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

Buzzing 2: Ecological Love and the jouissance of the fly

Man is ... a funny sort of animal, is he not? Where in the animal kingdom is the discourse of the master? Where in the animal kingdom is there a master? . . . if there were no language there would be no master ... because language exists you obey. Jacques Lacan, ‘Milan Discourse’ (1972).

Jouissance of the Other ... of the body of the Other who symbolizes the Other, is not a sign of love’. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (1972)

In Ecology without Nature (2007) Timothy Morton mounts an impressive attack on the ‘eco-mimesis’ that characterizes much environmental art and criticism which, in the wake of Romanticism, constructs a fantasy of immersion in the natural world that is indistinguishable from the contemplative state of the ‘beautiful soul’ whose pleasure precludes acknowledgement of participation in the environment and consequently ethical responsibility for it. In contrast, Morton wants to abolish the dream of nature and replace it with an ecology that recognises the creatures of the world as independent subjects with whom we should interact as such. Morton concludes his book by suggesting that the ‘best way to have ecological awareness is to love the world as a person’ (201). Furthermore, he writes, ‘the best way to love a person is to love what is most intimate to them, the “thing” embedded in their make up’(201). His specific example is provided by William Blake’s poem ‘The Fly’: ‘Am not I / A fly like thee? / And art not thou / A man like me?’ (see above)

What Morton means by ‘thing’ is not exactly clear, but given the prominence of Jacques Lacan in his readings (pp. 198, 202-3) I am assuming that it is a reference to the centrality of ‘das ding’ to Seminar VII. What, then, is das ding of the fly? It is a strange question because das ding is an effect of language; for Lacan, only speaking beings relate to a Thing around which the (death) drive, articulated by the whole Vorstellung of the subject, its means of self-representation, circulates. I am not sure that flies speak, although certainly they buzz. Can this buzzing represent the fly for the buzzing of all the other flies or for other speaking, musical, noise-making beings so that it might be loved as a person? What (ecological) system would need to be in place for this to be possible, and for such 'love' to become structurally mutual?

For Lacan, the very structure of the signifying chain implies some Thing outside it upon which the chain uncertainly grounds and articulates itself. The order of intimacy imagined for the world of nature, particularly animal nature, is often associated with the jouissance that has to be sacrificed in the name of human civilization. It is towards this jouissance that the drive aims, thereby becoming a death drive because it is located beyond the pleasure principle that marks the limit of civilized comforts that are always of course more or less comfortable for some. Projected in the void, the Thing is identified as both the absolute Good beyond the symbolic order and the absolute Evil of suffering implied through its deprivation by the Other. This Other, moreover, is always represented by another person, one’s neighbour, whom Christ commands that one love as oneself. Lacan notes that Freud ‘stops in horror’ at the Christian commandment to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ since it summons-up the unfathomable hostility that inhabits the neighbour that one recognises on the basis of one’s own hostility. ‘And what is closer to myself than that kernel of jouissance in myself to which I dare not approach?’. At the interior limit of the Thing (on the basis of which Morton suggests we must love another creature as a person), equivalence is established between jouissance and suffering: ‘he’ always enjoys at my expense and vice versa.

Animals are located squarely in this economy when Jeremy Bentham makes what is probably the founding ecological statement relative to ‘man’ and his animal neighbours: ‘The question is not can they reason, can they talk, but can they suffer?’ Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1823). If animals can suffer, they can also enjoy, and it is certain that man sees that everywhere he looks. Moreover, it is on this essentially economic and imaginary basis (calculating the jouissance of the other) that ecology seeks to intervene in the world. This economic relation is also central to Blake’s poem, where, in the first stanza, it is precisely the jouissance of the little fly’s ‘summer’s play’ that provokes the violence of the poet’s ‘thoughtless hand’ (his unconscious wille or death drive, no doubt). Accordingly, this thoughtlessness immediately provokes the thought of equivalence between man and fly because the poet’s own jouissance (dancing, drinking, singing) will at some point be brushed aside by some other ‘blind hand’. The fourth stanza begins with a typical Blakean conditional: ‘If thought is life ... And the want / Of thought is death’, ‘Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, Or if I die.’ While the ambiguity of this last stanza, based as it is on a conditional, can mean so many different things, Morton reads the poem as a ‘Cartesian meditation’ so that even though the mutable pleasures of the body are perceived to be as ephemeral as a fly, subject to the ‘blind’ vicissitudes of life and death, they provide the essential locus of happiness. At the same time, thought is able to maintain a sovereign distance through identifying with both. ‘Instead of bemoaning the fate of living beings ... the poem identifies with the “evil” (the “thoughtless,” “blind” mechanical operation) and with the insect’ (202). For Morton the poem has the doubleness of a Cartesian-Utilitarianism. Perhaps this can provide the rationale for an ecological, machinic ‘thought’ to manage the problem of the other's jouissance through a regime of happiness in which humans and animals (even flies) are equivalent and have equal rights? ‘Social mediation’, Morton writes, ‘is required to aid the creature’, a mediation based on what society imagines and ‘thinks’, which is to say calculates, about the creature’s ‘thing’, its jouissance (Morton, 2007: 202).

It is here that the ‘Cartesian-Utilitarian’ ecology seems to take on the same structure as contemporary capitalism where the master signifier is concerned with accounting for the right to jouissance. In his Milan Discourse (1972), Lacan provides an algorithm for capitalist discourse by adjusting slightly the Discourse of the Master. Capitalist Discourse is produced when the subject ($) displaces the signifier of the master from the position of agent to that of (repressed) truth below the bar (see above).

In ecological terms, we could say that Man-the-master (Man who masters nature precisely as an effect of naming it) is displaced by the animal-subject ($) who is liberated through its right to jouissance/happiness (a) which bears on it from the position of production. The signifier that marks the difference between ‘man’ and the ‘animal’ is displaced and they enjoy an imaginary equivalence in which an animal can be loved as a person even as humans are understood purely in terms of their drives and interests, calculated statistically, and understood through ‘swarm’ behaviour as part of ‘hive minds’ that ‘buzz’ in the network biosphere. It is of course this system of ‘bionomic’ ecological capitalism (S2) ‘socially mediates’ to produce the conditions that enable the animal-subjects ($) to enjoy and be happy. (S1) represents the laws of governance that command and regulate capitalism (S2) and its institutions to produce the surplus jouissance (a) that enables the animal-subjects to enjoy more or less equally in bovine contentment. Following the arrows, it can be seen that the discourse works in a continuous loop like a machine. In his Milan address, Lacan commented that ‘it is the cleverest discourse that we have made. It is no less headed for a blowout. This is because it is untenable . . . it suffices so that it goes on casters (ça marche comme sur des roulettes), indeed that cannot go better, but that goes too fast, that consumes itself, that consumes itself so that it is consumed (ça se consomme, ça se consomme si bien que ça se consume)’ (11). The animal-subjects consume themselves in the all-consuming machine, but they do it more or less painlessly; jouissance is regulated, distributed through the excess commanded by the ‘blind hand’ of the bioeconomic machinery of joy – or at least until the blow out.