Anal Aggression and the Twentieth Congress of the American Dream
Music: The American Analog Set: Promise of Love
Love Promises
We knew with our weak messianic powers that it would come to this, despite a profound hope and a conviction that others might see like we do. That is, our prophecy and soothsaying were best left to silence; we are looking back at the wreckage (Bush's toys strewn about, dead people, victims and victims and victims, all but from the push of a button behind a curtain).
It all comes down to the primal scene, the original moment of violence or trauma reenacted in repeat symbolic explosions, like last night, sometime around 2:00 a.m., after I had fallen asleep watching election returns. Someone was subject to anal aggression. I awoke this morning after a bad dream in which George W. Bush was again elected president, turned on the television set, and discovered that George W. Bush was again elected president. Melancholia: someone was subject to anal aggression last night.
“Guns, Gods, and Gays,” said some irritating reporter trying to explain the meaning of “moral conviction” for those “Red State voters.”
It’s the wrong color red, of course.
It all comes down to the primal scene, that original moment of violence or trauma reenacted in repeat symbolic explosions, like when I was about five, if I recall. (In the End, correct recollection does not matter, either in terms of my own development or national reckoning, alas.) I used to get up long before my parents on Saturday mornings. Eventually, an hour or two later, my mother would get up and fix breakfast, and later, my father. One morning, however, mom did not get up even though the sun was. I went to their bedroom door and opened it: there was rustling, furtive movement, and my father yelled, “get out!” and my mother said “what’s a matter baby? I’m getting up soon, go back and watch TV” and something was terribly wrong but “baby” seemed like a temporary fix.
Now I’ve done it.
But I know how to recover from this (kill daddy!). Indeed, as I’ve grown up countless comic books and action films have taught me the recourse of blind thrusting, give unto others as they have given unto you. The pedagogy of the action film is a soul-deep teaching—at least it was for me, having grown up around numerous “G” words—none of which being “geometry.” There is no better example than Collateral Damage (2001, but released 2002), in which Arnold Swarznegger avenges the murder of his wife and child by bomber “terrorists” (first Arabs, then Columbians after Nine-eleven); this mean firefighter smokes them out of their holes in their native land. Or Ang Lee’s film, Hulk, in which a wee-man becomes a giant, throbbing green phallus that really gives it to the men responsible for killing his mother (indeed, the primal scene is a featured flashback throughout the film, except, unlike my discovery at the age of five, Bruce Banner eventually remembers that what he saw behind the bedroom door was his father killing his mother).
“Guns, Gods, and Gays,” they say. Receiving anality is the enemy. The trouble with this ominous copographic foe is that fascism, like the enemy, is always within. Isn't that always the premise of horror/sci-fi films?
The Verso Three
Kerry has lost and, despite his neo-liberal programming, I wanted to see the Anti-Manchurian cyborg win. But this kind of “victory” would not do for a Red America, since it would represent the father who consults instead of spanks: You have two daddies to choose from, I said to one of my classes, the one who gives you a whoopin’ right there on the spot, or the one who consults mom (France for my students) to see what the punishment would be (usually the tiresome sanction of “no telephone, no TV,” and so on). I used a more radical metaphor in preparation for a radio interview on the first of the presidential debates: America is electing its phallus; you can go with the one that gives you a good hard fuck, or the one that makes love to you. I elected not to go with that on the air, of course, but it was amusing to imagine the images as I was addressing a largely conservative audience of talk-radio junkies (and, horror of horrors, many of whom would have probably agreed without a touch of amusement).
In the haunting class we are just completing the third of a series of books dedicated to making meaning of September 11, 2001, an event rooted in three places and in “real” time that, predictably, has been reduced into a simple, screened totem: “Nine-eleven.” Paul Virilio’s Ground Zero is the worst of them, rooting the aestheticization of the so-called terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in a collective will to sublimity catalyzed by the push-button modernity (people become nothing more than paint tubes, exploding red like the unfolding of a flower). Virilio’s tendency to cite anyone that comes to mind, most especially himself, makes Ground Zero little more than an index of theory metaphor-bombs, all of which might be summed up simply as “the arrival of the cinematographic bomb.” Jean Baudrillard’s The Spirit of Terrorism fares much better: Us and Them, that is to say, “We,” secretly desired the Absolute event, evidenced in Hollywood dreams: “the terroristic imagination dwells in all of us.” His argument that the real effects of the destruction of the twin towers are purely symbolic is persuasive, while his jettisoning of the psychoanalytic for such a claim is not. Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real is the best of the three, despite his tendency to meander in pursuit of the clever exemplar. Zizek, at least, always has an eye on the pragmatic, political possibilities and the real event of critical inversion: nothing is completely closed-up in advance. Nine-eleven is our most recent prime-number example.
Against Virilio’s retrojected warning against the postmodern cult of the sublime, Zizek argues: “The problem with the twentieth-century ‘passion for the Real’ was not that it was a passion for the Real, but that it was a fake passion whose ruthless pursuit of the Real behind appearances was the ultimate stratagem to avoid confronting the Real . . . (24). If we were truly passionate for the Real, presumably, we would rediscover a kind of Nietzschean pursuit of aesthetics and beautiful veils because the Real is so sublimely horrible/mind-blowing/impossible. The Real humbles; a passion for it easily slides into what Virilio has termed the Global Suicide State, premised on a false passion.
I find Zizek’s analysis compelling and persuasive, but only to a point: how do I cultivate a passion for the Real that does not succumb to falsehood insofar as fiction is all we got? I suppose the answer is that there are better and worse fictions, and that the pedagogy of the art film is much closer to the desired ethic than the pedagogy of the Western. Hulk is not the answer.
Or rather, we must acknowledge the one-sided truths (hence falsehoods) of the art film and the porno are within the filmic totality. I find Zizek's recourse to dialectic comforting, and his claim that we must adopt both sides (anti-global capital and anti-terrorism) as components of the "total" ethical stance accurate. Zizek is recommended at his most straightforward and clear headed:
We do not yet know what consequences this event will have for the economy, ideology, politics and war . . . . Either America will persisit in . . . the deeply immoral attitude of "Why should this happen to us?" . . . Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long-overdue move [to] "A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!" That is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it happening anywhere else. In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation--what we are getting instead is the forceful reassertion of the exceptional role of the USA as a global policeman, as if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it. (49)
The Usual Suspects Increasingly Cassandras
When I was about twenty-seven, if I recall correctly (in the end recollection does matter, because we felt our careers were under attack), after a long day of teaching many of the usual suspects packed a small classroom for a teach-in for comfort, perhaps wisdom. We were there to see John Mowitt, one of my favorite professors, give a talk titled “Re(:)thinking the Unthinkable,” which centered on two ideas. First, “as a civilian target the university confronts the unthinkable most immediately in the form of its own censure.” In other words, we witnessed a new battle in the culture wars, often couched in terms of the “end of irony” or the death of postmodernism. His second idea was more extensively developed much later by Jean Baudrillard in the monograph-cum-essay collection, The Spirit of Terrorism.
Well, here we are, our suspicions confirmed. We knew with our weak messianic powers that it would come to this, despite a profound hope and a conviction that others might see like we do. It’s not that I worry about my academic freedom, or that I will not be able to use my specialized jargon in public, or that I will not be able to use anal sex metaphors in my blog. I knew today would happen—at least I dreamt it before it came to pass (regards to Ed Cayce). What troubles me is my own interiority, my own understanding or explanation for how millions can read about the pointless bloodshed “over there” and continue to support blind thrusting: am I, or people of my ilk, simply abjectly naïve to think a general public might see it like I, like “we,” do?
I remember sitting at the sit-in, then, when I was 27, in the wake of primal trauma, thinking that while this threat of censure was real, it was nevertheless slightly—just slightly—over reactive. Overreaction has a important function, and getting hot and bothered about one’s plight does a group of like-minded souls good. Similarly, reading Baudrillard and Virilio and Zizek, I’ve often found myself wrapped up in their often dramatic and sometimes shocking pronouncements but thinking—knowing—somewhere in the back of my mind that much of this is hyperbolic, that to take Baudrillard, literally, at his word all the time is foolish. Having read the Nine-eleven books and forced to think about them, the teach-in back then, and the present victory of “W,” today “reality” takes on the garish hues of horrible cartoon (like that segment in the original Creepshow, when the kid leads an unsuspecting bystander into his imaginary world of Technicolor horror). The usual suspects, once comedic characters, are now tragic ones, increasingly Cassandras. This morning, when I woke up and saw the results, I felt—I think for the first time, I’m unsure—I felt like I was caught in a kind of warped Cassandra complex.
Music: Red Lorry Yellow Lorry: Blow
When Will I Be Blown Up?
The usual suspects never mistake sex for war. That much I can claim. There is no cult of sublimity for us. The sublime may be Real, but confronting it is an openness to radical alterity, not an obliteration of the Other.
Nine-eleven is the primal scene, a reenactment of that initial childhood trauma that further develops the psyche: is daddy hurting mommy? What’s going on? Well, if you buy this tip you must believe that our self-consciousness or “subjectivity” is founded on trauma and haunted by it--the first being birth, the next, the primal scene, and so on--life being but a series of mini-traumas that we define ourselves against or over, as if the self is a series of narrative shields or, well, “screens.” Nine-eleven was a mac-daddy trauma, one of those unsettling events in which our collective identity, in which the American Subject in general, was caused to reckon with its own traumatic past.
When we are made subject to massive, collective trauma we are often subjected by a bigger daddy—we long for subjection. “W” quickly screened a moment of mournful possibility by, of course, characterizing the threat of castration as an exogenous one: You are either “with” US or “against” US (with the terrorists). Always, in national trauma, decisions are made on our behalf that bear consequences for each. Just be an American in Berlin for one day, you’ll see.
Freud associated the primal scene with orifice-ambiguity, and argued that the child, reliving the fantasy of the primary scene, associates the original violence with anal sex, indeed, with his or her own subjection to the Law, to daddy’s “GET OUT!”
Not that anal sex is a bad thing between two loving people.
But anal aggression--"sodomy" in the abstract--is coded in the Western imaginary as the domiance of a blind, masculine thrusting and a “feminized” or “passive” target; hence it's fetishization in heteroporno and demonization in heteronormic "reality." I don't mean, of course, physical intercourse, but rather a mythic that adheres in the American imaginary. In this context, unquestionably, “W’s” hyper-masculinist fantasy characterizes the US as having been violently butt-fucked—its own phalluses castrated by the exogenous suppositories of doom. Consequently, it was time to assert the Law. I realize this is a facile psychoanalytic reading, but at the same time it’s so obvious and “textbook” it is tempting to read the Tragedy in the comic frame. Perhaps characterizing it so is my own push-button modernism, screening the Real of the situation. Regardless, like the muffled boom of the first atomic mushroom, we are once again hearing the dreaded ding-dong of doom.