Bob Flanagan and Monsieur M.: Notes On Two Supermasochists

Uncertain if this functions strictly as a “paper,” I describe the following as a series of observations on the conjunctive and disjunctive relation between self-styled “supermasochist,” Bob Flanagan in the posthumous documentary Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Kirby Dick, 1997), and of “Monsieur M.” in Michel de M’Uzan’s 1972 essay, “A Case of Masochistic Perversion and an Outline of a Theory.”

There is no ambiguity during Sick that Bob Flanagan considers his masochistic practices to be entirely indicative of an immense strength on his part. Certainly, we see great parallels here with Monsieur M. of M’Uzan’s analysis, whose own allusions and accounts of “the terrible tortures he had endured” were ultimately descriptions of his own seeming “omnipotence [told with] an immense pride.” (461)

Assuredly, M’Uzan’s interpretation of M.’s masochism feels not too dissimilar from such a case as Venus in Furs, in which “the sadistic partner [is] a person destined to be held in contempt, someone who is devalued as he is reduced to the role of being a specific instrument.” (461) However, there is an ambivalent, albeit extant, relation here to Deleuze’s introduction to the same. For Deleuze, the masochist aims, in being beaten, to embody his father, thus presenting his domineering super-ego avatar to be beaten and accordingly castrated. According to M’Uzan, M.’s desire to be beaten appears to be a desire to be beaten by his father, although also makes clear to us that M did discover his father’s own masochistic desire, whilst also, it seems, denigrating his male sadists all the while. Thus, although we may well surmise the performative embodiment of the father in the masochistic role in the case of M. just as much as in Deleuze’s own speculation, it is difficult to suggest that the function of castrating disavowal of the father is as active in the fantasy.  It is for similar reasons that M’Uzan proposes the category of masochistic perversion, contrasted to moral masochism and/or feminine masochism, due to a lack of concern regarding the super-ego in the case of M.’s desire. Nevertheless, M’Uzan and Deleuze would disagree on the form of concern the moral and/or feminine masochist show in their desire toward the super-ego, suggesting more an identification with the mother, rather than an invocation of her. (462) Accordingly, M’Uzan ultimately concludes that M.’s psychological domain of familial relation is an entirely other landscape:

 

He is like his wife, his wife is like him, she is his parent, he is like his parents, etc. These are not identifications in the active and differentiated sense in which we find them in neurotics, but are purely “duplications.” Under these conditions one must consider his personality as being essentially structured outside the Oedipal situation. (463)

 

Interestingly, when director Kirby Dick interviews Flanagan’s parents about his predilections, his father expresses a certain sympatico with his logic, if nothing else, whilst Flanagan’s mother repeats over and over that she asks herself “where was I?” Flanagan and his dominant long-time partner Sheree Rose express no doubt at all regarding the maternal associations with the dominatrix. Rose is entirely forthcoming in her assertion that to be a dominatrix is in many ways to be a strict mother, one whose consistent, if not constant, giving of punishment and care is reflective of the idealised oral mother. Flanagan’s statement that “I don’t get turned on by slamming my hand in a car door; I don’t get turned on by being treated badly… but I’d ask Sheree to be mean to me.” In this statement we conceive of a triangle, at its points: a hand slammed in a car door, “bad” treatment, and “mean” treatment. We may surmise from this triangle, that each point is roughly reflective of the three women of Masoch: the slamming of the car door is the untameably unpredictable hetaeric, with no regard for context; the potential for “bad” treatment is the castrating Oedipal, actively sadistic and dehumanising; “meanness,” by contrast, is indicative of a role that can be negotiated, even scripted: the oral ideal. The script becomes apparent, as we see a comedic video of Flanagan and Rose, the overhead narration being a letter written to a fictionalised Flanagan’s mother:

“Dear Mom…I fell in love. In some ways, she sort of reminds me of you. I don’t know if it was the clothes she wore, the sound in her voice, or the look in her eye, but I knew I was hooked for life.”

 

Of course, just as we understand the reaching toward the ideal oral mother as not simply being a stationary locus toward which the subject can journey and at which the subject can finally reside, but instead the median point in the perennial oscillation of the subject-as-pendulum, the harmony of Flanagan and Rose’s dynamic as a couple is likewise portrayed at points in flux. The masochist may indeed often operate as the one in control, but here we move from Venus in Furs’ representation of the sullen, aggrieved and resentful masochism of Severin, to seeing outtakes from Flanagan and Rose’s video art, in which he becomes the angry director. Contract signing away all agency of action, decision and sensation of Flanagan’s over to Rose or no, Flanagan expresses his discomfort and displeasure freely and forcefully, if hurt when unprepared, or beaten inaccurately. Flanagan asserts whilst interviewed for his MOMA installation Visiting Hours, “I’m more the mad scientist than the guinea pig.”

As the film chronologically progresses, and Flanagan’s struggles with cystic fibrosis become harder for him to endure, his receptiveness to Rose’s expressed desire to engage in BDSM severely wanes. Rose says to the camera, “I don’t think he’s even a masochist anymore; I think life has beaten him down too much.” Whilst there was no doubt that Flanagan’s masochistic practice was always connected to a sense of battle against his ultimately fatal disease, we now have it presented as him being in the middle between two “beatings.” A submission to one is a disavowal of the other and, accordingly, his ambivalence about his own longevity appears reflected by his portrayed ultimate ambivalence about his lifestyle.

Contrary to the more consistent consideration of heterosexual male masochism presented by Freud and Deleuze, in the case of Monsieur M., his wife was a fellow masochist, and they both relied on male lovers (the ones so contemptuously considered). Instrumentalising these seemingly nameless and faceless others, both masochists were able to dominate and be dominated by each other by proxy, whilst M. certainly also was able to construct and affirm a masochistic identity on the basis of the maleness of these proxies that allowed for nuanced if pragmatic negotiations of gender performance and expression (consider in particular the tattoos Je suis une putain, servez-vous de moi comme d’une femelle, vous jouirez bien and the more non-binary assertion Je ne suis ni homme ni femme, mais une salope, mais une putain, mais une chair à plaisir). Indeed, one possible reason for the contemptuous treatment of male lovers ostensibly afforded so much power as to be able to instruct M. to amputate body parts, is that – outside of the masochistic scene – M. expressed no particular homosexual desire. in fact, the ultimate waning of his masochistic inclinations appears directly connected to heterosexual loss and desire.

We know from M’Uzan’s account that, although it did start up again for some time later, M.’s relationship to masochistic perversion halted abruptly at the death of his wife, who succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis – reportedly, “she endured such extreme torture and was dominated by such intense perverse needs that she wasted all her strength, dying at the age of 23.” (457) The chronology of M.’s sadomasochistic rituals and encounters is ambiguous (as it is, to some extent, with Flanagan – to this we shall return), but we can determine that M. initially disengaged from the masochistic lifestyle for a period of at least two years, following his wife’s death, thus presumably restarting at about age 35, and having ten years of somewhat less successful encounters and relationships, before his interest officially started to diminish, seemingly concurrent to a stark increase in vanilla heterosexual dreams about a “voluptuous woman with whom sexual relationships approached normal love making.” (458) Thus, the cessations to M.’s masochistic inclinations appear instigated by the death of one masochistic woman, and the spectral appearance of another, hetaeric figure. That the first cessation appears marked by a period of sympathetic contraction of the same disease that claimed the life of his young wife should not, I suggest, be considered insignificant. As with Freud’s description of the question of life’s prolongation arisen within the conflict between Eros and the death-drive, the question of death in this case functions as a unifying principle between masochistic parties that appears at once to be in conflict with masochistic desire, but also its ultimate apotheosis of expression.

As with so many other analyses of masochism, the function of suspension, as much as the act, appears central to these examples of masochistic practice. Flanagan recounts to an audience about his early childhood indulgences:

 

Every Friday night… I’d wait ‘til everybody went to sleep, and I’d start to play… I’d pour white glue over my body… Trussed up by these plant hooks… All these ropes, suspending me off the floor.

 

As much as we may interpret the masochistic scene’s close association with binding and suspension as the particular attempt to freeze a particular moment – namely the moment the dominating female partner reaches the apex of cold, oral ideal – we cannot help but first and foremost associate Flanagan’s suspension of time as being directly linked to a desire to prolong a life marked for early death. Indeed, Flanagan credited his masochistic practice for having just such a result, living far beyond his original prognosis. Nevertheless, he also sardonically announces, “I was promised an early death, but here I am forty years later, still waiting.”

As with M’Uzan’s case of M., Dick’s documentary of Flanagan can only be considered approximately chronological, so it is hard to determine what was the “last” masochistic ritual of Flanagan’s before his demise. However, the final we see in Sick, before his deterioration of health is as such that Rose posits that he is “no longer a masochist,” is the infamous video of him, hammering a nail through his penis, into a block of wood. There are perhaps three elements worthy of note when regarding this video: first – just as with those early experimentations – Flanagan is performing independent of Rose or any other dominatrix. Second, nailing his penis to a block of wood likely represents for the majority of us the logical conclusion to the masochistic emphasis on being tightly bound and constricted. Third, the undoing of this act, with the resultant blood streaming from Flanagan’s penis, operates as the final ejaculation, the suspension now lifted.

Given that we see Flanagan describing the scene to an audience just before the video itself (unless, of course, it was a repeated act), we may assume later modes of play. Nevertheless, the narratological effect of this portrayed as the final masochistic act before Bob’s ultimate succumbing to his cystic fibrosis speaks, I believe, to the enmeshment of the illness with his play: not simply as something disavowed by Bob’s assertion of his own corporeal agency through his choice to go through such extreme feats, but perhaps as the ultimate super-ego who may be bested through the ritualistic process, but in the Deleuzian sense that depends upon its participation. The bloody release represents not simply a willingness to let go of the suspension and accept death, but indicates the end of a session in which the illness itself may be embodied as the anal-sadistic father to be defensively castrated by the oral mother. Perhaps the spectrality of this illness with which Flanagan parodically aligns himself for this act dictates the necessity for such genital mutilation, but we as an audience to the film do see it work. Following his death, Rose shows the camera the fatal phlegm that was in his lungs: now trapped in a plastic container. In choosing to let go, in choosing to die (rhetoric employed both by the nurses and Rose at Flanagan’s deathbed), that ultimate super-ego is made manifest that it may be castrated and, indeed, bound.

 

Throughout God of Vengeance, there is a recurrent motif of the contractual relationship between a gendered understanding of innocence, and ethno-theocratic cultural identity. Certainly, in the introduction of queerness, in the depicted relationship between Manke and Rifkele – above all regarding its emancipatory logic as discussed between the two characters – one can see fit to apply both Emma Goldman’s and Gayle Rubin’s essays entitled “The Traffic in Women” as a means of understanding first the functional continuum between systems of marriage and the maligned representations of sex work (as with Goldman’s initial essay), as well as nods toward a broader structural understanding of the female subject position as delineated in such an economy of signification. Undoubtedly, the spatial architecture of the play’s proceedings speaks to the ultimately frustrated separation of patriarchal concepts of piety and castigated forms of female labour – easily interpretable as respective parallels to the Superego / Symbolic and Id / Real – consequently making the liberationist “rain scene” the fleetingly triumphant Ego / Imaginary. It is within reason to understand this scene as something of a dialectical synthesis between the innocence demanded by the “upstairs” society, and the unbridled disregard for respectability. Indeed, the sexual Aufheben from patriarchal rule we see in this moment, through queer relationality as praxis, occurs both through sublation and supplementation via Manke’s concurrent – indeed, contingent – adoption both of the roles of mother and of bridegroom. Accordingly, family dynamics – both intergenerational / parental and intragenerational / spousal – are at once disavowed in their prior mode of application, revealed as little more than dispositifs of performative function, and then repurposed as such for a new economy of same-gender affection.

Manke’s address to Rifkele, reliant as it is on aqueous imagery in its romance, feels pointedly reminiscent of the Song of Solomon aka Song of Songs, whose eroticism has throughout history resulted in its performance in taverns and brothels as well as by observant Jews during Pesach. Crucially, then, we can interpret an expressly spiritual dimension to this affair: invoking a “Holy of Holies” that nevertheless transcends borders of respectability and indeed, even in its official religious application, uses the language of desire to indicate an Exodus: first from Egypt, and now from Yekel.

Returning, however, to the question of space: if we hold with the notion of the upstairs apartment, downstairs brothel, and street outside as representing the various components of the Borromean knot, we might well accordingly interpret Rifkele’s exodus from the Symbolic patriarchal order as being also an exodus from language – not least of all the function of language to delineate the moral parameters of her position within the traffic of women, including and especially the piety so hypocritically demanded of her by her parents. Thus, Rifkele’s uncertainty how to respond to Yekel’s interrogation of her virginity is not merely reticence. Rather, the language of patriarchal order bears next to no meaning for queer discourse and, in kind, queer discourse appears untranslatable to the language of patriarchal order.

The dominant narrative within Venus in Furs – Severin’s autobiographical text-within-the-text – in its opening scene, presents Severin’s journey within a few pages from a devoted and seemingly public worship of the “cold, cruel” statue of Venus, to the far more clandestine fascination with a procured photograph of Titian’s Venus with a Mirror, to the immediately horrified response to seeing first the statue adorned with furs, and then Wanda, similarly attired. Certainly, the synthetic operation at play here is on one level an entirely uncomplicated function of the Hegelian dialectic that so influences Masoch’s personal philosophy. However, the intermingling of Severin’s horror and desire is what catalyses the parameters of this text’s analysis, from both a Freudian and Deleuzian perspective.

There is a stark immediacy in the fetishistic function within this scene, such that the instigating stimulus for the horrified reaction to the revelation of maternal castration is, in fact, the erotic object of the realisation’s disavowal, which is to say the furs. Accordingly, I am reminded in this encounter yet again of the “dangerous” supplementation of the Symbolic order, that which – through its imposition of language upon the Real which itself lacks nothing, establishes an absence that must now be healed. This horrific encounter soon follows Severin’s rumination, first on Samson and Delilah, and then on the Book of Judith. Interestingly enough, the two editions of Venus in Furs I possess have divertingly distinct translations regarding the beheading of Holofernes: one reads “The Lord hath smitten him by the hand of a woman,” whilst the other: “The almighty Lord hath struck him, and hath delivered him into the hands of a woman.” Accordingly, the uncertainty between these two positions of smiting and deliverance feel entirely borne out in the ambivalence of the encounter, and indeed the novel’s resolution.

Nevertheless, we can interpret in both accounts, a degree to which the role of woman can supplant the classically considered punishing patriarch and, in so doing, can render even capital punishment a source of jouissance for the masochist. From such a perspective, Deleuze’s assertion that the masochistic route toward pleasure is to portray his patriarchal superego, so that it may be castrated by the figure of the oral mother, having both defeated and acquired attributes of the hetaeric and oedipal mothers (whom we might understand as the overtly deistic / Titian-painted Venus, and the marble statue Venus, respectively), is affirmed. Indeed, Severin, speaking to himself so harshly during his flight response indicates the splitting mechanism upon which so much of this process is dependent.

Freud’s “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” which seems so overtly to influence Deleuze’s commentary, in all its cultural critique, makes central two plays of Shakespeare: The Merchant of Venice, and King Lear. Assuredly, this scene in Venus in Furs is also highly indicative of a third: The Winter’s Tale. Freud tells us that, ultimately, the third mother is above all “the Mother Earth who receives [the subject] once more…the silent Goddess of Death will take him into her arms.” Yet again, smiting and deliverance are inextricably married. And yet, just as with The Winter’s Tale, here we see a statue come to life. Severin’s demanding fantasy necessitates that a figure of death become a figure of life. Within the vain folly of this prerequisite lies the source of the frustrated resentment that so permeates the relationship between Severin and Wanda.

The status – certainly the role – of language in Histoire d’O feels most of all defined by its sexual-anatomical reticence, above all in its at first disorienting substitution with ventre where most readers would expect to read con. Such a discursive technique has various affective and analytical consequences, some appearing at first to be mutually contradictory, others definitively intertwined:

1. The demonstrative capacity for acts of sexual subjugation and punishment, free from vulgarity aligns the text with – as Bataille expresses in Eroticism, and Deleuze echoes in Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty – the language of the torturer, “the language of authority.” Just as torturers are “people who in real life could only have been silent,” (MCC, 17) Réage’s text is effectively “silent” in its reference to conventionally sexualised organs.
2. To one degree, the notable absence of references to the vulva operates as a dual process of castration, which would thus affirm Deleuze’s assertion that “sadism stands for the active negation of the mother” (68). Indeed, even ignoring the body itself, the text’s introduction to O, simply through her clothing, already feels oddly defined by notable absence: “elle est vêtue comme elle l’est toujours… un blouse de soie, et pas du chapeau.”
3. However, to another degree, the almost mutual reservation in alluding to the sexe of any male character, rather than queue, pine or bite, may be interpreted as a functional, fetishistic, disavowal of sexual difference – not least of all maternal castration.
4. Disavowal as a system of repression which, in the Freudian sense, is not merely a quashing down of reality but a system of distorted or dishonest representation here might allow for – in the case of ventre – a diffusion of the gaze to this typically-understood-as-separate body part, which could thus be interpreted as a linguistic device in accordance with the overall theme of Deleuze’s interpretation of masochism as a desexualisation of sex, and an effective re-sexualisation of everything else.

Permeating Histoire d’O is an economy of supplementation, at the level of content and form: René demonstrates his capacity to supplement any number of slaves at Roissy for O, and is himself supplemented by various masters and mistresses. Indeed, even the events themselves are revealed at multiple junctures to be possessed of an ontological uncertainty: the introduction is immediately countered with an alternative version, whilst there are small indications that neither passage may be entirely correct. Indeed, by the end of the novel, several variations are presented that leave the reader uncertain as to whether O is even alive or not.

That such a literary device may appear absurd is not, to my mind, particularly far from Réage’s intent, if we consider absurdism through temporal non-coincidence the manifestation of the humour Deleuze locates at the centre of the masochistic contract, and its enactment’s relation to law: “To imagine that a contract or quasi contract is at the origin of society is to invoke conditions which are necessarily invalidated as soon as the law comes into being. For the law, once established, violates the contract in that it can apply to a third party, is valid for an indeterminate period and recognizes no inalienable rights.” (92) And, indeed, several pages before, Deleuze states: “A close examination of masochistic fantasies or rites reveals that while they bring into play the very strictest application of the law, the result in every case is the opposite of what might be expected (thus whipping, far from punishing or preventing an erection, provokes and ensures it). It is a demonstration of the law’s absurdity.” (88)

Accordingly, we ask: what is the law, here? My interpretation, both of Histoire d’O and, indeed, Venus in Furs, is that it is love. In both cases, the masochistic contract is presented as a condition of, or for, love. In both cases, the tensions are revealed between love and the contract at the introduction of additional parties, even when such additions are stipulated as permissible within the contract itself. René’s characterisation throughout Histoire d’O is remarkably inactive, indeed impotent – he appears to be more of a voyeur of O’s subjugations than an agent, and yet does engage in one repetitive behaviour akin to the continuous repetition required of the sadist to appropriate the Ego of his victims, and that is his repeated declarations of love. That they evoke such feelings of repugnance is, I believe no mistake on part of the author, but a revelation of the logic of masochistic contempt. Rather, just as the logic of linguistic supplementation is invoked through discovery of a lack that, non-existent within the Real, must be a product of the linguistic Symbolic imposition, revealing a recurrence of failure through différance, there exists just such a phenomenon within the romance novel whose structure is predicated on a romance whose meaningful signification is forever deferred through an inherent vice of volatile supplementation.

Lacan’s approach to the function of law, as understood in such a way that might be relatively easily bifurcated into the (predominantly) implicit – incest prohibition – and functionally explicit – the ten commandments – is presented in relation to the reality principle: the  seemingly necessary repression of the id with, or in, the aim of optimising the subject’s ability to function in accordance with the demands of society.

Unsurprisingly, Lacan indicates the Oedipal relation – desire for the Mother, rebuffed by the nom / non of the Father – as the birth of the reality principle, and accordingly presents the fundamental “demand” of society within the parameters of a negative imperative. The instigation of this economy of disavowal is the introduction of (to?) the Symbolic order, consequently and crucially speech itself and, in such an introduction, demarcates the un/representable.  The un-sayable, within a linguistic structure so fundamentally reliant upon (e.g RE: the ten commandments) the saying of “no.”)

It is for such a reason that Lacan states the ten commandments do not explicitly ban incest: the incest prohibition as the sine qua non of speech itself, is seemingly implicit in the commandments, simply for their ability to be said at all. Accordingly, the explicit negatives in the commandments operate as secondary repressions of that primary repression: the listed crimes might be understood as figures in a masquerade of tension between the subject and the primary, problematically (certainly oxymoronically) indicating and alienating.

It is this troublesome masquerade that parallels Derrida’s account of the supplement: the Mother is rendered the Thing, which is represented through various nominally rejected  means.  Such a process of representation and repression feels indicative of the supplementary failure of the signifying function of speech: always in absence or excess of its referent of desire.

Thus, this problematic chain of signification embodied in the cultural/legal process of supplementary disavowal speaks to the problem of repression, as that which makes us aware, without being conscious, operating as the natural inverted reflection of perversion’s desire to represent that which seemingly cannot be successfully, wholly, transmitted.

Infantile Aggression, Queer Performance and Ambivalent Love: Kleinian Psychoanalysis and the Drag Cinema of Jack Smith

(Originally written November, 2016)

Watching examples of Jack Smith’s drag performance in American underground cinema between the late 1950s and early 1960s, both in his own films and others’, one immediately notices recurrent themes of childhood, violence, female superiority and dark reflections on what one might label “alternative sexuality.” Whilst psychoanalytical interpretations of gender and sexuality in cinema are common within the Freudian and Lacanian schools, Kleinian perspectives on queer cinema are largely notable by their highly remiss absence, considering the uniqueness of Klein’s work for its interest in children and, often, children’s sexuality and aggression. It is the purpose of this essay to correct this, certainly by analysing Little Stabs at Happiness (Ken Jacobs, 1960), Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963) and Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963) from a Kleinian perspective, but also by analysing these films as criticisms of that same perspective, or at the very least, of the “normality” whose achievement marks, for Klein, a successful treatment of the analysand. It is my intention to reveal that it is not merely through queer performances and narratives that this is achieved, but also through the cinematic form, itself.

Smith’s method and indeed philosophy of drag seems to presuppose queer theorist Kate Bornstein’s own: namely, the assertion that drag is not merely the potential mindful performance of multiple genders, but also “race, age, class, religions, sexuality, looks, disability, mental health, family and reproductive status, language, habitat, citizenship, political ideology and humanity.”^[i] In Little Stabs at Happiness (Ken Jacobs, 1960), Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963) and Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963) we can observe evidence – however fleeting – of almost all these statuses and notions being mined for parodic, performative potential. Crucial for the sake of this investigation, however, is age. In Little Stabs at Happiness, Smith is seen, dressed as a baby, whilst in Blonde Cobra, he is credited via the juvenile diminutive “Jacky Smith,” and relates the tale of “a little tweensy, microscopic little boy.”

In Klein’s documentation, Oedipal anxieties relating to castration seem to appear not only in seemingly heterosexual boys, but also in girls and boys displaying homosexual tendencies:

In uncovering bit by bit the primal scene I was able to gain access to Peter’s very strong passive homosexual attitude. After having depicted his parents’ coitus he had phantasies of coitus between three people. They aroused severe anxiety in him and were followed by other phantasies in which he was being copulated with by his father. These were portrayed in a game in which the toy dog or motor-car or engine – all signifying his father – climbed on to a cart or a man, which stood for himself in this process the cart would be injured or the man would have something bitten off; and then Peter would show much fear of, or great aggressiveness towards, the toy which represented his father.^[ii]

However, the analysands are seen constantly to be fluctuating in their chosen roles during playtime and, it seems, more often than not portraying the abusive adult figure, “not only expressing his wish to reverse the roles, but also demonstrating how he feels that his parents or other people in authority behave towards him – or should behave.”^[iii] The acts of violent play phantasy throughout The Psychoanalysis of Children therefore routinely exist in quantum states, in which both injured party and injurer may simultaneously and paradoxically hold both positions (“…the child was also the mother, turned into a child”^[iv]). Thus, in Blonde Cobra, Smith’s recounting of one little boy burning the penis of another’s with a lit match, we can quite easily understand this not merely as a tale of psychotic sadism between two children, but as a very clear reflection of transferred persecution complex, centered around castration anxiety, not least of all because of the manner of Smith’s narration:

Abject Bodies and Psychic Enclosures: Constitution of the Biopolitical Subject in the European Witch Craze

(Given at the Goldsmiths Knowledge Exchange series, April 6th, 2017)

 

In the eleventh lecture of Society Must Be Defended, Michel Foucault described the emergence of a system by which the State can exert control over its subjects, without relying upon the constant threat of death. This system he called biopower. Instead of the earlier sovereign power, it is a “rational” mechanism that interweaves itself in the nuanced fabric of daily life, “with institutions to coordinate medical care, centralise power, and normalise knowledge.”[i] In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici details the brutal function the witch-craze played in the transition to capitalism. Of particular interest to her is the role this reign of terror played in deconstructing the female body as a site of production, in favour of maintaining its status as an externally-governed site of reproduction.[ii] Federici considers Foucault’s theory of biopower as a proposed alternative to the theory of primitive accumulation but challenges it, accusing him of shrouding its emergence in a “mystery” that would all but too easily have been solved had he accounted for the witch-craze in his analysis of this discursive shift in the regimes of power.[iii] Certainly, no matter how insidious we may find any means of state control, one would be hard-pressed not to consider Foucault’s account a rose-tinted if not blinkered perspective on the evolution of power, to describe a period of mass gynocide a move away from “the right of the sword.”[iv]

What Federici and Foucault may both be seen to agree upon is that, during the 16th and 17th century, there began a series of policies and events that marked a significant change in the relation of power between governance, subjects, and their bodies. That both theorists not only analyse this era, but do so out of a desire to move beyond Marx’s singular attention to the subject’s body as nought but a site of labour and alienation, and on towards conceptualising the ideological construction and constitution of that body, and its relation to the subject’s experience of such power-knowledge, suggests their work – though contradictory at times – may be put into a discursive exchange to establish a singular analytical framework. Such a framework should be able to chart the witch-hunts of the era as a process of bloody transition not only from the Feudal system to Capitalism via primitive accumulation, but also from singular sovereign power to a state of biopolitics. It is my desire, in this essay, to establish just such an exchange. In addition, I am in a certain agreement with Robin Briggs’ assertion that justifications for the witch-craze cannot simply be left at the door of a fully conscious external patriarchal force, but that investigation leads to “a range of intellectual and symbolic devices” at the helm.[v] Rather, we must understand the implementation of a violently misogynistic religiosity as another symptom of the root cause of the nature of power. Thus, I shall venture to risk a third dimension to this work, one that is routinely engaged in investigating symptoms for the nature of causes: a psychoanalytical perspective on the witch-hunt, as it related to early Capitalism. For, as we may with ease recognise that primitive accumulation was dependent on the establishment of physical borders through privatisation and enclosures – and by definition the expulsion of people from those borders – just so, analysis of the witch-hunts may recognise the establishment of psychic equivalents of these borders and, accordingly, psychic equivalents of expulsion from them. As such, what begins as an investigation of the relation between mass gynocide and primitive accumulation, shall result in what is effectively a Lacanian / Kristevan psychoanalysis of the biopolitical State.

Book Review: “Eros and Civilization: a Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud” (Herbert Marcuse, 1955)

Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization is, albeit not the first, one of the most significant contributions to the Marxist psychoanalytical canon. However, while one who attempts such a theoretical or philosophical synthesis would typically self-identify with (or at least warrant) the prefix “neo,” be it either neo-Marxist, neo-Freudian, or indeed both, Marcuse appears anxious to disavow such specification, making consistent critical reference to the latter. Indeed, what appears to be central to Marcuse’s thesis is rather that, even though Freud himself affirms what he considers to be the necessity of repression, namely the ego and super-ego’s repression of the id, one may still interpret (in, what Marcuse would seem to insist, is an ultimately traditionalist manner) Freud’s analyses with a liberationist intent.

Throughout the first several chapters of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse illustrates Freud’s fundamental theories about the psychological formation of the subject, and proffers such theories’ application to social theory, although he makes it clear that such social critique is not dependent on an adherence to Freud’s writing as psychoanalysis, but rather as something more akin to philosophy. The main thrust of the argument is as such: civilisation and culture (Marcuse indicates uncritically Freud’s equivocation of the two) constrain the subject’s libidinal urges, countermanding and displacing the pleasure principle with instead the reality principle: the result of the id’s containment in the face of exogenous responsibilities and expectations, to allow for artificial and productive pursuit of satiation: “The reality principle supersedes the pleasure principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure for delayed, restrained, but ‘assured’ pleasure.” Thus, although Eros and Civilization is unquestionably founded upon a repressive hypothesis, it is one that not simply allows for some pleasure to be experienced by the subject, but is instead dependent upon it, although what seems to be satiated is by no means a desire for happiness; rather, it is a sense of freedom, albeit with the firm caveat that it is a “freedom in civilization,” (p.19) which Marcuse would – and indeed does – argue constitutes an objective unfreedom.

One significant reason Marcuse gives for the opposition of this “freedom in civilization” to a state of happiness is, in reference to Totem and Taboo, the genealogical (and, indeed, generative) guilt, descendant from the cannibalistic patricide of the “primal crime.” This guilt is a phenomenon upon which Marcuse’s conception of civilization is wholly dependent. Accordingly, “the progress of civilization” is enacted via reproduction and reaffirmation of a reality principle which, through affect of guilt and ideological dispositifs of delayed-gratification sublimates libidinal drives toward a plane of increasing unfreedom.

In the second half of Eros and Civilization, Marcuse naturally notes the hypocrisy in such ideology, certainly inasmuch as the excess of productivity of this system – what the entrepreneur would call profit, and what the Marxist would describe in terms of variable capital and surplus-value – is itself indicative of how much is done that need not be done, and thus is indicative of the manner in which contemporary civilization does indeed operate not through necessity brought about by the “struggle for existence,” but rather operates to prolong this struggle (130-1). Indeed, such an ideology of progress is indicative enough of a foundation of Hegelian positivism (or, indeed, materialism) that wrapped up in the process in “the vision of a higher form of reason which is the very negation of these features” – an aufheben that would itself undo these technologies: from sublimation to sublation. Accordingly, with this excess of productivity already lies an excess of libidinal energy: a repressed to return. Thus, for Marcuse, the solution to the problem lies in the problem. Just as, for traditional Marxism, it is the most alienated who upon whom we can most rely for revolution, it is for Marcuse that which is most displaced (phantasy, the unconscious, the aesthetic, the id), which prefigures organisation upon which we may locate the potential for a non-repressive civilization.

Although Eros and Civilization is compellingly (if repetitiously) written, Marcuse’s assertions are often too emphatically made: he makes various significant departures from classically Freudian thought, including a historically-unwarranted optimism regarding the unconscious, whilst insisting upon a classically Freudian approach, but also undermining this by arguing against its validity for its originally intended purpose. In many ways, Marcuse’s actual placement of “civilization” within his analysis of the psychological parallels of sublimation to it is woolly, whilst his liberationist invocation lacks the prerequisite materialism for a traditionally Marxist theory, and yet remains too dialectical in approach to fit neatly within a poststructuralist or postmodernist tradition. Nevertheless, within Eros and Civilization is a span of ideas that have proven crucial to neo-Marxist, poststructuralist and postmodernist thought, even if only at the stage of embryonic propositions, in the works of Lyotard, Bataille, Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari. There is certainly value to this text, if predominantly as a conceptual milestone in the development of social theory.

Sodomized and tired: sexual ambivalence and nihilism in gothic rock, post-punk and deathrock

(given at the 2018 Punk Scholars Network / International Society of Metal Music Studies conference – “Doing Metal, Being Punk, Doing Punk, Being Metal: Hybridity, Crossover and Difference in Punk and Metal Subcultures,” De Montfort University, Leicester 14/12/18)

Goth morbidity arose in part from a Schopenhauerian scorn for organic life: from Goth’s perspective, death was the truth of sexuality. Sexuality was what the ceaseless cycle of birth-reproduction-death (as icily surveyed by Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Circle Line”) needed in order to perpetuate itself. Death was simultaneously outside this circuit and what it was really about. Affirming sexuality meant affirming the world, whereas Goth set itself…against the world and against life…Goth suspected that rock was always and essentially a death trip.”

– Mark Fisher, k-punk, “It Doesn’t Matter if We All Die”

Of the predominant counter-cultural phenomena found within youth culture, Goth is perhaps the most associated with a ubiquitous sexuality, after the Hippie “free love” movement. Nevertheless, an encounter with the lyrical and sonic content of the most explicit gothic rock compositions, for all the darkly naïve romantic aestheticism one might associate with the genre, reveals a stark reflection of the neoliberal Thatcherite/Reaganite era: where love was not already dead, it most certainly was no longer free.

I came upon your room
It stuck into my head
We leapt into the bed,
Degrading even lice,
You took delight in taking down my shielded pride

Until exposed became my darker side

The imagery of sex and sex work in “Dark Entries” holds a position of self-consciously counter-intuitive dual functionality in Bauhaus’ psychogeographical tour through a red-light district: offering an escape from a grim capitalist mundanity, but only via an even darker transactional relationship with desire: “well-meaning upper class prey” rendered “walking money cheques, possessing holes”. This is not, however, to say goth sexuality as displayed in “Dark Entries” is “the same but more somehow;” there is, as briefly referenced by Mark Fisher, a queering of the normative sexual dynamic, in as much as the male/female subject/object relation is rendered in Gothic discourse an abject/object relation, instead. Mulveyan gaze theory historically bifurcates the experiences of male visual pleasure in transfixing the female object between positions of either fetishistic scopophilia or voyeurism: either holding the object up to the imaginary ideal – the cold, distant, inhuman partner of phallic desire, or revelling in the violent and lustful invasion and degradation of the object, scornfully rendered subhuman. In either case, this process is to affirm the integrity of the male subject, threatened by the castration represented by the image of the woman. However, the “protagonist” of the song’s psychotically close relationship with the jouissance-associated Real loses himself within this unconscious realm, to an extent where pronouns, both in the sense of gender, and in the sense of first/second/third person become notably interchangeable – “Dark Entries” begins from the perspective of “I”, referencing a second party, to whom the former appears to be sexually submissive: “in a hovel of a bed / I will scream in vain / oh please Miss Lane / leave me with some pain” – moves to an exchange between the singer and partner for whom the listener is avatar: “I came upon your room” – and then finally lands on a third-person-omniscient perspective on a cruising hustler: “he’s soliciting in his tan brown brogues, gyrating through some loathsome devil’s row.”Accordingly, aside from the traditional dynamic of sexual difference that affirms male subjectivity, here that subjectivity is entirely atomized.

Of course, the most obvious statement one can make is that, the ambiguity of gender past the first stanza queers the sexual dynamic inherently, simply through being almost certainly an exercise in non-heterosexual representation, and yet the ambiguity is not one of celebration; simply the result of an apathetic economy of sexual discourse. I phrase it thus, rather than indicating an economy of desire for, as Foucault’s history of sexuality notes, the evolution of society towards modern ethical concerns, reflected first in confessional religious practices, then later in psychoanalytical and psychological ones, is a shift from questions of “limitations of pleasure” to the “deciphering of desire as hermeneutics of self.” There is a greatly apparent ambivalence toward this latter position: desire itself is never acknowledged, and the self as a fixed enough concept to warrant hermeneutical investigation is called highly into question. And yet, such deciphering does occur, through the actions of another in a manner we would associate with the most voyeuristic dynamics established by Mulvey. This revelation of self within a frame of jouissance is, predictably, unutterable and horrific. Until exposed became my darker side.

Accordingly, the abject/object position of gothic sexual economy, leaving no subjectivity affirmed, has a consciously troubled relationship with integrity – particularly the sort of integrity one might expect to hear insisted upon in punk lyrics.. Simon Reynolds and Joy Press’s description of Siouxsie Sioux’s unmistakable image as “towards a glacial exteriority of the objet d’art’ evinced through ‘a shunning of the moist, pulsing fecundity of organic life” speaks to a universality of disgust: rejecting societal normality, in all its hypocrisy; not for something more profound, but for more illusion. The goth feminine opposition to normative commercial beauty standards is not on account of the falsity, but of the duplicity – makeup, painstakingly applied in such a way as to imply an absence of makeup, constraining itself to the regime of the natural. Meanwhile, as Fisher remarks, “The Siouxsie Look is, in effect, a replicable cosmetic mask – a literal effacement of the organic expressivity of the face by a geometric pattern, all hard angles and harsh contrasts between white and black.” Beneath the mask, we may expect to find nothing, but it is not comparative; it is not a “nothing” that may in contrast affirm “something” else – it is the nothing of mortality. Though ersatz, it is effective, inasmuch as the idealised inhuman feminine object is the catalysing avatar for abject male self-destruction: as Siouxsie sings in “She’s a Carnival,” “she’s a portrait of a poison for you to quench your thirst.”

Indeed, the opener to Christian Death’s seminal debut, Only Theatre of Pain attests to this sentiment:

Let’s skirt the issue
Of discipline
Let’s start an illusion
With hand and pen
Re-read the words
And start again
Accept the gift of sin

It is not my intention in this essay or, indeed, any other to speculate on the trauma of others as artifacts for philosophizing or cultural theory. Suffice to say, surviving friends, bandmates and lovers of Rozz Williams have in interviews directly quoted him as describing Only Theatre of Pain as being “autobiographical” – accordingly, I shall endeavour to allow the lyrics that combine dark manifestations of Christian ritual and sexual abuse – not least of all of children – to speak for themselves at a most fundamental level.

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that every aspect of an immediate impression of his performance advertised a disregard for Nietzsche’s old adage: in battling demons, Rozz Williams displayed extreme comfort with becoming one, himself. However, the ubiquity – at least in the Theatre era of Christian Death – of symbolism associated with Satanism cannot be divorced from the reality that to hold an upside down cross is still to hold a cross; to say the Lord’s Prayer backwards is still to say the Lord’s Prayer. The sadomasochistic content of Christian Death’s music and imagery being rooted so firmly in a dystopian Christian world should not so naïvely be read as adolescent subversion, seeking to offend chaste, or at least vanilla, straight-laced churchgoers. Rather, it may be interpreted as a distinctly alternative, but nonetheless sincere, investigation of fundamental truths – not just hypocrisies – of the spiritual position, which undoubtedly include feelings of loneliness, confusion and ambivalence, perhaps best illustrated in the chorus to “Stairs – Uncertain Journey”:

Be Satan
Be Satan
Be Satan
Be…
Satan be gone

Indeed, sacrilegious as it may assuredly be, the subject position most often paralleled in the album’s lyrics is that of martyrdom: including and especially that of Jesus himself: “spiritual cramp coming for my ribs / those gangsters toting guns are shooting spikes through my wrist”. In this regard, Rozz Williams’ ethos reflects that of Joan Didion’s famous espousal of the philosophy of one of the first rock bands to be described as “gothic” – The Doors – whose music “insisted that love was sex, and sex was death, and therein lay salvation.” In essence, Eros becomes the binding agent between Agape and Thanatos that can justify such messianic sacrifice as the passion of Christ, through an overtly queered and feminized position:

Ritual mockery
Rectified doubt
I’m holding with arms open wide
Sleeping endless sleep on a bed of nails
Wake me up with your kiss

It is in moments of Christ-like endurance of torture / reception of sexual advances that Rozz takes on the cold, inhuman object position, himself, but it still maintains human frailty – the “salvation” sought after here seems to be, more often than not, salvation from profound isolation:

To hell with your excuses
What do you know
Of desperation?
You people never feel the pain
Of dark-eyed angels
In a desperate hell

Certainly, this is most clear, returning to the opening track “Cavity – First Communion,” whose final stanza addresses the notion of communion, a spiritual togetherness, catalyzed and congealed in what can only be sadomasochistic congress to remedy a loneliness that seems intertwined with any concept of a discrete subjectivity, again dissolving the fixity of pronouns. Perhaps most interestingly is the manner in which this song mirrors – possibly intentionally – James Kirkup’s controversial, banned poem The Love That Dares to Speak its Name, a first person account of a Roman centurion, having sex with the corpse of Jesus, following the crucifixion It is of note, however, that once again Rozz takes the passive position – the most direct action sounding withdrawn and masturbatory, until this also results in a diffusion of identity:

Three shots ring out a scream
Who wants to play Roman soldier
That lives inside of me?
…
My secret fear of being alone
I sit and hold hands with myself
I sit and make love to myself
I’ve got blood on my hands
I’ve got blood on your hands
…
Blood on our hands

This unappetisingly surrealistic state of queer sanguineous unity in isolation does, of course, take on a greater poignancy in the face of the goth scene’s notable concurrence with the HIV/AIDS crisis in the UK and USA. In his infamous reflection on homosex and the masculine ideal at the time of the crisis, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” Leo Bersani opens with the provocative first line: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” Though it would be supremely ambitious, this late in my paper, to try and précis for anyone unfamiliar with Bersani’s work all the avenues down which he travels, I shall simply summarise the final concluding paragraphs: the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS crisis was its literalisation of the self-annihilation represented in the “feminising” position of being fucked in the ass, and in doing so one may demolish one’s own “perhaps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him…[one] grounded in the sacrosanct value of selfhood.” He ends, reflecting on the almost spiritual ritualism of shattering the self through queer sex as “propos[ing]… jouissance as a mode of ascesis.” The “I” dissolves again, and becomes a position of “we” through untenable congress: blood on our hands, blood on our hands, blood on our hands.

In discussing Rozz Williams’ lyrics within the context of self-annihilation, one cannot avoid the fact that, on April 1st 1998, he took his own life. Such a fact makes difficult any reading of Rozz’s work that would doubt his sincerity. And yet, earlier in this paper, we discussed the issues surrounding this concept within the gothic context. Accordingly, I wish to propose that, through the inversions and subversions of hegemonic psychic structures of knowledge production through sexual difference, the gothic position is to be sincere about one thing: nothing.

On Flaming Creatures (excerpt from “Infantile Aggression, Queer Performance and Ambivalent Love”)

Flaming Creatures‘ queer “placeless and timeless” aesthetic was to such an extent that Jonas Mekas reported hearing it erroneously described as a “’remarkable first public screening of a film made fifty years ago.’”

Flaming Creatures continues in its ambiguities, “casually blurred genders and abstract body tangles…There’s a serious lack of gravity, an absence of perspective…[for such graphic sexuality] Flaming Creatures is notable for its absence of tumescence.”  Naturally, considering the prominence given to a scene of cunnilingual rape and, later, a drag queen Marilyn Monroe vampire, feeding on and resurrecting the titular creatures, we once again encounter instances of oral and genital love/sadism confusion. This time encountering an actual vampire, rather than simply passing reference to the vampire’s devotee as in Blonde Cobra , we come face-to-face with an icon of queer time: animated non-linearity, disrupted futurity and alternative (to) reproduction. However, the key to grasping the full potential of Flaming Creatures as opposition to the normal society that might be ensured through the psychoanalysis of children lies not just with queer sadomasochism and supernatural creatures but within the film’s aesthetic, both at its most avant-garde and also, perhaps surprisingly, at its most conventionally cinephilic.

To summarise briefly Jean- Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus, ” cinematic specificity is defined by mechanical processes which act to mystify the transformation of an “objective reality” into individual photographic images with Renaissance perspective, and then into a fluid, singular stream of coherent vision and narrative. Accordingly, the cinematic-spectatorial process is founded upon multiple psychological fictions, only one of which has anything to do with the story itself. Thus, although it may be argued by Klein and others that a fundamental aspect of development out of infanthood is the discarding of phantasy for reality, there remains a dominant culture of fantasy, functioning wholly on the obfuscation of the divide between reality and fiction.

In Flaming Creatures, Smith employs multiple techniques which could paradoxically be classified either as narratologically-justified formalism or as veritable verfremdungseffekt – as P. Adams Sitney describes:

In the first scene, as figures pass back and forth in front of a poster on which the credits of the film have been ornately written, the grey, washed-out picture quality gives the impression that he was filming in a cloud. The narrowing of the tonal range obscures the sense of depth, which Smith capitalizes on by cluttering the panning frame with actors and with details of limbs, breasts, a penis, and puckered lips so that not only depth disappears but the vertical and horizontal coordinates as well.

Indeed, through processes of visual abstraction, non-professional acting, obviously painted sets and the extreme disturbance of the rape scene itself, with the victim’s screams battling and besting the score’s control of the aural space, Flaming Creatures proves a challenging spectatorial experience, whose effects of interpellation and alienation oscillate wildly throughout its 43 minutes. Simultaneously affective, however, is Flaming Creatures’ overt reference to recognisable Hollywood tropes, in their most concentrated forms. Sitney again:

Flaming Creatures deliberately manifests what [Smith] finds implicated in Maria Montez’s and von Sternberg’s films, and without the interference of a plot. When he brings to the fore what has been latent in those films— visual texture, androgynous sexual presence, exotic locations (the Araby of Montez’s fi ms or the Spain, China, and Morocco of von Sternberg’s)— and at the same time completely dis cards what held these films together (elaborate narratives), he utterly transforms his sources and uncovers a mythic centre from which they had been closed off.

Indeed, by making such references to the camp potential of Montez and Sternberg, whilst eschewing the “serious” elements of the plot, Smith’s cinema does not just showcase the drag performances of its cross-dressing and/or otherwise openly mannered actors, but it in fact may be understood to characterise the Hollywood aesthetic with just the same mindful, parodic drag performance as defined by Bornstein. The mindfulness of this performance, as well as its disregard for the carefully constructed stories of its source material goes some way to address and challenge the interpellative nature of these hegemonically-sanctioned fantasies, whilst giving space to the riotously confused, queer and violent phantasies of neurotic children with homosexual tendencies who would be “cured” by psychoanalysis. The American underground’s camp, queer position in relation to Hollywood (not just limited to Smith and Jacobs but also George Kuchar and Kenneth Anger to name but two others) is defined by Hoberman as an “obsessive ambivalence,” a term which, aptly enough, is nothing more than a succinct condensation Klein’s description of Erna’s relationship to her own parents. Perhaps this truly reflects the position of the American underground drag cinema in contrast to its Hollywood parent figure: challenging the transcendent ego of interpellative conventional narrative and form, parodying the super-ego of heteronormative hegemony and linear time, and revelling in the unbridled phantasy of a destructive id.