This is part of a much larger (five essays in all, each totalling at about 25-30 pages) paper I did for a Literary Theory course I took last Fall. I apologize for the poor grammar (e.g., not italicizing all things that should be in italics), but it was a long paper, and I think you can read it even though it does lack these things. The references may be a bit difficult to trace at certain points, since I’m a very loosy-goosey researcher, I don’t always cite where I get things from, though I know who wrote them. Also, references simply with page numbers come from the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. Anyway, enjoy.
2.0: Chaos
Chaotic structures have long been dismissed in scientific communities as “un-understandable.†However, chaos is not radically opposed to rationality. We have more or less mastered the concept of rationality, but even the sciences are reaching their outer limits: at a certain point, we come up against the object barrier, and physical laws reverse themselves or no longer operate. But have we really mobilized our forces into a position where we accept this defeat, or are we still trapped in the fantasy of possessing sophisticated knowledge – of ourselves, of others, of the universe? Is there ever a real “end†to our thirst for controlling the world and its postulates? Certainly this drive and fantasy are not internal to science in and of itself. For our part, it may be wise to pose a Manichaean hypothesis: in the last instance, we might be said to be faced not with an appropriation of the object of the world by the subject, but with a duel between subject and object. In regards to the outcome, all bets are still on…
In some sense, one can say the twentieth century was the century of the object. Are we not, currently, faced with a kind of turnabout, of revenge, almost of vengeance, on the part of the allegedly passive object, which allowed itself to be discovered and analyzed, but has suddenly become a “strange attractor†and, in a manner of speaking, an opponent? Here, something akin to a fatal antagonism is being played out, of the order of that between Eros and Thanatos, in a kind of metaphysical clash. Today, our sciences confess to the strategic disappearance of the object on the Virtual Display Unit: the object is henceforth beyond our grasp. As it happens, the tragic irony emerges: the rules of the game are changing, but it is no longer we who set them. That is the destination of a culture: our own. Other cultures, other metaphysics, are doubtless not so badly undermined by this development because they did not have the ambition, expectation or phantasm of possessing the world, of analyzing it in order to control it. But since we claimed to control the totality of postulates, it is clearly our system headed for catastrophe: not the object’s.
Once chaos invades and disturbs our fatal illusion of the world, which is in itself a perfect crime: no motivation, no equivalent, no alleged perpetrator, such that we are always-already in a criminal enterprise, does it not represent the end of an epoch? In science’s leaps and bounds and gaps and dark-spots, it has claimed the universe for itself. Why we may call the illusion of the world a fatal one is the following: as the perfect crime/criminal, it has achieved its own perfection. We cannot decipher in it or through it any kind of meaning – “why am I here?†– which is why we have built up our fortress with technology and reasoning. But in the perfect crime, it is the perfection that is criminal. To perfect the world is to finish it, to fulfill it – and hence to find a final solution for it. Is this not already what is occurring in our vain struggle to “understand†superstring theory and Foucault? Are we not, just in our analysis of them, engaging in an attempt to find a “final solution†for the world, for ourselves? And if we find the final solution in these studies, is there anything we could do with them, or do they simply represent the death of our age?
When we subject (or is it object?) texts to Chaos Theory, we see in them a system of fluids and mechanics that operate on the subatomic level: simply the letters and idiosyncrasies signal a structure that could collapse at any given time if the right person were to poke at its cinder blocks. When Marcy Playground sings, “Hangin’ round / I’m downtown by myself / and I’ve had so much time to sit / and think about myself / and there she was,†they are reaffirming that we really do live in a postmodern universe: a universe wrought with devious gazes that all trace back to nothing.
2.1: Ellis as an Introduction to Foucault
Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction quickly exorcises our proper understanding of the narrative set-up; that is, the frames from which we generally perceive things – in this case, a novel – are undermined so that they may form new dialogues that are constantly in flux. With little effort, one can piece the “proper†dialogue together to form a cogent, stable body of text, but even that, in itself, is another form of totalitarian control and domination. When one (presumably some snobby wanna-be intellectual) tells us how utterly important historicization and situating our understanding of a text in its historical context is, we should respond: but isn’t the historical con-text a text already, waiting to be read, and, further, how is it possible for us to read and interpret such a text without that very historical context to situate it in? What occurs in such a “necessary†stationing is the paranoiac Other of the Other which always leads to a nullified existence. There is no need for any type of “historical†context of the author to be brought to the table when reading a text; only the history of the subject (historical subject?) is necessary.
Almost four decades ago, Michel Foucault dismissed “man†as a figure in the sand that is now being washed away, introducing the (then) fashionable topic of the “death of man.†Like most movies of its genre, Terminator plays out a whole string of Foucauldian ideas and generalizations: namely, though, it identifies a post-human species whose goal is to accomplish that which humans can not and/or do not want to. Although Terminator stages this disappearance of man in much more naïve literal terms, as the replacement of man with a new post-human species, there is a common denominator between the two: the disappearance of sexual difference. In his last works, Foucault envisioned the space of pleasures liberated from sex, and one is tempted to claim that Ellis’s reality of “Sex, beer, and drugs!†is the realization of the Foucauldian dream of the Selves who practice the use of pleasures. While this solution is fantasy at its purest, the deadlock to which it reacts is a real one – how are we going to get out of it? The standard way would be to try to somehow resurrect the transgressive erotic passion, following the well-known principle, first fully asserted in the tradition of courtly love, that the only true love is the transgressive prohibited one – we need new Prohibitions, so that a new Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet will appear. The problem is that, in today’s permissive society, transgression itself is the norm. What, then, is the way out? One should recall here the ultimate lesson of Lacan concerning sublimation: in a way, true sublimation is exactly the same as desublimation. Let’s take a love relationship: is the “sublime†not the cold elevated figure of the Lady who had to remain beyond our reach – if she were to step down from her pedestal, she would turn into a repulsive hag. “Sublime†is the magic combination of the two dimensions, when the sublime dimension transpires through the utmost common details of everyday shared life – the “sublime†moment of the love life occurs when the magic dimension transpires even in common everyday acts like washing the dishes or cleaning the apartment. (In this precise sense, sublimation is to be opposed to idealization.)
One of the key conclusions to be drawn from all of this is that those who, like Michel Foucault, advocate the subversive potential of perversions are sooner or later led to the denial of the Freudian Unconscious. This denial is theoretically grounded in the fact, emphasized by Freud himself, that for psychoanalysis, hysteria and psychosis – not perversion – offer a way into the Unconscious: the Unconscious is not accessible via perversions. Following Freud, Lacan repeatedly insisted that perversion is always a socially constructive attitude, while hysteria is much more subversive and threatening to the predominant hegemony. It may seem that the situation is actually the opposite: don’t perverts openly realize and practice what hysterics only secretly dream about? Or, with regard to the Master: do hysterics not merely provoke the Master in an ambiguous way which, in effect, amounts to an appeal addressed to the Master to assert his authority again and more strongly, while perverts actually undermine the Master’s position? (This is how one usually understands Freud’s thesis that perversion is the negative of neurosis.) This very fact, however, confronts us with the paradox of the Freudian Unconscious: the Unconscious does not consist of the secret perverse scenarios we daydream about and (in so far as we remain hysterics) shirk from realizing, while perverts heroically “do itâ€. When we do this, when we realize (“act outâ€) our secret perverse fantasies, everything is disclosed, yet the Unconscious is somehow missed – why?
Because the Freudian Unconscious is not the secret fantasmic content, but something that intervenes in between, in the process of the translation/transposition of the secret fantasmic content into the text of the dream (or the hysterical symptom). The Unconscious is that which, precisely, is obfuscated by the fantasmic scenarios the pervert is acting out: the pervert, with his certainty about what brings enjoyment, obfuscates the gap, the burning question, the stumbling block that “is†the core of the Unconscious. The pervert is thus the inherent transgressor par excellence: he brings to light, stages, practices the secret fantasies that sustain the predominant public discourse, while the hysterical position precisely displays doubt about whether those secret perverse fantasies are “really it.†Hysteria is not simply the battleground between secret desires and symbolic prohibitions; it also, and above all, articulates the gnawing doubt whether secret desires really contain what they promise – whether our inability to enjoy really hinges only on symbolic prohibitions. In other words, the pervert precludes the Unconscious because he knows the answer (to what brings jouissance to the Other); he has no doubts about it; his position is unshakeable; while the hysteric doubts – that is, her position is that of an eternal and constitutive (self-)questioning: What does the Other want from me? What am I for the Other?
One often hears the claim that today hysteria is no longer sexualized but is, rather, to be located in the domain of non-sexualized victimization, of the wound of some traumatic violence that cuts into the very soul of our being. However, we are dealing with hysteria only in so far as the victimized subject entertains an ambiguous attitude of fascination towards the wound, in so far as he secretly takes “perverse†pleasure in it, in so far as the very source of pain exerts a magnetism - hysteria is precisely the name for this stance of ambivalent fascination in the face of the object that terrifies and repels us. And this excess of pleasure in pain is another name for sexualization: the moment it is there, the situation is sexualized, the subject becomes tangled in the perverse loop. In other words, one should none the less stick to the old Freudian thesis on the fundamentally sexual character of hysteria: wasn’t Freud’s Dora, the paradigmatic case of hysteria, continually complaining about being victimized by the manipulations of her father and Mr. K?
What complicates the issue further is that one should definitely not directly qualify homosexuality (or any other sexual practice that violates the heterosexual norm) as a “perversion.†The question to be asked is, rather: how is the fact of homosexuality inscribed into the subject’s symbolic universe? What subjective attitude sustains it? There definitely is a perverse homosexuality (the masochist or sadist pretending to possess knowledge about what provides jouissance to the Other); but there is also a hysterical homosexuality (opting for it in order to confront the enigma of “What am I for the Other?†What does the Other want (from me)?†and so on). So, for Lacan, there is no direct correlation between forms of sexual practice (gay, lesbian, straight) and the “pathological†subjective symbolic economy (perverse, hysterical, psychotic). Let us take the extreme case of coprophagy (eating excrement): even such a practice is not necessarily “perverse,†since it can well be inscribed into a hysterical economy – that is to say, it can well function as an element of the hysterical provocation and questioning of the Other’s desire: what if I eat shit in order to test how I stand with regard to the Other’s desire – will he still love me when he sees me doing it? Will he finally abandon me as his object? It can also function in a psychotic if, say, the subject identifies his partner’s shit as the miraculous Divine substance, so that by swallowing it he gets in touch with God, receives His energy. Or, of course, it can function as perversion if the subject, while doing it, assumes the position of the object-instrument of the Other’s desire (if he does it in order to generate enjoyment in his partner).
On a more general level, it is interesting to note how, when on describes new phenomena, one as a rule overlooks their predominant hysterical functioning and prefers the allegedly more “radical†perverse or psychotic functioning. Say, in the case of cyberspace, we are bombarded with interpretations which emphasize how cyberspace opens up the possibility of polymorphous perverse playing and permanent reshaping of one’s symbolic identity, or how it involves a regression to the psychotic incestuous immersion into the Screen as the maternal Thing that swallows us, depriving us of the capacity of symbolic distance and reflection. It can, however, be argued that the most common reaction of all of us when we are confronted with cyberspace is still that of hysterical perplexity, of permanent questioning: “How do I stand with respect to the anonymous Other? What does It want from me? What game is it playing with me?..â€
With regard to this crucial opposition between hysteria and perversion, it is important to note that Adorno’s Philosophy of the New Music, that masterpiece of the dialectical analysis of the “class struggle in music,†resorts to the clinical categories of, precisely, hysteria and perversion in order to elaborate the opposition of the two fundamental tendencies in modern music, designated by the names of Schoenberg and Stravinsky: Schroenberg’s “progressive†music displays the clear features of an extreme hysterical tension (anxiety-laden reactions to traumatic encounters); while Stravinsky, in his pastiche-like traversing of all possible musical styles, displays no less clear features of perversion, that is, of renouncing the dimension of subjectivity proper, of adopting the stance of exploiting the polymorphous multitude, with no real subjective engagement with any specific element or mode.
And – to give this opposition a philosophical twist – one is tempted to claim that this fidelity to the truth of hysteria against the pervert’s false transgression is what led Lacan, in the last years of his teaching, to claim pathetically: “I rebel against philosophy [Je m’insurge contre la philosophie].â€Apropos of this general claim, the Leninist question should be asked immediately: which (singular) philosophy did Lacan have in mind; which philosophy was, for him, a stand-in for philosophy as such? Following a suggestion by Francois Regnault (who draws attention to the fact that Lacan made this statement in 1975, in the wake of the publication of Anti-Oedipus), one could argue that the philosophy actually under fire, far from standing for some traditional Hegelian metaphysics, is none other than that of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher of globalized perversion if there ever was one. That is to say, is not Deleuze’s critique of “Oedipal†psychoanalysis an exemplary case of the perverse rejection of hysteria? Against the hysterical subject who maintains an ambiguous attitude towards a symbolic authority (like the psychoanalyst who acknowledges the pathological consequences of “repression,†but none the less claims that “repression†is the condition of cultural progress, since outside the symbolic authority there is only the psychotic void), the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux. For Lacan, of course, this “anti-Oedipal†radicalization of psychoanalysis is the very model of the trap to be avoided at any cost: the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly. In other words, for Lacan, the philosopher’s “radicality,†his fearless questioning of all presuppositions, is the model of the false transgressive radicality.
For Foucault, a perverse philosopher if ever there was one, the relationship between prohibition and desire is circular, and one of absolute immanence: power and resistance (counter-power) presuppose and generate each other – that is, the very prohibitive measures that categorize and regulate illicit desires effectively generate them. Simply recall the proverbial figure of the early Christian ascetic who, in his detailed descriptions of situations to be avoided, since they provoke sexual temptations, displays an extraordinary knowledge of how seduction works (of how a simple smile, a glance, a defensive gesture of the hands, a demand for help, can carry a sexual innuendo). The problem is here that, after insisting that the disciplinary power mechanisms produce the very object on which they exert their force (the subject is not only that which is oppressed by the power but emerges himself as the product of this repression) –
– it is as if Foucault himself tacitly acknowledges that this absolute continuity of resistance to power is not enough to ground effective resistance to power, resistance that would not be “part of the game†but would allow the subject to assume a position that exempts him from the disciplinary/confessional mode of power practiced from early Christianity to psychoanalysis. Foucault thought that he located such an exception in Antiquity: the Antique notions of the “use of pleasures†and “care for the Self†do not yet involve reference to a universal Law. However, the image of Antiquity deployed in Foucault’s last two books stricto sensu fantasmic, the fantasy o f a discipline which, even in its most ascetic version, needs no reference to the symbolic Law/Prohibition of pleasures without sexuality. In his attempt to break out of the vicious cycle of power and resistance, Foucault resorts to the myth of a state “before the Fall†in which discipline was self-fashioned, not a procedure imposed by the culpabilizing universal moral order. In this fantasmic Beyond, one encounters the same disciplinary mechanisms as later, only in a different modality, a kind of correlate to Malinowski-Mead’s mythical depression of non-repressed South Pacific sexuality. No wonder Foucault reads pre-Christian texts in a way which totally differs from his usual practice of reading: his last two books are much closer to standard academic “history of ideas.†In other words, Foucault’s description of the Self in pre-Christian Antiquity is the necessary Romantic-naïve supplement to his cynical description of power relations after the Fall, where power are resistance overlap.
So when, in Discipline and Punish and Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Foucault endlessly varies the theme of power as productive, with respect to political educational power as well as power over sexuality; when he emphasizes again and again how, in the course of the nineteenth century, repressive attempts to categorize, discipline, etc. sexuality, far from constraining and limiting their object, “natural†sexuality, in fact produced it and led to its proliferation (sex was affirmed as the ultimate “secret,†the point of reference, of human activity), is he not, in a way, asserting the Hegelian thesis on how reflexive probing into a transcendent In-itself produces the very inaccessible X that seems forever to elude its final grasp? (This point can be made very clearly apropos of the mysterious “dark continent†of Feminine Sexuality allegedly eluding the grasp of patriarchal discourse: is not this mysterious Beyond the very product of male discourse? Is not Feminine Mystery the ultimate male fantasy?)
As for disciplining and controlling, Foucault’s point is not only how the object these measures want to control and subdue is already their effect (legal and criminal measures engender their own forms of criminal transgression, etc.): the very subject who resists these disciplinary measures and tries to elude their grasp is, in his heart of hearts, branded by them, formed by them. Foucault’s ultimate example would have been the nineteenth-century workers’ movement for the “liberation of workâ€: as early libertarian criticisms like Paul Lafargue’s Right to Laziness had already pointed out, the worker who wanted himself liberated was the product of disciplinary ethics, that is, in his very attempt to get rid of the domination of Capital, he wanted to establish himself as the disciplined worker who works for himself, who is fully his own master (and thus loses the right to resist, since he cannot resist himself…). On this level, Power and Resistance are effectively caught in a deadly mutual embrace: there is no Power without Resistance (in order to function, Power needs an X which eludes its grasp); there is no Resistance without Power (Power is already formative of that very kernel on behalf of which the oppressed subject resists the hold of Power).
There is nothing more misguided than to argue that Foucault, in Volume I of his History of Sexuality, opens up the way for individuals to rearticulate-resignify-displace the power mechanisms they are caught in: the whole point and strength of his forceful argumentation lies in his claim that resistances to power are generated by the very matrix they seem to oppose. In other words, the point of his notion of “biopower†is precisely to give an account of how disciplinary power mechanisms can constitute individuals directly, by penetrating individual bodies and bypassing the level of “subjectivization†(that is, the whole problematic of how individuals ideologically subjectivize their predicament, how they relate to their conditions of existence). It is therefore meaningless, in a way, to criticize him for not rendering this subjectivization thematic: his whole point is that if one is to account for social discipline and subordination, one has to bypass it! Later, however, (starting from Volume II of History of Sexuality), he is compelled to return to this very ostracized topic of subjectivization: how individuals subjectivize their condition, how they relate to it – or, to put it in Althusserian terms (Oh, Lenin!), how they are not only individuals caught in disciplinary state apparatuses, but also interpellated subjects.
2.2: Pornography, Hypertext, and Barthes
Michael Mann’s Manhunter is a movie about a police detective famous for his ability to enter intuitively, through his “sixth sense,†the mind of the perverse, sadistic murderers: his task it to detect a particularly cruel mass murderer who slaughtered a series of quiet, provincial families. The detective rerurns again and again super-8 home moves shot by each of the slaughtered families in order to arrive at a trait unaire, the feature common to all of them that attracted the murderer and thus directed his choice. But all his efforts are in vain as long as he looks for this common feature on the level of content, i.e., in the families themselves. He finds the key to the identity of the murderer when a certain inconsistency strikes his eye. The investigation at the scene of the last crime shows that to enter the house, to break open the back door, the murderer used some kind of tool that was inappropriate, even unnecessary. The old back door had been replaced a few weeks before the crime with a new type of door. To break open the new door, another kind of tool would have been far more appropriate. So how did the murderer get this piece of wrong or, more precisely, out-of-date information? The old back door could be seen clearly in scenes from a super-8 home movie. The only thing common to all the slaughtered families is than the home movies themselves, i.e., the murderer had to have had access to their private movies, there is no other link connecting them. Because these movies are private, the only possible link between them is the laboratory where they were developed. A quick check confirms that all the movies were developed by the same laboratory, and the murder is soon identified as one of the workers in the lab. Wherein lies the theoretical interest of this denouement? The detective searches for a common feature that will enable him to get at the murderer in the content of the home movies, thus overlooking the form itself, i.e., the crucial fact that he is all the time viewing a series of home movies. The decisive turn takes place when he becomes aware that through the very screening of the home movies, he is already identifying with the murderer; that his obsessive gaze, surveying every detail of the scenery, coincides with the gaze of the murderer. The identification is on the level of the gaze, not on the level of content. There is something extremely unpleasant and obscene in this experience of our gaze as already the gaze of the other. Why? The Lacanian answer is that such a coincidence of gazes defines the position of the pervert. (Herein consists, according to Lacan, the difference between the “feminine†and “masculine†mystic, between, let us say, Saint Theresa and Jacob Boehme. The “feminine†mystic implies a nonphallic, “not-all†enjoyment, whereas the “masculine†mystic consists precisely in such an overlap of gazes by which he experiences the fact that his intuition of God is the view by means of which God looks at Himself: “To confuse his contemplative eye with the eye with which God is looking at him must surely partake of perverse jouissance†(Lacan 147).)
This coincidence of the subject’s view with the gaze of the big Other, which defines perversion, enables us to conceptualize one of the fundamental features of the ideological functioning of “totalitarianismâ€: if the perversion of the “male†mysticism consists in the fact that the view by means of which the subject contemplates God is at the same time the gaze by means of which God contemplates Himself, then the perversion of Leninist Communism consists in the fact that the view by means of which the Party looks at history coincides immediately with history’s gaze upon itself. To use good old Stalinist jargon, today already half-forgotten, Communists act immediately in the name of “objects laws of historical progressâ€; it is history itself, its necessity, that speaks through their mouths.
Which is why the elementary formula of Sadean perversion, as formulated by Lacan in “Kant with Sade,†is so convenient to designate the subjective position of Stalinist Communism. According to Lacan, the Sadean subject tries to elude his constitutive split, his division, by transferring it onto his other (the victim) and by identifying himself with the object, i.e., by occupying the position of the object-instrument of the will-to-enjoy—which is not his own will but that of the big Other, who assumes the form of the “Supreme Evil Being.†Herein consists Lacan’s break with the usual notion of “sadismâ€: according to the latter, the “sadist pervert†assumes the position of an absolute subject usurping the right to enjoy, without restraint, the body of the other, reducing him/her to an object-instrument for the satisfaction of his own will. Lacan argues, however, that it is the sadist himself who is in the position of the object-instrument, the executor of some radically heterogeneous will, while the split subject is precisely his other (the victim). The pervert does not pursue his activity for his own pleasure, but for the enjoyment of the Other—he finds enjoyment precisely in this instrumentalization, in working for the enjoyment of the Other. It should then be clear why in Lacan, the matheme of perversion is written as the inversion of the matheme of fantasy: a◊S (imagined a “barred subject†sign). And it should also be clear with this matheme designates at the same time the subjective position of the Stalinist Communist: he torments his victims (the masses, the “ordinary†people) infinitely, but he does this as an instrument of the big Other (“the objective laws of history,†“the necessity of historical progressâ€) behind which it is not difficult to recognize the Sadean figure of the Supreme Evil Being. The case of Stalinism nearly exemplifies why, in perversion, the other (the victim) is split: the Stalinist Communist torments people, but he does so as their own faithful servant, in their own name, as an executor of their own will (their own “true, objective interestsâ€).
The final irony of Manhunter would, then, be the following confronted with a perverse-sadistic content, the detective is able to arrive at a solution only by taking into account the fact that his very procedure is, on a formal level, already “perverse.†It implies a coincidence between his gaze and the gaze of the other (the murderer). And it is this overlap, this coincidence of our view with the gaze of the other, that helps us to understand pornography.
As it is ordinarily understood, pornography is the genre supposed to “reveal all there is to reveal,†to hide nothing, to register “all†and offer it to our view. It is nevertheless precisely in pornographic cinema that the “substance of enjoyment†perceived by the view from aside is radically lost—why? Let us recall the antinomic relation of gaze and eye as articulated by Lacan in Seminar XI: the eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object. When I look at an object, the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it:
This antinomy of gaze and view is lost in pornography—why? Because pornography is inherently perverse; its perverse character lies not in the obvious fact that it “goes all the way and shows us all the dirty detailsâ€; its perversity is, rather, to be conceived in a strictly formal way. In pornography, the spectator is forced a priori to occupy a perverse position. Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes at us. It is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all.†Contrary to the commonplace according to which, in pornography, the other (the person shown on the screen) is degraded to an object of our voyeuristic pleasure, we must stress that it is the spectator himself who effectively occupies the position of the object. The real subjects are the actors on the screen trying to rouse us sexually, while we, the spectators, are reduced to a paralyzed object-gaze.
Pornography thus misses, reduces the point of the object-gaze in the other. This miss has precisely the form of a missed, failed encounter. That is to say, in a “normal†nonpornographic film, a love scene is always built around a certain insurmountable limit; “all cannot be shown.†At a certain point the image is blurred, the camera moves off, the scene is interrupted, we never directly see “that†(the penetration of sexual organs, etc.). In contrast to this limit of representability defining the “normal†love story or melodrama, pornography goes beyond, it “shows everything.†The paradox is, however, that by trespassing the limit, it always goes too far, i.e., it misses what remains concealed in a “normal†nonpornographic love scene. To refer to a phrase from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: if you run too fast after happiness, you may overtake it and happiness may stay behind. If we proceed too hastily “to the point,†if we show “the thing itself,†we necessarily lose what we were after. The effect is extremely vulgar and depressing (as can be confirmed by anyone who has watched any hard-core movies). Pornography is thus just another variation on Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the tortoise that, according to Lacan, defines the relation of the subject to the object of his desire. Naturally, Achilles can easily outdistance the tortoise and leave it behind, but the point is that he cannot come up alongside it, he cannot rejoin it. The subject is always too slow or too quick, it can never keep pace with the object of its desire. The unattainable/forbidden object approached but never reached by the “normal†love story – the sexual act – exists only as concealed, indicated, “faked.†As soon as we “show it,†its charm is dispelled, we have “gone too far.†Instead of the sublime Thing, we are stuck with vulgar, groaning fornication.
The consequence of this is that harmony, congruence between the filmic narrative (the unfolding of the story) and the immediate display of the sexual act, is structurally impossible: if we choose one, we necessarily lose the other. In other words, if we want to have a love story that “takes,†that moves us, we must not “go all the way†and “show it all†(the details of the sexual act), because as soon as we “show it all,†the story is no longer “taken seriously†and starts to function only as a pretext for introducing acts of copulation. We can detect this gap via a kind of “knowledge in the real,†which determines the way actors behave in different film genres. The characters included in the diegetic reality always react as if they knew in which genre of film they were. If, for example, a door creaks in a horror film, the actor will react by turning his head anxiously toward it; if a door creaks in a family comedy, the same actor will shout at his small child not to sneak around the apartment. The same is true to an even greater extent of the “porno†film: before we pass to the sexual activity, we need a short introduction—normally, a stupid plot serving as pretext for the actors to begin copulation(the housewife calls in a plumber, a new secretary reports to the manager, etc.). The point is that even in the manner in which they enact this introductory plot, the actors divulge that this is for them only a stupid although necessary formality that has to be gotten over with as quickly as possible so as to begin tackling the “real thing.â€
The fantasy ideal of a perfect work of pornography would be precisely to preserve this impossible harmony, the balance between narration and explicit depiction of the sexual act, i.e., to avoid the necessary vel that condemns us to lose one of the two poles. Let us take an old-fashioned, nostalgic melodrama like Out of Africa, and let us assume that the film is precisely the one shown in cinemas, except for an additional ten minutes. When Robert Redford and Meryl Streep have their first love encounter, the scene – in this slightly longer version of the film – is not interrupted, the camera “shows it all,†details of their aroused sexual organs, penetration, orgasm, etc. Then, after the act, the story goes on as usual, we return to the film we all know. The problem is that such a movie is structurally impossible. Even if it were to be shot, it simply “would not functionâ€; the additional ten minutes would derail us, for the rest of the movie we would be unable to regain our balance and follow the narration with the usual disavowed belief in the diegetic reality. The sexual act would function as an intrusion of the real undermining the consistency of this diegetic reality.
In the same way, a hypertext is an endless story that simply “shows too much.†Yes, it shows too much, we agree – there is an overwhelming feeling when one embarks on them – but it shows too much of what? When Barthes claimed, “I do not know whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics (eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists a pleasure of the work (of the works)†(1475), it was no coincidence that the word “pleasure†appeared. In the Virtual world, we are controlled strictly by desire itself: there is no ego, no need for aesthetic recourse. If, for instance, I wanted to post pro-Ku Klux Klan banners “on the web,†there is no way to stop me – there is no way to stop anyone from doing anything on the internet. Thus, the Virtual is the playing field for desires and, ultimately, the pervert. When we read a hypertext, we are bombarded with multiple stories…IF we allow ourselves to read them through the different frames. It is this space, this Virtual space, that Barthes essentially defines when he asks, “Is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?†(1475). Clearly, for the hypertext, it is a narrative that tries to escape it’s textuality. By offering us radically different portraits every time we read it, we are forced to call into question our own life, our own frame-of-mind: if, in the Virtual, we are able to perceive that there are an infinite many ways to view a “text,†isn’t it also the case that our “Real Life†is just a Virtual one, as well?
2.3: The Author That Never Wrote
If we are, like we should be tempted, to subject Barthes to the chaos of Foucault and his arbitrary power networks, isn’t there a kind of infinite gap separating the two? Neither believes the author is necessarily dead—just unimportant to the text itself. And, yes, this is always a concern for us precisely because it has always been this way. When Marx proclaimed: “All that is solid will melt into the air; all that is holy will be profaned†(McCaffery), was he not precisely formulating the social situation as of today? There is always a necessary confinement inside the Virtual that represses the ego at all costs, such that only the id and the superego may emerge. This is, for Foucault and Barthes, a concept that vindicates their points: the Text is always-already Virtual, and as such, it is open to an infinite number of frames (and webpages!) to perceive it through. That is to say, all texts escape their binding: all texts escape their author. This is why, for our current study, we can say, “Yes, there is an author, but he is the author that never writes.â€
Notes
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage 1979, p. 30.
Lacan, Jacques, “God and the Jouissance of The Woman,†Seminar XX: Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Encore). New York: Norton, 1982, p. 147.
McCaffery, Larry. dcox.customer.netspace.net.au/crash.html