The Manufacturing of Desire

/1/ - The dollhouse’s plasticities

If one was not already aware of the peculiar cultural curiosity of Realdolls, then the film Lars and the Real Girl will certainly bring the odd creations to light. The dolls, which are carefully crafted companions made by molding silicone over a flexible metal skeleton, cost around six thousand dollars and come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and skin tones.

The doll was introduced in the mid-to-late nineties by a small company in California called Abyss Creations and, while several imitators have arisen, Abyss remains the most well known. The dolls are sold primarily for sex, though some buyers use them as art pieces, model stand-ins, et cetera. Used models can also be purchased on ebay and in several of the online communities which have grown in response to the product. Numerous sites carry lengthy forums discussing everything from dressing tips, advice on creating more realistic eyebrows, and so forth. Men discuss how to best heat their dolls’ bodies or just their vaginae. There is even a monthly webzine called Coverdoll, which features pictures of upscale dolls and dozens of articles about them.

What is most interesting about Realdolls, aside from the uncanny creepiness pictures of them invoke, is the rhetoric surrounding the men (and some women) who have them. There’s been a Salon article, a BBC documentary and several fictitious representations and the treatment of such owners oscillates between unmeasurable loneliness and endless creepiness. iDollators, as they call themselves (playing with commandment breaking as well as capitalizing Doll) vary from men who simply want an exceptional masturbatory aid to those who refer to their doll, as does one man in the aforementioned Salon article, a ‘teddy bear with benefits.’

/2/ - The erotics of silence

Once one gets through the immediate visceral reaction to the appearance of the Realdoll, it seems impossible to not question the deeper implications. Let’s start with the prototypical lonely owner, or the owner who has given up on relations with actual women. This may sound like a harsh judgment, but many of the men who have silicone companions state themselves that the Realdoll is, in fact, a replacement. Several of the owners emphasize the Realdoll’s silence, and her/its listening skills. As an interesting note, Davecat, one of the men interviewed in the Salon article “Just like a woman,” and the speaker of the teddy bear quote above, created a website for his doll. Interestingly, the name of the faux company bearing the copyright on the bottom of the page is ‘deafening silence Plus.’

There is an important point about the nature of silence to be remembered here - silence should not be viewed as the blank slate or starting point of things, but that which must be created in the wake of noise, of the horrible clamor of life, the universe, and everything. As Mladen Dolar discusses in A Voice and Nothing More, silence must be created for the voice to emerge: it is the negative of the voice and not simply the absence of it (p. 152). The silence between an owner and his doll can then be seen as a prudent silence on behalf of the doll, as recognition of her partner’s authority.

We could say then that the silence is anything but lonely: it is unsocial, but not lonely. Following from Lacan’s well known statement that ‘desire is the desire of the Other,’ (meaning that we desire to understand the desire of the Other, to be the desirable object) the doll’s silence effectively short circuits such a question. The doll’s inability to return the signifier of the other back to them, to suggest one’s desire, leaves only the underdeveloped kind of wish fulfillment of the iDollator. Furthermore, we should remember that jouissance feminine is spoken, it is that which slips between the cracks of language of the signifier.

In “Just like a woman” it is suggested that the Realdoll as prop is not dangerous in that it is simply a transitional object, an item that, in the absence of a child’s full, undifferentiated relationship with its mother, provides a gradual separation from the maternally supplanted world. The Realdoll however, is an oddly subjectified existence; it is purported to supplant a social relation. If anything, the Realdoll attempts to backwards anchor a subject into a pre-differentiated state dominated by a fantasy of omnipotence.

/3/ - ‘The beauty of her stillness’

To bring this to the visual disturbance that the Realdolls interject: on some uncomfortable level the Realdoll exhibits an unsurprising progression, as another thread in the seam between femininity and semblance. Several early psychoanalytic writings connect the notion of femininity to masquerade, and specifically to the veil. Two interconnected reasons are given for this. The first being that the veil allows for, as Jacques-Alain Miller says, not the covering over of woman but the invention of her. The second related point is, as Lacan states in “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectice of Desire,” that woman concealed behind the veil is what makes her the phallus, the embodied notation of the man’s authority (Ecrits, p. 699).

The rendering of woman as phallus cannot take place in the instance of the Realdoll simply because the social dimension, the difficult working towards the impossible synthesis of the two, cannot take place. Despite how it looks, the Realdoll is not the veil, masking the impossibility of womanhood which requires the sacrifice of femininity, but the coil of femininity itself, in all its deadness. Or put another way - the Realdoll is the femininity which is neither covered nor doing the act of covering, neither the mask nor the impossible being of woman, it is the graveyard passage in between.

Here Žižek’s reading of Hegel as not dismissing appearances as important is apt. For Hegel, appearance is more real then reality itself. And, as Miller states later in his essay “The Relation between the Sexes,”the woman, being the phallus, accepts her lack and can therefore indirectly challenge authority whereas what he calls the ‘postiche’ woman, is based on creating appearances to show that she lacks nothing- this is the Realdoll expunged from the male fantasy.

So what is the desire for the Realdoll? One cannot help but discuss how male desire is essentially mortifying, as Žižek is quick to discuss in relation to Vertigo. Scottie refashions Judy into Madeline, as Žižek puts it - he literally makes the living woman into a dead one and his desire is only affirmed after he inspects the details - in particular the blonde curl of hair (Ticklish Subject, p. 300). The exact opposite of this occurs in the film when Scottie’s unattractive friend paints a painting he has been admiring and jokingly applies her head on top of it. Scottie’s fantasy, which would have been glaciated in the form of the image, is perversly warped and he accordingly leaves the room in disgust.

/4/ - The carefully crafted crevice

Now what should be said of the use of the Realdoll as a masturbatory prop? One can only shudder at the kinds of misogynist fantasies eased by the advent of the doll. While the doll can and has been used therapeutically, it is celebrated by some owners as a replacement to ‘organic women.’ Mike Kelly, interviewed in “Just Like a Woman,’ is clear that he does not have sex with the dolls but instead masturbates with them and refers to his three dolls as ‘its’ not ’shes.’ While the dolls appear as the most revolting feminist nightmare, at the same time, again as suggested in “Just Like a Woman,” Realdolls may remove men from the gene pool who shouldn’t be dipping their toes in or give men who may be prone to violence against women an outlet. (It should also be noted the Realdoll has been used by disabled folks, such as paraplegics, because of their mobility issues in regards to sex.)

Gordon Griggs, another man featured in the article, has a website where he talks about his Realdolls as well as listing the wrongs that women have committed against him. He has video blogs where he discusses the advantages of his Realdoll. For Griggs, the Realdoll is nothing more than a sexual replacement for an actual woman, and in that he seems to subscribe to Otto Weininger’s statement that ‘Woman is only thoroughly sexual.’ Weininger’s work, Sex and Character, which Žižek discusses in The Metastases of Enjoyment, elevates sexual difference to an ontological truth. Weininger, who may be following Plato, describes woman as a receptacle ready to be penetrated at all times.

As Žižek points out, apropos feminism, Weininger’s statements, while at times somewhat Lacanian, are not simply because Weininger denies that there is any such thing as a feminine essence. For Weininger, and for men like Griggs, love is a trap by which sex is covered over and recodified. In one of his blogs Griggs, and several commentators, celebrate the Realdoll because of their low cost and inability to spread disease. They are compared not to woman on the whole but to prostitutes. Ultimately August Strindberg’s comment about Weininger’s Sex and Character could be, in the eyes of folks like Griggs, be attributed to the Realdoll in that it solves ‘the woman problem.’

/5/ - Purchased completeness

Another character in “Just Like a Woman,” and perhaps the most pitiable, is Slade Fiero, the man who is the Realdoll doctor, the Aphrodite to scores of post-modern Pygmalions. Fiero offers a series of repairs on his website and he also buys and refurbishes used dolls to sell for a lower price than new models. Here is the most disturbing experience of Fiero’s work:

“Some of Fiero’s stories are the stuff of horror films. He once got an e-mail from two garbage collectors who found a Real Doll hacked to pieces in a dumpster. One owner sent Fiero a mutilated corpse of a doll. ‘The jaw in the doll was still in her skull, but behind her neck. Her hands were ripped off and fingers were missing. Her left breast was hanging on by a thread of skin, like your bra strap,’ he tells me, gesturing at my shoulder” (Meghan Laslocky.)

McMullen, who started Abyss Creations, has gotten a series of special requests which border on the insane. Requests for dogs and children: one man even made a request for an exact replica of his 60 year old mother. On various websites, where the owners are quick to defend themselves, leagues of men exchange advice like they are hobbyists who deal in human bodies.

The Salon piece ends somewhat sentimentally, suggesting that no one should judge the users of Realdolls, especially if you haven’t experienced true loneliness, but one has to wonder the larger and long lasting implications of a march towards simulated womanhood. Looking again at Žižek’s discussion of Vertigo, it is the fact that Madeline perishes which elevates her to a sublime object; the fact that she can expire is what gives her authenticity (Looking Awry, p. 86-87). Isn’t the same to be said for the various models of the Realdoll, doesn’t their replaceability make them the perfect threat to the organic woman?

In the more vague sense, Realdolls may simply be another example of post-post modernity’s march away from reality, or at least the more tangible aspects of it. As Žižek discusses in The Plague of Fantasies, one prominent feature of modernity was the seemingly paradoxical interplay of movement and image. Life can only be truly seen by arresting all movement, meaning that the very representations of life were mortifying, still, and dead.

In this sense perhaps the Realdoll is such a mortification come full circle - where instead motion is frozen, the spirit of industry guiding modernity, it is the sense of relation, the sociality which has become so rapid and virtual. When one opens the crate of the real doll, with her flower decorating her chest, before you lies the chaotic of the social, baked in silicone.

Trauma’s transmogrifications

/1/ - The commons of trauma

The panoply of images after shocking events, whether wildly national/global, such as September 11th, Hurricane Katrina, or somewhat more localized, as in the case of school shootings and abuse scandals, invariably contains the image of the traumatized victim par excellance, the woman with her reddened face buried in her hands, tears streaming, supported by another.

Opposed to this full trauma, or the trauma of ‘too much,’ there is also the trauma of the ‘too little.’ This is a trauma that is a kind of destitute trauma, the lone person on the roof of the flooded house holding a white board with ‘help’ spray painted on in black. Or ‘Alive Inside!’ to borrow from Dawn of the Dead.

In both senses these traumas are public but seem to function differently. The trauma of fullness, or what could be called a sublime trauma, is effective because it focuses on the boundless of the traumatic event itself, and the victims are merely a kind of bodily extension of the event, the trauma personified, the results of the disaster solidified in flesh.

In the trauma of emptiness the uncertain endings of events are in focus. In the case of hurricane Katrina or other massive natural disasters, the life span of what has already happened is what is at stake: the gap between the damage and when things ‘return to normal.’ The full trauma is about diagnosing the pain in all its forms and effects while the empty or lonely trauma is about understanding the entire traumatic event as a bounded object.

It may be that, whether local or global, that the full trauma is human-caused (genocides, serial killings, et cetera) and that the empty trauma is caused by nature. The obvious explanation here is blame - one cannot blame a hurricane like one can a terroristic organization, lone gunman or what have you. Blame allows the trauma to live on in a way that environmental trauma cannot. (One can of course blame the human response or lack there of to natural disasters thereby transforming empty trauma into a full one.)

/2/ - Children’s private nationalities

A fistful of Queer theory texts including, but not limited to, Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of American Goes to Washington City, Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings and Lee Edelman’s No Future, all deal with the interplay of children, trauma and or nationality. All three texts involve a kind of quotidian trauma, a ‘commonizing’ of traumatic feelings and subsequently of politics.

Berlant argues that an ‘intimate public sphere’ has become the center of American politics, and that the fetus, in particular, has become the signifier around which much of contemporary political concern encircles. Berlant goes on to state that the figure of the fetus in particular has become the most used loci of public intimacy. Berlant further argues that the pregnant woman becomes reduced to an almost formless “vehicle for the production of national culture” (p. 87). This line of thinking seems best supported by the bumper sticker that claims that abortion is killing future American soldiers, or that America’s future as an anglo dominated country is threatened by abortion (here it seems archaic fears of miscegenation are being drug up from the tomb.)

One has to wonder how exactly such an intimate sphere came about when, as aptly analyzed in Jacques Ranciere’s text Disagreement, the first democratic publics in Greece rejected the plebians in the discussion of governmental issues - it was believed that they could not engage in enlightened discourse, that all they had to offer was animalistic cries of pain. It seems someone learned, along the long way of democracy’s history, that it is best to utilize such cries of pain, displays of affect, and the like, as an undeniably valuable form of political currency.

The fetus and the child are the ‘most silent’ and therefore necessitate the most political attention, according to our contemporary intimate public. Yet silence is not the determining factor since many injured groups are only ‘heard’ politically when someone dies, as Cvetkovich suggests in Archive (p. 278). Edelman goes even further suggesting that queer folk are diametrically opposed to the view that a viable future is possible only through a politics of ‘think of the children!’ or what he dubs ‘reproductive futurism.’

Let us take a somewhat sharp turn into the more common field for visual depictions of trauma.

/3/ - Horrific productions

Filmic representations of horror seem to oscillate between the two aforementioned poles of traumatic experience (that of full and empty) but, at the same time, horror inverts the form of their progression.

In the classic horror slasher film we have the tension building up to the murder, the murder itself, and then the eventual discovery of the body. For our purposes here we are focusing on the first and third terms. The first term appears to be the reversal of the empty trauma: the lone survivor. The slow approach of the killer is about the work of getting to the empty trauma - that small increments of killing are oddly designed to lead us to the empty surviver, to the last victim. (This process is oddly formalized in the film Unbreakable when Samuel L Jackson’s character admits that he has caused a series of attacks in order to find someone like him, to find another person that shares his gift.)

In relation to the full trauma, we have the acts of killing continued to the eventual discovery of the body/bodies and then the ultimate effect it has on the lone survivor. This trope of the final girl, dubbed by Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws, states that the woman surviving in a male dominated genre (horror) is only possible through phallic appropriation by the woman such as her taking of the villain’s weapon. On the website Cinema de Merde, the author suggests a compelling alternative: What if the final girl is just the excuse which allows the viewers to enjoy the sadism that has been happening for the past few hours?

Circling back to Berlant’s argument and the first photo above, it seems that women are codified as the bearers of trauma. How many countless war movies spend an exorbitant amount of time on the telegram of death, the notifying man at the door? Regardless of whether the scale of the trauma is national, as part of a larger conflict/disaster, or more localized, women seem to be required to carry the weight.

/4/ - Trauma’s short circuit

If it is true that men die and that women endure in the national and horrific imaginary, then is this why children must remain unsexed and, more forcefully, the only figurative hope for the future in both body and concept? Children are reduced to pure victim; they only obtain adult characteristics when it expands their victimhood. Furthermore, and to return to the previous few passages, the absence of child and the fragility of the child as child is anchored to that of the vague codification of the fertile or pregnant female body.

Here again we have the interplay of the full and empty trauma - the dead child, full of now impossible potentiality, and the empty arms of the mother-not-to-be. The short circuit here would explain the figure of Medea, of the mother who kills her own child.

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is the most well known piece that tarries with a Medean theme. Using the story of Margaret Garner as a point of departure, Morrison engages in an interesting work on the livibility of trauma and history and how the present disperses somewhere in the crossfire. This relation is discussed openly by the main character Sethe when she says:

“I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms” (p. 18). Sethe is worn to the bone by the eventual materialization of her dead daughter, whom she beheaded to spare from slavery. Beloved’s somewhat ghostly but somewhat physical body displays the confusion between the physical and emotional history of slavery’s victims. As the end of the text suggests, in a somewhat maudlin fashion, only community is capable of making trauma livable even when one’s particular experience of a larger trauma (such as slavery) is always different from another’s. And while Sethe’s experience is ‘not one to pass on’ it is passed on, it needs to exist as a kind of splotch on history itself that cannot be ignored but can only be partially discussed.

/5/ - Frayed ends

The horror film seems to the the transformation of anxiety into possible trauma, whereas the quotidian futurism of childhood is the overly active or disregard for trauma’s creation. The sphere of childhood is continually armored against possible invasion, and the life and times of children are becoming ever more sheltered in ways which grace many young people with social and psychological fragility.

In a sense we can grasp the internal limit of children’s futurity in the concept of ‘growing up too fast’ intertwined with never leaving the mother’s side. While we cannot predict the dangers of the external world, we cannot avoid having anxiety about them, but to let that anxiety become trauma in our fantasies freezes certain possibilities. Given too much freedom, trauma becomes constant and unrelenting.

Showtime’s program Dexter is an interesting twist to this logic. The main character, Dexter Morgan, was left in a tank full of dead bodies along with his brother at the age of three. He’s later adopted by a policeman named Harry who recognizes that the boy has sociopathic tendencies. Harry decides to make Dexter into a socially responsible serial killer by training him in his talent while making sure he only targets the guilty - criminals who have slipped through the cracks of the justice system.

Dexter is about the endlessness of trauma as Dexter’s brother becomes a killer as well, suggesting that the ongoing potency of the traumatic event. One has to wonder about Dexter’s upbringing - if he could be taught to be socially responsible in his murder, couldn’t he be stopped as a murderer all together? Dexter’s ‘dark passenger,’ the entity which takes control of Dexter and forces him to kill, has all the markings of the Freudian drive - while it can be somewhat directed and reformed by the subject’s environment, its fundamental nature cannot be changed.

This brings us back to the split of the full and empty trauma and, in particular, the function of origin and blame. The two traumas meet each other in the figure of the serial killer - if one cannot change who one is, if one is either born a serial killer or becomes one very early on in their ontogentic development, then where is the final origin of the trauma, where does its weight fall? If we take into account our earlier discussion of a gendered split in trauma, or at least a division of perception, it seems that the full trauma is gendered feminine, that women carry the weight of the large, disastrous trauma whereas men epitomize the lonely trauma. In the case of the final girl, this lonely trauma turns into anxiety and culminates in a kind of hysteria whereas for men, the full trauma is converted into a violence that produces trauma in others, that works towards an impossible collusion between fullness and emptiness.

The Porosity of the Signifier

/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’)

Where have the fathers gone?

/1/ - The Great insults

In several texts Žižek has pointed out the great insults to humanity and our perceived role in the universe. The first is Copernicus’ discovery that we are not at the center of the universe contrary to the bible. The second great insult comes from Darwin - we are not even the creation of god but the result of a ‘grotesque’ kind of evolution. The third great insult comes from Freud - not only have we lost our cosmic place and origin but we don’t even control ourselves, we are wrought by desires and an unconsciousness that disrupts our view that we are fundamentally rational creatures.

I am tempted here to add the rampancy of capitalism as the final insult to humanity, as the great cultural insult - after divinity, biology, psychology are ruined, capitalism functions as the deathblow to culture itself - we cannot even produce ‘rationally’ but only produce more forms of production to distract ourselves.

This final insult leads us to the concept of the father, which is a question of abstract authority (law or Law) as well as gender. Isn’t it clear that the authority to be debunked after the aforementioned ones would be the social and in particular the micro social one, that of the father?

One of the tropes of the industrial revolution seems to be the decline of the social worth of the father and, in postmodern theory in particular, this decline has been echoed in the distrust of the Freudian Oedipal drama. In her jumpy text Is Oedipus Online? Jerry Anne Flieger points out the importance of defining Oedipus in a more vague way and that it’s meaning is far from diminished in these millennial times.

/2/ - Father as law

As Žižek and others have pointed out - the decline of the material presence of the father figure does not mean a disinterest in the paternal figure as such and, contrarily, may in fact suggest a furthering strengthening of such a figure through abstraction. Basically, as pointed out in my entry on faces, the disbelief in a particular other, this or that person, can often lead to the more paranoid belief that there is a big Other, an elaborate system, here instead of the father as figure we may simply see the law. In his article “The Big Other doesn’t exist” Žižek begins by pointing out that in Totem and Taboo Freud supplemented the myth of the Oedipal father with the concept of the primordial father, the father who lies at the heart of the Law.

In the standard Oedipal drama the father stands as the bar to the child attaining the incestuous love object so that child develops external desire due to which the child harbors an unconscious desire to murder the father whereas in the myth of the primordial father, the children actually murdered the father in order to release the jouissance (enjoyment) that he harbored. The death of the primordial father returns as a kind of guilt symbolically gelled in the Law. Freud knows that this didn’t ‘really happen’ but he is simply attempting to illustrate the passage from humans as more intelligent animals to creatures which harvest culture, society and rule. [Incidentally Freud drew his idea of the harem and the primordial father from an early theory of Charles Darwin having to do with ape behavior...]

While our belief in the big Other as an obscure ultimate authority (such as god) has declined, the big Other lives on (and may even be magnified) in the symbolic universe. This can be seen, again as Žižek points out, in an absurd comment from Groucho Marx: “Whom do you believe, your eyes or my words?” This kind of logic is exemplified in the experience of treating an obviously stupid and corrupt bureaucrat or official with respect because the law speaks through them. So even though we know that they are corrupt or disgusting or whatever, the fact that they sit on the bench and wear the robes mean that we must play into the fiction that the person truly embodies the law because they are a judge, cop etc.

/3/ - A Masculine symbolic?

To bring this back to the topic at hand - don’t we see exactly the same thing in the change of action heroes over time? Think of the difference between Nicolas Cage and Arnold Schwarzenegger as action stars. In Cage’s three major action films (The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off ) he is constantly under pressure to assert himself with his speech, to come off as a bad ass, to make the audience believe his words over our eyes (to tip our hat to Groucho). Schwarzenegger on the other hand, if any thing, undermined his toughness with his speech by utilizing stupid pun after stupid pun as he liquidated countless enemies. [A personal favorite is in the movie Predator where Arnold's character kills a man by throwing a large hunting knife into him thereby sticking him to a pole and Arnold retorts 'Stick around']

Let’s take a strange point here - what does it say about the dominant form of the male creature (or maybe more accurately masculinity) that the dominant ‘men’s magazine’ has shifted from Playboy to Maxim? There was an article in The Guardian some time ago (which I cannot find for the life of me) that discussed exactly what this shift can be seen to mean. The author argued that while Playboy was more sexually explicit, at the same time it was, at least somewhat indirectly, self destructive in that it assumed it’s readers would grow up or their interest in the publication would shift. There is no such veiled hope in the likes of magazines such as FHM and Maxim. [A recent Salon.com article suggests that this has to do with the decline of magazines on the whole, that while Playboy always tried to be literary, this is certainly not the cause with its contemporary equivalents.]

Now while the presupposed end result suggested was no doubt rife with heteronormative assumptions (something along the lines that one day, after all the womanizing, one would ’settle down’) still there is a kind of implicit imperative in the contemporary men’s magazines that is far more terrible - it is that which celebrates the figure of ‘the mook.’ The mook, as discussed in the excellent yet terribly depressing Frontline special “The Merchants of Cool” is the standard obnoxious, loud mouthed idiot that dominates MTV and almost any form of media that sets after the 18-25 year old demographic. Amongst their ranks you have Howard Stern, Tom Green, and the boys of Jackass (Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera, Steve-O etc).

This kind of figure seems to be at once the rejection of the father role as well as subjection to the super ego injunction to ‘Enjoy!’ As Žižek has argued, by way of Lacan, the superego represents the external which is internalized, such as laws. In current times one feels guilty for not enjoying, for not pursuing the various pleasures available via capitalism. Isn’t the image of the ‘deadbeat’ dead always capitalistic (since the central fatherly thing has been reduced to economics?) in that he is pursuing the wrong desires (younger women, convertible etc) instead of paying child support, sending gifts etc?

/4/ - The most Freudian of shows? or Kill your father [LOST spoilers ahead...]

While the show Lost is saturated with various thematic fluctuations, one thread that has remained prominent throughout is that of fathers. At least half of the main cast has what could be politely deemed ’serious daddy issues’ and in particular the characters John Locke and Ben Linus. While these characters stand out, I do not exaggerate - Kate killed her step father, Sawyer dedicated his life to avenging his father (who was murdered by Locke’s father), Jack turned in his father essentially ruining his life and fights not to become him, Hurley had an absent father, Jin tried his whole life to leave his father beyond, Sun was terrorized by her father et cetera.

But nothing surpasses Ben’s story. After years of abuse he decides to murder his father and everyone he knows. Ben’s father never forgives him for ‘killing’ his mother by being born and abused him through his entire life. In order for John to join the ranks of Ben’s Others, he requires that John kill his father, whom he’s been obsessed with much of his adult life. John’s father, the ‘man from Tallahassee,’ in order to be free. John is incapable of the act and, through one of Ben’s friends discovers that John’s father is the man Sawyer has been looking for. John locks the two in a room and the deed is done.

Ben’s case is even more extreme in that he murders his abusive father along with all his father’s associates in order to join the others. Ben is equally if not more totalitarian than his own father given the fact that he imprisons and attempts to brainwash a boy because he might have impregnated his daughter.

So how is the father drained of its power yet at the same time brutally haunting the present? As Žižek discusses in “A Letter which did arrive at its destination” every father is a failure, they always fail their ’symbolic mandate’ and leave the child to settle their debt, in one way or another. Fatherhood then is the very embodiment of failure, of accepting the blame, of ‘being the bad guy.’ It is this embodiment of failure that makes the father so unbearable, the fact that we always already accept the authority and that all the little details of our father (their rudeness, they way they eat, etc etc) are truly horrible because they unconsciously remind us of the ridiculousness of the authority.

/5/ - Building on the corpses of our fathers or Even for an eggshell…

Now, as Žižek points out, to obtain freedom from the father means assuming the position of the father. So while the necessity of the father remains, its power is diffused and place into the symbolic attributing to its ambiguity. Is there on some level a desire for the obscene father to return shatter the sort of meandering search for symbolic authority. And, in a sort of ‘looking awry’ at Deleuze and Guattari’s assumption that capitalism uses the concept of the father to continue itself, that it produces neuroses, one should assert that, following Lacan, that it is capitalism that causes the neuroses in that it embodies them. While often people are almost completely devoid of jouissance, the neurotic is consumed by it so that s/he becomes a kind of zombie, animated by little rituals, obsessional and believing that the father is dead to avoid the figure altogether. The fundamental prohibition, the no/name of the father should not be ignored/rejected lest (as it is this prohibition which paradoxically creates desire) the final insult of capitalism become the final insult as well as our guiding star. The point of psychoanalysis in contemporary times, to echo both Žižek and Badiou, is that the problem is not being forbidden to enjoy, but being threatened to constantly enjoy. Because not only is this mandate of enjoyment self contradictory (in that it is mandated) but the kind of enjoyment demanded is a decaffeinated enjoyment, where the malignant qualities as well as the substance have been excised.

In short we get the father with all the flaws and none of the authority and we become the terrified Hamlet, unable to come to a resolution. Happy father’s day!