the privation of anna nicole

Music: David Bowie: Lodger (1979)

Celebrity culture has had a bit of indigestion this week, heaving up two tantalizing stories: a diaper-wearing astronaut who pepper-sprayed a perceived romantic rival after a crazed, non-stop drive from Texas to Florida; and the shocking demise of Marilyn Monroe returned, Anna Nicole Smith, possibly from a drug overdose. What interests me about the coverage of these two events is that it seems to be built around what Lacan termed "privation," the perceived deprivation of the symbolic phallus particular to women. Whether or not one believes in Lacan's theories, the point is that "lack" is clearly a big player in television and Internet reports of the two women. This morning the Today show featured their own version of Dr. Phil, Keith Ablow, along the editor of People (!), who both stressed how "needy" Anna Nicole Smith was. She was starved for love, they said, and this put tremendous pressure on her recently deceased teenage son. Likewise, reports about Lisa Nowak have been stressing NASA's lament that their battery of psychological tests did not detect Nowak's lack of stability and strength of character. That Nowak attempted murder over a male love interest, of course, speaks directly to continual, metonymic slide of privation.

In a couple of seminars that are not yet translated (namely, the fourth) Lacan details three kinds of lack: symbolic castration, imaginary frustration, and real privation. Most folks who've mucked around in Lacan are familiar with symbolic castration (e.g., as entry into the Symbolic and so on). Real privation refers, first, to Freud's argument that girls develop penis envy, initially blaming their mothers and then, eventually the imaginary father (for not producing a suitable substitute, a baby). That is, when Suzie sees that Bobby (or Daddy) has a penis and she does not, she perceives a literal lack in the Real. Now, like everything that has to do with identity, this perception is a mistake, for (a) the vagina is a complete organ; it is not "really" lacking; and (b) the Real, strictly speaking, cannot be lacking. "Lack" is a symbolic perception. So, the idea here is that girls are socialized into thinking they are missing something, not the biological penis, but some symbolic thing that they have be deprived of (viz., the symbolic phallus). At first this missing thing is identified (mistakenly) as a real penis, but then as subjectivity evolves from girlhood to womanhood she "slips-along the lines of a symbolic equation, one might say, from the penis to a baby" (Lacan as quoted in Dylan Evan's Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis).

Of course, privation here is a more technical description of Freud's notions, so we should not be surprised to see this theory underlying the commentary of "experts": the notion of woman as "lacking" something is soul-deep---it's a common cultural assumption. So, Anna Nicole is described as constantly seeking objects to overcome an impossible-to-overcome lack: money, true love, and finally, children. The thing with privation is that it's never enough, it's impossible to overcome precisely because it’s a function of the symbolic—the lack is not, well, not real. So we have Lisa Nowak, already with the tokens of privation---an estranged husband and two children---but it was not enough. Enraged, she must destroy any obstacle (e.g., symbolic mommy or imaginary daddy) that stands in the way of her impossible "recovery." The script is Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction: we all know how the story goes and how the story ends. The Freudian tale of privation underwrites the news everyday.

Perhaps the saddest part of this cultural fantasy is that it has material consequences: children are born in their capacity as the symbolic phallus without any regard to their well being as human beings. I am reminded of a story, very close to home, about a newly wed wife who insisted on seeing her baby shortly after it was born, despite the fact the infant was premature and needed immediate, life-saving attention. She complained for days on end, alienating the family and even her husband, until the child was well enough to handle handling.

There are scores of wonderful mothers out there---mine especially. These mothers may or may not be reacting to privation, I don't know. But I do know the good mothers do not treat their children like objects to collect or possess. We rarely see the good mothers on the news or on television (unless, of course, it's a maudlin celebration of some sort, like in Disney's Extreme Home Makeover, which Dana has persuasive argued is all about the failure of the imaginary father). Instead, we're more likely to get the mother of all mothers: the needy one, the one that needs to be saved from her own, ravenous, drug-riddled self.