do with the historical truth of objects, that is, there unknown relation and not there unknown being? That is, although Speculative Realism demystifies the object, it essentially mystifies the relation of objects via the occasionalism of Harman, the loss of cause and effects’ linkage via Meillassoux, the objectification of the subject via Brassier and the material excess of ontology a la Grant. This demystification highlights the gap between surplus value (the non-object, or in Laurelle the decision) and the fantasy of endless productivity.
Hence, the implicit politics in Speculative Realism is found in its return to slime as the trace of life, that the smudge of materiality cannot be idealized away, not even in the most basic form of relation itself, in the notion of currency and exchange. This zero point of being is, in a sense, a paradoxically deanthropomorphized bio-politics - that matter matters in that it can think itself as such without recourse to the reflective structures of ethics or democracy. Speculative Realism exposes that the zombic hunger of Hardt and Negri’s multitude is a form of thinking and not a form of being. The psychoanalytic contribution here is that capital, while inhabiting the drive’s mode of iteration, is still subject to alteration. In thinking capital as object we highlight the objects around it as possibly dissociable from it such as democracy and the social.
/1/ - Critical Separation
What is it that separates human beings from animals? It is a simple question in the most broad sense and one that is constantly answered and simultaneously unanswerable. The connective tissue is one immersed in violence - when humans are treated ‘like animals’ do both the torturers and the subjects of torture become less than human or do both become more human? Is the infliction of pain on another person a human act assuming its outside of survival, clearly human and is what makes us human in our suffering the fact that, a la V for Vendetta, there is that which can never be destroyed by violence, the inch of our unknowable subjectivity which grants us the possibility of immortality.
Such capacity for immortality is the only purely human trait according to Badiou’s Ethics. In an interview appendix of the text, Badiou is jokingly attacked by Peter Hallward for being too hard on animals. Badiou states that, in a sort of material sense, we are animals, we belong in the category of animals. What sets is apart on a base level is our use of mathematics and, as Badiou sees it, it is mathematics which is the language which allows us to understand ontology, to access the possibility of subjective fidelity to an event, to become a subject in the wake of an event. Badiou argues that the animality of humans is exceeded by a kind of grace of thought - though the event is itself only materiality, it is a materiality grasped in a way that cannot be reduced to the interactions of the material pieces of our animal brains.
In terms of history of course, the line is blurred through long years of horrific treatment. The institution of slavery, the popularity of humans-as-spectacle in various world’s fairs - the human zoo of the Paris exposition, the odd fame of the Hottentot Venus and so forth. Given that so much animal treatment has primarily to do with enclosure, it should be no surprise that Agamben constructs the difference between animal and human with spatial perception as the material. Following Heidegger, Agamben argues that the animal perceives a mess of small worlds whereas only the human being sees the open as such, the broad system. The chapter entitled ‘Tick’ is an excellent example - the creature is blind and only sniffs out blood to feed on. Nietzsche’s comments about animal memory in The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, seem to come to a similar conclusion - the absence of history in animals leaves them in ignorant bliss.
/2/ - Contractual Interrelations
Waltzing through Manhattan instantly gives one an idea of how people will go for their pets emotionally, conceptually and financially. The anthropomorphization of dogs and cats in particular is evidence of the weight of anthrozoological relations. The domestication of the dog and the horse goes back tens of thousands of years and the use of live stock just as far if not further. Despite technological advance, services animals are still widely used to aid the blind and the deaf, and the benefits of human-animal contact for the sick and disabled is still popular.
A brief tour of reality television illustrates human investment in the pet - The Dog Whisperer, documents the inability of humans to control their pets as well as the relative ease of doing so. Interestingly enough, Cesar Milan’s approach is to instruct the owner to become a pack leader, an odd sort of Deleuzian becoming-animal if there ever was one. To become a pack is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to shift from the molar to the molecular, the embrace a sort of errant multiplicity. Dog Town, which tells various stories surrounding the animals and people of a giant rescue in northern Arizona, is evidence of the cost and effort that many are willing to put in to care for sick and homeless animals.
The notorious PETA is, of course, diametrically opposed to such relations. To say nothing of their activism, their media tactics have become increasingly ridiculously. Not too long ago they began a media campaign called the holocaust on your plate. The campaign juxtaposed large pictures of holocaust victims within camp walls with shots of animals in farm cages. The creator of the media argued that the same mindset allowed both to happen. The animalization of the Jews is, of course nothing new. Several of the Nazi texts, particular those that focused on the so called original races from mythological times.
In Mladen Dolar’s A Voice and Nothing More, there is an interesting anecdote about the relation of mice to Jews. He writes: “With mice we should also keep in mind the connection in German (a verb derived from Yiddish for Moses, Mausche, and meaning to speak Yiddish or Yiddishized German, and by extension to speak in an incomprehensible way, and by further extension secret dealings, hidden afairs, decit).” (p. 208)
Art Spiegelman’s well known Maus, tells one man’s experience of the holocaust by using anthropomorphic animals: the Jews are mice, the Polish pigs, the Nazis are cats, the Americans dogs and so forth. While there are several critical essays on Maus, they have become hard to find and many focus more of their attention on memory then the animalization of the holocaust. The effect, instead of trivializing history, brings a tenderness through sheer difference that is increasingly hard to find in the plethora of holocaust tales. The likely explanation here would be that of the uncanny valley - that non-humans with human characteristics create a strong emotional response. A somewhat similar attempt is made, in regards to the Iraq War, in Brian Vaughn’s Pride of Baghdad.
/3/ - Deep relations
While several texts have emerged regarding human animal relations, Midas Dekkers’ text Dearest Pet: On Bestiality remains one of the few that critical deals with zoophilia. Dekkers makes a fuss over how despite the intent of affection we have for our pets we can carefully mentally eliminate the possibility of cross species contact. This fear, as Deleuze and Guattari make clear, has quite a bit to do with theology - the witch, the devil et cetera, are always bestial, unnatural. D and G, in A Thousand Plateaus, confront psychoanalysis as unduly erasing the category becoming-animal, that it reduces the animal to the drives, to the bare biology, even pre-biological (p. 258-259).
Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Naughts (aka Zoo) follows two previously conjoined twins, Oliver and Oswald, whose wives die in a strange car accident. The two of them become obsessed with death, decay and the beginnings of life as well as strange coincidences surrounding the crash - the woman driving, who survived, was named Buick, and lost her baby after taken mercury in the past. She lost another pregnancy in the car crash - the car was a ford mercury. The accident was caused when Buick was distracted by a series of swans - the street she was on was swan lane.
The brothers soon produce time lapse movies of animals decaying, in an attempt to understand what happened to their wives as well as their own grief. Coupled with this is a fascination with amputation - Buick’s leg is amputated because of the crash and she later asks for the second to be done. This amputation, as well as Oswald’s and Oliver’s relationship, is mended through a strange appreciation of symmetry. The twins, both zoologists, relate their own state of being to the zoo in that, in previous times, conjoined twins would be deemed an oddity and locked up in cages, as was the aforementioned venus.
The films most interesting side character is, incidentally, Venus, a seamstress who sells her body and tells extravagant tales of bestiality on the side in hopes of one day being published. The large ominous blue sign of the Zoo, which simply says ZOO in giant blue letters, is seen backwards, as ooz or ooze, as that which all life returns to, as Venus goes of to either have sex with a zebra or die by it, it is not clear. By way of her unseen death, Venus provides a common connection of love and death as well as the knot of not being ever able to know how things end, the specifics of death (what the brothers are trying to understand) nor the beginning, the rising from the ooze.
If, following Badiou, we are capable of escaping the gravity of our bestial nature through a kind of errant immortality, then in what ways do we turn back to the animal?
/4/ - Battles or separation unraveled
The history channel’s recent special Life After Humans, wonders what would happen if every human on the planet was to up and leave. The show devotes most of its time to structural decay and the inevitable rampancy of animals after our sudden departure but also shows the severity of our current impact on them in myriad ways. For one, the special talked of how roads violently carve up the migration paths of many animals, most notably bears.
Warner Hertzog’s Grizzly Man is, at least partially, about a failed attempt to return to nature. The film follows Timothy Treadwell, an animal enthusiast who, along with his girlfriend, was found eaten alive by bears - his watch ticking on a disembodied hand. Treadwell, as well as various other animal hunters, many of which seem to care far less about conservation than he did, are written off, particularly when they die, as fools who tested the mettle of Mother Nature and hence none of us should be surprised.
Returning to Life After Humans, there is an ever present motif in disaster and apocalyptic/post apocalyptic films - that of the animals once enslaved, turning back to nature or perhaps, more accurately, reasserting their nature despite their bonds. The deer wondering through the abandoned school, the horse and carriage wondering without driver or passenger. Is this suggestive of a naive return to nature, to some harmony?
The very concept of nature itself, seen through the eyes of humans, is unnatural, such as when Lacan articulates the concept of antiphusis or anti-nature. As Lacanians such as Adrian Johnston and Lorenzo Chisea have discussed, human existence is shot through with the symbolic from the moment of our birth. Just as there is something always already ruined about humans (as animals at least) there is always the bit of the beast that cannot be erased from the animal - that glimmer of hunger or chance at escape which remains. The weighing question is the same that is at the end of the film Equus: who is it that really has the bit in the mouth?
/1/ - The Surreal and the Pornographic
At the risk of crassness, couldn’t we say that the link between Clowes, Lynch and the pornographic is that of the hole? Isn’t the very dynamic of pornography the interplay between penetration and its limit? Isn’t the pornographic image par excellence that of the completely penetrated woman who, some how, in a kind of defiance of physics and sheer materiality, manages to maintain some sort of consistency? While this raises interesting connections to Lacan’s discussion of jouissance feminine (which I’ll discuss below) it also lends weight to Žižek’s assertion of how men are desubjectified in the pornographic encounter. The male body is taken to be a completely flat entity, taken apart and cut up more into chunks than the female body. The argument here is that really the masculine force need only be a set of stupid signifiers whereas the woman must be felt as the Freudian Thing, the endlessly plastic entity that survives every alteration.
This survival is based not on the fact that the female body escapes the phallic (read symbolic) economy, but that it is so completely subject to it that it escapes its very logic. In Suzanne Barnard’s discussion in Reading Seminar XX there is a point where she discusses the Real in relation to language in which all jouissance is codified phallic - so how is it that there can be such a thing as jouissance feminine? Furthermore this is complicated by the fact that Lacan states that jouissance feminine is spoken. The collusion of the surreal and the erotic proves itself an excellent example of how the Real is the symbolic in the mode of the not-all. The not-all or pas-tout can be seen in the porosity of fiction.
This is particularly evident in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. As Žižek discusses in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, the opening scene is particularly expressive of this aspect when after showing an average scene of idyllic white picket fence America, the old man watering the garden has a heart attack. The interesting touch is not that the camera focuses on the face of the man as it moves close to him, but instead it goes past his face and enters the pristine green grass to show the seething layer of dirt and instincts. While there is the one obvious message of the falseness of the small town America veneer, there is also a larger issue of the very porosity of reality or, more importantly, what we take to be reality, that of the signifier.
Another discussion of how jouissance feminine is symbolic also in the mode of its delivery - it is spoken (and this is where Barnard had an issue with how spoken jouissance can function in a phallic economy). In the Pervert’s Guide as well as in the The Puppet and the Dwarf, Žižek uses the example of Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona in which one of the character’s enacts one of the most erotic scenes in cinema simply by the way she recounts a scene of sex, a beach orgy.
He sums it up in the following way: “the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of the non-All” and also that “to step into the Real does not entail abandoning language, throwing oneself into the abyss of the chaotic Real, but, on the contrary, dropping the very allusion to some external point of reference which eludes the Symbolic” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 69-70). It’s in this way that the symbolic, and in particular the feminine approach to the symbolic, is one that is porous. The idea of feminine jouissance is one that essentially ‘floats’ through the symbolic - not in an ideal way in which it simply bypasses it outside, but by passing through the cracks that can only be seen by submitting to it completely.
/2/ - Switching frames
Here I am tempted to continue a theme that has cropped up in several of my recent posts and relates, in particular to both film and graphic novels. But instead of discussing the idea of narrative gaps in terms of the gaps between scenes/frames, we can discuss the concept of the gap that is invited when there is a switch of sorts.
In David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive the concept of switching is pivotal the entire text and, in particular, the shifting places of reality and unreality. While there is one large switch in the film (involving the blue box and, incidentally, a scene of masturbation) but beyond this there are several odd moments that involve smaller and smaller levels of shifts. For instance when Naomi Watts’ naive young character goes to try out for a role - her acting in the scene (essentially her acting as she is trying to act) is far superior to her acting in the film (Muholland Drive) which is purposefully cheesy. Referring again to The Pervert’s Guide, Žižek discusses how Mulholland Drive is all about over proximity - everything is too much - too bright, too hot, too cold, the music in the theater is simply too emotional for any one to take. So how does the switching play into this?
If Lynch’s films, and in particular Mulholland, is about about over proximity then it seems that such proximity enhances the notions of gaps, or put more directly, when the frame becomes a thing in and of itself that to move from frame to frame, to try and experience things differently becomes the most unbearable gap. What makes the switch so painful is not much the feeling of the unknown other qua other - but the fact that there are different experience period. When Naomi Watts’ character writhes from the music (which is not coming from the singer but beyond the singer) it’s not so much the sound itself but the fact that the experience of the singer is so clearly and painfully expressible to her. In a sense, Mulholland Drive is painful exactly because it is not a comic book, because there is no comfortable whiteness between the frames but only rough cuts and that which seems like nonsense. It’s worth noting that the last word of the film is silencio (silence) uttered by the singer who previously collapsed during the song that wasn’t actually hers.
Daniel Clowes could easily be called the David Lynch of the comic book/graphic novel world - particularly when one looks at Eightball, David Boring and Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron in particular. If we wish to attempt a kind of porosity of the signifier in the comic book/graphic world than Clowes is the best candidate.
/3/ - Sex or story?
Velvet glove falls somewhere between the realm of the Twin Peaks and the exploitation films of Russ Meyer. Much of Clowes works plays with the boundary between pornography and fiction as well. The stupid flatness of the signifier (as I suggested in the first section regarding pornography) is all over Velvet Glove. After being beaten by two bored police officers, they carve a stupid face (Mr Jones) into his foot to mark him. That face starts appearing everywhere, and drives Clay crazy. He starts running into other characters who have dedicated their lives to trying to understand the figure of Mr Jones - there was a small tattoo on Hitler’s neck etc, the person who knows the ‘truth’ about the figure says it is only a joke. Ultimately Clay attempts to find some sort of meaning in something meaningless, in a snuff film that was based on the strange rantings of a little girl. In addition to the sort of meaningless chase for meaning, the text is obsessed with mutations and non-sexual relationships or overly casual encounters.
So why is it that so many surreal texts are inherently sexual or is it that sexuality itself is surreal, essentially nonsensical? To return to the aforementioned point about the symbolic and sex, and, again returning to The Pervert’s Guide, Žižek makes the obvious but at times forgotten point that ’sexuality is never about bodies, it is about words.’ Following this point Žižek discusses the fundamental prohibition of pornography. Everything can be seen, but almost nothing can be told, no true narrative can come to pass in that there can be no emotion. (A film like John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus may try and challenge such a deadlock but since I have not seen it I cannot comment on its effectiveness.)
Using the example of Eyes Wide Shut, Žižek points out how the entire film (especially seen in the awkwardly cold orgy scenes) is about how male fantasy can never catch up to the feminine fantasy. And what is interesting of course is that Kidman’s character never actually commits any acts of betrayal, it is her imagined affair with the officer that her husband cannot stand. So here we have the standard difference of men and women’s different approaches to the erotic - that one is visual while the other is narratological. If there is something in common however, or something that upsets that simply division it seems that it would be the otherworldliness or desire - the points at which desire is a horrifying disgusting thing.
Another Lynch film that Žižek discusses in the Pervert’s Guide is that of Wild at Heart. At one point in the film one of the characters (Bobby Peru) is molesting a woman terribly and repeating over over again ’say fuck me’ to her. After much coaxing and terrorizing on his part she finally says it. When she does he jumps away and smiles in a friendly fashion saying no thanks and that he’ll do it eventually but not now. The comment is absolutely devastating - it amounts to the worst form of mental rape. He essentially constructs a fantasy and then the moment she (forcibly) realizes it he rejects her.
/4/ - Corporeal concerns (the pornographic again)
Does the body just get in the way then, is it always as Žižek puts it a kind of masturbatory support for men and the porous entity which gets swept away in the story for women? To bring things back to the signifier, to complicate the issue a bit, the body, in psychoanalytic theory is a kind of plane of mediation. The body mostly comes into play when one discusses one of Freud’s partial objects such as the voice and the gaze. Ultimately the body is just the remainder, the ’stupid piece of meat’ that suggests that there is a greater meaning to every surface, every image. The porosity of the signifier, of symbolic existence, suggests the possibility of true meaning, of an actual origin. As Lacan says - words don’t refer to reality, they dig a hole in it. Or, following Sylvain Lazarus, the use of the symbolic, and in particular the proper name ‘indexes the real’, the word functions as a tipping point from the known towards the unknown.
To return to the concept of lost origin, and its treatment in Velvet Glove, the very mystery of enjoyment (jouissance) is staged in an odd way in the pornographic. One can take a look at the cum shot as the symbolic gesture to bring our discussion to a point. Film theorist Linda Williams in her text Hard Core, discusses how the money shot has endured for over thirty years because it is a necessary tool to display the authenticity of the sexual act (that orgasm occurred) and, as she states, an image necessary because of the inability to visualize female orgasm. While the money shot can easily be seen to be the externalized expression of male pleasure, one can see (both theoretically and practically) that the female orgasm is a visual spectacle in and of itself for a majority of reasons.
Historically the money shot has shifted - originally being on the back, stomach or anus to being almost always a facial. More recently the cum shot has put more focus on the open mouth and most recently, the eyes. The wasted seed on the face is the very image of the lost origin - if we think about it terms of wasted DNA. The very impossibility/ ridiculousness of pure enjoyment is colored by the fact that any enjoyment comes at a logical cost - not a cost that is logical but something that costs logic itself. In Kantian terms - the split subject is one split between reflection and apprehension - a subject which is split down the center between logic (how our being is formed/directed by large semi-transcendental factors) and psychology (those internal factors which are sensible only to ourselves in moments of reflection).
To further this logic, taking into account Kant’s seemingly paradoxical decisions stemming from The Critique of Judgment, a certain amount of sexual pleasure arises only when one says ‘no’ to the evolutionary imperative to ‘further the species.’ To bring this to a close, in the most ridiculous fashion possible - it would be best to take into account Lacan’s fictional creation of the undivided libidinal energy - that of the lamella.
In the Eleventh seminar Lacan discusses the lamella as the ‘object of the libido’ and, interestingly for our purposes here, Lacan tells a story of the lamella possibly leaping on one’s face in the night. The lamella (literally meaning man omelette) is a kind of pure surface - the horrible remainder that remains after castration (the loss of the authority which anchors and allows for the symbolic). It embodies the very failure of sex - the impossibility of the sexual relation. To drag more Lacanian terms out of the drawer, the facial is the collision of intimacy and extimacy. The exitimate is not simply the opposite of intimate, it is that which is ‘in more you than you’, it is the objet petit a, the little piece of the real. The collision occurs because it is in effect, the end, or at least, halted moment of desire (orgasm) but at the same time the promise of the unseen enjoyment, of possible enjoyment - the object cause of desire which is, in and of itself, nonsensical. The open mouth suggests the endless nature of desire (as drive) but the basic genetic (literally the building blocks of life) residue is also present - the basic vulgar reality of our desire which always comes to the same.
/5/ - Quickly to the end…
Ultimately the porosity of the signifier demands that one take seriously the issues of Freudian metapsychology, the question of how much of the subject is determined by noumenal concerns, ‘genetic’ frameworks which direct our paths, and how much of that frame is bent by our experiences. This same question is echoed in the above mentioned conflict between desire and drive - desire with a particular object, an object that is always changing (based on our experiences) and that which never changes, the kinks and longings we cannot shake from our fleshy bodies (based on our mental ‘genetic code’)
“The Portent” by Herman Melville
“Hanging from the beam,
Slowly swaying (such the law),
Gaunt the shadow on the green,
Shenandoah!
The cut is on the crown
( Lo, John Brown),
And the stabs shall heal no more.
Hidden in the cap
Is the anguish none can draw;
So your future veils its face,
Shenandoah!
But the streaming beard is shown
(Weird John Brown),
The meteor of the war.”
I have recently finished Russell Banks’ novel Cloudsplitter which tells the story of the pre-Civil War abolitionist John Brown. Told through the eyes of Owen Brown the book questions the sanity and ethics of the man.
The blurb on the back of the text refers to Brown as a terrorist, though the book was published before 2001, before that word took on its current meaning, but still that word seems to be one that tends to put an end to thinking. Thankfully the book does not do this, it refuses to place Brown in any firm and easy category. Cloudsplitter wavers from an apologetic apologia to praise of Brown’s fervor - the importance of action, the Christian duty to combat slavery and so on. Recalling my high school education concerning the man, I remember him as a notable, but laugable, footnote to the lead up to the civil war, and was discussed in such a way that begged him to be dimissed as a lunatic. If we can shake loose the rhetorical baggage of the word terrorist, the inescapable evil of that word, we can say that Brown was a terrorist in that yes, very directly, he wished to terrorize the pro-slavery forces attempting to claim Kansas as a slave state. While terrorism has (seemingly) come to mean indiscriminate violence towards innocents, that current definition, I would argue, does not fit Brown.
What does one make of the Pottawatomie massacre then when Brown directed his children to drag five pro-slavery settlers from their beds in the middle of the night and hacked them to bits with broad swords? It is important to note that Brown did not start out as a violent militant, though that’s where the stories of him so often start. For years Brown organized and maintained a vein of the underground railroad while he lived in North Elba, NY.
Throughout his life and after Brown had the earnest support of Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Henry David Thoreau and other countless abolitionists both black and white.
The importance of Brown, and his eventual legacy, was summarized best in Victor Hugo’s open letter written in 1859 from exile:
Victor Hugo
“Politically speaking, the murder of John Brown would be an uncorrectable sin. It would create in the Union a latent fissure that would in the long run dislocate it. Brown’s agony might perhaps consolidate slavery in Virginia, but it would certainly shake the whole American democracy. You save your shame, but you kill your glory. Morally speaking, it seems a part of the human light would put itself out, that the very notion of justice and injustice would hide itself in darkness, on that day where one would see the assassination of Emancipation by Liberty itself. [...]
Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus.”
If we can dismiss the political attacks on Brown what still lingers is the charge of madness.
The role of madness is of course widely used in fictional and non-fictional accounts of near-solitary revolutionaries. The solitary hero has been on the screen quite frequently as of late. The figure of the revolutionary figure has appeared on the silver screen again and again, in the last few years, largely due to the comic renaissance. One of the most extreme examples of this, aside from V for Vendetta, is Sin City. The figure of Marv (played by Micky Rourke in the film) is particularly interesting because the cause of his actions, seems to be so tenuous yet it takes a hold of him so strongly.
Marv, militant or madman?
Unlike the eternal hero of Don Quixote though, Marx is quite aware of his madness and instead of being tempered by his colleagues he is egged on. Surely Goldie’s death is an injustice, but is it only through Marv’s madness that his devotion to bring her killer down possible? Marv’s only justification for what he is doing is that “She [Goldie] was nice to me” (p. 157 of The Hard Goodbye).
Mark Fisher in his essay “Gothic Oedipus: subjectivity and Capitalism in Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins” argues that in Sin City Miller creates a world that brings about “demythologization” and casts the world in shades of gray. I would argue that this is not the case, especially as Marv is concerned.
This is shown best by Miller himself in the collection Booze, Broads, & Bullets. The short Silent Night starts with Marv looking at the reader stating “Be Good.” The next five pages show Marv walking through the snow without caption or dialog. He approaches a seedy looking club and intimidates his way into its dungeonous interior. He offers money to a woman and is then led by her and two armed guards to a room where a small girl is being kept locked up. Marv looks in on her then kills the guards and the woman. He then tells the little girl that he’s taking her home to her mother. It ends with Marv looking again at the reader asking “You being good yet?”
I do not see any shades of gray here. Marv’s challenge is that the ‘good’ he is doing makes us uneasy in that he is killing three people. Here is an example of how diabolical evil and the highest good are symmetrical in Kantian terms as Zupancic argues in Ethics of the Real (p. 91). Marv kills people who have kidnapped a child and are willing, we assume, to sell her body. The form of his action, murder, does not discount the good arising from the content of his action. I think Miller’s point is not at all about shades of gray but about how we view the good. Good in the current sense, more often is non-violent or about temporarily bandaging a given situation, whereas for Miller it is far more direct and unpleasant. In the end I think madness is a moot point…
This is not meant to be an ‘ends justify the means’ argument but at the same time I am very of those who dismiss violence or other forms of direct action. Returning to John Brown it is important to note the difference between him and some of his abolitionist colleagues, particularly those in New England. Frederick Douglass who would not help Brown in Harper’s Ferry wrote following the Civil War:
The Sage of Anacostia
“Did John Brown fail? John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic. His zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him.”
It is telling as well that on the day of his execution, sixteen months before the Civil War, Brown wrote:
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”
For many abolitionists, equality needed to be fought for, for Brown equality always existed, in the eyes of God, and that’s why slavery needed to be destroyed. For these reasons I find it ridiculous that anyone could dismiss Brown’s actions as simply terroristic Though in the eyes of many, and in the structure of the government, it would be quite a long time before something that even looked like racial equality would exist. Does the violent radicalism of Brown need a sober compliment or vice versa? Some of the most powerful moments in Cloudsplitter are between Frederick Douglass and John Brown, when they sit at a table arguing over plans and afterwards a silence falls in the room. Something passes between them that is a strange kind of understanding.
The only other thing like this, this unspoken understanding in regards to the issue of race that comes to mind is when Abel Meeropol, a Communist, Jew and Union man, in the 1930s wrote a poem and then later turned it into song lyrics. The lyrics were eventually presented to Billie Holiday and became the song Strange Fruit. It was not a meteor but something else, when at the end of her set the club would dim the lights, drink and food service would stop, and one spotlight would rest on Holiday as she sang:
Billie Holiday
Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and at the root
Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees
Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh
Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop
