a tale of two perversions

Music: Georgia Fair: All Through Winter (2011)

For the intellectual heir of Jacques Lacan in France, Jacques-Alain Miller, "perversion is when you do not ask for permission." Such and observation is shorthand for a distinction between jouissance, human enjoyment or a kind of pleasurable pain impervious to or beyond representation, and desire, which is founded on a question (what do you want? what do I want?). Perversion is characterized by a relative disinterest in others, only the act---a kind of pure act---that invites charges of obscenity. Perversion calls the law, broadly conceived, into being; where there is perversion, there is discipline . . . there is a spanking, and increasingly perverse spankings are becoming public. Spankings are delivered along the inseam of permission and permissibility: For example, in Mike Nichols' 1967 masterpiece The Graduate, Ben comes to realize his desire at the moment his seducer appears to transgress the rules without asking. "For god's sake, Mrs. Robinson. Here we are. You got me into your house. You give me a drink. You . . . put on music. Now you start opening your personal life to me and tell me your husband won't be home for hours."

Mrs. Robinson: "So?"

Benjamin: "Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me."

Mrs. Robinson: "[chuckles] Huh?"

Benjamin: "Aren't you?"

Despite George Michael's claim that "everyone wants a lover like that," it's true in the diegesis only for Bancroft's brilliantly played character. The spectator identifies with Ben's desire ("is this what I want? do I like this?") as Mrs. Robinson appears to enjoy his questioning (much more than any sex act; it's not about sex, or rather, it is about sex but not concerned with the sex act). In this way the perverse act is staged for us in cinematic fantasy: it's not that Mrs. Robinson truly wants Ben to make love to her; rather, it's Ben's reaction and attempts to bring the rules to bear on the situation: this is not supposed to happen; this is inappropriate; this is wrong. What Lacan teaches us about perversion is that Mrs. Robinson is not enjoying the promise of seduction, but the staging of the wrong itself. Sexual pleasure, if it occurs, would be incidental, a spin-off like Tang for space exploration. Indeed, from the perspective of the pervert, Mrs. Robinson is only bringing about Ben's enjoyment of her, beyond his desire, and is in some sense envious of the desire (that this, the questioning) he has in the moment. Strangely, desiring is a kind of limitation, it puts guardrails on enjoyment, it helps us to "pull back." Mrs. Robinson cannot "pull back," and despite appearances, is at some level envious of those who can question and forge limitations, like Ben. And at the same time, she sees herself as channeling his enjoyment---that which is presumably associated with the rules, that which is presumably open to her because the guardrails are off.

This week, given the priapic plights staged by Penn State: The Movie, for the thinker interested in psychoanalysis commentary almost seems compulsory. The topic of pedophilia, however, strikes at the heart of psychoanalytic understanding and locates psychoanalysis' rhetorical weak-spot: in providing an explanation for the violation of our most taboo of cultural taboos, those relatively unsympathetic to psychoanalytic insights can easily find such insights morally objectionable themselves. Or, to put it plainly: it's taboo to talk about the taboo. Discussions of pedophilia that say too much---that say something other than blanket condemnation---are somehow odd apologias for perversions, or participate in scope of perversion itself. That, too, is true, hence the title of this post. And the strategy of approaching the issue of perversity obliquely, at a slant, is for good reason ,because talking about the taboo similarly courts misunderstanding if not outright condemnation.

Unless, of course, one is a "journalist."

Indeed, the overdetermined, culturally sanctioned way to discuss perversion is perverse itself: to discourse on pedophilia, I must first and foremost condemn it in the name of human decency. This is not to say I don't agree with the spirit of condemnation. Although I would stop short of pathologizing perversity as such, pedophilia is culturally forbidden form of perversion because it is morally reprehensible, and for reasons easily adduced, principled and consequentialist. Even so, this obligatory opening gesture ("pedophilia is evil!") is itself perverse if one understands perversity is also, first and foremost, wrapped-up in a complicated relationship between jouissance and the law. Two quick examples will suffice, the first from my own recent past experience as a scholar.

Some years ago I was a blind reviewer for a manuscript that purported to be a content analysis of the website of a famous pedophile/pederasty advocacy organization. The conclusions of the analysis were, it seemed to me, obvious: the website's rhetoric made claims about the "rights" and civil interests of boys, who have been systematically disempowered in Western culture, and this organization promoted and protected boy's rights. The arguments made by the website were consistent with the defensive claims of pedophiles with one exception (that children are seducers, a common claim made by pedophiles). I rejected the manuscript on scholarly and moral grounds. As scholarship, the essay seemed rather pointless. But the essay was not pointless in other ways; the moral objection I raised was that the point of the scholarship seemed to be its motive,enjoyment. The authors were "getting off" on slumming around in pedophiliac rhetoric. For the authors, despite a sense of detached scholarly objectivity, the motive deployed to justify such "research' was moral: "we have to understand how perverts think in order to stop perversity!"

The irony of my rejection of the manuscript was that it was particularly righteous (the editor never asked me to review a manuscript again because of this righteousness). We might even say that I took some pleasure in naming and denouncing the enjoyment of others as obscene; in castigating what I saw as a perversion of scholarly mission I was, in my own way, also engaging in a kind of perverse enjoyment---I got to embody "the law" and deliver the judgment of indiscretion and moral violation. And that observation begs the second example easily, NBC's pedophile-busting reality television program, To Catch a Predator.

For about three years (2004-2007), show host Chris Hansen made his a household name by busting would-be sexual predators lured to parentless homes by of-age teens or young adults pretending to be 12-14 year olds. For me, the show was excruciating to watch for a number of reasons, but the most glaring was the obscene enjoyment of Chris Hansen himself, visibly delighting in the painful righteousness of meting the moral law (which, viewers were told, were followed by the police after Hansen got to confront the "suspect" on camera). Despite ratings, the show was eventually cancelled because, NBC claimed, "sexual predators" were now well aware of the show and its methods and were becoming harder to "catch." I think the show was cancelled because of the mounting criticism and, in my view, its fundamental obscene character. The show was inescapably perverse in its staging of a sado-masochistic reality: the sadistic predator is revealed to be a masochist, Hansen becomes the law-giving sadist, and so on. Perhaps the most disturbing detail here is that the decoys were of legal age, entrapping rhetoric to the contrary, and although few will admit it, often times the spectator felt sorry for the would-be criminal! Therein is the complexity of perversion as cultural entertainment (examples abound in horror films that get us to feel something for the evil anti-heroes).

These examples---of film, of scholarly blind review, of To Catch a Predator---represent perverse acts on both sides, behaviors that are classically perverse because they are premised on a kind of unwavering faith in either the jouissance of the Other or the Law (I'm only doing what you want me to do; I'm only following orders). I hope they serve to illustrate how all of us are capable of obscene enjoyments, how we all can do perverse things or participate in the perverse. Such daily perversities, however, are premised on behaviors and nothing fundamentally essential. There are some people in our society whose subjectivity is perverse, however. These folks are very rare. And in psychoanalysis, these are the folks we say harbor a "perverse structure." All people are capable of perverse acts; a very few number of people are themselves perverse. The pedophile is the most stark example of an individual for whom perversity is a core disposition.

Of course, space prevents any thorough or technical discussion of perversity as a structure that is, in rare cases, pathological. Pedophilia is perhaps one of the most vexing "diagnoses," since most people do not have the capacity to understand it in an empathetic way, and this is because we are structurally "neurotic." Here's a quick thumbnail of the Lacanian take on the perverse structure: most people, paradigm persons, undergo two processes or formative transformations in childhood, "alienation" and then "separation." Collectively these fly under the term "castration," which in general just means having one's self "cut off" from the mother-child dyad as one unit, becoming "two" (or really, becoming "three," since the mechanism of the cut off is a third other).

According to Lacan, each process or, better, "event," concerns a symbolic paternal figure (a second parent, irrelevant of sex, can function as the "symbolic father"). The first process, "alienation," is when a child learns that he or she is not the same being as his or her mother and, more importantly, that s/he is not supposed to be or allowed to be. It is the moment of hearing "no" and understanding what it means for the first time---coming to terms with Jagger's observation that you cannot always get or have what you want. To be alienated is to understand prohibition, to understand what "no" means.

Understanding "no," however, doesn't necessarily mean you'll mind the prohibition. Of course, because the "no" is usually scary or accompanied by a threat, most children do. Minding the prohibition, accepting it, is the second step termed "separation." We've all seen this with "separation anxiety" in toddlers, yes? There are certain kids that cannot possibly part with mama. Kindergarten is, in many senses, a pedagogy of separation (and this, of course, requires the life-skill of sharing). It is with the understanding that comes with separation and absence that we learn the basic life-skills of exchange and substitution. So, for example, take the Peanuts character Linus: he cannot part with his safety blanket and sucks his thumb. These are substitutions, or transitional objects, that presumably help him to deal with a separation from mother or the maternal body. Regardless, the end result of successful separation is symbolization, fundamentally an economic relation premised on substitution (exchange, transaction, etc.). And for Lacan, the symbolic is the law as such, broadly construed.

Most of us are neurotics: whether obsessive (most academics) or hysterical, neurotics have undergone both alienation and separation. Together, these events mark the completion of "castration," whereby one is prohibited and separated from the maternal bosom and thrust into the world of social (or symbolic) relations. Prohibition, that initial "NO!" asks us to give up our unbridled enjoyment of mama in exchange from something else---the symbolic world represented by speech. Desire comes into play at this point in terms of questioning: "Ok, I cannot have mamma for myself. What, then, do you want from me? What do I want?" Without language, we cannot reflect on what it is that we desire. Enjoyment represents the satisfaction of our drives---eating, shitting, screwing, touching ourselves---and these things we learn we cannot do whenever we want. We give up our driven impulses with a little self-restraint to be social creatures, and "let go" only in socially sanctioned ways. Desire functions, in a way, as a limit to enjoyment; the guardrails, as it were.

Now, the psychotic person never goes through alienation or separation; this is a person who never understood "no." Psychotics are often very easy to spot (especially if you do any sort of online dating!). The trickier character is the pervert. The pervert is in a kind of developmental purgatory or limbo (although I wince at using that d-word): she has heard and understood the prohibition of alienation, she gets the "no," however, she has no way of symbolizing it or understanding (internalizing) its meaning. This is why structural perverts are very good at leading what appears to be a "normal life," indeed, why some may never commit perverse acts: law is reckoned with, it is felt, it's just not established or firmly emplaced. To use a computing metaphor: it's like knowing how to code HTML, just not being able to do it or not seeing where you've missed the backslash or typed the wrong coding. Or rather, it's being able to follow the rules perfectly but not really caring about the end result; it's following the rules/code itself gets repeated, over and over, almost compulsively.

There's a lot I'm not going into here (for example, the symbolization of the "maternal phallus" in the fetish, the realization of "lack," and so on), but the gist, I hope, is clear: the pervert can enjoy but cannot desire because s/he lacks the symbolic resources to desire. The pervert does not ask questions, or as Miller puts it, "does not ask for permission." And so the pedophile emerges as a person who knows, very well, that what he or she is doing is not socially sanctioned, appropriate, and so forth, but does it anyway---not because it is taboo, but rather, to bring the taboo into being. What's at stake for the pervert is the law itself, the law as such, the invitation for the paternal, a deep call for understanding, at some level, what the "no" means or is because s/he cannot.

Sandusky is not only a textbook case of pedophilia from the behavioral (viz., DSM) standpoint, but from a Lacanian standpoint was well. He went to great, elaborate lengths to create an environment for his victims---troubled boys whom, predictably, are looking for father figures, who themselves are calling out for the alienation/separation of primary and secondary repression. From the pervert's standpoint, he is doing what the child wants, bringing the law into being. This is why, according to Fink, the cultural fantasies of unbridled enjoyment are really a ruse for the pervert and the horrified observer: Sandusky is racked with anxiety, and by repeatedly restaging the trauma of prohibition he is making the Other---the Law---exist. That he may "get off" in the company of the boys is really not the purpose; however strangely, the pedophile sees himself as a liberator, letting boys enjoy themselves. Yes, this is twisted, but it's only this twisted thinking/feeling that begins to explain the compulsory character of perverted acts (I would be remiss not to point out that there is also some empirical brain research that suggests there are serious differences in the brains of pedophiles, but what that means exactly is not yet understood or proven in any satisfying way).

I've gone into the differences between structural perversion and perverse acts because one can beg the other. Often, our response to perverts is also similarly perverse, and I think we would do well to recognize the point of convergence in righteousness and our rush to absolute condemnation and judgment. As Size (damn autocorrect) Zizek notes of "fundamentalists" in his recent How to Read Lacan, the religious zealot's conviction "does not concern facts, but gives expression to an unconditional ethical commitment." That unconditional, blind commitment to some principle or law is perverse because at its core is a sort of painful delight---enjoyment---in proclaiming the law, thou shalt not! It's Chris Hansen busting would-be sexual predators, or my blind-reviewing self condemning scholarship as trash. It's the subtext of the current media orgy reporting on and condemning, in nauseating detail, the crimes committed by Sandusky and, we worry, school administrators in covering it up: in the zeal to win at any cost, the "perverse core" of collegiate athletics is revealed in its complicity with the obscene and heinous.

The two perversions, then, are these: the perverse structure of pedophiliac subjectivity, and the perverse response we have to that subject. One begets the other. One kind we might feel is justified---and frankly, it is. But we should not ignore our own complicity in this strange, warped economy that would keep enjoyment at bay, since the very fantasy of "busting a pedophile" allows us to approach enjoyment just the same, albeit from a different direction, from the higher ground of moral righteousness. This is, of course, not to excuse or condone either type of perversion. It is to say, however, that we need to be more critical of our consumption of this story---and the zeal with which is it being covered. We cannot help ourselves, like watching the scene of a car accident. But, still, I guess I'm saying we should not exempt ourselves from obscenity at the heart of controversy. Again, I come back to Jagger: "I shouted out/ who killed the Kenndys/ when after all/ it was you and me." One is right to be suspicious of those who proclaim most righteously the evils of Sandusky, just as we are the religious zealot who condemns "fags" to hell. Sandusky will be brought to justice, I just want us to be wary of how much we ourselves enjoy seeing that. It too easily can snowball into a moral panic (pedophiles under every shrub) or righteous movements that create even more victims.

At the risk of perversity, here's the moral: Dehumanization is the most terrible perversity of them all. Or, you know: two wrongs don't make a right.