Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy

‘Let us recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site to him.’ Lacan, Ecrits.

Lars von Trier and the Fear of Philosophy - Lecture by Scott Wilson

Date:	23 May 2013, 6:00pm to 23 May 2013, 8:00pm
Location:	Lecture Theatre E002, Granary Building, Central Saint Martins, London
	N1C 4AA1
Fee:	Free

This is a paper about the creativity of fear in film and philosophy, focussing on Lars von Trier and Gilles Deleuze. The former is a film maker who has a long history of psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment for phobic anxiety which he has used both critically and creatively as material for his films. The latter, we discover from his biographer Francoise Dosse, had a phobia for both milk products and schizophrenics. In this paper, the understanding of phobia developed in the cinema of von Trier will be deployed in order to disclose the link between a fear of milk and the figure of the schizophrenic and offer a different way of understanding the dynamic genesis of Deleuze’s philosophy, particularly his logic of sense. Neither exactly a structure nor a symptom, phobia is a problematic category in psychoanalysis. Here, psychoanalytic, schizoanalytic and neuroscientific accounts of phobia are discussed by way of elaborating a ‘gnomonology’ that articulates a critical and clinical understanding of cultural production, particularly in its engagements with scientific discourse.

http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/research/crmep/events/

From a Dead Place ...

 

The words are barely discernible, thin, fragile shapes formed out of the hoarse yet bellicose raging of a desiccated, cadaverous throat, leprous, shredded; its death-rattled breath conveyed by the thundering vibrations of drums breathlessly pummelled without pause. There is no rock ‘n’ roll backbeat here, just a furious cacophony.  Voice smashed and sliced open by explosions of percussion challenging the darkness, buzzing guitar chords rising and falling up the scale, lurching, striving like a swarm of ravenous insects dipping and swerving in the frozen, airless void, defying gravity, seeking the taste of death ...

From Scott Wilson (ed) Melancology: Black Metal and Ecology, Zero Books, forthcoming in 2013.

Melancholia, Messianic Banquets and the 19th Hole

‘It is in the Eschaton that history surpasses its limitations and is seen for what it is’

Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology

‘The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it; nobody will miss it. Life on earth is evil’.

Justine, Lars von Trier, Melancholia.

From the writing on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast to the vision of Ezekiel and the messianic banquets in Isaiah, Luke, even the Last Supper itself, where ever there’s an apocalypse or revelation of the end, there is always it seems an eschatological banquet. Ritual feasts and banquets mark points of personal or interpersonal transition, social change, the movement from stranger to guest, enemy to partner, weaning, weddings, funerals and so on. As such they are like the Eschaton which while enabling the possibility of time and history, is not itself, as Jacob Taubes argues, subject to history since it is its eternal end, condition and point of transformation.

Appropriately dominated by a register of orality and consumption, its mise-en-scene a luxury hotel and golf resort, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is organized around a series of eschatological banquets: a wedding breakfast, an end-of-the-world or death breakfast and the special meal of a meatloaf that tastes of ashes. Along this locus of eating and disgust, the paper will discuss eschatology in relation to Melancholia as an essential fantasy which (again following Taubes) can be seen as both a screen and condition for ideas of freedom, revolution and even self-consciousness. Von Trier’s film depicts what Freud calls in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ a ‘mental constellation of revolt’ in the context of the voracious orality of a consumer culture whose acme and unsurpassable limit is represented in the film by the luxury golf course and the 19^th hole. The prominence of the latter, clearly signalled at the beginning and end of the film, indicates that the film’s register is phantasmatic and symbolic rather than realist, golf now become the pinnacle of (post)human culture, a pointless yet snobbish pursuit that nevertheless seems to sustain desire and negativity at the End of History, in the manner of Alexandre Kojève’s admiration for the Japanese. The film also juxtaposes scientific and religious versions of and responses to the imminent catastrophe of the earth’s demise and these will be discussed in relation to two quite recent eschatologies – the Messianism of Quentin Meillassoux whose ‘hyper chaos’ promises the coming of a God hitherto alien to this world, and the nihilism of Ray Brassier which regards the inevitability of extinction as an essential condition for a thinking of scientific realism without illusion, that is outside of the human-world correlation. 

In contradistinction to the religious and scientific thinking above, however, and in the context of Melancholia’s delineation of an essentially oral ontology, this paper will discuss the locus of the mouth as a site of multiplicity and a power of transformation in the base materialism of the depths that are both interior and exterior to time and history.

Culture, Politics, Eschatology: A Symposium

Department of English & Creative Writing, Department of History, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion,Department of Sociology, the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts and the Journal for Cultural Research.

The symposium’s theme is the continuing cultural and political relevance of eschatology. In recent years, diverse contemporary commentators have attended to eschatology. The symposium takes its cue from the work of three in particular, Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1947, Taubes’ Occidental Eschatology (2009) is a classic study of the legacy of Judaeo-Christian eschatological theology for radical politics in modernity. His The Political Theology of Paul (2004), published posthumously from lecture notes, remains a highly influential recuperation of the radical implications of Paul’s theology. Agamben’s The Time that Remains (2005) continues Taubes’ project with a stunning reading of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans in relation to the messianic thinking of Walter Benjamin. His more recent The Kingdom and the Glory (2011), a genealogical study of the contemporary polity and its operation on an economic model, contests Foucault’s own, influential analysis of the same polity and its mode of operation by recovering their theological foundations. Foucault, for his part, maintained that ‘the new historicity of raison d’etat excluded the empire of the last days; it excluded the kingdom of eschatology. Against this theme, which was formulated at the end of the sixteenth century and is still with us today, counter-conducts develop that make it a principle to assert the coming of a time when time will end ... an eschatology in which civil society will prevail over the state’.

Storey Institute, 21-22 September 2012, Lancaster UK

Confirmed Speakers:

Gil Anidjar, Columbia University
Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham
Ward Blanton, University of Glasgow
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Ziad Elmarsafy, University of York
Yvonne Sherwood, University of Glasgow
Scott Wilson, Kingston University

Confirmed respondents:
Arthur Bradley, Bulent Diken, Michael Dillon, Charlie Gere, Paolo Palladino, Thomas Rohkrämer and Yoke-Sum Wong.

 

Melancholia and the cinema of depths

Now, the history of depths begins with what is most terrifying: it begins with the theatre of terror whose unforgettable picture Melanie Klein painted.

Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense

There’s a resemblance between the two planets and Justine’s tits. Can you see that? ... when they were kind of getting very close. That’s a very important point.

Lars von Trier, Criterion Forum.

As its soundtrack suggests, Melancholia is a romance, but a romance between two sisters and two planets, apparently ‘good’ ones and ‘bad’ ones, set in a Kleinian cinema of terror. Appropriately dominated by a register of orality and consumption, its mise-en-scene a luxury hotel and golf resort, the film is organized around various scenes of eating: a wedding breakfast, an end-of-the-world or death breakfast and the special meal of a meatloaf that tastes of ashes. This paper will argue that the film depicts what Freud calls in his essay ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ a ‘mental constellation of revolt’ in the context of the voracious orality of a consumer culture whose acme and unsurpassable limit is represented in the film by the luxury golf course and the 19^th hole. The prominence of the latter, clearly signalled at the beginning and end of the film, indicates that the film’s register is largely (or simultaneously) phantasmatic rather than realist. Here I will suggest that deliberately or not, the film’s narrative tells a very Kleinian story of psychic development from the earliest sadistic/oral, paranoid-schizoid phase of the infant’s relation with the mother’s breast through the ‘depressive position’ that enables the process of ‘identification’ (in Justine’s case with the planet) necessary for the passage to ‘symbolization’. The latter figured, no doubt, by Justine again in the erection of the ‘magic cave’ that provides the space for the ironic ‘happy ending’ of the sisters’ reconciliation and successful fulfilment of maternal responsibility. But beyond this simple allegory, my paper will consider whether Melancholia, through its technical means, seeks to produce a ‘kleinmatic’ cinema of depths.

Ashes to Ashes: The Ethics, Depths, and Image of Melancholia

Panel Proposal for the 2012 Film-Philosophy conference with Felicity Colman and Richard Rushton

MOUTH (coming soon)

The broached year
with its mouldering crusts
of delusion bread [Wahnbrot].

Drink from my mouth.

Paul Celan


Celan’s unnamed poem that begins ‘The broached year’ might be approached as a condensed iteration of his famous holocaust poem Todesfuge or Deathfugue where the command given is to drink the blackmilk of daybreak. The figure of the mouth appears in Celan as the last site of pleasure, and indeed of ethics, in a post-apocalyptic world. If the broached year only offers delusion bread or literally ‘crazy bread’, then drink from another’s mouth. Thus Celan inverts Adorno’s infamous dictum, no poetry after Auschwitz. From now on, there is only poetry, only the figure of the mouth. Edia Connole and Scott Wilson in MOUTH follow this ethical demand, drink from my mouth, as the only possibility of love. We are sure you will love what they offer to you if you manage to open your mouth and hear them…

Simon Critchley & Jamieson Webster

The Number and the Beast

Quentin Meillassoux’s follow up to After Finitude, Le Nombre et la sirène (2011), seeks to ground his idea of the absolute in the secrecy of numerical code in an elaborate commentary on Stéphane Mallarmé’s (1895) ‘Un coup de dés’ (1895). Through a painstaking task of counting and re-counting the words of the poem, Meillassoux lights upon the number 707 which he finds is both a cipher for the future of poetry and a figure for chance itself. Poised between the ‘7’ that is the sign of chance and the ‘7’ of the classic French alexandrine meter is the 0 that symbolizes the abyss that yawns open in the absence of God, giving way to the eternal contingency of hyperchaos.

Given the question raised by the poem concerning ‘LE NOMBRE’ of the ‘ultérieur démon immémorial’ and its existence, and whether or not it is an hallucination éparse d’agonie, and moreover notwithstanding Meillassoux’s painstaking attempts to count it, this intensely symbolist poem is no doubt also referring to another literary demon. Indeed, not simply a demon but the apocalyptic beast of the sea that is encoded with another number that its author calls on the reader to enumerate: ‘Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666’ (Rev.13:18). A dice throw that did not abolish chance might be one that came up six after six after six, for as Meillassoux insists absolute chance – contingency – has nothing to do with probability (see Meillassoux, 2008: 105). 666. These were the numbers that came up for Francesco Petrarch the poet, with devastating effects. The code for all blasphemy, persecution and evil, for hatred and the apocalypse, is also the code for love and the love of perfection, for Divine form. Is this pure chance?

With reference to Meillassoux’s text, Mallarme’s and others in the canon for whom the numerological drive is central (Dante, Petrarch), this paper speculates on the form and affects of numbers as a particulate system heterogeneous to language. As such it will consider the essential meaninglessness of numbers, whose enigmas yet inflame the amorous intensities of poets, mystics and psychotics. It will also consider how far away this is from the claims made for mathematical knowledge of the universe and its laws, as if algebraic formulae were likewise the means through which God speaks to scientists in His own language. In the absence of God and indeed faith in science, yet giving up on neither perhaps, we can no doubt take number 666 as another sign – not necessarily of contingency, but of that base matter that inhabits the horror of its Idea.

Abstract for ‘Thinking the Absolute: Philosophy, Speculation and the End of Religion’ conference, June 29 – 1 July, Liverpool Hope University, UK. You can register here

Facebook: the structure that took to the streets

‘In a lot of ways, Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies’. Mark Zuckerberg.

The news that Facebook has a population greater than the US and the EU put together (BBC2 04.12.11) reminds us that the company’s aspirations tend towards a proximate ‘statehood’ than simply profit. As such, its ‘revolutionary’ potential is not neutral. The question therefore concerns what kind of social bond or social contract it instantiates. A very good indication is outlined at the beginning of David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect (2010), the authorized history of the company. He tells the story of a campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) which again reminds us that Facebook’s political utility is perfectly equivocal such that it can just as easily become a tool for counter-revolution, for popular revolt in support of a weakened and ineffective state.

“Oscar Morales was fed up,” begins the book, because the Columbian’s holiday period, like much of the country apparently, was being disturbed by “the suffering of a little boy named Emmanuel” who was being held hostage along with his mother Clara Rojas and others including the politician Ingrid Betancourt by FARC. Expectation was high that at least little Emmanuel, if not all the hostages, would be released by Christmas 2007 as a result of negotiations between the guerrillas and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. By the New Year the boy still hadn’t been released, but to everyone’s surprise in early January the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe announced that Emmanuel was no longer in the hands of the FARC, but in foster care. For Morales and many others, this was the last straw. “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry [...] we felt assaulted by the FARC. How could they dare negotiate for the life of a kid they didn’t even have? People felt this was too much. How much longer was the FARC going to play with us and lie to us?”.

Morales set up a Facebook Group called Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC (A Million Voices Against FARC). Information about the Group and its plea was rapidly distributed through Facebook’s ‘social graph’, and in a few weeks the Group had thousands of members, and a large demonstration was organised. The demonstration attracted the attention of the Press as indeed did the novel means of its organization and the campaign spread further – in the process expanding the number of Facebook users since it was new to Columbia and associated only with ‘kids’ (4). The very visibility of the numbers of the Group emboldened the campaigners –“Facebook gave Columbia’s young people an easy, digital way to feel comfort in numbers to declare their disgust” – and the site itself provided a key point of organization and liaison. “Facebook was our headquarters ... It was the newspaper ... the central command ... the laboratory” (Morales quoted by Kirkpatrick, 5). President Uribe eventually succeeded in negotiating the release of the hostages but the Facebook campaign and the demonstration were credited with applying pressure on the FARC. Oscar Morales’s “group and the subsequent demonstration made him into a national and international celebrity” (6).

The anecdote illustrates nicely how Facebook establishes a social bond though the production of ‘faces’: the new technology of the social networking site enables Oscar Morales to become the face of the protest against FARC, and ultimately achieve ‘celebrity’. In Seminar XVII Lacan famously organizes the social bond across four terms:

agent other
truth production

It is clearly Facebook and the Group it enables (Un Millon Voces Contra Las FARC) that is the ‘agent’ here, addressed to the ‘other’ whose reference is FARC. The authority and ‘truth’ of the Facebook Group is grounded in the number of members of the Group galvanized in relation to the guerrillas. Although they were in the thousands rather than millions (there not being enough Facebook users in Columbia at the time), millions of people did demonstrate in cities across Columbia, inspired by the Group. In contradistinction to the inhuman facelessness of FARC, then, Facebook produces Oscar Morales as the (human) face of a Group actually made up of thousands of other faces like so many pixels or the digital code into which the face dissolves in the original Facebook logo.

The four main forms of the social bond for Lacan are the discourses of the Master, the Hysteric, the University and the Analyst. It seems to me that Facebook, appropriately given that it was developed at Harvard, is an example of University discourse in which knowledge (S2), supported by the signifier of the master (S1), is in the position of agent which, through its address to the lack constitutive of desire (objet petit a), produces the subject ($).

A certain modification is necessary however in order to discuss Facebook as a form of social bond with regard to this structure. Facebook is certainly a product of the University, but does not so much represent the ‘knowledge’ of the University as its ‘information’; it is not the agent of operative knowledge, but operative information. As such the structure can organize all the rankable degrees of University life on the same plane from social grooming to academic and professional achievement.

Famously, Facebook was developed at Harvard in a kind of perversion of its bureaucratic procedures. All Universities, colleges and fraternities had a ‘facebook’ of passport-style photographs that are held along with other information as a record of its staff and students. Zuckerberg and his colleagues, initially through Facemash leading to theFacebook used these procedures as a means for student enjoyment: self-promotion, narcissism, dating, voyeurism and so on. From the very beginning there was something ‘superegoic’ in the way in which its ‘obscene’ content (the inspired by the initial idea of comparing female students’ faces to farm animals for example) was conveyed by the apparent neutrality of bureaucratic form. Accordingly, the signifier (S1) that is the governing support of Facebook (S2) is not the name of a Master or a governing Idea of the University (Truth, Culture, Excellence), but a number (1) that stands for numbers generally, metrics, statistics, quantification and so on. The ‘knowledge’, then, if there is any, is statistical information that is operative through the manipulation of computerized data through the use of algorithms. With the Oscar Morales story, number (Un Millon Voces) provides the hyperbolic, even performative command that brings the Group into being as a mass, and its authority as a number provides its ‘comfort’ and security.

As everyone knows there is something uncanny about passport photographs and their inability to deliver a satisfyingly narcissistic image of one’s face (enabling them to be compared to farm animals, for instance). I don’t recognize this image; it’s not me! It is as if the photo booth steals some aspect of the face essential to its enjoyment as a mirror image. The digital face-making, or prosopopeia of Facebook, is predicated upon a generalized prosopagnosia (or prosop – a – gnosia) where the a stands for the lost enjoyment stolen by the bureaucratic passport photograph. However, the theft of enjoyment in the Oscar Morales story concerns the fact that he and his countrymen were cheated by the FARC of the collective joy that would have been brought by the sight of the face of Emmanuel, his suffering relieved by his release on Christmas day. The fact that he was quietly released by the hostages into a foster home without fuss or announcement seems to have produced an irrational rage in the Columbians, strange given the possible alternative: “People were happy because the kid was safe, but we were so fucking angry” (Kirkpatrick, 1). It is therefore into this gap, marked in its absence by the suffering or joyful face of Emmanuel in the field of mediatized visibility, that Facebook pours its information, a million faces combining to producing Oscar Morales as Columbia’s first Facebook star, making him “a national and international celebrity” (6). As such, however, he inevitably loses something, loses his offline, off camera ordinariness, becoming vulnerable to the harsh light of media attention and expectation as a hero of political and moral virtue.


Lacan presented his theory of the four discourses in the context of the events of May 1968, most notably in a rowdy exchange with students at Vincennes. Memorably, Lacan claimed that “the aspiration to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master”. At the same time, as Matthew Sharpe notes, Lacan also made the claim that university discourse “is increasingly becoming the dominant form structure of social relations”. While Lacan initially had in mind “the societies of the now-former Soviet bloc”, Sharpe shows that new forms of advertising in their ‘superegoic’ appeal to transgressive (as opposed to officially sanctioned) enjoyment are organized according to the same structure, since advertising “faces, and educates, a more or less unformed, ignorant individual” which it compels to consider, “from a quasi-superegoic position of neutral self-observation ... what we really are and really want, beneath whatever social masks and roles we may from time to time have taken up”.

Since about 2008, Facebook’s core business, its means of making money, has been advertising, but it is claimed that this is purely a means rather than an aim, and in any case “the word advertising is really no longer the right word for what is going on at Facebook” (Kirkpatrick, 263). Rather, Kirkpatrick argues that Facebook provides a space in which producers and consumers interact to the point of becoming indistinct as mutual users of the site. From the beginning “Thefacebook had no content of its own. It was merely a piece of software – a platform for content created by its users” (31) in which marketers can now pay for visibility for their products but “can no longer control the conversation” about them (263). For Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook ‘monetization’ merely generates the revenue necessary for a much more profound social project. The company is “founded on a radical social premise – that an enveloping transparency will overtake modern life”, and this premise is the foundation of Facebook’s utopian promise. As the story of Oscar Morales relates, Facebook can be an effective tool working for popular causes in the aid of the state – no doubt in other states it can work against them. As such, however, Facebook is not a neutral ‘tool’ for the political expression of popular reason. It is a form that is itself transformative of other political structures, ushering in a new kind of governmentality. “In a lot of ways”, Zuckerberg argues, “Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies”. While particular technology companies are always vulnerable to the rapid exploitation of new technological innovations and a certain boredom threshold concerning their formats, Facebook has it seems made a decisive breakthrough in its reformatting of the social bond. In its infinite streams of commentary, ‘likes’ and followers of Groups and interests, Facebook has transformed the meaning of ‘Friendship’ and opened it up so that a transparent – or ‘transparental’ – love has become the principle of a new technology of neoliberal governance. Whatever the fate of Facebook, for this model to become truly revolutionary would require a further turn clockwise towards the discourse of the Master in which love for the face of the ‘transparental’ One, the index of the multiple, supports the total operationalization of social reality without remainder other than the facelessness that is produced as its surplus and condition.

From Scott Wilson, ‘Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook’ in Glossator 5 (2011): 19-56.

Musca amusica and the sound of Ba’al Zebûb’s ascension

Halo of Flies Over My Head
I am decaying Satan's Wrath
The one to walk planet earth alone
Spreading disease, death and war ... Impaled Nazarene, ‘Halo of Flies’ All That You Fear (2004)

Attractive to the flies ... I am their mephitic trough ... a buzzing which engulfs all ...
Through compound eyes / I envision eternity
Lugubrum, ‘Attractive to Flies’, De Vette Cueken (2004)

Flies are a frequent trope in both black and death metal. For the latter, buzzing flies pullulating over a rotting corpse lyrically figures death metal’s pulverizing a-subjective affections of the body; for the former, flies are related to a metaphysical problem bound up not so much to the paradoxical notion of the death of God but the death and deification of Satan.

While there are numerous reference to flies in the various genres of metal (perhaps since Iron Maiden) the ultimate reference is to Satan or Beelzebub as ‘Lord of the Flies’, or as Malkuth put it, ‘Great Black Goat God (Lord of the Flies)’ (1994). A Hebrew insult at the followers of the God Baal, ‘dung flies’, ‘ba’al’ ‘zebub’ emerges in the Christian tradition, sometimes as another name for Satan himself, but more interestingly as an angel who successfully stages his own infernal rebellion, displacing Satan to second spot just above Euronymous, according to Weyer’s demonology. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, then, is also a figure for the overthrow or overcoming of Satan and the ascension of some other order, the order of dung flies.

The reference is picked up in metal (from Iron Maiden, across numerous genres) where there are also gestures towards Golding’s famous novel in which Satan is already a rotting animal’s head: the sacrificial offering to the Beast misperceived as the Beast itself. Or rather become the beast through the hideous teeming acephalic noise of the flies that swarm about its decapitated head. The process of self-identification and self-transcendence that hold the God-Satan-Man triad together is transformed through consumption. Flies, not Man, maketh the Beast, but first through turning the flesh into ‘a mephitic trough’, a Styx of digestive liquid’ (Lugubrum) in which ‘Transformed man [is] dethroned’, Nominon, ‘Hordes of Flies’ (2005). For Nominon, then, the process of complete post-parasitical transformation – ‘Innate insects part of me /Parasite inside eating me / Host of flies born inside – sees the Satanic ‘Beast’ (the satanic multiple) resurrected from the swarming darkness of base matter where death has no dominion: ‘Absence of life I am the lord of flies’. Companion species, no doubt, since the migration of homo sapiens from Africa, musca domestica have lodged in the margins of human civilization, incubating and pupating in its shit and garbage, feeding on wounds and rotting flesh, defecating and vomiting waste matter teeming in deadly bacteria and viruses: typhoid, cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis. In black metal’s buzzing, musca domestica musica, flies are both the locus of amusical ex-sistence and figure of Satan’s divine inexistence and return. ‘Through compound eyes / I envision eternity’.
My abstract for PEST, Black Metal Theory Symposium Date: Sunday 20 November 2011, 14.00-Close
Location: The Pint Bar, Eden Quay, Dublin, Ireland

Capsule presents ... Home of Metal Conference, 1-4 September 2011

University of Wolverhampton and Lighthouse

Science and Truth

(On an unconscious that isn’t one, but something of the one)

The apparent contradiction in the UK government’s decision to cut all funding to Arts, Humanities and Social Science subjects at University in order to open them to market forces while protecting Maths, Engineering and Science betrays something more interesting than the limits of pure competition theory or ultimate market failure. This decision shows that neoliberalism is an art of government, of course, as much as a mechanism of economic growth (as Foucault anticipated in the late 1970s), but perhaps more profoundly, it shows that in the UK at least, science is now the official bearer of truth. The decision concurs with Steven Hawking’s view that science is all we need to answer the big questions of philosophy, and the latter can fight for its survival among the other idols of the marketplace. Science has even superseded literature, Darwin having displaced Shakespeare as the touchstone of National Genius.

Scientific truth is not, of course, an effect of individual genius, but is grounded in scientific method and in the production of a number of (mathematical) correspondences that appear to cohere with certain regularities generated by nature or the real. Science does not speak the truth since these regularities are not found in language but in numbers or formulae. What or where is a truth that no longer speaks – not even of itself in the guise of a metalanguage? Is it a truth that counts, or is counted, or that counts itself (as truth)? For science to tell the truth, numbers would have to speak, a goal that the psychotic mathematician John F Nash Jr. set for himself (Nasar, 2001: 336), the same Nash whose famous ‘equilibrium’ is supposed to justify both the economic efficiency and the social benefits of neoliberalism. Naturally, the Browne Reports’ prioritisation of Science and Technology is not just recognition of the burden of truth and destiny that these subjects now seem to bear, but about generating another set of numbers that will reproduce and sustain the current system of social and economic relations.

For those of us brought up under the shadow of Matthew Arnold in the tradition of literary and cultural studies this decision shows that the governing class in the UK has finally given up on the idea that liberal culture has an essential ‘social mission’ or ideological function, as Althusserians used to say. Of course this has been evident for a long time. Even as some of us were busy deconstructing the ‘Shakespeare Myth’ back in the 1980s the governing idea of the University was already moving away from Culture to Excellence, an essentially vacuous term under which the University was transformed from a pedagogical institution to a mechanism for the exchange of information whose governing structure, if not metaphor, is the networked computer. Disciplines became stripped down to a set of equivalent ‘key skills’ to be cashed into the service economy. As we all know, the ability to savour poetic ambiguity, where it occurs, is a fringe benefit relative to a student’s aptitude for ppt presentations.

The neoliberal experiment in government has sought to construct a very different kind of subject to the subject of liberal culture, leaving the latter to withdraw to centres of privilege and heritage sites. As with other state institutions, the ‘privatization’ of Universities has been steadily achieved through the introduction of internal markets and mechanisms such as KPIs and PRP that formally assume a subject of pure self-interest that needs to be governed by the imposition of goals and targets that are continually assessed in the running commentary of internal audit, the latter having no external rationale or reference other than the economic efficiency or ‘value for money’ that is calculated on the basis of the same imaginary interests. This process reinforces and locks-in competition as a formal principle. The ultimate biopolitical aim, or effect, is to produce (economic) life according to mathematizable models. In this way governance manufactures the kind of data-producing subjects it wants even as it justifies itself scientifically in the name of economic reason.

Alongside the credence given to Hawking’s and others view that science has rendered philosophy pointless, another symptom of the belief that science bears the burden of truth is the rise of quasi-scientific approaches to the Humanities. And here I do not just mean sociobiology, evolutionary psychology and so on, but the work of a new generation of academics producing varieties of, for example, ‘cognitive literary criticism’ and ‘evolutionary literary theory’ which look ‘to the cognitive neurosciences for finer-grained descriptions of the workings of language, consciousness and subject-formation than those supplied by influential but inadequate post-structuralist theories’ (Richardson, 2007: 553).

But if the idea is to save the Humanities by imitating scientific methods, it is doomed from the start because its object, the manifest image of the conscious, language-defined human being, is itself unscientific. Ever since the post-linguistic turn of the 1980s and the rapid development of cognitive neuroscience, scientists have become increasingly sceptical about the utility and even ‘reality’ of ‘top-down concepts, such as thinking, consciousness, motivation, emotion, and similar terms’, doubting that they ‘can be mapped onto corresponding brain mechanisms with similar boundaries as in our language’ (Buzáki, 2006: 19). The once notorious eliminative materialism of Paul and Patricia Churchland that famously denounced and rejected the ‘folk psychological’ mysticism of conventional concepts ‘such as belief, desire, pain, pleasure, love, hate, joy, fear, suspicion, memory, recognition, anger, sympathy, intention and so forth’ (Churchland, 1998: 3), has become standard. Everything that goes on in the Arts and Humanities is essentially delusional, a tissue of semblance.

At their most provocative, the Churchlands claim not only that the folk psychology model that informs Humanities and Social Science is empirically false, but it is also damaging, chronically defective (12). Cognitive neuroscience knows very well that brains are not simply hard-wired, but need to develop. They must become subject to processes of learning in order to function appropriately and efficiently. Trillions of new synaptic connections need to be made between neurons ‘so that incoming sensory vectors are automatically and almost instantaneously transformed into appropriate “prototype” vectors at the higher populations of cortical neurons’ (14). This is ‘learning’. What learning is not, however, is ‘assembling a vast mass of sentences’ because the ‘basic unit of occurrent cognition is not language-based, but rather the high-dimensional neuronal activation vector (that is, a pattern of excitation levels across a large population of neurons)’. And ‘the basic unit of cognitive processing is apparently not the inference from sentence to sentence, but rather the synapse-induced transformation of large activation vectors into other such vectors’ (10). Since human languages are pre-eminently the accumulated archive of ancient folk psychologies, superstitions, misconceptions, misperceptions, myth, narratives reproducing basic cognitive errors, they are hopeless vehicles for learning, incapable of producing appropriate neuronal activation vectors and need to be eliminated. Folk psychology is simply bad theory that results in the bad human behaviour we see all around us and should be replaced by a theory based in the grey matter of the brain, an eliminative materialist ‘successor theory’ (35). The excitement of the Churchlands concerns their promise of a ‘superior social practice’ that will come with the displacement of FP by a theory based in a properly scientific account of ‘human cognition and mental activity’ (35). The disappointment is always that their social imagining falls back on a kind of liberal pragmatism expressing a pious hope that ‘a deeper understanding of the springs of human behaviour may thus permit a deeper level of cognitive interaction, moral insight, and mutual care’ (35), without explaining why the former should imply the latter. As Freud might have noted, one could just as well recoil in horror.

It is not, I would think, in the direction of moral pragmatism that the utopia promised by the faith in science lies. Far from diverting the techno-scientific drive, the financial crisis of 2008 has of course further entrenched the attempt by the forces of neoliberal governance to account for and speculate upon the economic effects of human cognitive processes both individual and collective. The hope is that the market mechanism can be enhanced through the elimination of irrational human impulses (greed, fear, panic etc.) that are based on the manifest image of human motives and behaviour based in language. Rather, through being reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, economic theories can become much more powerful and more substantially integrated within physical science generally. The promise appeals to the demand for increased economic performance, as brains directly interact with each other via screens and scanners for the satisfaction of the numbers.

Given that consciousness is now regarded as too ‘top-down’ a concept to be scientifically operative and too inefficient in matters of optimal performance (as sports people know, the ‘zombie’ brain is the key to high achievement, Ramachandran, 2005: 83), there would not seem much potential for an unconscious, political or otherwise. For psychoanalysis, of course, the unconscious is the seat of truth, at least insofar as it articulates the truth that the subject doesn’t know that it knows. ‘“I, truth, speak ...”’, wrote Lacan, evoking ‘the unnameable thing that, by virtue of its ability to pronounce these words, would go right to the being of language – if we are to hear them as they are to be pronounced: in horror’ (Lacan, 2006: 736). The unconscious can no longer be defined simply against the (self) consciousness of speaking beings, but also the functional nonconsciousness calculated by numbers. ‘I, truth, speak’, but the prosopopeia now addresses a prosopagnosia that can no longer perceive in a face anything other than an abstract form correlated to the oscillations of neuronal assemblies that might be mapped onto ever-shifting profiles, markers of nodal points of data predicated on an empty mediating space for the exchange of biometric and economic information. Truth shimmers in every upgrade of Facebook ...

While the stream of numbers slide over the real, or the ‘noumenon that, for as long as pure reason can remember, has always kept its mouth shut’ (Lacan, 737), those speaking beings still on the language side of things might ask: what numberless horror is produced or encountered in the slippage, the something of the one (1+) that foams in excess of formulae? Fortunately, it seems, while the noumenon does not speak, it bites, or at least according to some, even as its fangs hook into the ‘technocosm’.

The Browne Report’s indifference to the fate of Arts and Humanities relative to the economic imperative demanded of Science and Technology is something I assume that Nick Land and his acolytes are gleefully cheering in technoecstasy. ‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’. (Land, 1992: 223). LOL.

References
György Buzáki (2006), Rhythms of the Brain OUP.
Patricia & Paul Churchland (1998), On the Contrary, MIT.
Jacques Lacan (2006), Écrits, Norton.
Nick Land (1992), ‘Circuitries’, PLI, 217-235.
Sylvia Nasar (2001), A Beautiful Mind, Touchstone.
V.S. Ramachandran (2005), Phantoms in the Brain. Harper Collins.
Alan Richardson (2007), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, OUP.

Heavy Metal and the Other Side of Culture

Abstract for The Home of Metal Conference, 1st-4th September 2011.

‘Technology's progression, over man machines reign
Enslaved without compassion, new masters of (the) earth we dwell
Human life is worthless, in this automated living hell’.
Bolt Thrower, ‘Profane Creation’ War Master 1991.
‘We no longer judge such technical developments from without, we no longer judge at all, we function: machined/ machining in eccentric orbits about the technocosm. Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream’.
Nick Land, ‘Circuitries’, (1992).

This talk looks at two moments in the history of the non-relation between metal and academia that find coincidentally their location in Birmingham and the Midlands: heavy metal and cultural studies; Grindcore/death metal and the Warwick philosophy group associated with Nick Land in the early 1990s.

It is well known that both heavy metal and Cultural Studies emerged in the Midlands in the 1960s. But if they were born in the same town, the movements associated with Stuart Hall and Ozzy Osbourne have had little to do with one another, perhaps because Cultural Studies academics saw, in heavy metal, only a monocultural (predominantly white, male) form unsuitable as a vehicle for political transformation. Ironically, Cultural Studies’ development into the study of identities established in consumable differences stands accused of preparing the ground for a different kind of political transformation that has resulted in the full marketization of the Humanities. Metal, meanwhile, over the same period, has become the name under which multiple styles, scenes and festivals have articulated the pleasures, desires, discontents and demands of numerous people across Europe and the rest of the world. As I have suggested elsewhere, metal could be regarded (in the language of Cultural Studies) as the popular cultural, counter-hegemonic form par excellence in so far as national and regional varieties of DM, BM, Viking, folk, doom, ambient and so on have become the positive reverse of the absence of any political alternative to the ‘globalatinization’ represented by institutions like the EU, on the one hand, and neoliberal consumer culture on the other.

Metal as an explicitly political form derives from the legacy of Grindcore, particularly Napalm Death, who in some ways provide a point of punk-inspired cross-over into Cultural Studies-style political investment in popular culture, but from a position of deep ambivalence towards humanity, if not a profound anti-humanism. At the same time in Warwick’s philosophy department, in the circle around Nick Land, the writings of Nietzsche and Bataille were re-animated to inform an extreme, nihilist version of Deleuze and Guattari that celebrated the destructive forces of global capitalism as the most radical form of ‘machinic desire’. Death metal bands like Coventry’s Bolt Thrower, meanwhile, echoed Land’s contention that ‘war in its intensive state is desire itself, convulsive recurrence, unilateral zero’. Exulting in the destruction of liberal culture and the universal humanities, Land’s acolytes breathlessly embraced the promise of techno-science, particularly digitalization, as represented in cyberpunk, Blade Runner and The Terminator movies. As dated as some of it seems now, this imagination provided the impetus for developing a ‘para-academic’ space on the network that provided some of the most interesting and innovative models for the survival of thought in the ruins of the university, in virtual spaces where much of the new academic interest in metal currently resides. Contemporary academic interest in metal follows this logic and is the effect of a generation of graduates, metallectuals on the margins of the Academy, for whom metal’s ‘unemployed negativity’ provides the most appropriate vehicle with which to articulate not just their discontent and contestation of the violence of neoliberal subjectification in state institutions, but also and as such to forge a different form of intellectual life on the other side of culture.

Popular Culture and World Politics IV

23-25 November 2011 at University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Lapland, Finland
Plenary Speakers:
Tiziana Terranova, Napoli, Italy
Scott Wilson, Kingston, UK

If you are interested in attending this conference please visit our
website at http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=20727
The deadline for abstract submissions is June 30th.

We study popular culture to understand the representational practices through which power relations are constructed worldwide, and grasp the aesthetic practices through which the intolerability of power relations are given political expression, and out of which new political subjectivities and peoples are brought into being. Deconstructing the former is integral to the processes of struggle by which we can contribute to the composition of the latter.

The Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Lapland, is pleased to invite you to continue this effort at the Popular Culture and World Politics Conference (PCWP 4) to be held in Rovaniemi, Finland, 23-25 November 2011. The conference is the fourth in a groundbreaking series of annual events that began in the University of Bristol in 2008. Since then the series has developed into an exciting annual event which attracts scholars, practitioners and artists from throughout the world and across the disciplines and fields to debate and discuss the world politics of popular culture.

This year, the conference will be held on the ultra-northern verges of Europe, in Lapland, which occupies liminal space in-between popular imaginaries of Western modernity and Arctic wilderness.

The three-day conference will attract papers and presentations from thinkers whose work is inspiring contemporary forays into the relations between politics and culture across the humanities, social sciences and the arts. Invited keynote speakers include Tiziana Terranova (Napoli, Italy) and Scott Wilson (Kingston, UK).

With this Call for Papers we invite participation in all possible forms. In addition to panels and individual papers, we welcome proposals for art exhibitions, screenings, performances or other modes of expression. In so doing we hope to build the event into a rich experience which involves not only talking about popular culture but also experiencing, sensing, feeling, producing and, in most cases, enjoying it.

Suggested themes for panels, papers and other presentations include
(but are not limited to):

- Challenging the theory/practice divide
- Aesthetics and the constitution of new subjectivities
- Decolonizing methodologies
- Popular culture and climate change
- The politics of Santa Claus
- Representation and race
- Senses, sensibilities and the redistribution of the sensible order
- Art and political activism
- Popularization of indigenous cultures
- Imaginaries of hope in contemporary politics
- Aesthetics of security
- War and media
- The politics of cinema
- Digital aesthetics
- The biopolitics of popular culture

All other themes will be entertained too.

If you are interested in attending this conference please visit our website at http://www.ulapland.fi/?deptid=20727 and submit a brief abstract of your paper, panel proposal (including the names and titles of each presentation) or artistic contribution (max. 450 words). We will inform you about the outcome of your abstract submission by the end of August 2011.

Welcome!

Prof. Julian Reid and Dr. Laura Junka-Aikio
University of Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

Rhythm and Event

Abstracts by 31 July to E.Ikoniadou@Kingston.ac.uk and S.Wilson@Kingston.ac.uk

I Only Want To Be With You (Songs from the Tarantinian Ethics)

True romance leads beyond narcissism. ... In True Romance the point at which one sees oneself from the position of the other is also the point of death and disappearance. Death intervenes to demonstrate the imbalance of romantic fantasy, even as the other’s pain and suffering prove that fantasy with a vengeance. Death is thus the limit and fulfilment of romantic desire, introducing an absence that allows the fantasy to thrive, unimpeded by reality: ‘What they need is not one another’s presence, but one another’s absence’ (1993: 42). Indeed, for Lacan, ‘between the object as it is structured by the narcissistic relation and das Ding, there is a difference ...’ (Lacan, 1992: 98). The difference is crucial. If death is on the agenda for Mickey and Mallory only in so far as it is the death of others, or the living death of a lobotomy, then absence and obstacles are crucial to sustaining their passion. True love blossoms and burns most after they have been imprisoned, the screenplay suggests, in Mickey’s letters and Mallory’s songs that are addressed to the silence that is the support of their fantasy. The other’s absence seems to have little bearing on their passion, while the bars of the prison only serve to affirm it.

We stare at McClusky and Scanetti for a second. Then, like a bull, we charge/dolly straight at them. Mallory screams out of shot. We smash head first into the bars. Mallory’s POV flings up, looking at the ceiling, then falls backward.

SCAGNETTI

Jesus Christ!

McCLUSKY

Don’t worry about it. She does that all the time. (Tarantino, 1995b: 15-16)

‘For what is love other than banging one’s head against a wall’, comments Lacan, ‘since there is no sexual relation?’ (1982: 170). For Lacan, the imagined, absolute and ideal union driving love’s fantasy remains impossible because it is an effect of signification: it is the Other, the locus of desire and object of demand, that is addressed in love, not a real person. For Lacan, using courtly poetry as his example,

the being to whom it is addressed is nothing other than being as signifier. The inhuman character of the object of courtly love is plainly visible. This love that led some people to acts close to madness was addressed at living beings, peoples with names, but who were not present in their fleshly and historical reality . . . they were there in any case in their being as reason, as signifier. (Lacan, 1992: 214-5)

The address to the other thus moves beyond the other towards the Other, demanding of the Other recognition and love for the totality of the subject’s being. But as it remains the locus of difference and desire, the Other cannot reply other than by signifiers, the very marks of separation. The absence of any reply to the subject’s exorbitant demand leaves only signifiers as the obstacles to true union, obstacles that exacerbate desire. Courtly love, for Lacan, exemplifies the detours provoked by this absence of relation: ‘it is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put an obstacle to it’ (1982: 141). The barriers thus work to preserve the illusion that, beyond them, beyond words, beyond life itself, an idealised union is possible.

But the bars of signification also open a gap between self and other, introducing a cause that belongs to neither one nor the other. The difference between the amorous couple is temporal. Writing on Tristan and Isolde, Maurice Blanchot discusses the nostalgic anticipation of the continually delayed arrival of love’s impossible presence:

the fulfillment of all veritable love which would consist in realizing itself exclusively according to the mode of loss, that is to say realizing itself by losing not what has belonged to you but what one has never had, for the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ do not live in the same time, are never together (synchronously), can therefore not be contemporary, but separated (even when together) by a ‘not yet’ which goes hand in hand with an ‘already no longer’. (Blanchot, 1988: 42)

For Lacan, it is also a matter of the dislocation of the lovers’ spatial relation: ‘when in love I solicit a look, what is always profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that – You never look at me from the place which I see you’ (1977b: 103). The fantasy is never complete, difference ultimately eludes love’s capture. Love opens beyond the other, the imagined object of love; it ‘can be posited only in that beyond where, at first, it renounces its object’ (1977b: 276). That is, love moves from the other to the Other, the locus of speech and signification, and manifests a gap between the real being and the subject of signification. For Denis de Rougemont, lovers are prisoners, possessed by a power they neither know nor control: ‘They are prisoners of “exquisite anguish” owing to something which neither controls – some alien power independent of their capacities, or at any rate of their conscious wishes, and of their being in so far as they are aware of being’ (39-40). Perhaps this accounts for Mickey’s extraordinary self-possession in the State Penitentiary. Since he is already imprisoned in love, there is no such thing as prison, it is already an environment familiar to him, a familiarity that abolishes the locks and the steel bars. Indeed, the presence of the real prison supports his self-possession since it realises the shackles of love’s ‘alien power’ in concrete form, thereby rendering it, too, familiar. With Mickey the prison only serves to replace, as banal obstacle, the sense of the ‘alien power’ of love that, for Blanchot, is an undefinable strangeness that haunts and thwarts shared love as it:

excludes mutuality as well as unity where the Other would blend with the Same. And this brings us back to the foreboding that passion eludes possibility, eluding, for those caught by it, their own powers, their own decision and even their ‘desire’, in that it is strangeness itself, having consideration neither for what they can do nor for what they want, but luring them into strangeness where they become estranged from themselves, into an intimacy which also estranges them from each other. (Blanchot, 1988: 43)

The strange, alien, uncanny power emerges, however, in writing, in the epistolary romance Mickey narrates to Mallory but cannot send.

For Mallory, this alien power also comes from the signifier, from the words of the songs she sings: ‘She starts moving her body to music only she can hear, then begins to sing the song “Groove Me” in a slow a cappella, using the cell as her stage and a man who isn’t there as her audience’ (1995a: 24). The songs express her pain, suffering and separation: ‘Love is a hurtin’ thang’; ‘Long Time Woman’. Another song she is reported to sing is ‘I Only Want to Be with You’.

The title and hook-line, ‘I Only Want to Be with You’, inscribes desire within love. The total, singular and exclusive desire of love is bound up with being, or rather, as the title suggests, with the lack in being, the ‘want-to-be’, or want of being. Thus, the absence of the other and the absence of being remain at the centre of love’s expression and the song’s performance of total desire. Punctuated throughout the song, various declamatory statements lay out the co-ordinates of love’s desire: the unconditional, ‘It doesn’t matter where you go or what you do’; the ever vigilant, ‘I want to be beside you everywhere’; the fateful, that is, accidental and inevitable, ‘I fell into your open arms/ And I didn’t stand a chance’; mutual possession, ‘I only know I never want to let you go’, ‘That ever since we met you’ve had a hold on me’; the acknowledgement that love takes the singer beyond knowledge and possibility, ‘I never knew I could be in love like this’; and beyond care, ‘As long as we’re together, honey, I don’t care’; and finally beyond reason to truth ‘It’s crazy, but it’s true/ I only want to be with you’ (Mike Hawker/Ivor Raymonde. Springfield Music Ltd.). The song also calls up that alien power beyond immediate, specular visibility, ‘Cos you started something, oh can’t you see’, and begins by speaking of that object inaccessible to knowledge, the some thing in you more than you that impels love, ‘I Don’t know what it is that makes me love you so’, an object which opens the address to the Other who is beyond reply though who is determinedly, if perhaps unsuccessfully, buttonholed, ‘Now listen, honey’.

The strangeness of the amorous relation as it is broached by the song is inscribed in the very terms of address, in the function of the shifter ‘you’. Between the impersonated object of love and the demand for love from the Other, gaps appear. This is because, as Lacan observes, ‘the you in its verbalized form does not at all coincide with the pole we have been calling big O’ (1992: 270). The I-you structure of address, moreover, discloses ‘a distance that’s not symmetrical, a relationship that isn’t reciprocal’ (1992: 274). Nonetheless, the structure manifests the effects of signification on the subject, effects that evoke a superegoic function: ‘it’s the you that says you in us, this you that always makes itself more or less discreetly heard, this you that speaks alone ...’ (Lacan, 1992: 275), that is, the discourse of the Other. ‘Present as a foreign body’, the you manifests ‘something completely uncertain and problematic in this fundamental communication’ in which ‘the I is essentially fleeting in nature and never entirely sustains the thou’ (1992: 287). Similarly, the you remains ‘unsecured in the substratum of discourse’ and depends on the effects of metaphor to provide a temporary quilting point to sense and meaning: ‘the you is the hooking of the other in the waters of meaning’ (1992: 299). ‘Now listen, honey ...’ Thus in love’s communication, like ‘I only want to be with you’, the you and the I, one and other, remain at some distance: ‘this you presupposes an other who, in short, is beyond him’ (1992: 300). It is a distance, a gap that lies not only between inside and outside, but one that remains internal to love’s discourse, implicated in its signification to the extent that both I and you, subject and other, are separately rendered uncertain, subjected to the shifting course of signification that, ruffled by love, never runs smooth.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics, Sage, 2001

Songs from the Tarantinian Ethics: Oral Pleasure and ‘Son of a Preacher Man’

Tarantino’s movies are concerned both with consumption and critical discourse. The most seductive element of his movies is often considered to be his dialogue. Speech is privileged to an unusual degree, and his screenplays are not surprisingly highly valued by actors for the opportunities they allow ... in chapter one, speech is associated with law and transgression. Antwan Rockamorra’s castrating encounter with paternal law, in the shape of an outraged Marsellus Wallace, is manifested in the shape of a ‘speech impediment’ caused by a lacerating fall through a greenhouse. The object immediately referred to as lost at the beginning of Pulp Fiction, is the voice, a voice lost in the silent intimacy of Antwan’s gift of a foot massage to Mia Wallace. Antwan’s lost voice underscores the importance of speech generally, which is offered, in Pulp Fiction and in Reservoir Dogs where Blonde removes the ear of the captured cop, as key to the ethical relation, the privileged mode of exchange with the Other. Consequently, many scenes in Pulp Fiction are dominated by an often disembodied voice that, in one way or another, lays down the law. ...

... The most highly developed and significant scene, however, in which a voice frames, interrogates, directs and deploys a body within its power occurs when Vincent goes to call on Mia Wallace. ... in the scene it is no longer the content of Mia’s speech that becomes important, but the positioning and eroticisation of her voice. Mia is removed from the place of the unattainable ding of the courtly relation to become the voice of a new, feminised superego while her gaze is located at the empty heart of a panopticon. She is still situated, imaginarily, in the position of the phallus, but not in the form of a definite image or object. Rather than an object, Mia is now the unseen origin of an imagined gaze that speaks. Mia surveys Vincent through a bank of security monitors while addressing him through an intercom. When she is perceived, she appears as a metaphor in the shape of a disembodied, obscene mouth giving oral pleasure to a microphone. At this point also, it becomes clear that the soundtrack is now directly addressing the eroticised relationship between speech and moral law.

It is Hurley and Wilkin’s ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ sung by Dusty Springfield: ‘the only one who could ever reach me / was the son of a preacher man / The only boy who could ever teach me / was the son of a preacherman’. The oddly un-courtly aspect of Mia is that she is neither silent, iconic nor inscrutable. On her date with Vincent, she doesn’t engage him in the coded, seductive play of courtship; indeed she doesn’t tempt him into doing anything; on the contrary, in the up-front forthright manner for which American women are rightly celebrated, she tells him to do everything.

Perfectly at home in Jack Rabbit Slim’s, Mia instructs Vincent on the law of desire, ‘it’s more exciting when you don’t have permission’, even as she gives him permission, becoming the law herself (61). Which is to say that she does not merely permit but positively orders him, in the face of his resistance, to dance publicly with her; she is the trophy she instructs Vincent to win for herself: ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I do believe Marsellus, my husband, your boss, told you to take me out and do whatever I wanted. Now, I want to dance. I want to win. I want that trophy’ (65). They dance to the answer to the question of who to prefer out of Elvis and The Beatles – Chuck Berry – and they win. It is Mia who impales the father on his own law, using his own commands as the means to his cuckoldry, turning transgression into an imperative.

It is the link between speech, desire, orality and the pleasure-imperative that, if anything, links Mia with the other female characters, Fabienne and Esmarelda Villalobos. It is of course ‘oral pleasure’ that Fabienne demands of Butch, a request with which he complies on condition that she ‘kiss it’ in return (101). This exchange establishes a certain mutuality to their relationship, but further, in the context of Tarantino’s scirpts thus far, it frames that mutuality within a clearly defined ethic of romantic sexual conduct.

This ethic is more fully elaborated in the second scene [excised from the Tony Scott film] of True Romance where the importance of providing the woman with oral service is forcefully debated, along with its history and its implications for race. Appropriately enough, the question is discussed by three pimps. Drexl, the white wannabe black man, and Big D are explaining the law to Floyd.

BIG D

Shit, any nigger say he don’t eat pussy is lyin’ his ass off.

DREXL

I heard that.

FLOYD

Hold on a second, Big D. You sayin’ you eat pussy?

BIG D

Nigger, I eat everything. I eat the pussy. I eat the butt. I eat every motherfuckin’ thang.

DREXL

Preach on, Big D. (Tarantino, 1995b: 8)

For Floyd, the very idea is humiliating, shameful, and, moreover, an indication of the moral degeneration inflicted on black men by the dominant white, pussy-eating ideology of America, bringing oppression into every sphere. Floyd continues,

There used to be a time when sisters didn’t know shit about gettin’ their pussy licked. Then the sixties came an’ they started fuckin’ around with white boys. And white boys are freaks for that shit ... Then, after a while sisters get used to gettin’ their little pussy eat. And because you white boys had to make pigs of yourselves, you fucked it up for every nigger in the world everywhere ... Now if a nigger wants to get his dick sucked he’s got to do a bunch of fucked-up shit. (1995b: 8-9)

Given Drexl’s evangelical acclamation – ‘preach on’ – to Big D, and Floyd’s gloss on the racial history of pussy consumption, it is possible to give a Tarantinian interpretation of ‘Son of a Preacher Man’ that makes sense of its emphasis on orality and erotic moral instruction. It is clearly the song, conveyed by the sixties’ premier white soul singer, of a young black woman’s initiation, by a white boy, into the delights of oral pleasure: ‘The only one who could ever reach me / was the son of a preacherman / The only boy who could ever teach me /was a sweet lovin’, / sweet talkin’ / son of a preacherman’. While the endless consumption of dicks in ‘Like a Virgin’ testifies to the jouissance demanded by the Other-as-great-fucker (‘Big D’), the oral adoration given to what Jules in Pulp Fiction calls ‘the holiest of holies’ (Tarantino, 1994b: 20), while it confirms the castrating power of the father, sacralises the law of the Other as female, subjecting the father to the general imperative of consumption.

It is a law that has, moreover, become internalised as the quintessentially American superegoic, moral imperative to consume and enjoy for the Other at the expense of one’s own pleasure or that of one’s partner. The law is of course the same for oral consumption in general. While it is Fabienne who, with her breakfast order of ‘a big plate of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, eggs over easy and five sausages ... a tall glass of orange and a black cup of coffee ... [and] a slice of blueberry pie to go with the pancakes. And on top, a thin slice of melted cheese’ sets the incredible standard demanded by the Other (1994b: 108-9), edible consumer products are frequently cited and – with Jules’s objection to pork excepted – universally and unreservedly affirmed: ‘Uuummmm, that’s a tasty burger’ (26), ‘Uuuuummmm, hits the spot!’ (27), ‘Goddamn! That’s a pretty fuckin’ good milkshake’ (58), ‘Goddamn Jimmie, this is some serious gourmet shit’ (146). Repeated utterances such as these underscore the importance of giving and affirming the oral pleasure of American ideology.

From Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics (Sage, 2001).

Songs from The Tarantinian Ethics: Madonna's pain and the ear of the Other

Pain, the other’s pain, underlines the simultaneously human and inhuman relation between White and Orange: it culminates in a tragically human and inescapably ethical sacrifice of life for the other. Through pain one reaches the limit, the Thing, that articulates ethics and desire:

In brief, Kant is of the same opinion as Sade. For in order to reach das Ding absolutely, to open the flood gates of desire, what does Sade show us on the horizon? In essence, pain. The other’s pain as well as the pain of the subject himself, for on occasions they are simply one and the same thing. To the degree that it involves forcing an access to the Thing, the outer extremity of pleasure is unbearable to us. (Lacan, 1992: 80)

It is pain that guarantees the human relationship. For White, pain proves the authenticity of Orange: ‘that kid in there is dying from a fuckin’ bullet that I saw him take. So don’t be calling him a rat’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 28). Pain draws the subject to the point of death and thereby draws out the truth, just as it does when White’s sacrifice places him in an identical position to Orange.

The ethical question of the other’s pain is raised at the beginning of the film by Mr Brown in his infamous ‘Madonna speech’. His interpretation highlights the function of metaphor by suggesting, emphatically, that ‘the whole song is a metaphor for big dicks’. In so doing, his reading of ‘Like a Virgin’ squarely refutes the version offered by Mr Blonde who proposes, romantically, that ‘it’s about a girl who is very vulnerable and she’s been fucked over a few times. Then she meets some guy who’s really sensitive…’(3). Dismissing this, Brown underscores the crucial experience of pain:

Now she’s gettin’ this serious dick action, she’s feelin’ something she ain’t felt since forever. Pain ... It hurts like the first time. The pain is reminding a fuck machine what it was like to be a virgin. Hence, ‘Like a Virgin’. (4-5)

The pain differentiates machine from human, innocent from habitue, recalling something that has been lost. At its crudest, the reading of ‘Like a Virgin’ affirms phallic law in its most brutal, literal rendering of a subjection. But the loss of an innocent, virginal state as a result of this encounter metaphorically signifies, for the position of the interpreter, a different traumatic, castrating encounter with phallic law. What is raised in the interpretation is the spectre of lack, of subjection to law. For the woman, the experience of pain broaches the Thing at the extremity of pleasure, a pleasure enjoyed, not by the interpreter, Mr Brown, but by another, the Other:

The real father, Freud tells us, is a castrating father. In what way? Through his presence as real father who effectively occupies that person with whom the child is in a state of rivalry, namely, the mother. Whether or not that is the case in experience, in theory there is no doubt about it: the real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker – though not, believe me, in the face of the Eternal, which isn’t even around to count the number of times. Yet doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the decline of the oedipus complex into the one whom the child may easily have already discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old, namely, the imaginary father, the father who has fucked the kid up. (Lacan, 1992: 307-8)

‘Like a Virgin’ is about the ‘Great Fucker’: ‘it’s about some cooze who’s a regular fuck machine. I mean all the time, morning, day, night, afternoon, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick, dick’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 4). As ‘fuck machine’ the woman testifies to the jouissance demanded by the Other, the great fucker and castrating father. The myth of the phallus as embodiment of the Other’s jouissance is thus promoted in this reading of ‘Like a Virgin’. It is a reading endorsed by the director who, as actor, performs the speech: ‘I have no doubt in my mind she [Madonna] is going to come to me and say: “Quentin, you’re a hundred per cent right, that’s exactly what the song’s about. And I was laughing my ass off when all these fourteen-year-old girls were singing it.”’ The certainty, however, even as it anticipates authorisation, was deluded: Madonna inscribed a copy of her album Erotica ‘To Quentin – it’s about love, not dick’ (Bernard, 1995: 193). The interpretation, countermanded by an inscription of authority, discovers itself to be fantastical. [NOTE]

But what the interpretation discloses, significantly, is the realm of fantasy determined by the Thing: ‘Freud placed in the forefront of ethical enquiry the simple relationship between man and woman. Strangely enough, things haven’t been able to move beyond that point’ (Lacan, 1992: 87). For Lacan, the relation between the sexes is a nonrelation, a relation only to the objet a which is, precisely, not one, but ‘something of the One’ (1982: 139). Indeed, the nonrelation between Madonna’s and Tarantino’s versions of the song charts an insurmountable difference between male and female fantasy: the myth of the phallus embodied or literalised, is opposed to the myth of romantic union, the phallus idealised. It is a point that, strangely, cannot be surmounted since it figures the gap between the sexes as Thing. Sexual difference is the point on which symbolic castration turns, the point of lack, the very gap, the site of loss and separation marked by the objet a. The differentiating effects of the castrating father thus enjoin the male subject to, and bar him from, the jouissance of the Other.

Since Dogs is framed by the elevation of the great fucker at the beginning of the film and the Other’s explosive assertion of power at its end, in the shape of the LAPD, the position of Joe appears tenuous. Throughout the film, he assumes the role of paternal metaphor: the one who lays down the law, who knows the robbers ‘as men’, who knows their real names, and who is invoked as the one that will take care of things. But his plan is ruined by one Thing: his blindness to Orange. His authority is questioned, his rules broken, his law collapses, the supposed father killed. What Orange introduces and the film dramatises is this collapse, its implosion. The fragmentation, the repetitions and regressions circulate around the central absence that Joe’s law cannot fill. For Lacan, it is ‘the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father in the place of the Other’ and ‘the failure of the paternal metaphor’ that defines psychosis:

We will take Verwerfung, then, to be foreclosure of the signifier. To the point at which the Name-of-the-Father is called – we shall see how – may correspond to the Other, then, a mere hole, which, by the inadequacy of the metaphoric effect will provoke a corresponding hole at the place of the phallic signification. (Lacan, 1977a: 201)

It is precisely around such a hole that Reservoir Dogs turns.



Scene here

But there is one figure for whom there are no holes: Mr Blonde. ‘I guarantee we’ve got a rat in the house’, says Pink. ‘What would ever make you think that?’ replies Blonde. Supremely indifferent to their predicament and unconcerned about his part in it, he replies to the accusations about his trigger-happy response to the alarm sounding with a statement of fact: ‘I told ‘em not to touch the alarm. They touched it. I blew ‘em full of holes. If they hadn’t done what I told ‘em not, they’d still be alive today’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 59). Callously indifferent, ‘a fucking psycho’, he has one thing in his favour, as Pink observes: ‘Right now, Mr Blonde is the only one I completely trust. He’s too fuckin’ homicidal to be workin’ with the cops’ (44). Pink’s vote of confidence is subsequently underscored by the flashback entitled ‘Mr Blonde’. With an almost filial relation to Joe and a fraternal relation to Eddie, the loyalty of Blonde is beyond question: ‘... you don’t lie to a man who’s just done four years in the slammer for ya’, Joe comments to Eddie (50). Unimpeachable in the eyes of the Other, Joe and Pink, Blonde is distinguished as psychotic: he has foreclosed any relation to the Other, ‘his shooting spree in the store’ defining him as a subject of pure expenditure. Without reference to a reality or any law, his actions situate him beyond reason, subject only to his own sovereign pleasure. ‘First off, I don’t have a boss,’ he informs the captured cop. He then goes on:

Now I’m not gonna bullshit you. I don’t really care about what you know or don’t know. I’m gonna torture you for a while regardless. Not to get information, but because torturing a cop amuses me. There’s nothing you can say, I’ve heard it all before. There’s nothing you can do. Except pray for a quick death, which you ain’t gonna get. (1994a: 61)

Without point, use or purpose beyond the value of amusement, the torture scene presents psychosis as that which is detached from any reference to law, usefulness or meaning. Hence the importance of the organ he severs from the body of the captured cop. The ear is what connects the subject to the voice of the Other: in Reservoir Dogs it is presented as an ethical, human organ, the one that, in the absence of visual orientation, connects others to the screaming voice of Orange’s pain. Moreover, the ear is what connects subjects in the film to the Other, the world outside the drama which intrudes from the airwaves in the form of K-Billy’s voice. Blonde switches on the radio, before opening his razor: ‘Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you’ (63), he mouths, assuming the place, the words of the Other. These words signify, for the psychotic, the redundancy of the Other: there is no law, no paternal metaphor, only jokers and clowns. Blonde, moreover, is deaf to the cop’s pleading. Without compassion, he has no relation to the other or the Other and, by severing the other’s ear situates the cop in an identical position, cut off from all law or protection. ‘Mr Blonde just stares into the cop’s / our face, singing along with the seventies hit. Then he reaches out and cuts off the cop’s / our ear’ (63). The script includes the audience in this scene of utter subjection to irrational, tyrannical and ruthless violence. However, in the film, the camera pans away, separating the cop from ‘us’ as ‘we’ effectively turn away from the amputation in an act that may produce relief in not seeing, having no mirror to see an unbearable infliction of pain.

But the moment is heard. It is an ethical moment, opening morality to its own desire. ‘Was that as good for you as it was for me?’ Blonde asks the cop off screen, but it is to ‘us’ that the disembodied voice is really addressed, as we-the-camera stare into the vacant space at the back of the warehouse. Well was it? Yes, clearly, but in a different way. For the audience the (missed) spectacle of the ear amputation is a moral moment that calls up and frustrates moral desire, activating a prurience in withdrawal and disappointment; it is ethical in the way it opens a gap in the moral gaze, leaving an imaginary residue and a sound when it is the real thing that is wanted, the point of abhorrence that is also the place of absolute moral enjoyment and execration.

Tarantino explains just how deliberate, and deliberately moral, was his seduction and thwarting of the audience during this scene. It appears to have been designed precisely to produce this sort of disturbance between desire, morality and the law. As he says in the interview featured on the video of Reservoir Dogs.

In the infamous ‘torture’ scene the use of the song ‘Stuck in the Middle with You’ – which is a kind of bouncy, kinda cool song – not only does it not lighten up the scene, it makes the scene even harder to watch. You’re sitting there and you’re watching it, then all of a sudden this tune comes on and you’re tapping your toes, it’s real catchy and everything, Michael Madsen starts doing his little dance, and then ... BOOM! The hard stuff starts. You’re sitting there watching this [hard] stuff, but it’s already too late, you’re already a co-conspirator. You enjoyed the song, you enjoyed his dance, now you’ve got to take the hard stuff. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.


The ‘hard stuff’ introduces the kernel, the hard core, of subjective existence, that which remains least avowable to subject, the objet a. The scene is so traumatic because its use of the song calls up an unconscious self-reproach in the audience that invites an aggressive response, a response, furthermore, that takes its support in a disappointed prurience. Perhaps that is why this scene has become so notorious, has been so singled out with so much moral outrage and so many calls for censorship: and yet it is all directed towards an act that is missing, that has already been censored.

Aesthetic violence, then, becomes ethical if it opens a gap within representation which questions the complicity of desire and law. Aesthetic violence and the violence of aesthetics manifests both a hole in the real and a corresponding rupture in the fabric of the symbolic, the locus of law. In the encounter with the hole all (paternal) metaphors appear inadequate as, in the figure of Blonde, all reason fails and all meaning falters in the face of an absolute negativity that goes beyond, even as it constitutes, the possibility of ethics. The negativity that comes to the fore in Reservoir Dogs pertains to desire that is moral in so far as it appears useless and ineffective: ‘the desire of the Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the lacks of the discourse of the Other ...’ (Lacan, 1977b: 214). Desire surpasses the position of the one supposed to be master, Joe, as his own self-reproach acknowledges. For Pink, the desire for the money prevents him walking away from the job. Desire exceeds the Other, it seems, as it raises the problem of the Good alongside that of goods; desire serves no purpose, accedes to no law other than that of desire, attenuating another economy beyond that of meaning and regulated exchange.

This other economy is one of pure expenditure, the explosive expenditure on which the movie climaxes. In Blonde’s irrational, amoral, purposeless violence, it mimics the consumption of commodified culture; it is ‘a shooting spree in the store’, the absolute expenditure, without return, of the consumer’s shopping spree. Excessive expenditure leaves the subject of desire wanting only to the extent that it wants for nothing or, in Felix Guattari’s words, wants only the absolute Other, the ‘diamond of unnameable desire’ (1984: 8), the point of its own extravagant consumption and non-return. The exorbitance of the subject’s desire charts a trajectory that is heterogeneous: toward a sacred point and enmired in utter profanity, a locus of shit and the sacred. Indeed, if Reservoir Dogs has any reference it is, perhaps, to the condition of sovereignty and abjection, to what, in a restricted economy of use and exchange, is held in reserve, the surplus, the profit and the value that serves no useful function, unemployable and unworkable, the dogs, the remains, leftovers of another world of desire, the thieving rabble, the detritus and utter waste of expenditure.

[NOTE]The authority of Mr Brown’s reading is countermanded in the text by Joe in his guise as real father. Mr Brown’s reading is continually being interrupted by Joe as he flicks through an old address book that seems to consist entirely of a list of women’s names, his old flames perhaps. ‘Toby’ … ‘Toby Chew’ … and so on. Just at the point where Mr Brown offers up his conclusion in triumph, Joe declares the reading ‘Wong’. Mr Brown immediately reacts ‘Fuck you, I’m right!’ (Tarantino, 1994a: 5). This demonstrates that the real father of the unconscious knows, even though it doesn’t know it knows. (Hager Weslati)

from Fred Botting & Scott Wilson, The Tarantinian Ethics, London: Sage, 2001