on hatred in the news, breasts

Music: The Orb: Aubrey Mixes: The Ultraworld Excursions (1991)

This has been the week of hate and hating in mainstream news. Glambert "came out" (again) in Rolling Stone; that this was an event at all signifies a seething hatred somewhere out there, or else it simply would not be news at all (remember?). Reverend Jeremiah Wright quipped that "them Jews" are keeping Obama from speaking to him. And just two days ago James von Brunn, a man consumed with hatred for racialized Other, attempted to storm the National Holocaust Museum and kill anyone in sight; he shot officer Stephen Tyrone and will be charged for murder.

In my field, the dominant theory for understanding aggression toward others---the sexed, the raced, and the queer---is that of "scapegoating," and in particular the scapegoating theory advanced by Kenneth Burke. Burke argues that human beings are born into various hierarchies, which leads to a sense of mystery about an out-group. Curiosity about the out-group in turn leads to a transgression against that group---a faux pas or rule-breaking or something---and then "victimage": blaming the self ("mortification") or the other ("scapegoating") to deal with the guilt of transgression. (Nate Stormer's suggested illustration has always stuck with me.) Aggression towards others is explained in terms of how one recons with guilt.

Such a theory is gravely unsatisfying as an explanation for aggression we've witnessed this week, as its pretty much helpless to describe psychotic aggression. Moreover, it's just too Christian; taking a cue from Melanie Klein, it seems to me feelings of narcissism and envy are closer to the core of aggression. Guilt, it seems to me, is a much more mature and evolved emotion. Futhermore, for some reason Burke's fairly sophisticated understanding of identification (narcissistic in character) was never worked through his theory of victimage, such that both perspectives lack---however ironically---motive. The missing piece is ego, and more specifically, the ideal ego [i(a)]. For today's post, I'd like to sketch a projective identification theory that may help us to distinguish different types scapegoating along a continuum of aggression; one side is indifference, while the other is hate.

There are three conceptual components to this sketch: the ideal ego, primary narcissism, and projective identification. The first is Lacanian in character, and refers to an imaginary fantasy structure that always holds out the promise of completion and unity. The ideal ego is a kind of image that forms in one's head of one's supreme omnipotence, an image that dominates the self-conception of toddlers (think about the aggression of the "terrible twos"). For Lacan, one usually learns to temper this imaginary fantasy of oneself as "all powerful" with the "ego ideal," a symbolic limitation, an understanding of one's finitude, that comes from without. In a sense, most psychotic behavior is an infantile regression to a sense of omnipotence, and a general inability to understand limit, the almighty "no."

Although Klein doesn't work with the ideal ego/ego ideal distinction (in part because Freud is really unclear), we can see it in her discussion of primary narcissism and projective identification. Primary narcissism simply refers to the normal, basic focus of an infant and toddler on itself until, of course, the ego ideal develops. The hallmark of primary narcissism is magical thinking (making the word change by will alone, as with "The Secret" and other forms of popular bullshittery). This process is initially worked-out in relation to ideal objects, and for Klein, this is first and foremost the breast (or we can say bottle if the child is bottle fed---the object needs to negotiate need and demand). The kid words works out all kinds of stuff with these mysterious, tantalizing objects.

The problem with breasts, from the kid's point of view, is they're inconsistent. They don't always miraculously appear when the kid is hungry. And sometimes they don't always yield milk. This leads to feelings of envy and the consequent agression---the kid wants to "have" the boobs all to him or herself, to suckle and squeeze whever s/he wants!

Now, I know this sounds ridiculous, but stick with me; we're tying to imagine what it must be like to be very, very little. Clearly at the age of breast feeding we don't have words or language, but we do have feelings, and worse, these feelings don't have language or symbols to help navigate them---good and bad feelings are without censor. Small children are raging fonts of affect (again, think of the temper tantrums at the age of 2). So, when Klein says kids feel "envy" for the breast, she doesn't mean it like, say, I feel envy for someone's busy sex life. She means the kid feels like it wants the breasts to itself, all the time, any time.

Projective identification, for Klein, develops early in relation to the first ideal objects, objects that can become "bad." Since the kid really doesn't understand it is distinct from mother yet, a "bad" breast that doesn't appear when it wants to eat, or that doesn't give milk, is confusing. To deal with this, the child "rejects" the bad breast in an aggressive way—in kind of tantrum. For Klein, this is a very early defense mechanism termed "splitting": rejection or aggression toward the "bad" breast is a projection of the "bad" part of self onto an outside object. Of course, this is also a challenge to the ideal ego, which is all harmony and unity and omnipotent. Klein says splitting is necessary for normal development, but can become pathological:

These mechanisms and defenses are part of normal development and at the same time from the basis for later schizophrenic illness. I described the processes underlying identification by projection as a combination of splitting off parts of the self and projecting them on to another person, and some of the effects of this identification has on normal schizoid object relations.

By "schizophrenic" Klein is not referring to the DSM-IV condition, but something akin to a subject position. The "schizoid-paranoid" subject position is one in which the ideal ego dominates; it is an infantile, psychotic state of omnipotence. Klein argues that one eventually must move to a "depressive" state (depressive in the sense that one "gives up" this quest for unity and has to make reparations for splitting from mother). This distinction is not so important at the moment; it's only crucial to note here that projective identification involves projecting bad parts of me on to an object outside of me, and that object can be a person.

Now, why is projective identification and improvement over identification in the Burkean sense? It is an improvement because it stresses, first, the narcissistic basis of all identification. Yet more importantly, projective identification explains what hate actually is. The key to Klein's theory is that one is not "done" with projective identification; rather, it is continual and constitutive of a psychotic ego, since the "bad object" is never sent out into the wilderness, as a scapegoat would be. Rather, the bad object is projected onto so that the person can keep it within the domain of his/her omnipotence. In other words, I project that which I don't like onto mother, so she holds on to this bad thing, but she is still my mother and therefore part of me, and so projection cycles. Only by literally splitting from mother---making a clean break---am I released from this cycle and its psychosis.

Or something like that.

So, if we think of identification in this way, then James von Brunn's anti-Semitism starts to make sense as a life-long fashioning of the ideal ego—a psychotic one. Stories have been circulating about Brunn that he didn't just dislike Jews, but was obsessed with all things Jewish and his hatred was all consuming. His wife apparently left him in the 70s because his whole world revolved around hating the Jews. In other words, this was a man whose identity was foundationally regressive: his self-understanding was entirely based on projective identification and a complete inability to recognize his own limitations, his own failures. Without the Jews, Brunn would cease to exist. This is hatred in its purest sense, the opposite of indifference, and the flip side of love.

We can also see projective identification at work in homophobia—perhaps even better. As the film American Beauty made cliché, folks closeted to themselves are the most aggressive homophobes. If we consider the fact that we all have homoerotic desire to greater or lesser extents, we'd be much better off as a people. Instead, for some reason in the United States (certainly in other parts of the world too, but especially in the U.S.) homoerotic desire is the scene of an awful lot of projective identification. Some individuals are choosing to develop their identity on the basis being "not gay." For example, the massive amounts of time and energy that have gone into fighting "gay marriage" really helps to demonstrate just how much hatred is used to constitute identity. The passionate defenses of marriage between a man and a woman are doing the work of identity-maintenance. This is why the fight must be continual and never-ending; for the most vocal and ardent opponents, without the projection of "I'm not gay!" their identity implodes.

Homophobes cannot stop being homophobes; they are in the process self-fashioning---a psychotic and infantile one.

This is why we have to understand hatred as "active," and why you cannot convince an active hater not to hate. If someone is a conspicuous hater, then projective identification is funding the core of his or her being---she would cease to exist without the bad object, which is split off and then kept within the zone of his or her illusions of omnipotence. Pure hate is a projection zone and, in some sense, the object can become interchangeable ("if its not the gays, then it is the Jews"), but the object cannot be completely obliterated because it sustains the hating identity. This is how ideology gets its fuel (and in a sense, all I'm doing is explaining Athusser's understanding of interpellation from a Kleinian vantage)---affect, and very primitive or infantile ones at that!

One final point: haters seem to be more prominent among the very young and the very old. It seems to me the vast majority of people are indifferent to bad objects. For example, this von Brunn hater is 88 years old; he had always hated, but the psychotic fantasy of omnipotence---his toddler tantrum---didn't occur until the November of his years. I've also noticed, in my own family, that at least one person seems to get more racist the older he gets. I do not remember growing up with racist people in the least, and can even remember my parents teaching me lessons of tolerance. Now when I go home, however, I hear lots of racial slurs and growing fantasies about the "spics" and "Koreans" taking over the world. I've been personally baffled by this creeping transformation, but its clear to me the hatred has become "active" in that it is cycling to prop an identity that has been slowly sinking into a mid-to-late life depression.