M Y C
M Y C
A L A
jan jagodzinski
MUSIC IN YOUTH CULTURE
© jan jagodzinski, 2005.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
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Introduction: Aural/Oral Connections 1
I
T C 5
1. Stuttering In-Between Deleuze and Lacan—Acts of Transposition 7
Lacan Bashing/Bashing Lacan 8
Sexuation: Beyond Sex/Gender 13
Skin-Ego as BwO 18
The Jouissance of the Death Drive 24
Music as Sound of “Matter”: The Clamor of Becoming 28 2. The Figurality of Noise and the Silence of the Death Drive 33
Musical Transgressions: The Event 33
The Virtual Body and the Real 38
3. The Uncanny Figural Voice 45
Ethical Paradoxes of the Deadly Jouissance of Postmodernity 45
Forms of Jouissance 48
Perversions and Hysterizations of the Music Scene 51
On Castrati and Divas 57
II
P T M S: T B ⁄ B ⁄ B 59 4. The Perversions of Gangsta Rap: Death Drive and Violence 61
Death Row Records: Taking the Rap? 61
Rap as Rhythmic Repetition of Resistance 64
The Ambiguities of Rap’s Style 68
Racial Profile: The Public Enemy 69
The Gangsta Rapper as Spectre 72
5. Gangsta Sadomasochism: Tails Yo’ Good, Heads Yo’ Bad 77
The Sadomasochism of 2 Live Crew 77
“I ain’t nobody’s bitch”: Post-Oedipal Fallout 80
Hitting the Target with Word-Bullets 81
Stealing Back Jouissance: Crime as Law, Law as Crime 82 Word Bullets into Golden Eggs: When Rap Turns Empty 86
W(rap)ping Up Rap with Eminem 89
The Schizophrenic Self: The “Real” Slim Shady 92
6. Plummeting the Gothic Depths of the Soul: Nü Metal and
its Beyond 95
Disturbing the Skin-Ego of Nü Metal: Obsessive Drives 95 Forging an “Ugly” Aesthetic: The Grimace of the Joker 98
Ko}n’s Real Kernel 100
The Biting Noise of Nü Metal 101
Freaks! The Searching Bullet 105
The Bullet’s Death Drive 108
Decadence: A Time to Reap in the Ko}n? 109
7. The “Grunge” of Punk-Rock: Slacking Off 111
Separation Woes: The Ambiguous Paternal Function 111 Approaching Psychosis: Kurt Cobain’s Grunge 115
Suicide “Note” 118
Authenticity as Sinthome: Musical Noise as Strange Attractor 121
8. Serial Connections: The MM Show 123
Serial Connections 123
Addicted to Scream 126
Columbine’s Holy Wood: Third Strike and You’re Out 129 9. Beyond the Law: The Anti-Slacker as Mass Murderer 135 Unmasking Patricide: Wish Fulfillment Gone Astray 135 Mass Murder and Serial Killers in Fantasy and RL 139 Psychotic Delusions: Mass Murder as Media Glory 143 School Tragedies of Overidentification: 15 Minutes of
Twisted Fame 146
10. The New Castrati: Men II Boys 151
Public Castrations: Boy Bands 151
Making of the Band: Inverting the Truman Show 154
More Heaven than Heaven 158
American Idol 2: Pop Karaoke 159
Stardom 101: Hiding in Front of the
Obscene Underbelly 163
Cloning Pop Stars for Global Success:
Civilized Racism 165
III
T H M S:
T G ⁄ G ⁄ G 169
11. Postmodern Hysterics: Playing with the Virginity Card 171
The Paradox of Dirty Virgin Divas 171
The Dirty Other Feminine Jouissance 174
The Sadean Fantasy of Sexual Equality 176
Midriff Virgins: Spears and Company 179
The Masquerade of Virginity 181
12. The Dilemmas of Gurlz’ Desires: Perverting the
Post-Patriarchal Order 187
Desire and the Law 187
Conflicted Desire in Gurlz’ Narratives 189
The Perverted Maternal Superego 192
Not Just One of the Bois: Being Wild and Free 196
The Perversions of Tin(k)y Desire 198
The Fourth Fetish 199
13. The Good Witch-Bitch: Grrrl Power as the Desublimated
Ugly Aesthetic 203
What Do Grrrl’s Want? 204
Lipstick in Your Face: Preparing and then Losing Ground 206 Fly Grrrls: The Erotic Full-Figured Body 208 Femme Fatale as the Color of Red: Shirley Manson of Garbage 210 From Red to Pink: Miss Undaztood’s Schizophrenia 213 14. The New Virginity: The Nostalgic Return of the Veil 217
Miss America Becomes Virginal! 217
The “Storm” of the Ego Ideal: Teenage Girls’
Loss of Self-esteem 219
Wearing a Chastity “Belt”: Nostalgic Virginity as a
“Knockout” Punch 224
The Recodified Veil of the Hejab 227
Re-Veiling/Revealing the Courtly Lady 229
Propping Up and Striping Down Paternity 232
IV
I 235
15. The Fan(addict): The Sinthome of Believing in the
Multiples of ONE 237
The Postmodern Groupie Today 237
A Wry Look at the Fan(addict): Galaxy Quest 240
Omega 13: Twisting Time and Space 243
Punkbaby: Silke’s Skin-Ego 244
Silke’s Tattoos 247
A Drummer is Beating 249
The Politics of the Skin-Ego: The Split-Screen Mirror 251 16. Let’s Rave not Rage! New Age Techno Hippies and
Digital Electronica 255
U(h)r Klang of the Real: The Techno Beat of the
Machinic Fetus 259
The Paradox of Rave’s “Natural Technology”;
Or Technology as Antitechnology 262
Going Back into the Womb to Be Born Again: Posthuman
Cyborgs 263
C: A E R 267 17. An Ethical “Act” in the Real: A Brief Meditation to Close 269
Coda: To Jeremy 274
Notes 277
Bibliography 291
Index 303
I : A ⁄O
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usic in Youth Culture: A Lacanian Approach is a companion book to Youth Fantasies: The Perverse Landscape of the Media (2004), which examined postmodern youth from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective by concen- trating on the medias of video games, Internet, and television. This second volume continues to examine youth fantasies specific to music that emerged in the past decade, from approximately the early nineties to the present contemporary musical scene. It can be read as a portmanteau book (mot-valise) within Youth Fantasies in the sense that it exits as an enfolded space within that first volume—bracketed by it, so to speak. In Youth Fantasies, the thesis concerning the post-Oedipalization of postmodernist society was developed where it was argued that there has been a fundamental “enfoldment” of space between postadolescence and adulthood blurring any distinct boundaries between them as a symptom of the subsequent loss of trust in authority of the Symbolic Order. This thesis is dramatically illustrated by the music industry.Odd spelling throughout this book is used to indicate the newly created space of postmodern youth. Bois, Boyz, and Boys are the differential signi- fiers for the psychic conflicts over the limited modernist hegemonic image of Man used to demarcate the skater crowd from punk-metal-Goth-rap Boyz, which are yet again differentiated from pop culture’s Boy Groups. Similarly, Girlie/Gurlz, girls and Grrrls indicate similar differentiations among females in various postfeminist contexts. These distinctions are developed in an exploration of fantasies associated with virginity and being called a “slut.”
This differential array of signifiers is predicated on the cauldron of psychic struggles that are taking place precisely within the enfolded space opened up by the postmodernity of designer capitalism. Purposely (at times), these sig- nifiers have been capitalized to indicate their particular psychic relationship toward libidinal bodily energy referred to as jouissance, which demarcates the experience of intensity through bodily drives.
Lacan took a dim view concerning developmental stages that were based on biological growth when it came to youth. Rather, the “bio” of life took a backseat to the way the rhythms of past “psychosocial” events impacted future growth. Talk of stages referred to the libidinal body of the drives; to our oral, anal, sexual, gazing, and vocalizing bodies, which constantly inter- rupt the regularities of living, making us undergo processes of repression, frustration, and regression. For example, “tweens” may be identified as a
biological cohort aged nine to twelve, but their struggles are shaped by socioeconomic structures bringing such issues as body weight, bullying, styles of dress, parental desires, and drug abuse to fore at the level of their virtual affective “driven” bodies. These become revealing “nodal points”
around which symptoms are structured, and are thus far more revealing of their psychic struggles than the cognitive literature of psychological develop- ment based on well-known stage theories such as those of Jean Piaget and his followers, which dominated the modernist theorizing of early child devel- opment. At the very least, a psychoanalytic account both supplements and decenters such cognitive accounts as we have already argued in the early chapters of Youth Fantasies.
To what extent can this array of music youth cultures be theorized as examples of “becoming-woman” in Deleuzean terms? Are they the rhizomatic and productive mutually transformative results of the impossible gap between the masculine and feminine heterogeneous binary appositions, like Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 293) famous example of the orchid (a plant) in exchange with the wasp (an insect) where a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp take place? Is the emerging psyche of youth cultures in the past decade dispersed into hybridic becomings? But, isn’t this all simply another instance of Lacan’s outspoken claim that “desire is the desire of the Other” which also recognizes difference? This last series of questions raise a pressing concern: just how are these psychic struggles to be characterized? Given the claim of post-Oedipalization, does the neurosis of the Freudian familial drama still apply? Many scholars have turned to the schizophrenic account of the capitalist socius (conduct of relations) offered by Deleuze and Guattari with their strong rejection of Lacanian psycho- analysis exemplified in their two-volume work Anti-Oedipus (1977) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987) to theorize another possibility. Becoming- woman, a Deleuzean term, seems to sit uncomfortably within a book that utilizes Lacanian psychoanalysis, who is often accused of transcendental phal- logocentrism against the author(s) of empirical transcendent immanence.
To what extent, then, do I find myself “Oedipally” still loyal to Lacan, or to his most eminent practioner in the English-speaking context such as Zizek?
Gratefully perhaps, an exploration of pop music can result in a productive misreading so, at the very least, some form of “betrayal” can take place that furthers an understanding of youth today? Such questions address my own anxiety when venturing into the space “in-between” two such powerful systems of thought. The first chapter, Stuttering In-Between Deleuze and Lacan—Acts of Transposition, attempts to define my own position.
The homonym aural/oral in the subtile characterizes the intimacy of the two drives in youth cultures. It refers to two registers of meaning. First, it brings together hearing and voraciously consuming music together as a way to capture the musical entertainment industry of advanced capitalist coun- tries, which is a haptic event that is performed on a dynamic field that is both unifying as well as disruptive. Second, as developed in the second and
third chapters, the oral and aural form a hybrid “diadeictical” relation (Lyotard, 1971, 39) between the drive-demand of oral consumption (pure desire) and the desire of the aural voice through the intervention of the death drive as bodily jouissance. This identifies a transgressive stance toward the accepted performed musical codes. The performative side of music since the Beatlemania phenomenon of the 1960s has now advanced into the concert and television spectacle making marketing based on serialization as simulacra the central concept for commodity production. The political economy of repetition, which is how musical industries supplement commodity serialization, demands that a mold be manufactured from which the mass reproduction of an original can then take place (Attali, 1999, 128). It is the labor that goes into the production of the mold by its producers and design engineers (“molders”) where the greatest costs are incurred followed by the costs for its media spectacularization to maintain its currency and demand for its repetition. The costs of reproduction of the commodity are significantly lower as profit is recovered through sales of the music CDs, musical videos, guest appearances, performances, and paraphernalia. It should be apparent that Attali’s conceptual language draws on a Deleuzean paradigm with its stress on repetition and moulds. His conceptualization of “noise,” as devel- oped in chapter 2, however, is appropriated under Freud/Lacan’s death drive when theorizing musical youth cultures.
Designer capitalism signifies a repetition and a serialization of all forms of consumption, from fast foods to ready-to-wear clothes. Repetition in music requires an attempt to maintain diversity and meaning for demands. The artist as performer acts in the capacity of a replicant, a form of upgraded social Darwinism when the spectacle of performance becomes repeated so as to act at a point of idealized unity rather than difference. An American, British, Canadian, or Australian “idol” emerges in the currency of the pop music industry where such repetition enables a leveling of power to superfi- cially appear by making the music “popular.” Yet, on the one hand, each Idol is “translated” into its respective culture to make it appear unique. The universal/singular tension seems to be solved through such a repetition of difference. But, on the other hand, power becomes concentrated in the record companies and producers who front the spectacle and invest time and money in it. I attempt to describe this paradoxical process in chapter 10,
“The New Castrati: Men II Boys.” Ironically, one might call this a “becoming- child,” after Deleuze.
Repetition and serialization contain within it a difference, a conceptual articulation generally bestowed in contemporary philosophy to Giles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida’s notion of différance as the non-presence of the other, which is already inscribed within the sense of presence. However, Lacan’s complex notion of the psychic Real had already explored this same territory in the early 1970s, which Deleuze and Derrida were to claim as their own through their own unique explorations of it. Their debt to Lacan remains, by and large, an uneasy one, dividing scholars in various camps rather than
acknowledging the many similarities between them when it comes to the realm of the “impossible.” This divisive aspect is articulated, explored, and questioned in the first chapter.
The question remains as to whether such repetition by the music industry simply produces “silence” by eliminating “noise” (or non-sense) through the conformity of popular repetition—as Attali maintains. Just when does the repression of noise erupt? The thesis forwarded here is that the eruption of
“noise” has taken place through the perversion and hysterization of the performer/audience relationship throughout the last decade and into the new millennium in ways, I hope, that will be surprising to the reader.
In the second chapter, “The Figurality of Noise and the Silence of the Death Drive,” I attempt to establish my own position regarding the transgression of difference in music, while in the third chapter, “The Uncanny Figural Voice,” I explore the conceptualization of jouissance in such transgression
“against and beyond the Law.”
The following seven chapters consist of part II, entitled, “Perversions of the Music Scene: The Boyz/Bois/Boys.” Here, I explore the masculine postadolescent “stretch” as captured by the signifier(s) bois/boyz and boys of Gangsta rap and hip-hop, metal, punk, and Goth, ending with the pop culture of Boy Bands and the making of American Idol. I claim that these masculine musical developments pervert the music scene. In chapter 7 I attempt to make connections to the much publicized school shootings and suicides. This is then followed by Part III, “The Hysterization of the Music Scene: The Gurlz/Girls/Grrrls,” which consists of four more chapters that explore the developments by cultural music forms of postfeminism. I try to discuss the fantasies around the virgin/slut dichotomization and the responses to this. I end the music section with Part IV, an “Interlude” of two further essays, one on the Fan(addict), which maps out our understanding of a new kind of fan that has arisen in postmodernity, and the other develops Techno music as a utopian fantasy of global harmony. Techno music lends itself to a Deleuzean analysis, thereby providing another opportunity for a comparison with Lacanian psychoanalysis. The concluding essay is a medita- tion on “the ethics of the Real,” hints of which the reader will encounter throughout most of the chapters.
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D L—A
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n Youth Fantasies, an attempt was made to steer a course that incorporated Deleuze and Guattari where it was felt that a certain transposition between their conceptual systems was possible; namely the concept of nomadology could be transposed as the discourse of the analyst as no-madic research.The no-madic researcher occupies the impossible position of Lacan’s objet a to theorize the drive/desire dialectic, both individually and socially, always in a state of “becoming” to act in the capacity of a “vanishing mediator” so that a fantasy might be traversed. His or her position becomes useless or redundant after such an occurrence. Post-Oedipalization was the term used to transpose their anti-Oedipal stance. But, just how “anti-Oedipal” were Deleuze and Guattari anyway? Guattari, a gay Left activist trained by Lacan, was still a practicing analyst and member of Lacan’s École Freudienne de Paris when Anti-Oedipus was written. If one reads Flieger’s (1999, 2000, 2005) many attempts to sort through their critique of Freud and Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari often begin to sound more Freudian than they would ever admit; their “lines of flight” being less successful than the written bravado of their neologisms would at first suggest. Their critique certainly applies, but only if Freud and Lacan are read as caricatures in the most orthodox way possible. Flieger forcefully shows that Anti-Oedipus brings out the most radical elements in both Freud and Lacan at a historical moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s when Freud’s ideas had become psychologized by neo-Freudians, while Lacan’s concepts had been cast into a structuralist straightjacket. The time was ripe to further radicalize psychoanalysis through their form of schizoanalysis. Atoms now not only “swerved,” as the young Marx had maintained in is doctoral thesis (following the Epicurean–Lucretian doctrine of the clinamen as the “free” declination of atoms) in reply to the atomism of Democritus, but now “molecules” became a flux of “schizzes and flows.” But, by this time Lacan had also moved on. His rethinking of sexuality freed of both gender and identity had already begun to be worked out in Seminar XIX, . . . Ou pire/ . . . Or Worse (1971–1972), and fully developed the following year S XX, Encore (1972) with his formulae of sexuation, the
very same year when Anti-Oedipus was publicly released. This development, as argued later, contests any easy accusations of binary logic, and offers an alter- native to the endless differentiation of sexes claimed by Deleuze and Guattari.
L B/B L
When one reads Braidotti (1991, 1994, 2002), Deleuzean theory is proudly proclaimed as anti-Oedipal, and used as a wedge against Lacanian psycho- analysis of the 1950s and 1960s. Alice (in Wonderland), as Deleuze devel- oped this figure in The Logic of Sense (1990), now becomes the non-Oedipal poster child (Braidotti, 2002, 69), as if it were possible to remain forever in Wonderland. Avril Lavigne and Michael Jackson, as I argue in chapter 11, however, are doing a good job at trying to stay down the rabbit hole for as long as possible. Apparently, becoming-woman/animal is not about signifi- cation, but about the transcendence of the linguistic signifier. “Expression is about the nonlinguistically coded affirmation of an affectivity whose degree, speed, extension and intensity can only be measured materially, pragmatically, case by case” (Braidotti, 2002, 119). Alice is a special case. In Wonderland Alice’s antics illustrate her “becoming.” Wonderland is a world where present time never “actually occurs” but remains “always forthcoming and already past” (Deleuze, 1990, 80). In the book’s opening pages, Deleuze argues Alice is simultaneously getting larger (than she was before) and smaller (than she will become), caught in the interval of “pure” time (aion). However, should one take the trouble to read Feldstein’s (1995) Lacanian rendering of Alice, the differences between the two approaches seem, once more, transpositional. Feldstein also reads Alice as “an emblematic study of the representation of the representational process itself as it relates to the reconfiguration of Alice’s identity” (152). The difference is that Feldstein offers a sociopolitical questioning of Carroll’s fantasy concerning women.
In Wonderland, Alice is deprived of the right to grow up; she remains a child.
Philosophers in the Academy are continually engaged in territorializing their tuff by calling on names, while at the same time claiming to be irreverent and disrespectful of them. Disciple-hood is often an anathema, but theft of fragments stolen from here and there is common fare. In the heated intel- lectual circles of Paris parallel concepts amongst Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Blachot, Barthes, and lesser well-known figures, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but their sources disavowed and never acknowledged. In an exchange between Braidotti and Z izek during the final panel discussion of IAPL’s (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) 2002 meeting in Rotterdam, it became very clear that each hard- lined their own stance to maintain a distance from one another. Braidotti had published Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming that year, while Z izek was busy writing his own “encounter” with Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies, which came out two years later. Rumors have it that they will
be now writing a book together to “encounter” their differences! As might be suspected the theoretical claim of this book is to transpose their similarities, which may help in grasping the post-Oedipal musical cultures of postmodernity rather than insist on differences. But, of course, some differences between their ontological systems can never be reconciled.
How is becoming-woman to be understood in the context of the prolif- eration of signifiers for youth employed here (girls, girlz, grrrls, boys, bois, boyz), since Deleuze and Guattari’s term is not itself a gender theory; it is not necessarily a condition of possibility for femaleness or feminine concepts, nor is it biologically, hormonally, or chromosomally defined? Deleuze and Guattari made no claims concerning the experiences of “real women,” nor did they provide any direction to becoming-woman, although they were crit- ical of neoliberalist feminist positions. Rather, their term refers to a nomadic or itinerant machinic vector or force, a “middle-line” in-between a system (logos) and its dissipation—in-between, in their terms, molar and molecular lines of flight—in-between order and chaos, the proviso being that such a
“quanta” of energy can “cause” a collapse back into order (molar state of closure) or offer new potentialities. Becoming-woman is thought of as “the first quantum, or molecular segment” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 279, emphasis added) because woman’s identification is absent: she is Other, unrecognizable under masculine Law that is defined in terms of a “striated”
space; that is a homogeneous space of quantitative multiplicity. A form of becoming is inseparable from three specific forms of becoming: “becoming- woman, a becoming-child, a becoming-animal” (Deleuze an Guattari, 1987, 299) because of the asymmetrical binaries of social coding in Western societies:
namely male over female, adult over child and rational over animal. For Deleuze and Guattari, sexuality is, therefore, a distributive category rather than a bilateral one. This is contrasted to “smooth space” of becoming- woman, which conjures up an image that is completely opposite to what they mean. Such a space is heterogeneous and rhizomatic like an urban sprawl, characterized by quantitative multiplicity and continuous variation where there is no overarching principle or directionality. Such “lines of flight” of deterritorialization are characterized as open intervals (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 477–481). In short, Deleuze proposed a state of “pure” becoming (without being) that is extracted from corporeality. Such becoming takes place in the “transcendental empiricism” of time itself, which is the key to understanding the Deleuzean worldview. Transcendental empiricism refers to the actuality of preontological virtual possibilities (potentia), a level of vitalism (life) of presubjective consciousness that takes place prior to con- scious experience itself. Like Lyotard’s (1971) figural that coexits with dis- course, such sensate life coexists as a “stratigraphic” superimposition with conscious experience. Such a transcendental plane of experience refers to time itself, but not the time of movement (as chronos which he explored in his first book on cinema, Deleuze, 1986), but time as the infinite virtuality of the transcendental field of Becoming, the time of aion as the Stoics developed it.
Aion was “the pure empty form of time” (Deleuze, 1990, 194).
Feminists such as Braidotti (1991, 122–123; 1994, 118) have criticized Deleuze for his failure to directly engage with this question of feminism.
Braidotti throughout her writings always takes a stance of disavowal in this respect to his work, which goes something like: I know that I am disagree- ing with Deleuze’s claim that there are an infinite number of proximate and singular sexes (n-sexes, or polysexes), which emerge from his insistence that difference is an immanently differential process, nevertheless for a “feminist Deleuzean” like myself (2002, 68), sexual difference is still the primary or defining difference. Such statement of disavowal can be found in each of her books (1991; 1994, 123; 2002, 68). She forwards feminism as the first difference, which certainly politicizes “becoming-woman” and throws it, once again, into the metaphysics of representation—as exemplified by Griggers (1997) whose book bears the very title Becoming-Woman—a position Deleuze tried to avoid. It is precisely this avoidance that has Braidotti (2002, 82) iron- ically claiming that it is Deleuze (and by implication, not her) who disavows the consequences of his conceptualization of becoming-woman!
Where are youth to be placed? Are they not “automatically” becoming- minoritarian by virtue of their place in the social order? Oddly, I would agree with Braidotti’s summative claim that comes at the end of a long chapter defending her appropriation of Deleuze within and against Deleuzean followers. “The only way to resist this death-bound machinery [referring to military violence and lethal technologies of death] is to elaborate hybrid, transformative identities working inside and outside, on the majority and the minoritarian front simultaneously” (Braidotti, 2002, 110, emphasis added).
The various sex-gendered signifiers throughout this book are not all politi- cized as “minoritarian” positions, in Deleuze and Guattarian terms. Some forms of music cultures are caught by the molar powers that define their identity, yet there is a desperate attempt to redefine and reterritorialize them- selves. In this sense I tend to also concur with Braidotti (2002) when she says: “I think Deleuze [and Lacan] can help and even do a lot, but I would never advocate total reliance on his, or for that matter any other, theoretical framework. This seems to be the age of hybridity, transversal and transdisci- plinary connections and non-Oedipal creativity also and maybe especially in media and cultural studies where the intersection of feminist with Deleuze theories can be most enriching for both” (89).
In this book the transposition of Deleuzean concepts of “force” and
“affectivity,” which are of such central importance to his stance on radical immanence, play a major conceptual role in music. In Deleuze “force” is conceptualized as a degree of affectivity or intensity of an embodied subject, but the contradiction is that the immaterialism of such a “sense-event,” the flow of pure becoming cannot be reconciled so easily with the “embodied subject” who must then actualize this virtual space-time into Being. In this book, the death drive (more below) does the same conceptual work as the immanence of life, in that it has the same intensity (potentia) as well as resist- ance and constraint (potestas) for transformation. The pulse of the drives is the force of affectivity—“positive desire.” But, why should the “desire of the
Other”—claimed as “negative desire” or lack, be dismissed so forcefully by Deleuzeans? An overemphasis on positive desire as part of the virtual space of multiple and impersonal singular elements that are not as yet synthesized into “reality”—in my mind a simple transposition of the Freudian/Lacanian drives—does not allow any symbolic intervention between these affective drives and the social Other, outside of repression (see Dean, 2000, 244).
Most Deleuzeans who are critical of Lacanian psychoanalysis reduce desire naively to lack, as essentially being negative. Desire becomes images of what we lack; or we desire to be “whole” again, to achieve some sort of nirvana of a lost plentitude at the mother’s breast; desire becomes “other” than life. Then there are criticisms based on representation—conscious imaginary desire, which Lacan never adhered to. Lacan never posited an imaged object of desire, quite the contrary—objet a, the cause of desire is in the Real, not visible and not signifiable. The image of desire is only a lure. Speech and language theorized representationally is what Lacan struggled against. Desire is precisely what alludes language, what is only half said, or slipped up.
Unconscious desire is aimed at the impossibility of representation itself—that we can “never” be whole, never complete, a way to “live” with our “flaw.”
Where there is lack in Lacan, there is also excess—the bodily drives present the paradox of life and death, of Law and its transgression.
Every time one reads “desire” in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, it is just as easily replaced by the jouissance of bodily drives, with the death drive remaining unmentioned but desire (drives) as the flows of productive difference equally “deterritorializing” and destructive of any closed order, as is jouissance. Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is only successful when it “breaks down,” when it is no longer repressed, destroying and dissolving structures. Geminal influx of intensity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, 164) or
“geminal implex” (162), sometimes also referred to as “chaosmos” or
“intense geminal influx,” is characterized as a “machinic assemblage” mov- ing in one direction toward organization and in the other toward free flow.
For Freud the most primary drive was the oral drive. How different is that from Deleuze and Guattari’s first synthesis of a life producing “distionic”
intensity—by one flow of desire intersecting with another as mouth/breast?
Is not the drive “mechanism”—its circular loop—machinic? The importance of Deleuze and Guattari would be their attempt to update a theory of the drives—what they refer to as positive and productive desire—through an updated biologism of complexity theory. In this sense I would argue they fail to capitalize on the more radical aspects of Freud that surpassed biology and recognize anthropology as a distinct philosophical “science” that pertains to homo sapiens. Despite anthropology’s modernist racist roots, its quest is to think through what is distinctly human.
Deleuze and Guattari claimed the virtual field of molecularity as being productive while representation was confined to the molar. The result was the failure to recognize production as the very passage from the virtual to the actual (Badiou, 2000). Representation, for Deleuze and Guattari “is always a social and psychic repression of desiring-production” (1977, 184). This is
why desire as lack (its negativity) is also required. Without such a conceptualization, Deleuze and Guattari, like Foucault, eschew a theory of fantasy, in favor of a materialism. There is no mediation to complicate the relation between unconscious desire (in the Real) and the social, which Lacan’s Symbolic and Imaginary registers take into account. But, as argued below, Anzieu’s (1989) concept of the skin-ego is a materialistic bridge to Lacan without sacrificing the notion of fantasy. In Youth Fantasies, Lacan’s matheme for fantasy (] a) was, of course, a key consideration, as it is in this book. The book’s subtitle: The Perverse Landscape of the Media refers to Lacan’s inversion of his formula of fantasy into the matheme of perversion (a ]). Fantasies are always potentially perverse and in flux. The lozenge sign (poinçon) placed between the elements allows for the multiplicity of possible heterogeneous readings. The sign indicates the multitude of possible relations between the subject of the unconscious (je) and its object cause of desire (a), which are engaged through the readings of popular music cultures.
One site of the Real is interpreted here as the embodied unconscious self (je), the place of affect—what is “feelable” as opposed to what is “seeable”
(Imaginary register) and what is “sayable” (Symbolic register). Affect and jouissance, especially when it comes to music, while not completely equiva- lent, nevertheless, point to similar level of occurrence (more below). They overlap in the affective disruption that jouissance provides. Jouissance is not an experience of pleasure, but is connected to a momentary break from the symbolic fictions that constitute identity. In a skewed sort of way, it can be read as “positive” in the Deleuzean sense. This is where Deleuze and Guattari’s axiomatic statement “[t]here is only desire and the social, and nothing else” (1977, 184) appears to hold, but not entirely for jouissance is connected to the Symbolic Order precisely in the moment when it throws the Symbolic Order into question. As an eruption of “non-sense” it indicates either a hole (or lack) in the Symbolic Order of the signifier or an excess of over-presence in it. In this particular sense jouissance can be interpreted as being “productive” given its transformative potentiality, while desire, caught up in fantasy as a lack, is theorized in terms of reproduction, consumption, and exchange where the narrative structure of the signifier covers up jouis- sance as sense making. Jouissance can, therefore, be excessive and abundant, or lacking; at the same time it is painful, addictive, and dangerous, outside the Law where the death drive comes to fore. Jouissance can produce an interruption when the subject is completely unconcerned with the Other’s desire. The subject loses symbolically situated identity as opposed to narcis- sism where the subject’s identity is invested in the Symbolic Order. I fail to see how the theory of the drives cannot be read as “positive” desire, which is the “market” corned by Deleuzean supporters. As I argue below and in chapter 2, the death drive can be read as a “positive” site of transformation as an “ethics of the Real.”
How different is Lacan’s understanding of the unconscious from Deleuze’s stance that unconscious subjectivity is a passion-driven network of
“impersonal” machinic-like connections? Lacan always took the unconscious as a system in-and-of itself, interconnected with the Imaginary and Symbolic.
While Deleuze can be read as updating the biological paradigm along the vitalist lines of chaos theory, Lacan’s concept of the unconscious as the site of a “mathematical” acephalous Real, developed further in the late stages of his life, can be marshaled to do much the same work as Deleuze’s appropri- ation of chaos theory (e.g., Milovanovic’s many writings in criminology and law, 1997, 2002), as can the theory of the drives (Triebe). The death drive, in particular, as immanent to experience, becomes the “zero” that is added to the body. It is inevitably present but unregistered. The drives are trans- posed as the affective embodiment, and are a transposition of Deleuze’s claim of “positive” desire, which Braidotti always pits against Lacan’s notion of lack, as if lack has been simply theorized one-sidedly as a negative con- ceptualization rather than the paradoxical “full and empty” at once, which Lacan always put subtly into play. Although Braidotti attempts to maintain a hard line against psychoanalysis by forwarding Deleuze, she slips up once in a while. For instance: “The subject is a process, made of constant shifts and negotiations between different levels of power and desire, constantly shifting between willful choice and unconscious drives. . . . [the subject] is the fictional choreography of many levels into one socially operational self. It implies that what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will-to-know, the desire to speak, as a founding, primary, vital, necessary and therefore origi- nal desire to become” (Braidotti, 2002, 75–76, emphasis added). Statements such as these show the transpositional possibilities between the two, often claimed, disparate systems. The issue of sexuality, in particular, is identified as a dividing line between them. Lacan is accused of binarism, while Deleuze and Guattari, for the most part, receive “warnings” and “possibilities” for their potential for feminist and queer theory as exemplified, for instance, by Grosz’s (1994) questionable and hesitant support of becoming-woman “as going beyond identity and subjectivity, fragmenting and freeing up lines of flight,
‘liberating’ a thousand tiny sexes that identity subsumes under the One”
(207). How far are Lacan and Deleuze apart on the question of sexuality?
S: B S/G
Sexuality, as theorized within Lacan’s “formulae of sexuation” (S XX, Encore), belongs to the category of the Real. It is neither a constructed category (unlike gender), nor can sex somehow be articulated once and for all.
Potentially, sex is perpetually differentiated by a gap that separates two logi- cally heterogeneous systems: masculine and feminine. Sex is also not “manip- ulable” and “pliable” as transgendered and transsexual theorists often claim.1 Every culture has an origin myth regarding the sexes (Moore, 1997). I would argue that this unconscious abyss concerning sex—that is, there is no signifier for sex in the unconscious—emerged as a result of the sex/gender confusion that developed during the evolutionary “rhizome” from the Australopithecines to Homo Sapiens (jagodzinski, 1986–2004). An impossible gap emerges
between a sexuality still defined in biological terms (irregardless of any updated scientific findings based on the complexity of socio-genetic-biology) and our species-specific sexuality, which requires minimally a psychoanalytic explanation—the path of which was first trail blazed by Freud. Through his theory of the bodily drives (Triebe), Freud offered a philosophical anthro- pology that steered a path between biology and culture understood in construc- tivist terms, as strongly anthropocentric. It is the body subject to jouissance, to traumas and the excesses of the drives, governed by the death drive that makes it “human.” Put another way, the mystique of the male penis, the
“truth” of which is embedded in the phenomenon of impotency—of impos- ture as the “failure” or limit of the phallus, of (conscious) fatherhood and authority, and the feminine mystique of the vagina, the “truth” of which is embedded in the phenomenon of the disappearance of estrus—as the “failure”
or limit of the chora, of motherhood itself, that is being barren, present the complex of reproductive sexuality. Both phenomena are governed by an unexplainable “will” of their own. A male is unable to entirely “control” his erection, whereas a female, unlike the animal world, is potentially fertile all the time, but neither can she control the moment of her pregnancy. Viagra, artificial insemination, and birth control certainly take the mystique away, but then sexuality becomes desexualized (more below). Having an erection and having a child become instrumental functions with no necessary pretense to inexplicable desire. Designer sex can and does become instrumentalized.
At these limits of “failure,” queer positions emerge where the economy of sexual reproduction is no longer necessarily considered primary; sex becomes overdetermined as sexual production in its variety of perverse forms where an inversion of fantasy takes place offering a variety of performative masks (male) and masquerades (female) that quickly confuse any gender/sex binaries or biological claims to the determination of sex. The binary differentiations of being gay/lesbian/transsexual or straight are no longer in tight opposition to each other as designer sex makes everyone queer in some way, illustrating once more Freud’s (1905) position of polymorphous sexuality as developed in his “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.” “All human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious” (SE 7,145) and “[I]n human beings pure masculinity and femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense”
(SE 7, 220). This, indeed, is also Lacan’s position.
Sex is therefore a metaphysical category whose riddle will never be solved.
So while the phallus-penis slippage is certainly evident in Lacan’s phallocentric formulation, the same may be said of Luce Irigaray’s gynocentric position where the slippage between the vaginal and the transcendental “two lips” is a homologous occurrence. The masculine body as a solid opposed to the feminine fluid body repeats the abyss between them. The visibly tumescent penis and the hidden vagina that hides the usual visible coloring—the heat of estrus—shaped the “sex/gender” confusion of our species. Such a confusion can be theorized abstractly as the impossible relationship between the masculine One (closed system logic) and the feminine Zero (open system logic).
To stage a “betrayal” of Lacan/Z izek here, I believe both Braidotti and Irigaray are right to continue their insistence on the fundamental impossibil- ity of sexual difference and to question whether the phallus is binding on both the transcendental dualism of both sexes. In his usual brilliant flurry of rhetorical tropes, which continually reverse accepted assumptions until the reader finds him-or herself walking the paradoxical stairs inside one’s head as if caught in an Escher illustration (one is not quite sure if there is a way out, logical directions no longer seem to apply), Z izek (2004, 87–93) defends the phallus, bending and twisting the usual charges (reproaches) brought against it, so that it does double-duty for both sexes. Amazingly, the phallus emerges as an “organ without a body” (87), as the empty signifier of “sym- bolic castration.” A castration occurs when one enters the Symbolic Order essentially because the signifier (of language) has to “write” the body, the
“body” has to find its place of identity, that is to be disciplined by it through the various micro-practices of power as Foucault argued. An identity has to be taken on, and such a symbolic “insignia” or “mask” is made possible by the intervention of the phallic signifier since it “materializes” (enables the creation of such insignia, mask, symbolic identity to take place) by actualizing the
“immanent” autonomous asexual senses of the body (Deleuze’s virtuality of the senses). Such a process is best explained through dialectical materialism—
as the dialectic between Becoming (the flux of asexual or polymorphous senses) and Being (their actualization as sexuality). The phallus mediates this exchange, says Z izek.
If I have it right, the phallus acts like a “vanishing mediator” (in Z izek’s sense) between the paradoxical interplay of a desexualized and a sexualized world of experience. Given its status in the Real, the drive of sexuality is never complete, therefore its appearance is either excessive—when, for instance, the usual instrumental and asexual purpose of an object involved is suspended, all experience can become sexually charged (from the most crass Freudian reading, for example, a cigar becomes a phallic symbol, to the most sophis- ticated one, for example, the paradoxical link between sex and violence)—or it remains insufficient, left at the desexualized level. If sex is reduced to
“fucking,” to pornographic instrumentalism (Hustler’s motto is “lighten up, it’s only sex”) it becomes just another object, desexualized (see chapter 10 on the “dirty virgins”). The Lacanian–Z izekian claim is that sexuality can never directly enter into language (the “body” cannot (entirely) pass into symbolic “thought”; put another way, polymorphous sexuality at the level of sense is only partially, in a skewed way, present in language that enables flirting and a “guessing” game to go on: “Is s/he straight or queer?” “Is she interested in me or not?”). It is always a “missed” approach, either excessive or insufficient, either too soon or too late, but never direct and unproblem- atic, again confirming that sex is a failure of language. The phallus, which has no signified is theorized as the signifier that sustains this gap—of failure—
in other words, of castration.
Here is where a turn can be made: Is the feminine castrated the same way as the masculine in the Symbolic Order? Does Woman labor under the same
or another economy? In the social order, is not sexuality overdetermined through a feminine body rather than a masculine one? Isn’t it more excessive than insufficient? It doesn’t take much to feminize a man, but it is much more difficult to masculinize a woman. The art of bodybuilding is ample evi- dence of this (see Ian, 1995). Why must the phallus be the privileged signi- fier, and not recognize that another “vanishing mediator” is also operative?
Lacan, himself, posited the ambiguity of the feminine: there is the Woman who is caught by phallic jouissance and the Woman who is mercifully free of the phallus. Does this mean she is not “symbolically castrated,” and as such has no “identity,” identity being the preserve of the Symbolic Order as actu- alized by the phallus as “vanishing mediator?” Opposing phallic jouissance is the “jouissance of the Other,” meaning feminine jouissance that is not rec- ognized by the Symbolic Order—a jouissance that it lacks. As opposed to the Man, who wears a mask, always fearful of exposure (all the masked comic book super heroes have this anxiety that their “true” identity will be revealed, that they will be found out as being simply “ordinary” men like the rest of the population) and the non-phallic Woman who always wears a mas- querade to keep others guessing as to who she “is,” never too worried if she is exposed or caught for her alleged claims to the heights of authority, she can always escape by exposing another face, for there is “nothing” under- neath the masquerade—except another face. Oddly, the controversial playing with identity becomes a great strength and ruse in a phallic world.
Here, it is possible to read the feminine Zero also as One, challenging the One that is already in place: the feminine as a “supernumerary” element that has no place in the closed masculine order, as a particular subtracted element, which paradoxically claims a universal right for all, referred to as the paradox of a “singular universal.” As the “supernumerary” element, the feminine forces a passage from difference to antagonism since it stands for a “pure” differ- ence that suspends all other differences in the social field (Z izek, 2003, 65).
In this sense, those excluded from the social order speak an “objective truth”
or a “half-spoken truth” since they are the “objects” (not subjects) that stand for the lack or inconsistency in the Symbolic Order itself—the part that does not exist. They are the “slips” in the system, pointing to the “impossible” of any attainment of the w(hole) truth itself. Theoretically, it would seem, that neither One (masculine) nor the other (feminine) should be dominant, but a static harmonious balance is not possible since the temporality of movement of a system would be dismissed. If masculine and feminine are theorized as opposites, then the possibility of an “outside” appears, for example, a third term such as androgyny, which would make them equivalent to each other, or cancel their difference out. As opposites these two externalized poles mutually rely on one another to maintain a self-enclosed organic definition, like Master–Slave—the masculine is that which is nonfeminine and vice versa.
To avoid the quagmire of such logic is to posit a gap within sexual difference itself as Lacan does. Namely, that there exists a “minimal difference”
between them, the Real of an antagonism, an irreducible gap that causes a distortion, which never settles into a harmonious organicism.
This is where Z izek (2004) points out a crucial difference between Lacan and Deleuze when it comes to an understanding of difference. If more than a fundamental binary antagonism is posited—more than the immanence of two, that is, if a multiple of antagonisms (or differences) is claimed, as does Deleuze, then a “logic of nonatagonistic One-ness” appears. A homoge- nization occurs as these proliferating multiple of antagonisms “exist against the background of a neutral One as their medium, which is not itself marked or cut by an antagonism” (67, original emphasis). “Against the plane of immanence, the pure flux of Becoming as encompassing a single plane, the Whole or One of Being, governed by the Aion of Time we have Lacan’s meaningless Real, where there is no One, but only pure multitude, the vast infinite coldness of the Void” (Z izek, 2004, 29). Historically, the irresolv- ability of this gap (the gap between Zero and One) has led to all sorts of metaphysical speculations and resolutions within specific sociopolitical and historical conditions. The postmodern decentering of One (as the masculine Same) and the theorizations of non-One as the feminine multiple within itself by Irigaray and her followers is yet another instance of a rethinking of this impossible asymmetrical gap. From a Lacanian–Z izekian point of view
“there is no ‘primoridial’ duality of poles in the first place, only the inherent gap of the One” (2004, 65, original emphasis). The One in this statement should be interpreted as nothing. In chapter 14, which articulates the fan(addict), I also introduce the signifier ONE, but this time it is a dispersed and decentered ONE, which refers to the way fan(addicts) elevate and center themselves around a particular soundscape (the ONE) so as to differentiate themselves from the inexhaustible variety of available soundscapes generated by what can be referred to as the “clamor of becoming” as developed below.
For Lacan, masculine and feminine as conceptualizations are failed attempts to achieve some sort of totality, wholeness, or final teleological unity. Sexual difference is not one of an opposition but an effect of incompleteness. They form a fundamental irresolvable antagonism. The masculine closed system is open through an impossible exception (The Man). The feminine open sys- tem is closed by an impossible exception (The Woman), neither one of which can “exist” since they are Real non-visible and non-signifiable concepts—
simply unconscious fantasies. Their impossible unity forms a dissipative sys- tem that is constantly in flux. Chaos theory also characterizes Lacan’s latter writings in the 1970s. These are not binary, dualist, or dialectical conceptu- alizations as is so often claimed. Such terms are imaginary and apply to a two system gendered position, but not to the vicissitudes of sex in the unknowable unconscious Real. Sex in Lacan’s late formulations is equally as “distributive,”
multiple, interconnected, and in constant flux as Deleuze stance on poly- sexuality because of the failure of fulfillment of the two positions: The Man and The Woman. The infinite gap between masculine and feminine result in endless possibilities of imaginary representational sexualities. Given that The Man and The Woman “do no exist”(both are cultural myths, since there is no perfect empirical ideal in either system), the various paradoxical con- tradictions that are generated within the “formulae,” from the attempted but
always failed interaction between a closed (masculine) and open (feminine) system, result in a finite array of sexual representations within a historical period. While other representations are possible, the material conditions for their emergence is always in a state of becoming.
The dominance of the transcendental phallic signifier (as One) is a historical development (see Goux, 1992), not some teleological or prescriptive claim that is often charged against Lacan. Further, while Braidotti (2002, 77–80) argues that Deleuze’s position of becoming-woman presents an “unresolved knot” in his relation to feminine: on the one hand, it is the prerequisite for all becomings, on the other hand, it then dissolves into poly-sexualities.
Braidotti is unwilling to accept the paradox and insists in forwarding femi- nine difference as primary, privileging it as Deleuzean “minority-becoming.”
Lacan’s formulae of sexuation also presents a paradox on the “feminine”
side, which preserves on the one hand the impossibility of masculine–feminine sides from falling into a whole (One) by positing a dualistic understanding of the feminine. There is the “phallic woman” who labors under a phallo- centric regime (the sedentary molar woman in Deleuze terms), as well as the “true” woman (see Miller, 2000, 17–20) who does not, a woman who searches for her own feminine jouissance (the molecular or nomadic becoming- woman). Lacan preserves the impossible asymmetry that Braidotti protests (2002, 81) while Deleuze does not. There is no discrepancy with Lacan’s position when Braidotti writes that the feminine “is radically and positively other”(82) from the masculine. How far does then such a transposition take us away from a similar division between striated, molar, closed territorialized space as opposed to smooth, heterogeneous, deterritorialized, molecular open space? Are not Lacan’s “formulae of sexuation” a web of rhizomatic interconnections? Are not the possible sexualities, which are generated just as nonlinear and complex when their failed logics are articulated? The mul- tiplicity of sexed subjectivities and the differences in degree marked between them, it seems to me, are but different lines of becoming.
S-E BO
In Youth Fantasies (2004, 105–106) it was suggested that Deleuze and Guttari’s conceptualization of “positive” unmediated and unregulated desire of the primary processes of the libido—the flow of immaterial becoming, the delirium of unconscious libidinal flows—is transposable with the drive forces of jouissance that are no longer prohibitory in a post-Oedipalized milieu of designer capitalism. A confusion of terms occurs between the two systems in Deleuze and Guattari’s rushed zeal to differentiate themselves from a psychoanalytic orthodoxy so that it appears as though the Lacanian paradigm has very little to say about bodily materiality (everything is reduced to rep- resentation via the mirror stage), while Lacan’s statement that the “uncon- scious is structured as/like a language” is reduced to a naïve representational structuralism, replaced by an unconscious that is structured like/as a machine (more specifically, an open system machine that involves heterogeneous,
independent parts—machinic in their operation). The unconscious is now based on production/formation rather than representation/writing. Their term, desire, as free-floating energy, has the same equivalency as Freud’s bod- ily libido, Nietzsche’s “will to power” and Lacan’s drives. “Desiring machines”
are nothing more than the pulse movements of the drives, whose description has been updated along open-system terms of a decentered biological vital- ism, as the ebb and flow of intensity at the molecular level. Such an updated scientism is often referred to chaos and complexity theory (or nonlinear dynamical systems theory), the two developments are not necessarily identi- cal with one another, nevertheless both are post-structuralist open-system orientations, which attempt to grasp autopoesis (self-organizing systems) and states of disequilibrium, Ilya Prigogine’s “dissipative structures” (see for instance, Taylor, 2001). Desiring-machines, like the drives, are partial-objects.
BwO goes in tandem with desiring machines as a “plane of consistency,” a surface latticed with “longitudes and latitudes, speeds and haecceities”
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 266), on which flow “pure intensities, free, prephysical and prevital singularities” (58). Desire is a “pure multiplicity” that cannot be reduced to a unity. It remains pre-personal and pre-individual.
BwO, therefore, becomes “the field of immanence of desire, the place of consistency proper to desire” (191).
I am inclined to transpose BwO with Didier Anzieu’s (1989) notion of the skin-ego as developed in Youth Fantasies and utilized in the course of this book (see especially chapter 15). Anzieu first developed the notion of the skin-ego in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse, published in 1974, which is approximately the same time frame as Anti-Oedipus. Given Deleuze and Guattari’s description of BwO, the “ego” in skin-ego seems contradictory, for this already seems to be a “molar” representation and not a molecular one. Does it not already suggest a body image? This would be the most obvious reproach, but what if the skin-ego is theorized similarly as a plane of virtual potentiality, as an active “material surface” before a “picture” of the psychic Ego becomes registered—as a body ego without an image? For critics such as Tyler (2001), who challenge Anzieu for his alleged deficiency in not sufficiently attending to social differentiations of skin, fail to recognize that he is not dealing with representation as yet. This would be my reading of the skin-ego’s conceptualization. By skin-ego Anzieu means “a mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its develop- ment to represent itself as an Ego containing psychical contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body” (40, emphasis added). The oper- ative terms here are “make use” and “surface.” The formation of the imaginary ego takes place always in the past tense, drawing upon experience that has already been affectively felt or not felt, as in trauma. The bodily envelope (skin-ego) is always-already in-tension figurally (cf. Lyotard) with the drives, the erogenous orifices of the body, which not only include the most obvious ones—mouth, anus, ear, nose, and so on, but also the pores themselves where touch plays such a significant role in human psychic formation; that is, the skin-ego heterogeneously coexists as an “invisible image” of the self, activated
through the drives (Triebe) in a similar “repulsion and attraction” that arises between the desiring machines and the BwO. The pulsations of the drives in conjunction with the skin-ego can be read similarly as the functioning of a multiplicity of intensities one moment, and a zero-intensity the next, as these pulses become registered on the skin-ego. Multiplicity comes before the Zero, making these concepts transposable.
Anzieu goes on to say that such a bodily ego is “not recognized by the subject as its own” (therefore it is prepersonal and preindividual) and “the cutaneous and sexual sensations which emanate from it are attributed to the workings of an influencing machine in the service of a devious seducer/
persecutor” (40, emphasis added). This statement, it seems to me, not only has the same machinic sensibility about it, but also obliquely refers to the
“demon” in Deleuze’s scientism, the “dark precursor” introduced in Difference and Repetition (1994, 119–120), which mysteriously functions as a differ- entiator of continuous variation, an “object x” that lacks place and identity.
This “dark precursor” acts to maintain perpetual difference. It plays the part of a “differenciator” between two heterogeneous series, the “in-itself of difference,” or the “differently different.” Such a formulation has Zizek (2004, 81) claiming that this is simply a euphemism for the phallus—the signifier without signification! But, back to Anzieu.
What Anzieu is referring to by mentioning seducer/persecutor are two heterogeneous intensive systems that act on the skin-ego; namely, the para- doxical interplay between primary narcissism and masochism, between well- being and suffering, which then become secondarily eroticized through the constitution of the skin-ego (BwO). The shift from primary to secondary masochism and narcissism is constituted by the same continuous “break- down” as desiring-machines (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, 8). Primary masochism and narcissism can be interpreted as coexistent but different orders of intensities that are temporally dispersed by the skin-ego of the infant through the contact with the mother or caregiver, which communicate excitation and signifying information in a logic of both/and since there is a confusion in the early stages of infancy as to which is which. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1977, 76) articulation of a “disjunctive synthesis,” or “inclusive disjunction,” which allows impossibilities to coexist paradoxically applies here; that is, not as either/or but as “either . . . or . . . or,” what I would deem as the logic of both/and—the excluded middle. Alternations between over- stimulation (satisfaction) of contact and deprivation of physical contact (frustration) with the infant by the “influencing machine” (i.e., usually the mother or her substitutes, but it could also be the social environment per se) results in the topography of primary masochism—the skin-ego’s jouissance (its intensities) are governed by an envelope of excitation and suffering.
In secondary masochism the fantasy of a skin surface that is common to both mother and child results in an exchange of sensory stimulation, while the unconscious fantasy of the “flayed” body underlies the behavior of the per- verse masochist. Primary narcissism, on the other hand, is also governed by the fantasy of a common skin surface to both mother and child, but the
topography changes. The skin-ego is an envelope that acts as a protective shield of well-being. Its caregiver meets the baby’s needs; the illusion being that the infant has an omniscient double who reacts immediately in a sym- metrical fashion to its every signal. Anzieu makes the case that skin-ego, which develops in a narcissistic direction, transforms the fundamental fantasy of a common skin into a secondary fantasy of a skin “reinforced and invul- nerable” (44); while a skin-ego that develops in the masochistic direction, transforms the fantasy of the common skin as being “damaged, torn-off.”
These insights are of use in the discussion of the fan(addict (chapter 15) where we discuss the skin-ego of a particular fan, Silke. Such a direction also raises the “desire of the Other.” What does the Other want of me? What is the Other’s demand? Thus drawing the question back to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the “quasi-cause” that is explicitly linked to Lacan’s objet a (1977, 26–27) as the non-sense that is inherent to sense. The “quasi- cause” is a signifier without a signified in as much as it presents an impossi- ble transcendental plane of ideal identities that are striven toward, so claims Massumi (2002a), a key translator and interpreter of Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre. If this is so, the “quasi-cause” registers as a Freudian “slip” in Deleuze’s disavowal of Lacanian signifying system.
The advantage (or disadvantage depending where one positions oneself on the postmodernist landscape) of Anzieu’s formulation of skin-ego over Deleuze and Guattari’s BwO is that their post-structural biological scientism of the unconscious as a “factory” or a “production machine” of various assem- blages is based on the template of the psychotic experience of a “fragmented body” (psychotics experience parts of their bodies as separate entities), and the schizophrenic experience of catatonic states and multiple personalities, while Anzieu brings the materiality of the body in line with its anthropolog- ical human specificity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the relationship of repulsion and attraction between desiring machines and BwO is modeled on paranoia as extrapolated from Freud’s case concerning Judge Schreber (Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 16–19), whereas Anzieu retains the question of human suffering (masochism) and love (narcissism). We might think of their difference in terms of an egg, a “tantric egg,” which Deleuze sometimes referred to make his points. “The body without organs is an egg: it is criss- crossed with axes and thresholds, with latitudes and longitudes and geodesic lines, traversed by gradients marking the transitions and the becomings, the destinations of the subject developing along these particular lines (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977, 19). For him, it was not the embryology of the egg (its development) that mattered, rather more interesting were the dynamics of its “kinematics” or “morphogenetic movements” such as the stretching of its cellular layers, invagination by folding, and so on. The egg in Anzieu’s (1989) terms is more a psychical “container” where depersonalization is bound up with the image of an envelope capable of perforation. Primary anxiety becomes a flowing away of vital substance through holes, “an anxi- ety not of fragmentation but of emptying . . . as an egg with a broken shell being emptied of its [yoke]” (38–39). The libidinal quality and intensity of
