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Technologies of arousal: masturbation, aesthetic education, and the post-Kantian auto-

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Content TECHNOLOGIES OF AROUSAL:
MASTURBATION, AESTHETIC EDUCATION, AND THE POST-KANTIAN AUTO-
by
Christian Hite
————————————————————————————————————————
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2009
Copyright 2009 Christian Hite
Epigraph
ii
Nature has intended that man develop everything which transcends
the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, entirely by himself
. . . . The discovery of his food, of his clothing, of his external
security and defense (for which nature gave man neither the horns
of the bull, nor the claws of the lion, nor the teeth of the dog, but
only hands), all pleasures that can make life agreeable, even his
insight and intelligence, indeed the kindness of his will should be
achieved by man’s own work.
—IMMANUEL KANT
“Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent” (1784)
Dedication
For
Bernhard Cron
iii
Acknowledgements
Thanks to: Tania Modleski, Peggy Kamuf, Daniel Tiffany, Jim Kincaid, Dana Polan, Lynn Spigel,
Anthony Kemp, Marita Sturken, Donald E. Hall, Jan Ramjerdi, Kate Haake, J. Fisher Solomon,
Linda Williams, Lee Edelman, Rei Terada, Chris Cole, Ahmet Suner, and Babyland (Dan + Smith).
Special thanks to: Rosalee and Vesper.
iv
Table of Contents
Epigraph ii
Dedication iii
Acknowledgements iv
List of Figures vi
Abstract x
Preface
Left to One’s Own Devices? xi
Chapter One
One-Handed Reading (An Owner’s Manual?) 1
Chapter T wo
No Strings Attached?
Derrida, Kant, and Pleasure Without [Sans] Interest 14
Chapter Three
Rub It Out:
(En)countering Rubbish in James Joyce’s “An Encounter” 34
Chapter Four
Mimetic Jerks:
Hugo Münsterberg <<<“Movies”>>> Masturbating Hand 48
Chapter Five
Digital Manipulation:
The Vibrator, Women’s Liberation, and Masturbation (as) Re-education 81
Chapter Six
“Pleasure is a Very Difficult Behavior”:
A Note on Foucault and the Auto-(Erotic) 124
Chapter Seven
(S)cars:
Auto-erotic Resignification in David Cronenberg’s Crash 137
Bibliography 160
v
List of Figures
Fig. 1: Masturbating Reader/Writer xiii
Fig. 2: Cartoon posted in the English Department xvi
Fig. 1.1: Effects of Masturbation 4
Fig. 1.2: Faces of the Masturbator 9
Fig. 2.1: Doodle of Cut Flower 14
Fig. 2.2: Doodle of Entangled Shit-Flower 14
Fig. 2.3: The Mediating T urd (Genet) 15
Fig. 2.4: The Mediating T urd (Kant) 15
Fig. 2.5: Cut T ulip (Derrida) 18
Fig. 2.6: Fountain (Marcel Duchamp) 21
Fig. 2.7: The “Hold” of a (K)notty Suture 24
Fig. 2.8: Photo of Bathroom (M.O.C.A.) 26
Fig. 2.9: Do It Yourself Flowers (Andy Warhol) 31
Fig. 3.1: Pluck magazine, no. 114 36
Fig. 3.2: Pluck magazine, no. 441 37
Fig. 3.3: Pluck magazine, no. 204 38
Fig. 3.4: Pluck magazine, no. 253 39
Fig. 3.5: Pluck magazine, no. 52 41
Fig. 3.6: Pluck magazine, no. 108 42
Fig. 3.7: Pluck magazine, no. 229 43
Fig. 3.8: Pluck magazine, no. 565 44
Fig. 3.9: Joyce, On a Pedestal 46
Fig. 4.1: Hugo Münsterberg with Colleagues 50
vi
Fig. 4.2: Ad for Annette Kellermann in Neptune’s Daughter 52
Fig. 4.3: Pin-up Picture Postcard of Annette Kellermann 53
Fig. 4.4: Cartoon (“Now Ain’t That a Shame”) 55
Fig. 4.5: Portrait of a Young American Girl in State of Nudity 56
Fig. 4.6: Firing a Cannon at the Spectator (Entr’acte) 59
Fig. 4.7: Cartoon (Hand-cranked Mutoscope and Its Spectator/User) 60
Fig. 4.8: Interior of Mutoscope 61
Fig. 4.9: From Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion 62
Fig. 4.10: Use of Phenakistiscope before a Mirror 63
Fig. 4.11: Bicycle Wheel (Marcel Duchamp) 64
Fig. 4.12: Natures mortes (Francis Picabia) 65
Fig. 4.13: Natures mortes reproduced on cover of Cannibale 67
Fig. 4.14: Francis Picabia’s cover image for Littérature 68
Fig. 4.15: Francis Picabia’s cover image (close-up) 69
Fig. 4.16: Masturbating With a Mutoscope 70
Fig. 4.17: From Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau) 72
Fig. 4.18: By Himself, the Young Man . . . (Cocteau, Blood of a Poet) 73
Fig. 4.19: The Young Man Kisses . . . (Cocteau, Blood of a Poet) 73
Fig. 4.20: As the “Hand-Mouth” Moves . . . (Cocteau, Blood of a Poet) 73
Fig. 4.21: The “Hand-Mouth” (Cocteau, Blood of a Poet) 74
Fig. 4.22: Getting Rid of the “Hand-Mouth (Cocteau, Blood of a Poet) 75
Fig. 4.23: Patent for the “Pleasure Railway” 77
Fig. 4.24: Inside a Hale’s Tour “T rain” 78
Fig. 5.1: Portable Vibrator and Vibrator Attachments 82
Fig. 5.2: White Cross Electric Vibrator 83
vii
Fig. 5.3: The Star Vibrator 84
Fig. 5.4: Image from The Nun’s Story 85
Fig. 5.5: Image from A Free Ride 86
Fig. 5.6: A six-year old thumbsucker . . . (1897) 90
Fig. 5.7: Applied general faradization . . . (1881) 92
Fig. 5.8: Vaginal and Rectal Electrodes . . . (ca. 1900) 94
Fig. 5.9: The Weiss Portable Electromechanical Vibrator 95
Fig. 5.10: Title page to Smith’s Vibratory Technique . . . (1917) 96
Fig. 5.11: Excerpt from Illustrated Catalog of White Cross Vibrator 97
Fig. 5.12: Female Masturbator 99
Fig. 5.13: Freud’s Daughters 103
Fig. 5.14: Image from Spare Rib 23 (1974) 106
Fig. 5.15: Image from Boston Women’s Health Collective 108
Fig. 5.16: Image from “cunt positive” series 109
Fig. 5.17: Images from Getting In Touch: Self Sexuality for Women 110
Fig. 5.18: Betty Dodson with her electromechanical vibrator 112
Fig. 5.19: Cordless “Massager” 114
Fig. 5.20: Hatachi Magic Wand. Drawing by Betty Dodson 115
Fig. 5.21: Hatachi Magic Wand. Drawing by Betty Dodson 116
Fig. 5.22: Vibrator Cartoon (part 1). Sheeba Feminist Collective 118
Fig. 5.23: Vibrator Cartoon (part 2). Sheeba Feminist Collective 119
Fig. 6.1: Foucault in Sweden with his Jaguar automobile 124
Fig. 6.2: Freud with one hand on his c(ig)ar 126
Fig. 6.3: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (René Magritte) 129
Fig. 6.4: “Hard” pleasure. Greco-Roman aphrodisia 131
viii
Fig. 6.5: “Hard” pleasure. Christian flesh 131
Fig. 6.6: Derrida in his “first car” 132
Fig. 6.7: “Original” news photo of automobile accident 133
Fig. 6.8: Black and White Disaster #4 (Andy Warhol) 134
Fig. 7.1: The first shot of a shot/reverse shot . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 145
Fig. 7.2: Second shot of a shot/reverse shot . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 145
Fig. 7.3: The first shot of the initial encounter . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 147
Fig. 7.4: The (mis)recognition of Vaughan . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 147
Fig. 7.5: Vaughan’s attraction to James . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 147
Fig. 7.6: Vaughan’s tactile handling . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 148
Fig. 7.7: James’ lingering look . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 148
Fig. 7.8: Vaughan’s lingering look back . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 148
Fig. 7.9: In a re-staging . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 149
Fig. 7.10: In this re-staging . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 149
Fig. 7.11: It is precisely through . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 149
Fig. 7.12: In the front seat . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 152
Fig. 7.13: A close-up shot of James’ hands . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 152
Fig. 7.14: James kisses the invaginated . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 152
Fig. 7.15: Visibly marked by her leg braces . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 155
Fig. 7.16: Medium rear shot of Gabrielle’s . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 156
Fig. 7.17: Medium shot of the showroom . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 156
Fig. 7.18: Medium shot of Gabrielle . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 156
Fig. 7.19: Close up shot of Gabrielle’s . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 157
Fig. 7.20: Medium shot of the showroom . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 157
Fig. 7.21: Close up shot of the saleman’s . . . (Cronenberg, Crash) 157
ix
Abstract
This dissertation considers masturbation as a kind of reading practice in which the responsibility—
or response-ability—of the reader becomes a concern. This concern of the masturbating reader, I
argue, emerges in the eighteenth century with the post-Kantian notion of aesthetic education. The
conceit of this project, then, is not only that “masturbation” and “aesthetics” emerge at the same
time, but that these discourses—and the practices they entail—mutually (de)constitute each other.
As structured around “perverse” moments in the history of media technics—i.e., from the hands-on
readers of books, to the embodied spectators of movies, to the digital manipulation of vibrator
users—this project thus attempts to defamiliarize (and queer) present notions of “interactivity” by
focusing on the “masturbatory response” at the heart of “aesthetics.” Unlike other accounts of the
rise of aesthetics, however, this project tries not to be just another repression-sublimation narrative.
Aesthetic education, I argue, does not repress masturbation. Rather than saying “No” (“You can’t”),
aesthetic education is post-Kantian (or post-Can’t-ian) in its repeated attempts to normalize a self-
legislating (auto-nomous) being through practices of response-ability in which readers are incited to
“express themselves” and “their feelings.” In my first section, therefore, I read Kant and Schiller
through scenes of aroused book-reading dramatized in the texts of Franz Kafka, James Joyce, and
Jean Genet, where the (im)possibility of taking responsibility for “one’s own” response-ability is
played out between notions of auto-nomy and auto-maticity. I then move to one of the first texts
of film aesthetics, Hugo Münsterberg’s The Photoplay (1916), where the mimetic response-ability of
the masturbating hand deconstructs notions of autotelic cinema. In my final section, I consider the
electromechanical vibrator as a vehicle of auto-nomous (female) auto-eroticism in the Women’s
Liberation Movement, where the question of auto-eroticism as a (political) “auto-motive” is raised
only to be resignified in the work of David Cronenberg’s Crash. In aesthetic education, as Schiller
says, the question, indeed, is that of “man” (the human, the human hand, and the humanities) and
its heteronomous other(s): “technicity,” “writing,” “addiction,” “animality,” “mimicry,” “femininity,”
“prosthesis.” These keywords, then, constitute the constellation of this dissertation and its reading
of the bio-politics of “aesthetics.”
x
Preface
Left To One’s Own Devices?
“We are all Neo-Kantians,” Michel Foucault proclaimed in 1966, affirming “the ceaselessly repeated
injunction to return to the break established by Kant—both to rediscover its necessity and to
understand its consequences.”
1
Indeed, as Béatrice Han has recently pointed out, Foucault’s corpus
can be read as a series of ambivalent (dis)placements of this Kantian “break” and its subject: “the
constitution of an empirico-transcendental doublet . . . called man.”
2
Thus, if the “early Foucault”
inscribed his archaeological project “within the lineage of Kant, who was the first to question the
conditions of possibility of representation and consequently of all knowledge, thereby opening the
space of modern thought” (Han 3), then it is perhaps not surprising that the “late Foucault” will
inscribe his work on “technologies of self” [techniques de soi] within the lineage of a “minor text”
by Kant written in response to the question: “What is Enlightenment?” [Was ist Aufklärung?].
3
What is surprising, however, is that Foucault’s essay on “What is Enlightenment?” (1984),
4
never mentions that this “minor text” signed by Kant appears in the same issue of the German
xi
1. Michel Foucault, quoted in Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the
Historical, trans. Edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford UP , 2002), 3. All further references appear in the text.
2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences [1966] (New York: Vintage
Books, 1973), 319. According to Foucault, this complex event in Western thought—“the appearance of man” as
a “strange empirico-transcendental doublet” (317-318)—marks the threshold of post-Kantian modernity: “we
are so blinded by the recent manifestation of man that we can no longer remember a time—and it is not so
long ago—when the world, its order, and human beings existed, but man did not” (Foucault 322). Although
Kant tried to awaken “man” from dogmatism, he did so by driving “man” deeper into an “anthropological sleep”
(340); or as Foucault says: “this time not the sleep of Dogmatism, but that of Anthropology” (341).
3. See Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” [1784], in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac
Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 1-6. All further references appear in the text.
4. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” [1984], trans. Catherine Porter, in The Foucault Reader,
ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 32-50. All further references appear in the text.
Auto- From the Greek: “self, one’s own, by oneself, independent-ly,”
combining form of self [autos, ipse]. Exceedingly common in Greek:
autochthones, autographus, automatus. In English, prefixable to scientific
terms denoting action or operation; its chief meanings are: (a) of oneself,
one’s own; self-; (b) self-produced or -induced (pathologically) within the
body or organism; (c) spontaneous, self-acting, automatic.
—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
Automaton An instrument which moves by itself, or machine which
contains within itself the source of its motion. The word comes from the
Greek “autos,” ipse, . . . “I am excited and ready to move,” . . . from which
came “automatic,” “spontaneous,” “voluntary.”
—DIDEROT, D’ALEMBERT, ET AL.
Encyclopedia
periodical, Berlinische Monatsschrift (December 1784), as four prize-winning essays on the dangers of
masturbation.
5
Since masturbation figures prominently in Foucault’s corpus, we can assume that
he more than anyone would have appreciated this historical irony, this scandal surrounding Kant’s
“minor text” on “mankind” [Menschheit] and its call to escape from “immaturity” [Unmündigkeit].
6
(Foucault notes in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” [1971], for example, that “[h]istory . . . teaches us
how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin . . . . [H]istorical beginnings are lowly . . . derisive and
ironic, capable of undoing every infatuation . . . . Zarathustra himself is plagued by a monkey who
jumps along behind him, pulling on his coattails.”)
7
But why is this scandalous? Perhaps the appearance of four prize essays on masturbation
within the same issue as Kant’s answer to the question “What is Enlightenment?” constitutes less a
historical irony than a kind of tautology. After all, as Foucault points out, on one hand, Kant’s
response published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift indicates right away that “Enlightenment” is a
process that releases “man” from “immaturity”:
So, to let someone or something else (a book, for example) take the place of “our will,” i.e., to let
the other decide, is, for Kant, indicative of “man” remaining behind in a state of heteronomous
“immaturity” instead of escaping in its own autonomous “maturity.” Or as Foucault writes: “From
the very first paragraph, [Kant] notes that man himself is responsible for his immature status. Thus
it has to be supposed that he will be able to escape from it only by a change that he himself
will bring about in himself” (35). “Man,” it seems, must pull himself up by his own bootstraps.
And yet, on the other hand, just as quickly as Kant formulates this hypothesis of “man’s”
(self-incurred) “immaturity,” he simultaneously places the whole process of “Enlightenment” under
a “motto” [Wahlspruch]. A Wahlspruch, as Foucault points out, is a “heraldic device” (35), i.e., both
a distinctive feature by which one can be recognized, and a motto, or instruction, that one gives
xii
5. See footnote #32 in Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York:
Zone Books, 2003), 477. Laqueur, unfortunately, does not elaborate on this remarkable “coincidence.”
6. Foucault’s History of Sexuality was to include a volume on masturbation (La Croiade des enfants), which
he later abandoned. See, however, Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975,
trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003); “Infantile Sexuality” [1975] in Foucault Live: Collected
Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), 154-167; and “Sexuality and
Solitude” [1981], in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 175-184.
7. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” [1971], trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon,
in Foucault: A Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 79.
And by “immaturity,” [Kant] means a certain state of our will that makes us
accept someone else’s authority to lead us in areas where the use of reason is called
for. Kant gives three examples: we are in a state of “immaturity” when a book
takes the place of our understanding, when a spiritual director takes the place of
our conscience, when a doctor decides what our diet is to be. (Foucault 34)
oneself and proposes to others (35). The specific motto (“heraldic device”) that distinguishes the
process of “Enlightenment” for Kant is, of course, Sapere aude! “Dare to use your own reason!” (1).
Ironically, not only is this motto’s “calling of each individual to think for himself” (2), as Kant says,
borrowed from Horace’s Epodes (as if it could be anything else but another citation), but, according
to Foucault, it turns “Enlightenment” into both an impersonal process and a personal responsibility:
“Men are at once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the
extent that they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its
voluntary actors” (Foucault 35). It is as if “man” becomes a strange “play” between active/passive,
subject/object, as if an oscillation between toucher and touched (in a word: response-able).
And indeed, this question of “play” [Spiel], or what we might call here the question of the
post-Kantian (m)otto, from Friedrich Schiller to Herbert Marcuse, dis-closes the (aesthetic) difficulty
xiii
Fig. 1: Masturbating Reader/Writer. Frontispiece to Histoire de Dom B—, portier des Chartreux (1741).
traced throughout this dissertation in figures of the (auto-affective/hetero-affective) masturbating
reader (“playing with oneself”). Hence, from Schiller’s program for harmonizing post-Kantian “man”
through “aesthetic education” to Marcuse’s Schillerian chapter on the “Aesthetic Dimension” in his
Eros and Civilization (1955), the bible of the 1960’s counter-culture(s),
8
this dissertation finds its
footing, so to speak, in a series of “aesthetic” responses aroused by the aporetic Kantian (m)otto
(“heraldic device”). Each chapter of this dissertation, therefore, is less like a step in the march of
“aesthetic education” than a kind of repeated stumbling over the same knotted shoelace.
Indeed, the question of footing, or orthopedics [Gängelwagen], is at the heart of Kant’s
“What is Enlightenment?” and has been tripping “man” up ever since. The term Gängelwagen, which
designates a “device” used by parents to provide support for young children as they are learning to
walk (like training wheels), appears right away in Kant’s first example of the insidious “tutelege”
of well-meaning “guardians” who end up turning “man” into “domestic cattle”:
The courage to take a step “without the harness of the walking cart [Gängelwagen],” i.e., the courage
to “finally learn to walk alone,” is thus the courage to escape from the “immature” animal-machine.
This, ironically, is the vocation of the Kantian (m)otto (“heraldic device”). (Of course, everyone
knows the story of Kant’s daily walk, which he supposedly carried out with clockwork automaticity,
but rarely does anyone speculate about his shoes. He wore them, undoubtedly. Perhaps we can even
imagine him hopping bare-footed over a hot sandy beach, cursing what his shoes had done to the
soles of his feet, turning them into soft, useless, hyper-sensitive pads, the stuff of fetishes and auto-
eroticism. Feminine dependency? Aesthetico-technical corpus? But enough of this child’s play . . . .)
What does it even mean to heed the call of a “heraldic device” in order to escape from the
heteronomy of yet another “device” [Gängelwagen]? Doesn’t Kant’s use of a device to target a prior
device constitute a rather self-defeating (m)otto? According to Marcuse, whose text helped to spark
the “liberation movements” of the 1960s, “This conflict must be resolved if human potentialities are
to realize themselves freely” (187). And the vehicle of this resolution, for Marcuse, is aesthetic “play”:
xiv
8. See Herbert Marcuse, “The Aesthetic Dimension,” in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into
Freud [1955] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1974), 172-196. All further references appear in the text.
After the guardians have first made their domestic cattle dumb and have made
sure that these placid creatures will not dare take a single step without the harness
of the walking cart [Gängelwagen] to which they are confined, the guardians then
show them the danger which threatens if they try to go alone. Actually, however,
this danger is not so great, for by falling a few times they would finally learn to
walk alone. (Kant 2)
[T]he liberation of man from inhuman existential conditions . . . Schiller states . . .
must pass through the aesthetic . . . . The play impulse [Spieltrieb] is the vehicle of
Like a tripped out repetition of the Kantian (m)otto (“heraldic device”), Marcuse ends his discussion
of the “vehicle” of aesthetic “play” with a call to “maturity.” Or as he states: “The free individual
himself must bring about the harmony between individual and universal gratification” (191), i.e.,
without being driven to it by mechanical compulsions. The “vehicle” of aesthetic “mediation” (178),
in other words, as Marcuse says, is “beyond all immature autoeroticism” (169).
Now, the point here, of course, is not that Kant, Schiller, and Marcuse constitute some
kind of aesthetic conspiracy to repress masturbation (“immature autoeroticism”). Quite the contrary.
(Marcuse’s text, for example, was crucial to the so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s.) And yet,
this remarkable turn to Schiller—i.e., to the “vehicle” of aesthetic “mediation”—at the very heart of
Marcuse’s text is more than just a “minor” coincidence of the Kantian (m)otto (“heraldic device”).
Indeed, as each chapter of this dissertation demonstrates in a singular fashion, it is as if the same
difficulty of the Kantian (m)otto arouses end-less “vehicles” (“devices”) of aesthetic media(tion): i.e.,
from books, to movies, to vibrators, to autos, etc. Thus, too, the difficulty of this dissertation: How
to trace the endless difficulty of this arousal of aesthetic end-lessness: i.e., pleasure without interest?
For as Marcuse notes above (reading Schiller reading Kant): “the [play] impulse does not
aim at playing ‘with’ anything.” Aesthetic “play” is aim-less, end-less. Thus, to “play with oneself,”
to masturbate, with the aim of “pleasure,” is apparently to play “with” something (“oneself”) for
a calculated end. Yet, it is also to treat “oneself” as both an end and a means, as if an oscillation
between active/passive, subject/object, toucher/touched. “Masturbation,” then, like “Enlightenment,”
becomes both an impersonal process and a personal responsibility. Or as Foucault says: “Men are at
once elements and agents of a single process. They may be actors in the process to the extent that
they participate in it; and the process occurs to the extent that men decide to be its voluntary
actors” (35). But can one even “decide” to be a “voluntary” actor when heeding the call of such a
(m)otto (“heraldic device”)? Indeed, the very moment one decides to follow the Kantian (m)otto
(“Dare to use your own reason!”), one has already violated it, precisely by following it, by imitating
its example. The (m)otto, therefore, is trap: “to heed its call you must ignore its call.”
9
xv
9. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford:
Stanford UP , 1997), 66.
this liberation. The impulse does not aim at playing “with” something; rather it is
the play of life itself, beyond want and external complusion [heteronomy—C.H.]
. . . . Such formulations would be irresponsible “aestheticism” if the realm of play
was one of ornament, luxury, holiday, in an otherwise repressive world. But here the
aesthetic function is conceived as a principle governing the entire human existence
. . . . Aesthetic culture presupposes “a total revolution in modes of perception and
feeling” [Schiller], and such revolution becomes possible only if civilization has
reached the highest physical and intellectual maturity. (187-188)
Just because it is a trap, however, doesn’t mean the (m)otto is any less affective. Quite the
contrary. As this dissertation demonstrates in its readings of aesthetico-pedagogical manuals (hands),
from Kant and Schiller, to F . R. Leavis and Hugo Münsterberg, to the post-Marcusian writings of
the Women’s Liberation Movement, the difficulty of deciding to come to grips with such a (m)otto
(“heraldic device”) immediately arouses scenarios of responsibility (response-ability) in which the
question of end-lessly aroused “pleasure” (sensations, affects, feelings) becomes a bio-political concern
of the human(ities). The implication of these scenarios of post-Kantian aesthetic responsibilization,
i.e., from the “literature class” to the “consciousness-raising group,” as this dissertation repeatedly
points out in readings of such scenarios, is that heeding the call of “one’s own” affective response(s),
ever since the invention of “the masturbator” and of “aesthetic education” in the eighteenth century,
involves a peculiar “technology of self” ([m]otto): “It may be wrong, but it’s how I feel” (Fig. 2).
“If math class were like a literature class.” It is this boldfaced caption that underlines the
now seemingly self-evident analogy between “how I feel” and “literature class,” and that was added
on apparently by the English Professor who posted this cartoon on his office door (Fig. 2). But,
as this dissertation attempts to show, there is nothing self-evident about this post-Kantian scenario
of aesthetic responsibilization. Indeed, there is something insidious about its laminated assumptions.
At issue here, in other words, is not simply the case of a so-called “affective fallacy,” but rather
the invention of a “technology of self” ([m]otto) in which, as Martin Heidegger noted, “the subject-
xvi
Fig. 2: Cartoon posted in the English Department at California State University, Northridge (2004).
object relation . . . [becomes] a relation of feeling.”
10
Although Heidegger concedes in his lecture on
the “History of Aesthetics” that this peculiar subject-object relation of feeling is “recent” (“It arises
in the eighteenth century” [79] and is “definitive for aesthetic considerations” [78]), he, of course,
unlike this dissertation, would never dream of connecting the invention of “aesthetics” with that
of “masturbation,” or, as he says, of mixing up “art” and “physiology.” Why? Because:
To reduce “art” to the level of the “gastric juices” is, for Heidegger, like Kant, to remain at the
level of the animal-machine [Gängelwagen] which “knows no arena in which something could be
set up for decision and choice.” And yet, the setting up of such “arenas” for decision and choice,
as is repeatedly pointed out in this dissertation, is precisely the “set up” of post-Kantian aesthetic
responsibilization and its peculiar “technology of self” ([m]otto). Or as Kant states in the very last
sentence of “What is Enlightenment?”: “principles of government . . . [will find] it advantageous to
itself to treat men, who are now more than machines, in keeping with their dignity” (7). The figure
of the (auto-affective/hetero-affective) “masturbating reader,” from this point on, becomes a problem
of deliberation in the aesthetic government of “man.”
Now, one danger of the recent “affective turn” in literary criticism, as Rei Terada has argued, is that
it can be read as a defensive strategy, a humanist relapse: “historically, the idea of emotion has been
activated to reinforce notions of subjectivity that could use the help.”
11
With a pun on Foucault,
Terada connects this humanist relapse to the “expressive hypothesis” (11), i.e., the assumption that
“emotion requires a subject.” Since this dissertation deals with configurations of the “masturbating
reader,” there is here a similar danger, i.e., the assumption that “arousal requires a subject,” or, more
insidious still, that the touch of “solitary vice” is “immediate,” is “mine,” is “solitary.” All of these
assumptions of what Jacques Derrida has called “the humanualism of the-hand-of-man” are dangers
that this dissertation on the post-Kantian “auto-” ([m]otto) necessarily risks repeating in its “steps”
of deconstruction.
12
Less a teleological march into “maturity” than a case of “arrested development,”
this dissertation reads like a series of repeated responses, of passionate (if sterile) jerks. In a word:
“unwholesome.”
xvii
10. Martin Heidegger, “Six Basic Developments in the History of Aesthetics” [1936], in Nietzsche, Vol. I,
trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 78. All further references appear in the text.
11. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard UP , 2001), 14. All further references appear in the text.
12. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 221.
Physiology knows no arena in which something could be set up for decision and
choice. To deliver art over to physiology seems tantamount to reducing art to the
functional level of the gastric juices. (Heidegger 93; emphasis added)
xviii
What is man? And how did he come to be man?
The answer is—through the genesis of the hand. Here is
a weapon unparalleled in the world of free-moving life. Compare
with it the paw, the beak, the horns, the teeth, and tail-fins of
other creatures . . . . There is nothing in the whole world that can
be set beside this member, capable equally of touch and action.
—OSWALD SPENGLER
Man and T echnics (1931)
Chapter One
One-Handed Reading (An Owner’s Manual?)
Man from Latin manus (“hand”) + stuprare (“to defile”) is the most common etymology for the word
“masturbation,” as Thomas Laqueur notes, one which goes back to eighteenth-century speculations,
with alternative versions reworking manus + stuprare through turbare (“to disturb or disorder”).
5
Pollution by the hand (manus)? Man-disturbance? In what manner (technique)? Or by what
(mechanical, disgraceful, heteronomous) mannerisms: spasmodic gestures? “stock responses”?
6
And
what, if anything, does this have to do with reading, or, more precisely, with what J. Hillis Miller
has called an aporetic “ethics of reading,”
7
disrupting (or erupting within) a certain post-Kantian
articulation of the humanities (humaniora)
8
and the institutionalized study of literature—i.e., an
articulation that remains, if we believe Paul de Man, “more than ever and profoundly Schillerian”?
1
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions [1782-1789], trans. Edmund Wilson (New York: Knopf, 1923), 47.
2. Louis Aragon, Treatise on Style [1928], trans. Alyson Waters (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1991), 22.
3. F . R. Sturgis, M.D., Sexual Debility in Man [1900] (Chicago: Login Brothers, 1931), 67.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht II: Heidegger’s Hand,” trans. John P . Leavy Jr., in Deconstruction and
Philosophy: The T exts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986), 169.
5. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003), 96-99.
6. See I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (London: Routledge, 2001), 189 & 55-56.
7. See J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New
York: Columbia UP , 1987), and Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1990).
8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement [1790], trans. Paul Guyer et al. (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP , 2000), 229. Ian Hunter, “The Humanities without Humanism,” Meanjin 51.3 (1992): 479-490.
. . . dangerous books . . . read with one hand . . . .
—JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
1
. . . works . . . so depraved that anyone who reads them cannot
but unconsciously pull away his or her clothing and pass a
spasmodic hand over his or her sex, all the while sighing: Baby!
These books are bad.
—LOUIS ARAGON
2
Strictly speaking, the meaning of the word masturbation is the
inciting to and producing of a venereal orgasm by the hand;
namely, manual prostitution. By general custom, however, its
use has been extended to cover all those cases in which sexual
excitation and orgasm are produced by any mechanical cause . . .
.
—F . R. STURGIS, M.D.
3
The hand cannot be spoken about without speaking of technics.
—JACQUES DERRIDA
4
Referring in particular to Friedrich Schiller’s letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1793-1795),
de Man states:
Schiller, of course, articulates the question of “aesthetic education”—which he characterizes as the
“development of man’s capacity for feeling” (Letter 8, 53)
10
—not only after reading Kant (or rather
radically misreading him, if we believe de Man) but after writing two dissertations—as a medical
student, no less—on the Philosophy of Physiology (1779) and On the Connection Between the Animal
and the Spiritual Nature of Man (1780). Indeed, it is during his stint as a medical student that
Schiller meets and attends lectures by the Swiss physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, whose handbook,
Onanism; or, A Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation; or, The Dangerous Effects of Secret
and Excessive Venery (1760), had been wildly disseminated throughout Europe.
11
Like “masturbation,” the word “aesthetics” goes back to the eighteenth century: the German
philosopher Alexander Baumgarten coins the term in Meditationes Philosophicae (1735) as a “science”
of sense perception.
12
From the Greek aisthesis (meaning a “capacity for feeling and sensation” in
general), “aesthetics” thus shares an affinity with words like “anaesthesia” (meaning “loss of feeling
or sensation”), “hyperesthesia” (meaning “excessive or morbid sensitiveness”), and a swarm of other
buzzwords which come to pass with a certain anthropologico-physiological “discourse of the nerve.”
13
Hence Terry Eagleton’s recent (extravagant?) claim that “Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the
body”:
2
I don’t think any of us [in the humanities] can lay this claim [of being “beyond
Schiller”]. Whatever writing we do, whatever way we have of talking about art,
whatever way we have of teaching, whatever justification we give ourselves for
teaching, whatever the standards are and the values by means of which we teach,
they are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian.
9
9. Paul de Man, “Kant and Schiller” [1983], in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrezj Warminski (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P , 1996), 142. All further references appear in the text.
10. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man [1793-1795], trans. and ed. Elizabeth M.
Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Oxford: Oxford UP , 1982), 53. All further references appear in the text.
11. See Kenneth Dewhurst and Nigel Reeves, Friedrich Schiller: Medicine, Psychology, Literature (Berkeley:
U of California P , 1978), 183. On Tissot, see Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck, Masturbation: The History of
a Great T error, trans. Kathryn A. Hoffmann (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 61-77; and Ludmilla Jordanova, “The
Popularization of Medicine: Tissot on Onanism,” T extual Practice 1.1 (Spring 1987): 68-79.
12. See Hans Reiss, “The ‘Naturalization’ of the Term ‘Asthetik’ in Eighteenth-Century German: Alexander
Gottlieb Baumgarten and his Impact,” The Modern Language Review 89.3 (July 1994): 645-658.
13. See G. S. Rousseau, “Discourses of the Nerve,” in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed.
Frederick Amrine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press, 1989), 29-59, and “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards
Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” in Studies in the Eighteenth Century III: Papers Presented at the Third David
Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, ed. R. F . Brissenden et al. (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1976), 137-157. See also
Sergio Moravia, “From Homme Machine to Homme Sensible: Changing Eighteenth-Century Models of Man’s
Image,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39.1 (Jan.-March 1978): 45-60; and Adrian Johns, “The Physiology of
Reading,” in The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1998), 380-
443.
And, indeed, hanging in the breach of Schiller’s articulation—“aesthetic education”—is nothing less
than the “humanity” (and thus the “inhumanity,” the “animality,” and the “technicity”) of so-called
“sensuous man” (“little more than a bundle of sensations” [Letter 19, 137]), i.e., a “humanity” figured
as the simultaneous movement out of—and the disruption or eruption (erection) within—the cycle of
man’s “animal behavior” (“physical play”). For Schiller, this is a movement prompted by “beauty” in
the form of “fine art”:
We might say it is in the play of hands and erections that things become “personal” for Schiller.
Indeed, once this strange articulated breach of “aesthetic free-play” (i.e., Schiller’s version of Kantian
“reflective judgement”) has been awakened (aroused) out of and within the compulsive “physical play”
of “sensuous man,” it is as if he (never she?) is free to take himself in his own hand(s), so to speak,
his own person(al) erection. Hence Schiller’s stress on the need for “graceful” gestures as the proper
embodiment—personification—of this liberal-humanistic movement, or “aesthetic state”:
15
But what of the person who—willingly? voluntarily? purposely?—surrenders to “pathological”
inclinations in such an (aroused) “aesthetic state,” as if prompted by the instrument of “fine art”?
3
[Aesthetic’s] territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together—
the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its
sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that
arises from our most banal insertion into the world. The aesthetic concerns this
most gross and palpable dimension of the human . . . .
14
. . . a breach has been effected in the cycle of his animal behavior . . . . A leap it must
be called [both out of and within “physical play”], since a completely new power
[“aesthetic play”] now goes into action; . . . the mind takes a hand as lawgiver in the
operations of blind instinct . . . . (Schiller, Letter 27, 205-209; emphasis added)
Uncoordinated leaps of joy turn into dance, the unformed movements of the body
into the graceful and harmonious language of gesture; the confused and indistinct
cries of feeling become articulate . . . . [In this “aesthetic state”] conduct is governed,
not by some soulless imitation of the manners and morals of others, but by the
aesthetic nature [?] we have made our own. (Letter 27, 213-219; emphasis added)
Grace . . . is asked for in the play of the eyes and of the mouth, in the movements
of the hands and the arms whenever these movements are free and voluntary;
it is required in the walk, in the bearing, and attitude, in a word, in all exterior
demonstrations of man, so far as they depend on his will. (“Grace and Dignity”)
16
14. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990), 13. Eagleton’s
attempt to recuperate this “palpable dimension” for a Marxist humanism is not new. See, for example, Herbert
Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978).
15. On “aesthetic states,” see Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,”
in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (N.Y.: Columbia UP , 1984), 263-290; Martin Heidegger, “Rapture as Aesthetic
State,” in Nietzsche, Vol. I, trans. David Farrel Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 92-106.
16. Friedrich Schiller, “On Grace and Dignity” [1793], in Essays: Aesthetical and Philosophical (London:
George Bell & Sons, 1875), 187. All further references appear in the text.
Wouldn’t such de-liberate gestures automatically disqualify the human person(ality)? Here’s Schiller:
With a similar repugnance, Kant will explicitly list masturbation—“defiling oneself by lust” (548)—
along with suicide and the excessive use of narcotics as the three techniques of “mutilating oneself,”
i.e., of debasing oneself “beneath the beasts” via self-abuse (546-549).
17
As Kant states:
4
Fig. 1.1: “Effects of Masturbation.” Image from Stengers and Van Neck, Masturbation, 78.
If . . . man allows himself to be governed without reserve by the instinct of nature,
it is his interior autonomy that vanishes, and with it all trace of this autonomy is
exteriorly effaced. The animal nature alone is visible on his visage; the eye is watery
and languishing, the mouth rapaciously open, the voice trembling and muffled, the
breathing short and rapid, the limbs trembling with nervous agitation: the whole
body by its langour betrays its moral degradation. Moral force has renounced all
resistance, and physical nature, with such a man, is placed in full liberty . . . . The
inert forces of nature commence from then to gain the upper hand over the living
forces of the organism . . . . Man in this state not only revolts the moral sense . . .
but the aesthetic sense, which is not content with simple [“base”] matter . . . —the
aesthetic sense will turn away with disgust from such a spectacle, where concupiscence
[“carnal lust”] could alone find its gratification. (“Grace and Dignity,” 196-197)
. . . by [masturbation] the human being surrenders his personality (throwing it away),
since he uses himself merely as a means to satisfy an animal impulse. But this does
not explain the high degree of violation of the humanity of one’s own person by such
a vice . . . which seems . . . to exceed even murdering oneself. It consists, then, in this:
that someone who defiantly casts off life as a burden [i.e, via suicide] is at least not
making a feeble surrender to animal impulse in throwing himself away; murdering
oneself [suicide] requires courage, and in this disposition there is still always room
for respect for the humanity in one’s own person. But unnatural lust, which is
complete abandonment of oneself to animal inclination, makes the human being
not only an object of enjoyment but, still further, a thing that is contrary to nature,
that is, a loathsome object . . . . (549-550; emphasis added)
17. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals [1797], in Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J.
Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 1999), 353-604. All further references appear in the text.
There is a paradox here. What disturbs both Kant and Schiller (in the matter above) cannot simply
be the fall of “sensuous man” into “animal pleasure” (Kant 548), no matter how “feeble,” since such
a relapse into the reactive automaticity of the animal-machine—vis-à-vis “carnal lust” (Kant 549)—
would simply mean submitting to nature’s aim: i.e., the “preservation of the species” (Kant 549).
18
But masturbation, as Kant insists, is precisely the “unnatural use (and so misuse) of one’s sexual
attribute” (549). Thus, as Kant states:
Masturbation, it seems, is “revolting” (in every sense of the word) in its purposelessness, its counter-
(re)productive, non-utilitarian (reflective? aesthetic?) “free-play,” i.e., as a (de-liberate) “misuse” of
“one’s sexual attribute” as if an autotelic (auto-affective?) “end in itself.”
19
But if this is the case,
it becomes difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish something like a (“disgusting”) “masturbatory
response” (erection?) from a (“graceful”) “aesthetic response,” particularly when we recall that, for
Schiller, the erection (of) personality prompted by “fine art” is precisely a kind of unnatural breach
—jerk of imagination—“effected in the cycle of animal behavior”: i.e., a thing contrary to nature.
Interestingly, Sigmund Freud will recount a similar fable of erection in a fantastic footnote
to Civilization and its Discontents (1930), in which he speculates on the (aesthetic) consequences of
a radical breach in the organization of “primal man”: the assumption of erect posture.
20
As Freud states,
it is a “consequence of man’s raising himself from the ground, of his assumption of an upright gait,”
that “primal man” (single-handedly?) breaks with the “organic periodicity of the sexual process” (46).
No longer like a “dog”
21
in heat—i.e., programmed by an olfactory cycle of “stock responses” for
preserving the species and thus indifferent to “beauty” and “disgust” (incapable of pure reflective
judgements of taste? showing “no horror of excrement”?)—“primal man,” by raising himself up
5
Lust is called unnatural if one is aroused to it not by a real object but by his
imagining it, so that he creates one, contrapurposively; for in this way imagination
brings forth a desire contrary to nature’s end [aim? telos?] . . . . (549; emphasis added)
18. On the question of “reaction” versus “response”—and whether the ability to respond is solely the
“property of man”—see Jacques Derrida, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” trans. David
Wills, Critical Inquiry 28 (Winter 2002), 369-418.
19. Sade—Kant’s contemporary—valorizes the “revolting” pleasures of sodomy in just these terms, i.e., as
an “end in itself,” so to speak. According to Pierre Klossowski: “sodomy is formulated by a specific gesture of
countergenerality, the most significant in Sade’s eyes—that which strikes precisely at the law of the propagation
of the species and thus bears witness to the death of the species in the individual. It envinces an attitude not only
of refusal but of aggression; in being the simulacrum of the [‘natural’] act of generation, it is a mockery of it.”
See Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern UP , 1991), 24.
20. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents [1930], trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1962), 46-47. All further references appear in the text.
21. According to legend, the Cynic Diogenes (“The Dog”) committed the first case of what we today call
masturbating in public. Michel Foucault notes: “Since Diogenes ate in the agora, he thought there was no
reason why he should not also masturbate in the agora; for in both cases he was satisfying a bodily need (adding
that ‘he wished it were as easy to banish hunger by rubbing his belly’).” See Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech,
ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2001), 122.
off all fours, not only shifts the weight of humanity onto the big toe (as Georges Bataille notes),
22
but—in this state of erection—frees up the hand(s) . . . . “Primal man discovered it lay in his own
hands” (Freud 46), so to speak.
Ironically, then, rather than automatically disqualifying the human person(ality), it is as if
the “revolting” gesture of masturbation now constitutes its very essence, its strange “aesthetic nature”;
or like Bataille’s “muddy” big toe (simultaneously setting up “erect man” and upsetting its airy
“humanity”), it is as if the dirty masturbating hand bears witness to its condition of (im)possibility.
It is this congenital “perversity,” so to speak, that disturbs Kant and Schiller in a way that a “dog
in heat” never could (there’s nothing “disgraceful” or “disgusting” in this; we would never hold a
“dog in heat” responsible for “stock responses”). But to turn oneself (de-liberately? single-handedly?)
into a “loathsome object,” now that—apparently—is the “privilege” (responsibility?) of “man” alone:
Many years later, in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924)—a seminal handbook in the institutional
history of that thing today serenely called English literary studies—, I. A. Richards will write:
And, indeed, what seems to be at stake in “one-handed reading,” i.e., in this aroused “aesthetic
state,” is a certain technique of person(al) responsibility—or responsiblization—as if for “one’s own”
response-ability (“conduct of life”).
24
For as Catherine Liu has noted (regarding models of literary
criticism): “With the intervention of the hand, the danger of manipulation and abuse arises.”
25
Or
so it seems.
6
Alone of all known beings—man, in his quality of person, has the privilege to break
the chain of necessity by his will, and to determine in himself [single-handedly?—
C.H.] an entire series of fresh spontaneous phenomena [not mere “stock responses”?
—C.H.] (Schiller, “Grace and Dignity” 188-189; emphasis added)
Bad taste and crude responses are not mere flaws in an otherwise admirable person.
They are the root evil from which other defects follow. No life can be excellent in
which the elementary responses are disorganized and confused.
23
22. Bataille states: “The big toe is the most human part of the human body . . . . giving firm foundation
to the erection of which man is so proud,” but which man regards as “spit” (87). See Georges Bataille, “Big Toe,”
trans. John Harman, in Encyclopaedia Acephalica (London: Atlas, 1995), 87-93.
23. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (London: Routledge, 2001), 55-56. Emphasis
added.
24. On “responsibilization,” see Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (2nd
Edition) (London: Free Association, 1999), xxiii. According to Rose, the “twin process of autonomization plus
responsibilization” characterizes the governmentality of post-Kantian advanced liberalism. In rejecting the ideal
of the social state, liberalism governs by “acting on the choices and self-steering properties of individuals . . . .
creat[ing] freedom and those capable of inhabiting it” (xxiii). In this kind of “government through freedom,”
citizenship is practiced through “acts of free but responsibilized choice” (xxiii). The question, for us, is to what
extent this liberal “regime of the self” is simply another name for post-Kantian (Schillerian) aesthetic education
in which one’s “life” depends on one’s capacity for responsibilized judgement—a certain “ethics of reading.”
25. Catherine Liu, “Doing It Like a Machine,” in Copy Machines: Taking Notes for the Automaton
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2000), 5.
II. “If They Are My Hands . . .”
In the opening lines of an unsigned, undated fragment—entitled “Hands”—, Franz Kafka describes
a seemingly familiar scene of solitary book-reading suddenly disrupted by a struggle:
As if auto-interpellated by gestures and made to assume the (impossible?) responsibility of an
impartial (disinterested) “referee” in this strange contest of hand-to-hand combat, Kafka’s solitary
book-reader is disrupted—or should we say roused (stirred)?—from one practice or technique of
reading only to be caught up in another.
28
As if some kind of ex-centric subject-object (but which?
both? neither?) of this uncanny appointment, Kafka’s solitary book-reader has been summoned to
decide (by whom? or by what?), singled-out in the obligation of rendering (or handing-down) a
judgement: “If they are my hands, I must referee fairly, otherwise I shall bring down on myself the
agonies of a wrong decision” (Kafka 413).
29
The dilemma thus aroused in Kafka’s solitary book-reader—or should we say the dilemma
of Kafka’s aroused solitary book-reader? (i.e., how to avoid bringing down on oneself the agonies of
a wrong decision?)—, hinges on an assumption of ownership (of property; the proper, appropriate,
clean, self-same; one’s ownmost ownness): “If they are my hands . . . .”
30
And, indeed, who would
7
. . . because the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body,
one can understand why Kafka called the cough that erupted
from within him “the animal.”
—WALTER BENJAMIN
26
My two hands began a fight. They slammed the book I had been reading and
thrust it aside so that it should not be in the way. Me they saluted, and
appointed me referee. (412-413)
27
26. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death” [1934], trans. Harry Zohn,
in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (N.Y.: Schocken, 1969), 132. All further references appear in the text.
27. Fragment from Kafka’s notebooks, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, in Franz Kafka: Collected
Stories, ed. Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 412-413. The title—“Hands”—is
Josipovici’s. All further references appear in the text.
28. On the notion of “interpellation,” see Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
(Notes Toward an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1971), 127-186. In addition to the (mimetic) 180-degree turn made in response to the hailing address of
the policeman on the street (“Hey, you there!”), Althusser’s other main example of the everyday gestures of
interpellation (ideological misrecognition) is, precisely, the handshake.
29. Noting Jacques Lacan’s dis-locating use of the prefix ex- (from exterior) in the neologism “extimacy,”
Jacques-Alain Miller states: “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy. Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—
like a foreign body [ . . . ] who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs me.” See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Extimité,”
in Lacanian Theory of Discourse, ed. Mark Bracher et al. (New York: NYU Press, 1994), 76-77.
30. Jacques Derrida has called this assumption “the metaphysics of the proper”: le propre, self-possession,
propriety, property, cleanliness. See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins P , 1976), 26; and Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1981), 54.
dream of denying this owner’s manual? Or as we read in Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), a
text signed by René Descartes (alone? beside himself?): “How can I deny that these hands and this
body are mine?”
31
And yet, the very opening of Kafka’s fragment—the very struggle at hand, so to speak—
seems to already call into question the possibility of any such owner’s manual, i.e., of a certain
liberal-humanistic governmentality of possessive individualism , as C. B. Macpherson has called it, where
“every man is naturally the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities” and thus “naturally able
to govern themselves.”
32
Indeed, as we recall, it is precisely the solitary book-reader’s “own body,”
gesticulating as if possessed by a will of its own, which seems to betray its proper owner—i.e., a
betrayal (dis-closure) figured by the con-founding (autonomous? automatic?) motion of limbs and
members (private parts): “My two hands . . . slammed the book I had been reading and thrust it
aside . . . . Me they saluted, and appointed me referee.”
33
Whence the paradoxical condition of
(im)possibility of Kafka’s fragment (“Hands”): the very commotion (spasmodic gesticulation) that
summons (rouses) the book-reader’s sense of responsibility as a “referee” (“If they are my hands . . .”)
simultaneously undermines it—from the start—, as if already doomed to a vicious circle (or cycle)
of “arrested development,” impossible to beat off.
34
8
31. See Judith Butler, “How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?” Qui Parle 11.1
(1997): 1-20. On Descartes’ hands, see Jean-Luc Nancy, “Dum Scribo,” Oxford Literary Review 3.2 (1978): 6-21.
32. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford UP , 1962), 236-39.
On liberal-humanistic governmentality, see Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self,”
in Foucault and Political Reason, eds. Andrew Barry et al. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1996), 19-36.
33. According to the OED, “betray”—from Latin trade ˘re (“hand over”)—means both “to reveal or show
signs of” (to reveal a secret) and “to lead astray or into error” (to seduce). Hence the figure of the secretive
masturbator betrayed by her own hand(s): under the scrutiny of doctors or parents, limbs and members are said
to betray (dis-close: “give away”) their owner’s secret abuses—from “spasms in the genitals” to “damp, clammy
hands”—all signs that point to that “beastly” practice of “solitary vice.” A third definition of “betray” (“to place
in the power of an enemy” as a traitor) is thus also implied by the masturbator’s “beastly” animality: s/he is a
traitor to the “human race” in general (i.e., the duty to propagate the species) and her ownmost “humanity” in
particular, which is irresponsibly wasted in repeated acts of “self-abuse.”
34. The figure of the doomed masturbator “fixated” in—or “regressed” to—an “infantile” (“pre-Oedipal”)
no-man’s land of arrested development (“ambivalence”) has been a trope of certain psychoanalytic discourses which
assume a teleological psycho-sexual development of the ego toward mature personhood, or what Karl Abraham,
in “The Development of the Libido” (1924), calls “complete object-love” (452-453). Although a “child’s libido
[starts out] without an object (auto-erotic),” as Abraham says, in “the normal development of his psycho-sexual
life the individual ends by being capable of loving his object”: i.e., mature heterosexuality (431). Thus, to
remain fixated on auto-erotic thumb-sucking, for example, is symptomatic of “stunted” sexuality (265), arrested
at life’s “oral stage.” See Selected Papers of Karl Abraham, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1927).
Kafka, however, as if writing against this teleology of “mature” life, as Georges Bataille notes, “wanted
to entitle his entire work: ‘Attempts to escape from the parental sphere’” (132). Reading Kafka according to this
sovereignty of childishness, i.e., his rejection of the adult system (“remaining the irresponsible child he was”),
Bataille argues that Kafka’s work does not evoke sovereign life, but incalculable moments of deadly intoxication
(133-137). Hence the paradoxical character of Kafka’s “sovereignty”: it “can only exist on the condition that it
should never assume power . . . . never fit in . . .” (134). In his hostility to “effective activity”—i.e., the father’s
(re)production; the family circle; the familiar—, Kafka “affirms man’s collapse” (140). See Georges Bataille,
Literature and Evil [1957], trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973).
When Walter Benjamin proclaims that “Kafka’s entire work constitutes a code of gestures”
(120) (and what a strange “work” it is! the kind the Devil makes for idle hands, no doubt), he is
quick to add that Kafka’s work “divests the human gesture of its traditional supports” (122), i.e.,
the author(ity)—interiority, intentionality, ipseity—of proper ownership. Thus, rather than being the
“expression”—or person(al) proper(ty)—of human handiwork:
They walk doubled-up with fright. Is this what happens to (befalls?) the pathetic figures in Kafka,
who, once singled-out, bring down on themselves the weight, “the agony of a wrong decision”? . . .
And yet, the main thrust of Benjamin’s reading of this inhuman “event”—or what he calls Kafka’s
“animal gesture” (121)—seems closer to the critical nominalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom
“responsibility” entails the erroneous assumption of a fiction, i.e., of a “subject”:
9
Fig. 1.2: “Faces of the Masturbator.” Image from Laqueur, Solitary Sex, 65.
Each gesture is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself . . . . Kafka
tears open the sky behind every gesture . . . . The people who have assumed
responsibility for the knock at the manor gate [in Kafka’s story, “The Knock at
the Manor Gate”] walk doubled up with fright. (Benjamin 121)
Our “understanding of an event” has consisted in our inventing a subject which was
made responsible for something that happens and for how it happens. We have
combined our feeling of will, our feeling of “freedom,” our feeling of responsibility
and our intention to perform an act, into the concept of “cause.” [ . . . ] Only because
we have introduced subjects, “doers,” into things does it appear that all events are
the consequences of . . . a “doer.” [ . . . ]
When one has grasped that the “subject” is not something that creates effects,
but only a fiction, much follows [Hat man begriffen, dafs das “Subjekt” nichts ist,
was wirkt, sondern nur eine Fiktion, so folgt Vielerlei]. (296-297; emphasis added)
35
35. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power [1883-1888], trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage, 1968). All further references appear in the text.
And, indeed, while “much follows” from Nietzsche’s nominalist provocation that there is no “doer”
behind the doing—i.e., nothing but a metaphysical “error” (an anthropomorphism) we persist in
calling the responsible “subject”(a figure “doubled-up with fright”)—, the task nevertheless remains,
as Nietzsche says, for this to be “grasped” [begriffen].
36
But by whom? or what? And must this be
“grasped” properly (cleanly), as if a hammer used to smash an “idol”?
37
Our wager, here, is that
Kafka’s “Hands” dramatizes a more provocative mis-handling (abuse?) of what Nietzsche says must
be “grasped”: i.e, the fiction of (the) being held responsible; the invention of a “subject” made responsible.
If, for Nietzsche, the metaphysics of language—or the language of metaphysics—forces us to
make “lightning,” for example, the grammatical subject in the phrase “lightning flashes”—i.e., by an
arbitrary operation of division and isolation (interpretation)—whereby we erroneously introduce into
an otherwise inhuman flash-event the fiction of a substantial entity (a “doer”) which we mistakenly
hold responsible as the “cause,” then, by a no less metaphysical sleight-of-hand, Nietzsche insinuates
that we too are guilty (responsible?) of holding ourselves responsible as causes, as sources of decision,
as “ones” ac-countable, in the event of the movement of limbs and members (private parts). Thus:
Yet, with his own reliance on a lexicon of “muscular feeling” (i.e., an aesthetico-somatic physiology
of “the will,” which is also evident, for example, in his teacher Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings on
the “genital system”),
38
Nietzsche, here, seems to end up—despite himself—holding us responsible
for a certain abuse of reading. “What is it we have done?” he implores . . . . Since Kafka’s “Hands”
also tries to come to grips with a certain (self-) “abuse,” perhaps we should return to it now.
10
. . . we derive the entire concept [“cause”] from the subjective conviction that we are
causes, namely, that the arm moves—But that is an error. [!] We separate ourselves,
the doers, from the deed, and we make use of [abuse?] this pattern [interpretation]
everywhere—we seek a doer for every event. What is it we have done? We have
misunderstood the feeling of strength, tension, resistance, a muscular feeling that
is already the beginning of the act, as the cause, or we have taken the will to do
this or that for a cause because the action follows upon it . . . .
There is no such thing as “cause”; . . . we have projected it out of ourselves
in order to understand [read?] an event. (Nietzsche 295-296; emphasis added)
36. Some definitions of the German term begriffen include: to “understand,” “conceive,” “grasp;” “touch,”
“feel,” “handle;” and: “in a state of constant excitement” [in fortwahrender Aufregung begriffen sein].
37. Although Nietzsche subtitles Twilight of the Idols (1888) “How To Philosophize With a Hammer,” his
attempt to “grasp” such fictions (“errors”) is anything but that of a simple iconoclast. As Hans Vaihinger notes,
such fictions (“errors”) are irreducible for Nietzsche: “we always think and compute with constant errors” (349).
Indeed, since we cannot do without these necessary fictions (a “mobile army” of metaphors, metonymies, and
anthropomorphisms), the task is not to get rid of them (as if one ever could), but to become aware of them
“as such.” See Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of “As If,” trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1924).
38. Schopenhauer, for example, writes: “The genitals are, far more than any other external member of the
body, subject entirely to the will, and not at all to knowledge . . . . In fact, ideas do not act on the genitals in
the form of motivation . . . because the erection is a reflex action .” See Essays and Aphorisms [1851], trans. R. J.
Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1970), 216. Nietzsche, of course, would later famously declare that “aesthetics
is nothing else than applied physiology” (Nietzsche contra Wagner [1888], qtd. in Heidegger 91).
When we last left Kafka’s “Hands,” the solitary book-reader appeared to be locked in an
aporetic dilemma—vice?—of bodily betrayal, i.e., as the ex-centric “subject” of gestures that both
summon and undermine its assumption of responsibility as a (disinterested) “referee.” Although both
Jacques Derrida and J. Hillis Miller have valorized a kind of aporetic “double-bind” as the necessary
condition of (im)possibility for any “responsible” act of reading (worthy of the name) to happen
(arise? erupt?),
39
in Kafka’s “Hands” this (imperative) aporetic dilemma appears more to occasion—
or to incite—the solitary book-reader’s guilty confessions of (self-) “abuse.” Thus:
What “abuse” is being assumed here? Is it possible to assume responsibility for the irresponsibility
of right-handedness? Isn’t this a bit like being held accountable for a coughing fit—the erupting
cough that Kafka calls “the animal”? And yet, the solitary book-reader (referee) has neither the time
nor the luxury for such de-liberations—
But wait! Like an absurd flower sprouting out of and within the gears of this abusive “engine” of
mechanical stock responses (auto-mobility?), the book-reader is suddenly struck by a “saving idea”:
And so Kafka’s fragment, “Hands,” comes to an end (breaks off, apparently) with the “dishonest”
referee nodding in approval.
40
Why “dishonest”? Shouldn’t we congratulate this reader-cum-referee
11
39. See J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading (1987); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David
Wills (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995); Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford UP , 1997).
40. For a reading of the “nod” as a gesture of response in the context of Nietzsche’s genealogy of
responsibility (“accountability”), see Judith Butler, “An Account of Oneself,” in Giving an Account of Oneself
(New York: Fordham UP , 2005), 13.
All my life long I have made a favorite of the right [hand], without meaning
the left [hand] any harm. If the left had ever said anything, indulgent and just as
I am, I should at once have put a stop to the abuse. But it never grumbled, it
hung down from me, and while, say, the right was raising my hat in the street, the
left was timidly fumbling down my thigh. That was a bad way of preparing for the
fight that is now going on. How in the long run, left wrist, will you resist the
pressure of this powerful right hand? (Kafka 413; emphasis added)
Even now [the left hand] has been pushed to the extreme left rim of the table,
and the right is pounding regularly up and down on it like the [cycling?] piston of
an engine. (Kafka 413; emphasis added).
If, confronted with this misery, I had not got the saving idea that these are
my own hands and that with a slight jerk I can pull them away from each other
and so put an end to the fight and the misery—if I had not got this idea,
the left hand would have been broken out of the wrist, would have been
flung from the table, and then the right, in the wild recklessness of knowing
itself the victor, might have leapt, like a five-headed Cerberus, straight into
my attentive face. Instead, the two now lie one on top of the other, the right
stroking the back of the left, and I, dishonest referee, nod in approval. (Kafka
413; emaphasis added)
for establishing a certain “stroking” harmony—a certain “graceful” reconciliation—in the agitated
private parts, by (de-liberately) intervening—“with a slight jerk”—on behalf of the (abused) left hand?
and, indeed, on behalf of the reader’s own self-preservation? And yet, a lingering uneasiness remains.
Is it, perhaps, the lingering sense that the reader’s interested intervention (jerking off ) has violated the
“disinterested” aesthetic disposition of the proper post-Kantian “referee,” and, therefore, has only
exacerbated the “agonies of a wrong decision”? Or maybe—more diabolical still—it is the lingering
sense that the reader’s “saving idea,” the very recognition that “these are my own hands”—i.e., the
very assumption of a certain responsibility—has been a “dishonest” misrecognition (“wrong decision”),
an irresponsible error?
12
13
This marionette pretends not to feel the string that raises its
little wooden arm; it imagines that it is making the movements
it wants to make.
—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Saint Genet (1952)
. . . my hand is smeared with my liberated pleasure.
—JEAN GENET
Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers (1943)
Chapter Two
No Strings Attached?
Derrida, Kant, and Pleasure Without [Sans] Interest
cuttings—graftings . . . Jean Genet’s Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers [Notre-Dame des Fleurs] (1943) dramatizes
an absurd flowering “between” freedom and necessity (“between” sneezing and squeezing), as if the
mediating third was a mediating turd. This “flower” is in-stalled “within” the span—the threshold—
of a prison interrogation, i.e., even before the inmate (“Darling”) has been placed in a proper cell:
An arrested shit-flower (“dingle-berry”): a downfallen black (k)not of dung suspended in the hairs of
the inmate’s bottom, as if a bridge (dam?) spanning the anal cavity (cleavage?)—a tangled intensity
“flowering” in the loose-end(s) of the guilty one, bent over, face down. This (k)notty remainder
(“black spot”) without relief (sublation), without release (sublimation): Is it a/part (of “me”)? Can it
be cut-off (detached, sacrificed), a bit like fingernails (those senseless “claws”), a rem(a)inder of some
ancient “animality” behind “me,”
2
an embarrassing debt (duty, doodie)—no strings attached?
14
Fig. 2.1: Doodle of cut flower from the (s)crapbooks
of Soren Kierkegaard. Image reproduced in Mark C.
Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987),
313.
1. Jean Genet, Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers [Notre-Dame des Fleurs] [1943], trans. Bernard Frechtman (New
York: The Modern Library, 1965), 257-258. All further references appear in the text.
2. On the “terrifyingly ancient” (ancien, from anteanus: going before) related to the ante of Bataille’s anus
(“solar anus”), see Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987), 240.
. . . the guard said to him:
“Bend down.”
He bent. The guard looked at his anus and saw a black spot.
“. . . eeze,” he cried. Darling sneezed. But he had misunderstood. It was
“squeeze” that the guard had cried. The black spot was a rather big lump of dung,
which got bigger every day and which Darling had already several times tried to pull
away, but he would have had to pull the hairs out with it, or take a hot bath.
“You’ve sure been shitting,” said the guard.
1
Fig. 2.2: Doodle of entangled shit-flower (“dingle-
berry”). Doodle of duty (doodie) performed as an
“end in itself”? C.H.
A hairy situation, then, this mediating turd. (Recall the etymology of obligation, from the
Latin ligare, to tie or bind, found in the medieval relation of “liegeman,” being bound to a lord—a
relation of dependency, debt.)
3
But: what does this (k)notty “black spot”—this entwined “lump of
dung”—have to do with Kant’s third Critique (Critique of the Power of Judgement [1790]) and, more
specifically, with the (k)notty (naughty? improper?) “place” of one-handed reading (hairy palms)
“within” that post-Kantian articulation: aesthetic education? As Jacques Derrida notes, “at bottom”:
15
Fig. 2.3: The mediating turd: Genet’s (k)notty shit-flower.
The third Critique had the merit of identifying in art (in general) one of the middle
terms [Mitten] for resolving [auflosen] the “opposition” between mind and nature
[freedom and necessity—C.H.] . . . . But it still suffered, according to Hegel, from
the lacuna, a “lack” [Mangel]: it remained a theory of subjectivity and of judgement
. . . . [Hence] reconciliation is only announced . . . in the form of a duty . . . .
. . . [I]t is again a question of the immense “abyss” which separates the two
worlds [freedom and necessity—C.H.] and of the apparent impossibility of throwing
a bridge [Brücke] from one shore to the other . . . .
. . . [W]hat then is the object of the third Critique? . . . . What is it about,
at bottom? The bottom.
. . . [P]recisely, articulation . . . . For between the two faculties, an articulated
member, a third faculty comes into play. This intermediary member which Kant
names precisely Mittelglied, middle articulation, is judgement [Urteil] . . . .
Since the Mittelglied also forms the articulation of the theoretical and the
practical, we are plunging into a place that is neither theoretical nor practical or
else both . . . . Art (in general), or rather the beautiful, if it takes place, is inscribed
here. But this here, this place is announced as a place deprived of place . . . .
4
3. See John R. Wiske’s remarkable analysis of the “desperate debtor” vis-à-vis the “idiocy of authenticity”
in About Possession: The Self as Private Property (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP , 1977), 88.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” in The Truth in Painting [1978], trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987), 35-38. All further references appear in the text.
Kant’s first Critique (1781)
—“theoretical” (“reason”)—
conditions of possibility
for objects of knowledge
Fig. 2.4: The mediating turd: Kant’s turd Critique.
Kant’s second Critique (1788)
—“practical” (“desire”)—
conditions of possibility
for moral action
Kant’s turd Critique (1790)
—“art” (“pleasure”)—
conditions of possibility
for aesthetic judgement
(k)not
A “place deprived of place”: a “place” that is (k)not (one). For Kant, the placing of (an)
aesthetic judgement (if it ever takes place)—its articulation—must be without [sans] foundation,
without [sans] end(s), as if suspended in a bottomless abyss (an endless interrogation?). Like Genet’s
(k)notty shit-flower (“black spot”), Kant’s third Critique thus raises (knife in hand) the question of
what Derrida calls the sans of the pure cut: the de-cision of the absolutely coupable [cuttable, guilty]
(“Parergon” 94). A hairy situation, indeed, this “place” of Kant’s turd Critique, cut like a gas (Geist)
from any solid ground—without [sans] foundation, without [sans] end(s)—a “place” of infinite
de-cision, of fear and trembling, of end-less duty, of duty without [sans] end(s), as if without [sans]
“inclination” (compulsion), without [sans] “pathological” interests?
5
—Who cut the cheese?
We will have to come back to Nietzsche’s crack: the one about “old Kant” and how “the
categorical imperative smells of cruelty.”
6
For now, let us simply note how the third (turd) section
of Derrida’s “Parergon” (1978) (“The Sans of the Pure Cut”)—a section that reads (reeks) like a
clipped remainder (“dingle-berry”) from Glas (1974),
7
i.e., as if cut and grafted (from) “in-between”
its “two” columns on Hegel and Genet, a (k)notty shoelace tripping-up its legitimate framework—
lingers not only on Kant’s example of the tulip (“The tulip is exemplary of the sans of the pure
cut,” writes Derrida [89]), but, in particular, on “The scent of the tulip . . . one that would be
bright red, perhaps with shame . . .” (103). With shame? The scent of two-lips?
—Who cut the cheese?
16
5. Kant’s purified notion of “duty” [Pflicht] is set in opposition to the interests of “inclination” [Neigung].
For Kant, as Howard Caygill notes in A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), duty “proudly rejects all
kinship with the inclinations”; duty, grounded in freedom, is cut from the world of sense (Necessity) in which
inclination is rooted. Since inclination involves dependence on—or indebtedness to—sensation, a will determined
exclusively by inclination (“pathologically”) constitutes what Kant calls mere “animal choice (arbitrium brutum).”
Thus, while acting according to the interests of inclination indicates merely the “heteronomy” of the will, only
“pure” duty—i.e., performed without [sans] inclination—indicates that peculiar human “autonomy” of the will
which, although pathologically affected, is not pathologically determined. As Caygill writes:
With his “categorical imperative,” Kant thus distinguishes betwen “negative freedom, which consists in freedom
from ‘determination by alien causes’ (heteronomy), and freedom as autonomy, which consists in a subject giving
itself its own law. The latter consists in being a law to itself which is nothing other than acting according to a
maxim which can ‘at the same time have itself as a universal law . . . ’” (Caygill 101). Needless to say, the
questions opened by this Kantian “auto-motive”—its drive, its crash, its smoking tail-pipe—are inexhaustible.
6. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality [1887], trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP , 1994), 45. All further references appear in the text.
7. Jacques Derrida, Glas [1974], trans. John P . Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P ,
1986). All further references appear in the text.
Kant confirms that duty is peculiar to human beings . . . . All rational beings are subject to universal
law [Necessity—C.H.], but only human beings experience this subjection in the form of an
imperative, one which because of its unconditional [no strings attached—C.H.] source is categorical
[i.e., the so-called “categorical imperative”—C.H.]. This form of subjection is necessary because
human beings are in possession not only of a “pure will” but also of “wants and sensuous motives”
which conflict with it. The tension between pure will and sensuous motives [between Freedom
and Necessity—C.H.] . . . informs human volition . . . . [i.e.,] a will which, although “pathologically
affected,” is not pathologically determined. (165-166; emphasis added)
A “cigar at the tip of my lips.” Perhaps we should speak with Jean-Paul Sartre (himself no stranger
to the nauseating odor of a certain “black, knotty mass”
8
) of Genet’s “botany of the ‘underworld,’”
9
i.e., of Genet’s interest in clipping and cataloging certain flowery figures, like these (shamelessly)
resignified articulations (aesthetic judgements?) that slip from the two lips of Darling’s filthy mouth
(“regarding a desire to shit”) like so many precious farts (“pearls”) cut . . . so many pearly drops . . . ?
So, the cuttings of an interested botanist . . . fragrant pearly drops . . . ? And yet, as Derrida notes in
“The Sans of the Pure Cut,” the botanist figures in the third Critique precisely as Kant’s example
of the kind of person who—being unable to encounter a flower (a scented two-lip, say) without
concepts [Begriff] and without interest in its end(s) [Zweck]—is thus incapable of a “pure” aesthetic
judgement of taste regarding its “free beauty” [freie Schonheit], which is to say, incapable of the sans
of the pure cut, incapable of cutting (one), so to speak, no strings attached. But why (k)not? Kant:
17
“I’m dropping a pearl” means that the fart is noiseless.
[ . . . ]
[Darling] also says, regarding a desire to shit:
“I’ve got a cigar at the tip of my lips.” (Genet 91)
If [Darling] says, “I’m dropping a pearl,” or “A pearl slipped,” he means that he
has farted in a certain way, very softly, that the fart has flowed out very quietly
. . . the muted leak seems to us as milky as the paleness of a pearl . . . . The odor he
has silently spread in the prison . . . coils about him, haloes him from head to foot,
isolates him, but isolates him much less than does the remark [the articulation—
C.H.] his beauty does not fear to utter. “I’m dropping a pearl” . . . . (Genet 90-91)
Hardly anyone other than the botanist knows [conceptually—C.H.] what sort of
thing a flower is supposed to be [its end; its purpose—C.H.]; and even the botanist,
who recognizes in it the reproductive organ of the plant, pays no attention to this
natural end if he judges the flower by means of taste. Thus this judgement is not
grounded . . . . not attached . . . with concepts regarding its end [purpose—C.H.] . . . .
. . . [But] if the judgement of taste . . . is made dependent on the purpose . . .
and is thereby restricted, then it is no longer a free and pure judgement of taste.
10
8. In Nausea (1938), Sartre describes an encounter with the root (“black, knotty mass”) of a chestnut
tree as follows:
See Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea [1938], trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), 127-131.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr [1952], trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Mentor
Books, 1963), 511. All further references appear in the text.
10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement [1790], trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2000), 114-115. Emphasis added. All further references appear in text.
I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely
beastly, which frightened me. Then I had this vision. [ . . . ] The chestnut tree pressed itself against
my eyes . . . . [T]he bark, black and swollen, looked like boiled leather. [ . . . ] Knotty, inert, nameless,
it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence . . . . This root,
with its color, shape, its congealed movement [emphasis added—C.H.] was . . . below all explanation.
Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, half solidified . . . . It looked like a color,
but also . . . like a bruise or a secretion, like an oozing—and something else, an odor, for example,
it melted into the odor of wet earth, warm, moist wood, into a black odor that spread . . . .
A “free and pure” judgement of taste: an articulation without [sans] adherence, without
[sans] dependence on the crutch (clutch) of pre-fabricated concepts [Begriff], an aesthetic judgement,
in other words, like an immaculate conception,
11
or as Derrida writes, “without debt”:
But if “a concept always furnishes a supplement of adherence” (Derrida, “Parergon” 94), then, it is
as if the interested botanist can’t let (one) go, can’t cut (one)—cleanly and purely—autonomously,
spontaneously. Rather, as if suspended (ar-rested) in an artificial cloud of intoxicating concepts and
supplemental categories (a web of technical language; a prosthetic perfume), the interested botanist
clings—is “hooked”—to the end(s) of the tulip (two-lip) like a dizzying odor, like a “dingle-berry,”
hanging by a (k)notty thread of inc-lination (“. . . even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their
center by hairy sexual organs”
12
). Thus Sartre will write of the “sticky traces” left on the pages
of Genet’s prison manu-script (Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers): those brown “leaves”
13
that stink with the
lingering fragrance of shit-stained line(n)s, the fermented rubbish (skid-marks) of a few . . . pearly
drops . . .
18
Fig. 2.5: Image of cut tulip reproduced from
the turd section (“The Sans of the Pure
Cut”) from Jacques Derrida’s “Parergon,” in
The Truth in Painting (1978), trans. Geoff
Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: U
of Chicago P , 1987), 86
The cut leaves no skin, no tissue of adherence. A beautiful flower is in this sense
an absolutely coupable [guilty, cuttable] flower that is absolutely absolved, innocent.
Without debt. (“Parergon” 94)
It smells of bowels and sperm and milk. If it emits at times an odor of violets,
it does so in the manner of decaying meat and turns into a preserve; when we poke
it, the blood runs and we find ourselves in a belly, amidst gas bubbles and lumps of
entrails . . . . the sticky traces of the most monstrous dream. (Sartre 484)
11. Derrida laces (double-knots) the “immaculate conception” (I.C.) with Kant’s “categorical imperative”
[impératif catégorique] (I.C.) throughout the text of Glas (1974), but see esp., 215-216.
12. Georges Bataille, “The Language of Flowers” [1929], in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939,
ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl, et al. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1985), 12.
13. “French prison authorities . . . give the inmates paper with which they are required to make bags. It was
on this brown paper that Genet wrote, in pencil, Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers.” Sartre, Saint Genet (1952), 482.
Monstrous, indeed. Whether dependent on a supplement of pre-fabricated concepts, or
“pathologically” motivated by some heteronomous interest of inc-lination (“animal choice”?), it is
as if the “impure” de-cision (cutting) of the botanist remains adhered (dutifully indebted?) to a
certain determinate end—glued to the “backside,” as it were, by a sticky paste (half-chewed bits of
bread; a string of . . . pearly drops). Listen, then, to how Genet describes at length the (artful?)
“reading practice” of the inmate (“Genet”) who, like an interested botanist, grafts (pastes) certain
pre-fabricated cuttings and clippings (“flowers”)—i.e., scraps of old newspapers and littered pulp
novels—to “the back of a cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on the wall,” which, when turned
backside out, is then used (abused?) for the purpose (determinate end?) of (aimless?) masturbation
in a solitary cell (a dead end?):
“The left hand closes, and then arranges its fingers in the form of a hollow organ,” as if to mimic
a zero, a dead “end”? It is in this way that “Genet jacks off at the taxpayer’s expense” (Sartre 400).
And, indeed, what is Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers—Genet’s “epic of masturbation” (Sartre 483)—but a
(k)notty remainder attached to a dead end (“black spot”)?
14
Or as Sartre says: an “erotic device”
19
[D]ark and lovely flowers: . . . revealed to me by a scrap of newspaper . . . . murderers,
now dead, have nevertheless reached me . . . . but it cannot be by chance that I cut
those handsome, vacant-eyed heads out of the magazines . . . .
The newspapers are tattered by the time they reach my cell, and the finest
pages have been looted of their finest flowers, those pimps, like gardens in May. The
big, inflexible, strick pimps, their members in full bloom . . . .
Still, I managed to get about twenty photographs, and with bits of chewed
bread I pasted them on the back of the cardboard sheet of regulations that hangs on
the wall. Some are pinned up with bits of brass wire which the foreman brings me
and on which I have to string colored glass beads.
Using the same beads with which the prisoners next door make funeral
wreaths, I have made star-shaped frames for the most purely criminal. In the evening,
as you [reader] open your window to the street, I turn the back of the regulations
sheet towards me. Smiles and sneers, alike inexorable, enter me by all the holes I
offer, their vigor penetrates me and erects me . . . .
. . . I have culled here and there, from illustrated covers of a few adventure
novels, a young Mexican half-breed, a gaucho, a Caucasian horseman, and, from the
pages of these novels that are passed from hand to hand when we take our walk,
a few clumsy drawings: profiles of pimps and apaches with a smoking butt, or the
outline of a tough with a hard-on.
At night I love them . . . . I dawdle. Beneath the sheet, my right hand stops
to caress the absent face, and then the whole body, of the outlaw I have chosen for
that evening’s delight. The left hand closes, then arranges its fingers in the form of
a hollow organ which tries to resist, then offers itself, opens up . . . while I think of
the happiness into which I sink . . . . (Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers 62-65)
14. For Sartre, the very book Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers is nothing but a horrifying by-product (monstrosity)
“born” from the dead end(s) of masturbation, or what he calls “the childish narcissism of the onanist” (483).
An immaculate conception? More like shit into gold: the twisted afterlife of a (k)notty remainder (“black spot”).
of “the masturbator [‘Genet’] who wants to prolong his excitement”:
But how can we be so sure that there is no “art”—no “beauty”—in this “erotic device” (gadget,
utensil), apparently so attached to (a) certain end(s), a certain (ab)use, as if the calculable program
of an interested botanist? Why (k)not?
As Derrida notes, Kant handles this potentially (k)notty scandal—i.e., the monstrosity of a
“beautiful” gadget (of “the masturbator who wants to prolong his excitement”)—with the “single
stroke” of an all-too-handy distinction (pure cut) between “free beauty” (the tulip), on one hand,
and “mere adherent beauty” (the gadget), on the other. That this handy distinction (pure cut)—no
strings attached?—should involve Kant in the question (quagmire) of “the handle” [Hefte] is of course
not without significance. Or rather “double significance,” if we believe Georg Simmel, for whom
the handle also constituted quite a hairy situation: “one of the most absorbing aesthetic problems.”
15
20
15. In “The Handle” (1911), Simmel notes the uncanny “double significance” of the handle’s being a/part,
i.e., simultaneously “inside” and “outside” the work of art, such that the handle relates (mediates? contaminates?)
the properly autotelic artwork (an end in itself) with an exteriority of heteronomous ends and alien motivations
(manipulations). Thus in his example of the vase, Simmel states:
Although the uncanny “duality” of the handle seems to open up the artwork to the event of otherness as a site
of undecidability, Simmel seems to resolve this aporetic (“ethical”?) dimension of the handle into a Hegelian
“symbol” of harmonious synthesis (i.e., utility and beauty). Thus “the handle becomes a most significant cue to
this higher beauty . . . . a new synthetic form.” In this way, the handle’s “duality formulates the richness of the
life of men and things . . . the ways in which men and things belong to each other, of the fact that they are
simulatenously inside and outside one another, and that every involvement and fusion in one direction is also
a dissolution since it is contrasted with an involvement and fusion in another direction” (274). And yet, in this
give-and-take of the handle (being a/part), Simmel warns: “Everything now depends on our [k]not permitting
the integrity of our self-centered being to be destroyed” (274). See Georg Simmel, “The Handle” [1911], trans,
Rodolph H. Weingartner, in Georg Simmel, 1858-1918, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State UP , 1959),
267-275. For a critique of Simmel, see Theodor W. Adorno, “The Handle, The Pot, and Early Experience”
[1965], trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson, in Notes to Literature, Vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia
UP , 1992), 211-219.
The handle is the part by which [the vase] is grasped, lifted, and tilited; in the handle the vase
projects visibly into that real world which relates it to everything external, to an environment that
does not exist for the work of art as such. [Simmel notes earlier that the work of art “cuts off
these threads” (267)—C.H.] But . . . the handles connecting the vase with the world outside art
also become components of the art form [i.e., simultaneously “proper” and “improper”—C.H.].
. . . Intertwined . . . . The handle belongs to the enclosed unity of the vase and at the same
time designates the point of entrance for a teleology [an end, an event?—C.H.] that is completely
external to that form. (268-272)
Seeking excitement and pleasure, Genet starts by enveloping himself in his images
[pre-fabricated scenarios—C.H.], as the polecat envelops itself in its odor . . . . He is
guided by only one factor [one “end”—C.H.], his state of excitement. These figures
of fantasy must provoke erection and orgasm . . . . as if Flaubert had described the
poisoning of Emma Bovary only to fill his own mouth with ink. (Sartre 485-487)
[ . . . ]
When [Genet] speaks of Darling’s “downy behind” we can be sure that he does not
couple these words for the truth or beauty of the assemblage . . . . Thusfar there is
no art. Writing is an erotic device . . . . that of the masturbator who wants to prolong
his excitement. (Sartre 492-494)
For Kant, manufactured gadgets (utensils)—even broken utensils with a hole (“black spot”) where the
handle should be (disabled; “out of order”; apparently without [sans] purpose; without [sans] end;
useless)—can never provoke a feeling of “free beauty” [freie Schonheit] like the tulip (two-lip?), since
even broken utensils are experienced (re-handled) through the mediation of determinate concepts
[Begriff]. Just like the botanist who puts an end, so to speak, to the “free beauty” of the tulip
(two-lip) through an “impure” de-cision (cutting) that remains attached to certain ends, so, too,
handles can always be (virtually) re-attached to manufactured gadgets, so that even the apparent
aimlessness (“beauty”) of a utensil without [sans] a handle—i.e., with a hole (“black spot”)—remains,
as Derrida says, without the sans of the pure cut, or as Kant says, a “mere adherent beauty” [bloss
anhangende Schonheit], which is to say, a mere “device” (“hollow organ”?) still attached to certain
hand(y) ends and ready-made concepts [Begriff], as if by the silky suture of “the masturbator [one-
handed reader] who wants to prolong his excitement.” Or as Derrida explains:
21
[B]ecause the pure cut could be bandaged . . . . [the] gadget is not absolutely cut off
from its end; one can mediately prolong it toward a goal, virtually supply it, replace
the handle in its hole, rehandle the thing . . . . If the gadget is not beautiful in this
case, it is for want of being sufficiently cut off from its goal [but] . . . . [A]s long as
there is not a pure cut, there is no beauty. No pure beauty, at least . . . . The tulip is
beautiful only on the edge of this cut without [sans] adherence. (“Parergon” 88)
[ . . . ]
[Thus] the botanist cannot find the flower beautiful. At the very most, he can
conceive of an adherent beauty . . . . [bloss anhangende Schonheit], literally, “merely
suspended beauty, hung-on-to, de-pendent on” . . . . Adherent beauty . . . is suspended
by some attachment from the concept [Begriff] of what the object [tulip] must be
[its “end”—C.H.] . . . . however weak, tenuous, half-visible the ligament may be; it is
hung, appended [pendue; appendue]. (Derrida, “Parergon” 91-95)
Fig. 2.6: Fountain, Marcel Duchamp
(1917). Duchamp’s turd critique? A
urinal with its plumbing cut off, i.e.,
without [sans] a handle, disabled.
Left hanging by a tenuous “ligament” (a “tissue of adherence”) from (a) certain dead end(s),
the “impure” aesthetic judgement of the botanist thus reeks of a (k)notty de-cision (a cutting, a
sacrifice, a duty) done with strings attached (a “dingle-berry”), which is to say, a de-cision still undone,
a de-cision that is (k)not (one) (a “black spot”). And, indeed, what else are the “impure” cuttings of
the inmate “Genet”—glued to the backside of his hand(y) “device”—but the calculable program of
a “masturbator who wants to prolong his excitement” by handling his tool (putting an end to it?)
through the artificial crutch (clutch) of ready-made concepts [Begriff], i.e., as if attaching it to a
certain determinate (ab)use by the (k)notty suture of a few . . . pearly drops? Or as Genet writes:
“I felt my tool swelling under my fingers—and I shook it until finally . . .—” (265):
Like some jerk trying to flush Duchamp’s (disabled) urinal after taking a piss inside it (i.e., putting
an end to it),
16
it is as if “Genet” deliriously repeats formulaic scenarios in his solitary cell for the
determinate “pleasure” of (virtually) re-handling a lost “object” (“black hole”? two-lip?) through the
sutured hold of pre-fabricated concepts [Begriff], i.e., through the “hold” (the jerk? the shake?) of
a hand (“hollow organ”) glistening with the fragrant silky string of ejaculated sperm—“ warm and
white, in continuous little jerks” (Genet 64)—a hand with webbed fingers (hairy palms?). “The
onanist wants to take hold of the word as an object” (Sartre 492). No wonder, then, as Derrida
notes, that the interested botanist is incapable of a de-cision—a “pure” judgement of taste—in the
event of “free beauty”:
It is here, of course, with the intervention of a certain irreducible non-knowledge, that Derrida’s
writings on Kantian “aesthetics” seem to foreshadow (to program?) his own (“ethical”) writings on
22
16. Genet writes: “Someone has flushed the toilet in the next cell . . . . and a whiff of odor heightens my
intoxication. My penis is caught in my underpants; it is freed by the touch of my hand.” (109). For the inmate
“Genet,” the smell of blocked latrines (“overflowing with shit and yellow water”) stirs childhood memories of the
outhouse and masturbating with magazines: “It was my refuge . . . . in my hole, like a larva . . . . I would remain
for hours squatting in my cell, roosting on my wooden seat, my body and soul prey to the odor and darkness.
I would feel myself mysteriously moved, because it was there that the most secret part of human beings came
to reveal itself, as in a confessional . . . . Back issues of fashion magazines lay about there, illustrated with
engravings in which the women of 1910 always had a muff . . . ” (Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers 108-109).
A suture holds back the sans [of the pure cut] precisely inasmuch as the determinant
discourse of science [e.g., the conceptual framework of botany—C.H.] forms its
object in it . . . .
[A botanist] can know everything about the tulip, exhaustively, except for
what it is beautiful [its purpose; its “end”—C.H.]. That for which it is beautiful is
not something that might one day be known . . . . Non-knowledge is the point of
view whose irreducibility gives rise to the beautiful . . . . (“Parergon” 89-91)
. . . my hand is smeared with my liberated pleasure. (Genet 71).
[ . . . ]
I have a cramp in my wrist. The pleasure of the last drops is dry. (Genet 87)
responsibility and the “responsible decision,” as David Wills has noted.
17
Thus, Derrida too will
insist on a certain unconditionality of the incalculable in any “decision” worthy of the name,
18
or on
what he calls (with echoes of Kierkegaard) the madness of acting in “the night of non-knowledge
and non-rule.”
19
Like Kant, then, Derrida affirms that there can be no “event of a pure aesthetic
judgement” (“Parergon” 111) without [sans] the incisive interruption (pure cut) of non-knowledge at
the moment of de-cision:
No de-cision, then, without this unfounded “leap”—as if into a bottomless, endless abyss—i.e., with
no strings attached, with no parachute, no reassuring spool of thread (fort/da)—no (k)notty “suture”?
A “mad” leap, in other words, into “a place deprived of place,” a place without [sans] foundation,
where “I” must then (impossibly) assume responsibility for the singular de-cision (cutting, sacrifice)
that no one else could do in my place—i.e., a de-cision (an “end”?) that is resolutely “mine.”
20
Or as
Kant writes in the third Critique, one does not acquire taste by imitation: “To make the judgements
of others into the determining grounds of one’s own would be heteronomy” (163), mere mimicry
(“animal choice”?). The debt of such ready-made “determining grounds,” as Derrida writes, would
annul the decision—i.e., turn the event of coming into the “automatism attributed to machines”:
23
[T]he moment . . . of the . . . responsible decision must remain heterogeneous to
knowledge. An absolute interruption [pure cut—C.H.] must separate them, one that
can always be judged “mad,” for otherwise the engagement of a responsibility would
be reducible to the application and deployment of a [determinate—C.H.] program,
perhaps even a program under the refined form of teleological norms, values, rules,
indeed duties, that is to say, debts to be acquitted or reappropriated, and thus
annulled in a circle that is still implicitly economic . . . .
A “responsibility” or a “decision” cannot be founded on or justified by any
knowledge as such, that is, without [sans] a leap . . . . (Derrida, Rogues 145)
Whenever I have at my disposal a determinable rule, I know what must be done,
and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows knowledge as a
calculable consequence: one knows what path to take, one no longer hesitates. The
decision then no longer decides anything [an “impure” cut?—C.H.] but is made in
advance [i.e., ready-made; pre-fabricated—C.H.] and is thus annulled. It is simply
deployed, without delay, presently, with the automatism attributed to machines.
There is no longer any place for justice or responsibility . . . . (Rogues 84-85)
17. Wills states that it is “no surprise to find an experience of the ethical abyss in Derrida’s work that
parallels yet rewrites his analysis of the parergonal abyss in Kant’s aesthetics.” See David Wills, “Derrida and
Aesthetics: Lemming (Reframing the Abyss),” in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, ed. Tom
Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2001), 123. All further references appear in the text.
18. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason [2003], trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Micheal Naas
(Stanford: Stanford UP , 2005), 148. All futher references appear in the text.
19. Jacques Derrida, qtd. in Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility (Stanford: Stanford UP , 1997), 23.
20. Derrida writes: “the responsibility of responsibility . . . relates me to what no one else can do in my
place.” This irreplaceability, of course, refers mainly to death (assuming one’s own “end” and sacrificing others).
On this formulation, so massively indebted to Heidegger (via Kierkegaard), see Jacques Derrida, The Gift of
Death [1992], trans. David Wills (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1995), 43. All further references appear in the text.
But what kind of (mimetic) jerk would turn the event of coming into a mechanical “automatism”?
No doubt the same jerk that would put an end to “free beauty” (the tulip) by turning it into a
hand(y) “device” (two-lip) by the “hold” of a hand (“hollow organ”) webbed with a few . . . pearly
drops, i.e., the “hold” of a (k)notty suture [Begriff], strings attached. For Kant and Derrida, then,
at stake is the apprehension—or what we might call the ap(e)prehension—of the interested botanist.
(Recall here the etymology of the term “apprehension” from the Latin apprehendere, to seize or arrest,
from prehendere, to get: the act of taking hold.)
21
For “man,” as Kant writes, is a “human hand”:
24
Fig. 2.7: The “hold” of a (k)notty
suture: the “impure” cuttings of a
few fragrant . . . pearly drops?
21. Derrida discusses the “power of apprehension” [Auffassungsvermogen] in the fourth section of “Parergon”
(“The Colossal”), in which the “negative pleasure” of the Kantian sublime (the immeasurable, the incalculable)
infinitely frustrates the calculating economy of the botanist’s mastering grasp [Begriff]. As Derrida writes:
22. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology: From a Pragmatic Point of View [1796-1798], trans. Victor Lyle Dowdell
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP , 1978), 240. All further references appear in the text.
The hold of apprehension is not that of comprehension. In this problematic, the question is always
that of knowing if one can take hold of (apprehend or comprehend, which is not the same thing),
how we set about taking hold, and to what limits prehension can and must extend. How to deal with
the colossal? Why is it almost too large . . . ? [ . . . ] Why does Kant call colossal . . . the presentation of
a concept (of a Begriff whose Begreifen itself would go without [sans] a taking hold . . . )? (126-127)
The characterization of man as a rational animal is found in the form and
organization of the human hand, its fingers, and fingertips. Nature has made them
partly through their construction, and partly through their sensitivity, not only for
manipulating objects in one particular way, but also in an open-ended way [i.e., a
hand without a determinate “end”?—C.H.]. Nature has made them, therefore, fit to
be used by reason [i.e., fit to be put to an end? fit to be abused?—C.H.] . . . .
22
Just as every (disabled) utensil can be (virtually) re-handled—i.e., such that every artifact
(book) becomes the potential “device” (dead end) for “the masturbator who wants to prolong his
excitement” (strings attached)—, so too in the post-Kantian “university without condition,”
23
it is as
if every aesthetic judgement of taste, without [sans] condition, becomes a potential site of abuse
and arrest [Begriff], which is to say, the site of an end-less “ethical” interrogation in which the very
humanity and dignity of the “person” is at stake, i.e., left hanging by a thread, a (k)notty suture.
24
Thus, as Derrida states in a now classic (programmatic?) formulation: since a “decision can only
come into being in a space that exceeds the calculable program”—i.e., the calculating economy
of pleasurable return(s) (i.e., interest)—, there “can be no moral or political responsibility without
this trial . . . . ”
25
It is no accident, of course, as David Wills notes, that Derrida will read this
“trial”—this excessive moment of de-cision (point of no return)—“in terms of the extreme situation
represented by the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac” (123), knife in hand:
A hairy situation, this (k)notty double-bind of being called to—and having to answer for—one’s
cutting of a clinging other (“dingle-berry”), i.e., one’s de-cision to put an end (to it) out of pure
duty? As Derrida notes: “Access to pure duty is, in Kant’s terms, . . . ‘sacrifice,’ the sacrifice of the
passions, of the affections, of so-called ‘pathological’ interests; everything that links [strings
attached—C.H.] my sensibility to the empirical world, to calculation . . .” (Gift of Death 93). So, yes,
the cutting(s) of inc-lination. But why a “trial”? After all, as Kant writes in The Metaphysics of
Morals (1797-1798): “to have something cut off that is a part but not an organ of the body,
for example, one’s hair, cannot be counted as a crime against one’s own person” (547). A bit like
biting one’s fingernails.
—Who cut the cheese?
25
[For Abraham,] responding to or answering a call from one competing necessity,
God, means turning one’s back on [sacrificing—C.H.] an equally pressing priority,
that of kinship. In Derrida’s reading, this [double-bind—C.H.] is less a religious
quandary than the staging of the dilemma [knot—C.H.] of every human relation
and indeed every relation to another . . . . (Wills 123; emphasis added)
23. For Jacques Derrida’s profession of “this space of the new Humanities,” see “The University Without
Condition” [1999], in Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP , 2002), 202-237.
24. Derrida defends Kant’s notion of the “dignity” of the human person as follows:
25. Jacques Derrida, “Afterword: Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Limited Inc,
ed. Gerald Graff (Evanston: Northwestern UP , 1988), 116.
The role that “dignity” [Würde] . . . plays in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals belongs
to the order of the incalculable. In the kingdom of ends, it is opposed to what has a price on the
market [Marktpreis] and so can give rise to calculable equivalences. The dignity of a reasonable
being (the human person, for example, and this is, for Kant, the only example) is incalculable as
an end in itself . . . . [W]e must recognize that this incalculable dignity, which Kant sometimes calls
“sublime,” remains . . . indispensable . . . . [W]e should continue to accompany this Kantian concept
of a dignity that is incalculable and thus transcends the marketplace at all costs. (Rogues 133).
“. . . just try to frame a perfume”! (Such is the outburst that erupts in the middle of
Derrida’s reading of Kant’s turd Critique [“Parergon” 83], and which imposes itself like a lingering
response to a leftover question from Glas: “How could ontology take hold of a fart?” [58]). “We
think we know what properly belongs or does not belong to the human body, what is detached
or not detached from it” (Derrida, “Parergon” 59), but, like Abraham’s answerability to the call
of “pure duty” (the wholly other), any pointed answer to Kant’s call for the categorical “sacrifice” of
a clinging other—i.e., the cutting(s) of inc-lination—must (k)not be executed with the “automatism”
of doing one’s duty “when nature calls.” Taking a shit, after all—“when nature calls”—is but the
insistent “mechanical movement” (heteronomy) of “animal choice” (a “big lump of dung”)
26
and thus
belongs in a place of determinate “ends,” i.e., a bathroom with working pipes (strings attached?).
And, indeed, where else but a “repressive” place of arrest—a cell of solitary confinement—would be
26
Fig. 2.8: Photo of the bathroom
at the Los Angeles Museum of
Contemporary Art (M.O.C.A.).
A place of determinate “ends,”
of “impure” cuttings? A place
without [sans] “art”? (Photo by
author, C.H., 2008.)
26. In “Existence and Ethics” [1963], Emmanuel Levinas contrasts the “explosion of responsibility” to the
mere congealing of matter into a “lump”—a mechanical movement that has nothing to do with “responsibility”:
See “Existence and Ethics,” trans. Jonathan Rée, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane
Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 32. Jacques Derrida, whose own writings on responsibility
are indebted to (but very different from) Levinas’s, makes a similar contrast between the merely “mechanical
movement” of paralysis and the excessive “play” of aporia (i.e., the very condition of the responsible de-cision):
See “Provocation: Forwards,” in Without Alibi, trans. and ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP , 2002), xvii.
[The] irruption of selfhood . . . is equivalent to an explosion of responsibility . . . . The Self . . . acquires
a unique solidarity with Others. But this solidarity has nothing in common with the way a piece of
matter can be incorporated into a larger lump . . . . The Self [instead] is in mutual solidarity with the
non-self, as if it held the entire destiny of the Other in its hands.
Paralysis arrests, whereas aporia, at least as I interpret it (the possibility of the impossible, the “play”
of a certain excess in relation to any mechanical movement, oriented process, path traced in advance,
or teleological program), would be the very condition of . . . de-cision, event . . . .
able to hold (to handle?) the ap(e)prehension of the interested botanist, i.e., the “impure” cuttings
(“pearly drops”) of “the masturbator who wants to prolong his excitement” through “the mimetic
gestures characteristic of monkeys” (Genet 311)? Isn’t such a solitary cell of confinement just the
“place” of one-handed reading: a place totally excluded (cut off) from “art” and the “human(ities)”?
27
Of such a “room”—and its “obscene” cutting(s)—, the inmate “Genet” writes:
Supernatural, indeed. Isn’t this fantastic “repressive hypothesis” hard to swallow: as if the “obscene”
could be cut like a gas (Geist) from the “human(ities)” (no strings attached?), as if the toilets in the
museum never backed-up and overflowed (“the smell rising from the blocked latrines, overflowing
with shit and yellow water” [Genet 107])? I don’t think we can come to grips with the (k)nottiness
of one-handed reading by such a consoling repressive hypothesis.
28
Like the space of the bathroom
(a parasite at the heart of the museum), the (k)notty “place” of one-handed reading does not exist,
except perhaps as the extimate condition of (im)possibility at the heart of the “human(ities),” i.e.,
its “own” dead end.
Indeed, what else are the “pearly drops” cut from the determinate “end” (“bottom”) of the
inmate “Genet” but artful attempts to tastefully frame a perfume—(f)art—in his “cupped hands,”
or as Kant writes of the pure aesthetic judgement of taste: a “reflection of the subject on his own
state [of pleasure or displeasure], rejecting all precepts and rules” (166)?
27
27. Literary critic, Derek Attridge, for example, imagines the singular “place” of deconstructive criticism
in the new Humanities as follows: “A deconstructive criticism will not be one that apes Derrida’s writing on
literature; it will be, in fact, one that does not ape Derrida, or anyone else . . . .” See Derek Attridge,
“Singularities, Responsibilities: Derrida, Deconstruction, and Literary Criticism,” in Critical Encounters: Reference
and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing, eds. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (N.J.: Rutgers UP , 1995), 121.
28. For a Foucauldian genealogy of post-Kantian “aesthetics” that avoids such a “repressive hypothesis,” see
the remarkable work of Ian Hunter: Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education (London:
Macmillan, 1988); “The Occasion of Criticism,” Poetics 17 (1988): 159-184; “Personality as a Vocation: The
Politcal Rationality of the Humanities,” Economy & Society 19.4 (1990): 391-429; “Aesthetics and Cultural
Studies,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, et al. (London: Routledge, 1992), 347-372; Rethinking the
School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); “Assembling the School,” in Foucault
and Political Reason, eds. Andrew Barry et al. (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1996), 143-166.
I squatted . . . . My head was covered with dandruff that formed a crust which I
would scrape off with my nail and then knock from my nail with my teeth, and
which I sometimes swallowed.
It was at that moment that I understood the room. I realized—for a fraction
of a second—its essence. It remained a room, though a prison of the world.I was,
through my monstrous horror, exiled to the confines of the obscene (which is the
off-scene of the world) . . . . The world dwindled, and its mystery too, as soon
as I was cut off from it [no strings attached?—C.H.]. It was a truly supernatural
moment . . . this detachment from the human . . . . (311)
[I]n the cell where I am now writing . . . . I bury myself beneath the covers and
gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open
to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck in. I feel them, almost solid,
“. . . only the odor of my own farts delight me.”
29
But isn’t the (endless) pleasure of trying to take
hold of a fart (“one’s own” end?) by the mimetic gesture of turning two human hands into a “cup”
(a utensil; “hollow organ”)—i.e., of putting them to an unnatural end (abuse?)—just how Sartre
describes Genet’s onanism? a kind of “self-intimacy”? “the ‘double sensation’ of flesh touching itself,
of two fingers of the same hand pressing against each other” (484)? This is a reprehensible pleasure:
“sterile, rootless and aimless . . . in defiance of the rules, in defiance of nature, in defiance of life, in
defiance of the species and in defiance of society” (Sartre 96), which is to say, an aesthetic pleasure?
Here we could think with Genet (and Kant) about the (auto-affective?) pleasures of tobacco—the
repetitive gestures of smoking butts (“a cigar at the tip of my lips”; a scented two-lip) as a version
of the endless pleasure of trying to take hold of a fart, the cigarette being but an artful attempt to
frame a perfume by putting an “end” to the “human hand,” i.e., turning it into a prosthetic “butt”:
For Kant, too, the “influence” of tobacco (smoking butts) is but a “stimulus” that incites “organs to
specific evacuations” through the affective (aesthetic) “susceptibility” of the body’s sense of smell:
28
29. According to Dominique Laporte, the bathroom (privé ) is not only the “disgusting place where one’s
little business is stealthily carried out while one rubs one’s hands” (46), it is also the place where one smells
one’s farts and the farts of others. For Laporte, however, every smell, even when exquisite, “obstinately clings
[strings attached?—C.H.] to the index . . . [to] the materiality of the reference . . . . [Hence] All smells are
primordially the smell of shit” (84-86). See Dominique Laporte, History of Shit [1978], trans. Nadia Benabid
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delight me,
and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether
an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.
(Genet 176-177)
The word ‘butt’ and the taste of the sucked tobacco made . . . the spine stiffen
and draw back with three short jerks, the vibrations of which reverberated . . . on
to infinity, which shuddered and ejaculated a seed of constellations. (Genet 79)
The sense of smell is activated by drawing in air which is mixed [strings attached?
—C.H.] with alien vapors [even though] the body from which the vapors emanate
may be distant from the sensory organ [ . . . ] Smell is . . . taste at a distance [ . . . ]
Internal penetration (into the lungs) through smell is even more intimate than
through the absorptive vessels of the mouth [ . . . ] There is . . . a susceptibility to
certain objects of external sensations which . . . operate upon the organs of smelling
and tasting by a [chemical—C.H.] stimulus . . . . The stimulus is felt like the
influence of certain stable salts that incite organs to specific evacuations . . . . The
material most commonly used for this sensation is tobacco, be it in snuffing, or in
placing it in the mouth between the cheek and the gums to stimulate flows of
saliva, or in smoking it . . . . This kind of familiarity of a man with himself [auto-
affection?—C.H.] takes the place of fellowship, because in place of conversation
[“public” judgements—C.H.] it fills the emptiness of time . . . with continuous
newly excited and quickly vanishing [“private”—C.H.] sensations that have to be
renewed as stimuli time and again [without end?—C.H.]. (Anthropology 41-48)
Given that this kind of “familiarity of a man with himself” (smoking butts; fart-sniffing; pearly
drops) involves a (de-liberate?) “pathological” incitement of the body’s mouth-nose circuit (“taste”)
to “specific evacuations” (ends), it is perhaps not surprising that Kant’s turd Critique will attempt
to cut—to sacrifice—(no strings attached) the sense of smell and its pleasures from the “pure”
aesthetic judgement of taste. Or as Kant writes:
And yet, again, we should not read this simply as Kant’s attempt to “repress” the sense of smell
(bodily pleasure). Quite the contrary.
30
Take Kant’s famous articulation of “disinterested pleasure”
[uninteressirten Wohlgefallen]. As Derrida notes: “[On one hand] There is nothing less aesthetic . . .
than the beautiful object which must not interest us qua aistheton. But [on the other hand] this
aesthetic inexistence [a (k)not?—C.H.] must affect me and that is why the retention of the word
aesthetic is justified, from the start” (“Parergon” 49). So, as with a mere “judgement of the senses,”
a “pure” judgement of taste will always have a (k)notty remainder left behind (“black spot”) which
“must affect me,” and which thus justifies Kant’s retention of the word “aesthetic.” And it is this
(k)notty remainder—a de-cision that is (k)not of one’s own ac-cord (“almost nothing”)—which will
always entangle post-Kantian aesthetics in duty, so to speak, strings attached. Or as Derrida writes:
A (k)notty remainder (“dingle-berry”) which causes talk. Doesn’t this take us back to that threshold
space of the endless prison interrogation, i.e., back to the backside (cleavage) of the inmate “Darling”
who—even before being assigned a cell—was already being made to answer for the bad de-cision
flowering in his behind (an “impure cutting”), being made to assume responsibility for a de-cision
(k)not of his ac-cord (a [k]notty shit-flower)? between sneezing and squeezing: bent (over)?
31
29
30. As Derrida writes of the third Critique: “Starting out from pleasure, it was for pleasure that the third
Critique was written, for pleasure that it should be read. A somewhat arid pleasure—without [sans] concept and
without [sans] enjoyment—a somewhat strict pleasure . . .” (“Parergon” 43).
31. According to Jean-Francios Lyotard, the bending (over) which characterizes Kantian “reflection” (the
reflective judgement of taste) is “not a bending of thought back on itself, but rather . . . the bending of
something that is possibly more ‘inside’ thought than itself. This further inside is nothing other than feeling,
Empfindung, or, as we say today, affect . . . a “this” that is in no way a thing [a (k)not?—C.H.], but rather an
occasion for a ‘pure’ feeling in the Kantian sense . . .” (349). What else is this “feeling” (this “affect”)—“a ‘this’
that is in no way a thing”—but a (k)notty remainder which bends (us) over and causes talk by providing what
Lyotard calls the occasion “to share this feeling-judgement” (349)? Yet, as Ian Hunter argues in “The Occasion
of Criticism” (1988), it is a mistake to start (as Kant and Lyotard do) from some a priori “disposition” of the
“subject” (a “disposition of the mind by which it judges without concepts”), since it is precisely this capacity
which needs explaining. Such a “disposition,” according to Hunter, is but the by-product of aesthetico-ethical
techniques in which readers learn to problematize (their?) (k)notty “feelings.” See Lyotard, “On What is ‘Art’”
[1993], in The Lyotard Reader and Guide, eds. Keith Crome et al. (New York: Columbia UP , 2006), 339-350.
. . . the judgement that the rose is (in its smell ) agreeable is . . . to be sure, an
aesthetic and singular judgement, but not a judgement of taste, rather a judgement
of the senses. (100; emphasis added)
Almost nothing remains . . . . And yet there is pleasure, some still remains . . . . And
it is this remainder which causes talk . . . . (“Parergon” 48)
But can one be made responsible for (k)not doing one’s duty “purely,” with no strings
attached? (“big lump of dung”?)
32
No doubt, “Darling” will be made to do his duty autonomously
(all by himself), sacrificing (knife in hand) a certain (k)notty shit-flower. He will have to handle it
himself. Eat his own shit?
33
In the “long history of the origins of responsibility” (39), as Nietzsche says, the conceptual world of
“guilt,” “conscience,” and “duty” is but a late fruit: “how long must this fruit have hung [like a
“dingle-berry”?—C.H.], bitter and sour, on the tree! And for even longer there was nothing to see
of this fruit . . .” (41). If something reeks about this conceptual world of “duty,” it is because “this
world has really never quite lost a certain odor of blood and torture . . . not even with old Kant:
the categorical imperative smells of cruelty” (Nietzsche 43). And yet, if the place without place
(the mediating turd) of post-Kantian “aesthetic education” is less a space of repression than one of
responsibilization, as I have suggested here, then what are we to make of the (de-liberate) gestures of
a solitary reader like “Genet” who decides—out of principle—to make a “categorical imperative” of
onanism (as if an end in itself)?
34
Or as Sartre writes:
30
32. Derrida writes: “A turd one would like to make one’s own [s’approprier], without ever managing to do
so, which one would like to take back into oneself . . . . But the introjection of the piece [morceau] . . . always
ends up by letting drop an absolutely heterogeneous remainder of incorporation.” See “Cartouches” [1978], in
The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1987), 201-203.
33. As Genet states: “Poetry is the art of using shit and making you eat it” (qtd. in Sartre 536).
34. Marcel Proust had written of onanism in similar terms—as “sufficient in itself and not a substitute for
anything else”—although the “snail-track” remainder of (his) “solitary pleasure” hangs like a “silvery thread”:
See Marcel Proust, “In slumbers,” from Contre Sainte-Beuve [1908-09], trans. Sylvia Warner, in Marcel Proust:
On Art and Literature 1896-1919 (New York: Dell, 1958), 27-32. Emphasis added.
[W]hen I was twelve years old, and . . . locked myself into the water-closet with its dangling
garlands of orris root, it was an unknown pleasure I went in search of, sufficient in itself and not a
substitute for anything else . . . . [T]he window always stood open to accommodate a young lilac
which having taken root in the outside wall had pushed its scented head through the aperture
. . . . I was completely alone, but this element of being out of doors added a delicious uneasiness
to the sense of security which those sturdy bolts assured to my solitude. Then, in search of a
pleasure that I did not know, I began to explore myself . . . I could not have been more agitated,
more terrified. I believed at every moment that I should die . . . . I paused to draw a breath . . . .
and I drew the curtains, though the lilac bough prevented me from shutting the window. At last
a shimmering jet arched forth, spurt after spurt . . . .
In that moment I felt a sort of caress surrounding me. It was the scent of lilac-
blossom, which in my excitement I had grown unaware of. But a bitter smell, like the smell of
sap, was mixed with it, as though I had snapped the branch. I had left a trail on the leaf, silvery
and natural as a thread of gossamer or a snail-track, that was all. But on that bough, it seemed to
me like the forbidden fruit on the T ree of Knowledge . . . in the guise of this almost interminably
extensible silvery thread which I had to spin out of myself . . . I pictured the devil. (29-31)
All prisoners engage in onanism. But usually it is for lack of something better.
They would prefer the most lamentable whore to these solitary revels . . . . But
Genet wants to make bad use of masturbation. To decide to prefer appearances
[pre-fabricated concepts? second-hand supplements?—C.H.] to all else is to place
onanism, out of principle, above intercourse. (397-398; emphasis added)
To prefer onanism over intercourse, to prefer the second-hand supplement over the “real thing”—
out of principle (categorically? no strings attached?)—is undoubtedly a perverse gesture, if not an
outright sign of “mental degenercy.”
35
But what does making “bad use” of masturbation mean? Isn’t
this like deciding to abuse self-abuse? Can it be done? As Sartre explains: this gesture of making
“bad use” of masturbation is linked to Genet’s strategy for encountering utensils in general. Since
every utensil is the “crystalization of a collective imperative . . . which requires conventional acts”
(Sartre 288), using a utensil involves a strange de-cision: “one detaches paper by cutting along the
dotted line” (Sartre 288). Cutting-along-the-dotted-line? Painting-by-the-numbers? As Sartre states:
31
35. As Havelock Ellis notes: masturbation is inevitable when circumstances of social life prevent “relief”
(e.g., going to jail), but if “it is practiced in preference to sexual relationships” (as often happens, says Ellis, in
“mental degeneracy” and “shy and imaginative persons”), then “it becomes abnormal, and may possibly lead to
a variety of harmful results, mental and physical.” See K. Menzies and Ernest Jones [1919], Autoerotic Phenomena
in Adolescence: An Analytical Study of the Psychology and Psychopathology of Onanism (N.Y.: Hoeber, 1924), 48.
[These] “instructions for use” present themselves to Genet as a queer, hybrid, half-
individual, half-collective imperative, as an order that is no longer given to anyone
or by anyone and which nevertheless remains an objective solicitation, which is not
reducible to the simple reflection of an individual desire . . . . The buttons are there
to be buttoned . . . . The gesture is in the thing; it waits . . . .
[I]t is the things which indicate the gesture to be performed and it is
the man who becomes their tool . . . . The gesture he performs is nobody’s, above
all not his: the destructive power of the slip-knot has installed itself in his fingers,
knots them around a throat and tightens them. He will be able to say . . . “It was
fatality that took the form of my hands.” (288-291)
Fig. 2.9: Do It Yourself Flowers (Andy Warhol, 1962).
“Queer,” indeed, is this (k)notty de-cision (“nobody’s”): to detach a piece of paper by cutting along
a dotted line . . . (no strings attached?). Is this gesture active or passive? If it is not “one’s own,”
is it de-liberate? To make “bad use” of masturbation, then, seems to involve more than simply
deciding—out of principle—to mishandle a utensil (one’s “tool”) against a “collective imperative”
(useful procreation), but gestures toward a more disturbing de-cision (disturbance of decision): i.e.,
“. . . to depart from the human through deliberate baseness . . .” (Our-Lady-of-the-Flowers 140). Or
as Franz Kafka—no stranger to such de-liberations—writes in his fable, “Resolutions” (1913):
Between running-your-finger-along-your-eyebrows, on one hand, and cutting-along-a-dotted-line,
on the other (i.e., between resolution and de-liberation), what is the difference? If it were not
impossible to “distinguish between several states, between several movements, between several self-
affections” (the “self-displacement of this little fantasy of a penis”), as Derrida writes in a stirring
passage from “A Silkworm of One’s Own” (1997),
37
perhaps one could conscientiously single-out
a “characteristic movement,” as Kafka says, between running-your-finger-along-your-eyebrows and
plucking-the-petals-off-a-flower, one by one . . . s/he-loves-me-s/he-loves-me-(k)not . . . .
32
36. Franz Kafka, “Resolutions” [1913], trans. Willa and Edwin Muir, in Franz Kafka: Collected Stories, ed.
Gabriel Josipovici (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1993), 11.
37. In “A Silkworm of One’s Own” (1997), Derrida recalls—“before I was thirteen”—watching without
seeing the mysterious “movement” of his boyhood silkworm(s), and in particular the impossible “production”
(“weaving”) of “this little innocent member”—i.e., “the extruded saliva of a very fine sperm, shiny, gleaming,
the miracle of a feminine ejaculation”:
See Jacques Derrida, “A Silkworm of One’s Own” [1997], trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Acts of Religion, ed.
Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 309-355. Emphasis added.
Like the movement of this production . . . this becoming-silk of a silk I would never have believed
natural . . . I was above all struck by the impossible embodied in these little creatures in their shoe-
box . . . . [I]t was impossible to discern a sex. There was indeed something like a brown mouth
but you could not recognise in it the orifice you had to imagine to be at the origin of their silk,
this milk become thread, this filament prolonging their body and remaining attached to it for
a certain length of time: the extended saliva of a very fine sperm, shiny, gleaming, the miracle of
a feminine ejaculation which would take the light and which I drank in with my eyes. But
basically without seeing anything. The serigenous glands of the catapillar can, I’ve just learned,
be labial or salivary, but also rectal. And then it was impossible to distinguish between several
states, between several movements, between several self-affections of the same minusucule living
spontaneity. The self-displacement of this little fantasy of a penis, was it erection or detumescence?
I would observe the invisible progress of the weaving, a little as though I was about to stumble on
the secret of a marvel, the secret of this secret over there, at the infinite distance of the animal, of
this little innocent memeber, so foreign yet so close . . . . What I appropriated for myself over there,
afar off, was the operation, the operation through which the worm itself secreted its secretion
. . . . It dribbled. It secreted absolutely, it secreted a thing which would never be an object to it,
an object for it, an object it would stand over against . . . . a thing that was not a thing [i.e.,
a (k)not?—C.H.] . . . . (353)
[P]erhaps the best resource is . . . to make yourself an inert mass . . . to stare at
others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with your own
hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in you . . . .
A characteristic movement in such a condition is to run your little finger
along your eyebrows.
36
33
. . . we’re at the end of the chapter, again, with the word “flower”
[(“his navel, bud of flesh”: the remains of the mother) . . . ]
[ . . . ]
But despite the umbilical scene (“navelcord” again), despite the
archi-narcissistic and auto-affective appearance of this “Yes-I” which
dreams of massaging itself, of washing itself, of appropriating itself, of
making itself clean, all alone even in the caress itself, the yes
addresses itself to some other, and can appeal only to the yes of some
other; it begins by responding.
—JACQUES DERRIDA
“Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce” (1984)
Chapter Three
Rub It Out:
(En)countering Rubbish in James Joyce’s “An Encounter”
Rubbish, n. (15c) a. Worthless stuff, trash. Also, a worthless person.
b. Worthless, ridiculous, nonsensical ideas, discourse, writing.
—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
. . . letter from litter . . . .
—JAMES JOYCE, Finnegans Wake
Pluck . . .
The scholar who wanders into the archives and encounters one of these (private? personal?) letters
to Nora signed by James Joyce (“these filthy letters of mine” [L 183]) is perhaps not unlike the
nameless, young narrator (“bookworm”) of Joyce’s “An Encounter” (1905), the second story in that
assemblage called Dubliners (1914).
2
Both readers, hungry for something first-hand (“real adventures,
I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home” [D 21]), will have been exposed to—
(s)educed by?—something, apparently, shocking (“Have I shocked you by the filthy things I wrote”
[L 184]),if not thrilling (“You know how to give me a cockstand . . . . I could lie frigging all day
looking at the divine word you wrote. I wish I could hear your lips spluttering those heavenly
34
1. Letter to Nora Barnacle Joyce, 2 December 1909 , in Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard
Ellman (New York: Viking, 1966), 180-181. Emphasis added. All further references appear in the text as L.
2. James Joyce, “An Encounter” [1905], in Dubliners [1914], eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz
(New York: Penguin, 1996), 19-28. All further references appear in the text as D.
. . . my eyes were fixed, as they are even now, on a certain word . . . . There is
something obscene and lecherous in the very look of the letters. The sound of it too
is like the act itself, brief, brutal, irresistible and devilish.
. . . Yes, dear, it is a nice name “My beautiful wild flower of the hedges!
My dark-blue, rain-drenched flower!” . . . to fling you down under me on that soft
belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very
stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your up-
turned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks
and tangled hair . . . . feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck
up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged
in between your fat thighs . . . my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.
I have taught you . . . taught you to make filthy signs to me with your lips and
tongue, to provoke me by obscene touches and noises, and even to do in my
presence the most shameful and filthy act of the body. You remember the day you
pulled up your clothes and let me lie under you looking up at you while you did
it? . . . My prick is still hot and stiff and quivering from the last brutal drive . . . .
Nora, my faithful darling, my sweet-eyed blackguard schoolgirl . . . (my
little frigging mistress! my little fucking whore!) you are always my beautiful wild
flower of the hedges, my dark-blue rain-drenched flower.
1
exciting filthy words [first-hand—C.H.] . . . and fuck fuck fuck fuck my naughty little hot fuckbird’s
cunt for ever” [L 186]). Yet, to read “An Encounter”—as a scholar—is perhaps also to find oneself
(one’s second self? more than one?) in a classroom standing up before students (a minority before
minors?) mouthing the words of the headmaster, Father Butler: “What is this rubbish?” (D 20).
“An Encounter,” however, does not open with a literal scene of pedagogical instruction
(the perhaps familiar figure of the pedagogue, “The No of the Father,” is not first here), but rather
with the lit(t)eral: “a little library made up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck, and The
Halfpenny Marvel” (D 19). Here, let me read it to you, so you can hear for yourself, first-hand,
the lit(t)eral beginning of “An Encounter”:
“An Encounter,” then, lit(t)erally starts out with copies of “old numbers”: an older one (“It was Joe
Dillon”) introduces a few younger ones (pedo-)
3
to a certain “mimic warfare” (D 21) (“We banded
ourselves together, some boldly, some in jest and some almost in fear: and of the number of these
latter, the reluctant Indians . . . I was one” [D 20]), exposing them first-hand (“an old tea-cosy on
his head, beating a tin with his fist”) to the secret promise of the second-hand (“The adventures
related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened
doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories [Yank mags—C.H.] . . . . Though
there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they
were circulated secretly at school” [D 20]).
4
Or is it vice versa? the exposing of some younger ones
35
3. The OED links “Pedo-” [British form paed-] to the Gk. pedo-, comb. form of pais “boy, child,” from
the base peu- “small, little, few, young.” Hence the constellation of English words including: “Pedagogue” (1387)
from O.Fr. pedagogue “teacher of children,” from L. paedagogus “slave who escorted children to school and
generally supervised them,” later “a teacher,” from Gk. paidagogos, from pais (gen. paidos) “child” + agogos
“leader,” from agein “to lead”; “Pederasty” (1609), “sodomy with a boy,” from Mod.L. paederastia, from Gk.
paiderastia “love of boys,” from paiderastes “pederast,” from pais (gen. paidos) “child, boy” + erastes “lover” [the
English term “Pederast” is 1730s]; and “Pedophilia” (1905) from Gk. pais (gen. paidos) “child” + philos “loving.”
First attested in Havelock Ellis. [Derivative noun “Pedophile” is first recorded in 1951.]
4. In his exposé of “the extraordinary amount of tautology” (464) in mass-produced “Yank mags” (476)—
“Boy’s Weeklies” (1939)—George Orwell holds up for ridicule a style that is “easily imitated—an extraordinary,
artificial, repetitive style . . . . [such that] various facetious expressions are repeated over and over again . . . .
‘Ooogh!,’ ‘Grooo!’ and ‘Yaroo!’ (stylised cries of pain) recur constantly . . . . In addition, various nicknames are
rubbed in on every possible occasion” (463-464). See George Orwell, “Boy’s Weeklies” [1939], in Collected
Essays, Vol. 1, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 460-485.
It was Joe Dillon who introduced the Wild West to us. He had a little library made
up of old numbers of The Union Jack, Pluck, and The Halfpenny Marvel. Every
evening after school we met in his back garden and arranged Indian battles. He and
his fat younger brother Leo the idler held the loft of the stable while we tried to
carry it by storm; or we fought a pitched battle on the grass. But, however well we
fought, we never won a siege or battle and all our bouts ended with Joe Dillon’s
war dance of victory . . . . [H]e played too fiercely for us who were younger and
more timid. He looked like some kind of an Indian when he capered round the
garden, an old tea-cosy on his head, beating a tin with his fist and yelling:
—Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka! (D 19)
via the second-hand to what we might call the (s)eduction of the first-hand (“I began to hunger
. . . for wild sensations, for the escape which these chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me.
The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome [as pedestrian—C.H.] to me as the
routine of school [pedagogy—C.H.] in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to
myself” [D 21])? But will there have ever been a first- (hand) (“. . . beating a tin with his fist . . .”)?
One of the things Joyce pulls off with “An Encounter”—which is to say, plucks, which is to say,
simultaneously exposes (like plucking the feathers off a bird) and shelters (like plucking a child out
of an icy current)—is precisely a disordering (of) chronology (a “chronicle of disorder”) when it
comes to the first- and second-hand. This, I want to suggest, is what Joyce lit(t)erally dis-covers
through “An Encounter” with a certain “queer” (D 26) configuration of “rubbish” (“old numbers”)—
36
. . . it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you
were longing to be fucked by me . . . . It was you yourself, you naughty shameless
girl, who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you . . . . It was you who
slid your hand down down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and
touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and
stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your
fingers . . . . It was your lips too which first uttered an obscene word . . . . Perhaps
the horn I had was not big enough for you for I remember that you bent down
to my face and murmured tenderly “Fuck up, love! fuck up, love!” (Letter to Nora,
3 December 1909, 182-183; emphasis added)
Fig. 3.1: Pluck magazine
no. 114 (ca. 1897).
what Hélène Cixous might call “the figure of an entirely different relationship”
5
when it comes to
the series of (s)kid-marks called biblio-erotics
6
(“. . . so old and so new, new secondhand, this is our
culture and its writing . . . . Everything begins with this prosthesis” [Cixous 153]) (“a little library”).
37
5. See Hélène Cixous, “‘Mamae, Disse Ele,’ or Joyce’s Second Hand,” [1996], trans. Eric Prenowitz, in
Stigmata: Escaping T exts (New York: Routledge, 2005), 150. All further references appear in the text.
6. On biblio-erotics, or “the auto-erotic techniques of book sex” (xi), Ian Hunter writes: “the ability to
achieve [pull off—C.H.] sexual pleasure through books and a certain practice of reading is neither incidental
to—nor a regressive [second-hand—C.H.] surrogate for—the real thing. Pornography is not so much a
representation of sexuality as a specific practice of it. We can, therefore, quite properly speak of pornography
as emerging at that point where [in the late-eighteenth century—C.H.] the ethical and literary techniques of
conscience-formation were re-deployed as biblio-erotics or book sex . . . . [i.e.,] the eroticising machinery of the
confession of the flesh was re-deployed through the technique of the book as a biblio-erotics” (40-43). See Ian
Hunter, et al., On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993).
. . . I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when
I read your letter . . . . There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to
make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly,
dirtier, dirtier. (Letter to Nora, 8 December 1909, 184-185)
. . . I imagine things so very dirty that I will not write them [first—C.H.] until I
see how you write yourself. The smallest things give me a great cockstand—a
whorish movement of your mouth, a little brown stain on the seat of your white
drawers . . . . (Letter to Nora, 6 December 1909, 184)
. . . I am going to lie down and pull at myself till I come. Write more and dirtier,
Fig. 3.2: Pluck magazine
no. 441 (ca. 1905).
You should be careful here with these “old numbers” (copies) as some of this (“mimic warfare”) is
bound to rub off on you.
“What have you there in your pocket?” (D 20) It is with these words, i.e., with the start
of this pointed question aimed at a younger one (Leo Dillon) from an older one (the headmaster,
Father Butler), that the nameless narrator (“bookworm”) of “An Encounter,” looking on with the
rest of his class, experiences—first- or second-hand?—something of an awakening, with beating heart:
38
darling. Tickle your little cockey while you write to make you say worse and worse.
Write the dirty words big and underline them and kiss them and hold them for a
moment to your sweet hot cunt, darling, and also pull up your dress a moment
and hold them in under your dear little farting bum. Do more if you wish and
send the letter then to me, my darling brown-arsed fuckbird. (Letter to Nora, 9
December 1909, 186)
One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages of Roman History clumsy
Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy of The HalfPenny Marvel.
— . . . Now, Dillon, up! . . . What have you there in your pocket?
Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo Dillon handed up the paper and everyone
assumed an innocent face. Father Butler turned over the pages, frowning.
—What is this rubbish? he said . . . .
[ . . . ] This rebuke during the sober hours of school paled much of the glory of
the Wild West for me and the confused puffy face of Leo Dillon awakened one
of my consciences [more than one?—C.H.]. (D 20)
Fig. 3.3: Pluck magazine
no. 204 (ca. 1899).
But what to make of this initial heart-pounding public exposure of “rubbish” in a seminar of
Father Butler’s
7
(“Leo Dillon was discovered with a copy”) when its shameful discovery corresponds
to the awakening of a “conscience” (“one of my consciences”), as if merely one in a series of
“old numbers” (“chronicles of disorder”)? Everything begins with this prosthesis: you raise a hand
and stand up when you hear your “own” name called and answer “here” or “present” (“Now,
Dillon, up!”). The (s)eduction of the first-hand: what is being aroused here (ex-posed)?
8
The secretive
reader, Leo Dillon, with a “confused puffy face”—as if engorged with blood (“What have you there
in your pocket?”)—rises up as if some autonomous erection: “Everyone’s heart palpitated as Leo
Dillon handed up the papers and everyone assumed an innocent face.” Everyone assumed one.
There is much to say here about the (heart-)beating response to one’s inner “conscience”
(“mimic warfare”) as if a call from the outside, as if a mere prosthetic supplement (“old number”):
39
7. Avital Ronell has noted a certain “hidden phantasm of sodomy . . . as the groundless ground of the
transmission of knowledge, and how its ghostly echoes still sit in on sem(e/i)nars—the etymological roots of
seminar, seminal works, and other offshoots of the seed of knowledge . . .” (276-278). See “Confessions of an
Anacoluthon: Avital Ronell on Writing, Technology, Pedagogy, and Politics,” jac 20. 2 (2000): 243-281.
8. According to the OED, the word “Educe” (1432), from L. educere, to draw or bring out [“bring out,”
from ex- “out” + ducere “to lead’] is linked to “Educate” (1447), from L. educare, “to bring up, rear.”
. . . I wired you Be careful. I meant be careful to keep my letters secret, be careful
not to let anyone see your excitement, and be careful not to (I am half ashamed
Fig. 3.4: Pluck magazine
no. 253 (ca. 1900).
(“I wanted real adventures to happen to myself” [D 21]). Isn’t this the trap that the nameless, young
narrator (“bookworm”) of “An Encounter” falls into: the trap of emancipation?
9
Setting off on foot, the young ones (pedo-) never make it to the literal “Pigeon House” (D 21)
10
(the real destination of their expedition), but do encounter a “queer old josser” (D 26) in a field.
This “old number” with an “ashen-grey” moustache (D 24), who circles slowly back and forth
“with one hand upon his hip and in the other hand . . . a stick with which he tapped the turf
lightly” (D 24), as if to the beat of a secret tune, suddenly starts to talk:
40
9. At the heart of “emancipation,” as Jean-Francois Lyotard reminds us, is the mancipium, a word which
designates “the gesture of taking in hand. But it also designates—it’s a neuter word—that which is taken in
hand by the manceps, namely, the slave . . .” (419). Lyotard continues: “we know that adults, or those claiming
to be adults, have believed that they could define the child in these terms: one who is held by the hand.
In contrast to this, I would like to think about the following reversal: held in the grip of others during our
childhood, infancy continues to exert its mancipium even when we imagine ourselves to be emancipated, or
independent” (419). Lyotard admits that this thought of the mancipium will be a “scandal” to humanism
(“Humanism, whether Christian or secular, is summed up in the maxim: that man is something to be freed”
[420]), yet he maintains that “this scandal, as a wound (that Freud will call seduction), is inherent to infancy
insofar as the infant is subject to the mancipium of adults. Mancipium here must be taken two ways: as that
which adults exercise over infants, and as that which their own infancies exercise over them even while they are
exercising their mancipium over their infants” (423). The uncertainty here over “what is bound and unbound,”
as Lyotard notes, is “an uncertainty about the core itself that governs emancipation. This uncertainty bears at
one and the same time on the status of the appeal, of that which calls; let’s say it bears on the status of the
father” (423). See Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Mainmise (The Grip),” trans. Elizabeth Constable, Philosophy Today
36. 4 (Winter 1992): 419-427.
The OED, we might also note here, defines the word “Pluck” as both “the act of plucking” and “that
which is plucked . . . handful.” As a verb, “to pluck” designates (1) a sudden sharp pull, a tug, a jerk, a twitch,
a snatch; (2) to pull off the feathers, hair, fruit, petals, etc. from (to strip or make bare); (3) to shape or thin
(the eyebrows) by removing hairs; (4) to snatch or take by force, to steal; (5) to snatch; rescue from danger;
(6) to pull up; to pull (something) out of the ground or place in which it is planted or set; to eradicate, raze,
demolish; (7) printing. of ink: to detach and remove the surface of paper during printing; (8) to give a pull at;
to pull abruptly or with a jerk; also pull (a person or animal) by some part of body; (9) to rob; to plunder; to
swindle, to fleece [to pluck a pigeon]. As a noun, “pluck” designates: the inward part, essence (viscera of beast,
as used for food; animal intestines); in reference to human beings: the heart as seat of courage; determination
not to yield in face of danger or difficulty. [Cf. to “pluck up”: to summon up courage; to rouse one’s spirits.]
10. Formerly a fort, the Pigeon House became an electricity and drainage station, and later a hotel. It was
razed in 1897. At the time of Joyce’s writing, the Pigeon House was a municipal waste tip (because the site
minimized the stench for Dubliners).
to write it now). I was afraid, Nora, you might get so hot [i.e., just reading about
it, second-hand?—C.H.] that you would give yourself to somebody [i.e., seek it
out, first-hand?—C.H.] (Letter to Nora, 10 December 1909, 187)
. . . when the restraining influence [impediment—C.H.] of the school [pedagogue—
C.H.] was at a distance I began to hunger again for the wild sensations, for the
escape which these chronicles of disorder alone seemed to offer me . . . .
The summer holidays were near at hand when I made up my mind to
break out of the [pedestrian—C.H.] weariness of school-life [pedagogy—C.H.] for
one day at least. With Leo Dillon and a boy named Mahony I planned a day’s
miching [expedition—C.H.]. (D 20-21)
. . . he began to talk of school and of books. He asked us whether we had read
Of course, in Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), the scholar Q. D. Leavis holds up Lord Lytton,
in particular, for ridicule as “the first of modern best-sellers” (164), i.e., as an example of one whose
works—“largely masturbatory” (165)—constitute an early symptom of the widespread circulation of
mass-produced “popular novels” into the environment, and, which, because of their lowering of
the “level of appeal” (164), actually “get in the way of genuine feeling and responsible thinking by
creating cheap [second-hand?—C.H.] mechanical responses . . .” (74).
11
41
the poetry of Thomas Moore or the works of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton.
I pretended that I had read every book he mentioned so that in the end he said:
—Ah, I can see you are a bookworm like myself. (D 25)
11. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public [1932] (London: Plimlico, 2000). The following is a
more extensive citation from Leavis’ critique of Lytton and his “lowering of the level of appeal”:
. . . this lowering of the level of appeal makes Lytton the first of modern best-sellers . . . . his
pseudo-philosophic nonsense and preposterous rhetoric carry with them inevitably a debasing of
the novelist’s currency. But they were taken seriously by the general public . . . . To make a useful
generalization: best-sellers before Lytton are at worst dull, but ever since they have almost always
been vulgar. The direction Lytton gave to popular fiction caused it to set its face away from
literature . . . the voluptuous day-dream instead of the dispassionate narration of the complicated
plot. It was Lytton who taught the novelist to use what is now called uplift . . . a device for
rendering acceptable to the reader a fable which his instincts urge him to enjoy but his acquired
social conscience would otherwise oblige him to take exception to . . . . entertainment in which
uplift now figures are largely masturbatory. (164-165).
Fig. 3.5: Pluck magazine
no. 229 (ca. 1899).
And indeed, what happens next in “An Encounter,” at least according to some scholars,
is nothing less than a scene of public masturbation in a field by this “old number”: this “queer old
josser.” Here, let me read it to you, so you can hear it, first-hand:
42
He began to speak to us about girls, saying what nice soft hair they had and how
their hands were and how all girls were not so good as they seemed to be if one
only knew. There was nothing he liked, he said, so much as looking at a nice
young girl, at her nice white hands and her beautiful soft hair. He gave me the
impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart or
that, magnetised by some words of his own speech, his mind was slowly circling
round and round in the same orbit . . . . He repeated his phrases over and over
again, varying them and surrounding them with his monotonous voice. I continued
to gaze toward the slope, listening to him.
After a long while his monologue paused. He stood up slowly, saying that
he had to leave us for a minute or so, a few minutes, and, without changing the
direction of my gaze, I saw him walking slowly away from us towards the near
end of the field. We remained silent when he had gone. After a silence of a few
minutes I heard Mahony exclaim:
—I say! Look what he’s doing!
As I neither answered nor raised my eyes Mahony exclaimed again [more
than once, a second time—C.H.]:
—I say . . . He’s a queer old josser!
—In case he asks us for our names, I said, let you be Murphy and I’ll
be Smith. (D 26)
Fig. 3.6: Pluck magazine
no. 52 (ca. 1896).
What happens in this encounter? All we get here is an ellipsis (“I say . . . He’s a queer
old josser!”), nothing but the beat of three dots (“. . .”), a lit(t)eral series of three (s)kid-marks
(“old numbers”), second-hand. (“I neither answered nor raised my eyes.”) And yet, for the scholar
Fritz Senn, there seems to be no doubt about what this “pervert” (31) is doing: “the man is really
masturbating” (31).
11
Similarly, the scholar Gerald Doherty writes: “the verbal auto-arousal, which
initially gives him his kicks, incites the real masturbation” (43).
12
Joyce, however, never uses the
words “masturbation” or “pervert” in “An Encounter.” Perhaps both of these younger scholars have
fallen under the influence (“mimic warfare”) of an older one, Stanislaus Joyce, whose own first-hand
account of the event has somehow rubbed off on them. Thus as Senn notes: “Its autobiographical
basis is found in a real event in the lives of Joyce and his brother Stanislaus which occurred in
about 1895 when Joyce was thirteen” (29). Here, then, is what Stanislaus writes: “In ‘An Encounter’,
my brother describes a day’s miching which he and I planned and carried out while we were living
in North Richmond Street, and our encounter with an elderly pederast” (62).
13
But, once again,
the word “pederast” never literally occurs in “An Encounter.” (“What is this rubbish?”)
43
11. Fritz Senn, “An Encounter,” in James Joyce’s Dubliners: Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart (New York:
Viking Press, 1969), 26-38. All further references appear in the text.
12. Gerald Doherty, “‘An Encounter’: The Jouissance T rip,” in Dubliners’ Dozen: The Games Narrators Play
(Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson UP , 2004), 36-45.
13. Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper (New York: Viking Press, 1958), 62.
Fig. 3.7: Pluck magazine
no. 108 (ca. 1897).
A series of three (s)kid-marks (“. . .”). A “dirty little secret”? What is being ex-posed here?
And how does this (shameful?) public exposure of a “queer old josser” (“bookworm”) relate to
the heart-pounding (arousing?) discovery of “rubbish” (“old numbers”) in Father Butler’s classroom
seminar? According to the scholar and novelist, D. H. Lawrence, writing in 1929:
44
14. D. H. Lawrence, “Pornography and Obscenity” [1929], in Sex, Literature and Censorship, ed. Harry T.
Moore (New York: T wayne Publishers, 1953), 69-88. All further references appear in the text.
This “dirty little secret” has become infinitely precious to the mob of people today.
It is a kind of hidden sore or inflammation which, when rubbed or scratched,
gives off sharp thrills that seem delicious. So the dirty little secret is rubbed and
scratched more and more, till it becomes more and more secretly inflamed, and
the nervous and psychic health of the individual is more and more impaired.
One might easily say that half the love-novels and half the love-films today depend
entirely for their success on the secret rubbing of the dirty little secret. You can call
this sex-excitement if you like, but it is sex-excitement of a secretive, furtive sort,
quite special. The plain and simple [first-hand?—C.H.] excitement, quite open and
wholesome . . . is not for a minute to be confused with the furtive [second-hand?
—C.H.] excitement aroused by rubbing the dirty little secret in all secrecy in
modern best-sellers. This furtive, sneaking, cunning rubbing of an inflamed spot in
the imagination is the very quick of modern pornography, and it is a beastly and
very dangerous thing. You can’t so easily expose it . . . . So the cheap and popular
modern love-novel and love-film flourishes . . . . (77-78; emphasis added)
14
Fig. 3.8: Pluck magazine
no. 565 (1915).
Lawrence is quite emphatic about the need to counter this “mob-reaction” (72):
Because it is “always second-hand,” the mob and its reactions (“diddled into existence”) are easy
prey to the mass-produced environment (“the outside”), which acts as “an invariable stimulant”:
The problem for Lawrence (like the problem for Pluck magazine, which claimed to be “the paper
that kills the ‘penny dreadful’”)
15
is thus: How to rub out “rubbish”?
And indeed, for F . R. Leavis, a scholar who also argued that “a modern education worthy
of the name must be largely an education against the environment” (106),
16
the task of modern
teachers of English appears to be entirely bound up in this paradox of (en)countering “the outside”:
45
15. On this question of the problem of modern serial killers, note the following editorial from Pluck, no. 1
(1894), entitled “Why This Paper is Published and What It Is Going To Do”:
See Katherine Mullin, “‘Works which boys couldn’t read’: Reading and Regulation in ‘An Encounter’,” in James
Joyce, Sexuality and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2003), 28-55.
16. F . R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment [1933] (London: Chatto & Windus,
1948). Emphasis added. All further references appear in the text.
Young people devour . . . trash ravenously, not because they really like it, but because they must
read something in these reading days. A bitter cry for healthy literature comes every day from the
police courts. Each week dozens of boys and lads have to pay the penalty of offences and crimes
they would never have committed but for the reading of penny dreadfuls. (qtd. in Mullin, 39)
Why? . . . The mass is forever vulgar, because it can’t distinguish between its own
original feelings and feelings which are diddled into existence by the exploiter. The
public is always profane, because it is controlled from the outside, by the trickster,
and never from the inside, by its own sincerity. The mob is always obscene, because
it is always second-hand. (71-72)
For whenever the dirty little secret exists, it exists as the centre of the vicious circle
of masturbation self-enclosure . . . . And the most high-flown sex-emanicipated
young people today are perhaps the most fatally and nervously enclosed within the
masturbation self-enclosure. Nor do they want to get out of it . . . . (Lawrence 85)
. . . whether it be the pornography of the rubber-goods shop or the pornography
of the popular novel, film and play, [it] is an invariable stimulant to the vice
of self-abuse, onanism, masturbation, call it what you will. In young or old, man or
woman, boy or girl, modern pornography is a direct provocative of masturbation.
It cannot be otherwise . . . . Sex must go somewhere, especially in young people.
So, in our glorious civilization, it goes to masturbation. Masturbation is the one
thoroughly secret act of the human being, more secret even than excrementation
. . . . and it is stimulated and provoked by our glorious popular literature of
pretty pornography, which rubs on the dirty secret without letting you know what
is happening. (Lawrence 78)
Many teachers of English who have become interested in the possibilities of
training taste and sensibility must have been troubled by accompanying doubts.
What effects can such training have against the multidinous counter-influence—
films, newspapers, advertising—indeed, the whole world outside the class-room?
Ironically, for the nameless, young narrator (“bookworm”) of “An Encounter,” this exposure to
the “world outside the class-room” ends in yet another repetition (another copy) of Leo Dillon’s
heart-pounding response to being caught red-handed in Father Butler’s seminar—exposed (aroused?)
—(with) an “old number”:
If anyone can rub out “rubbish,” perhaps Joyce’s work of “litteringture” pulls it off.
18
46
17. “Seize me by the ankles” recalls a number of “ped-” words (from L. pedes “one who goes on foot,”
from pedis “foot”) that haunt “An Encounter” and its thematics of de-feat. Thus this final scene of potentially
losing one’s footing repeats an earlier scene of anxious anticipation: namely, after ditching school and hiding his
books near an ashpit, the young narrator waits for his companions to show up: “I sat up on the coping of the
bridge admiring my frail canvas shoes which I had diligently pipe-clayed overnight . . . . The granite stone of the
bridge was beginning to be warm and I began to pat it with my hands in time to an air in my head” (D 12).
“Pipe clay,” here, refers to a white shoe dressing that is mixed and rubbed on shoes (“to whiten with pipe clay”),
but also echoes the Old Testament phrase “feet of clay” (meaning: an unexpected flaw in the character of one
admired). In Ulysses (1922), Joyce writes: “They discovered to their vast discomfiture that their idol had feet of
clay, after placing him upon a pedestal” (654). Sitting up on the warm coping, patting it to the beat of a tune
in his head, the young narrator both anticipates and repeats the tapping stick of the “queer old josser” and thus
suggests how “An Encounter” revolves around several “beating fantasies,” to use a term of Sigmund Freud’s. The
question here, however, is less one of “A Child Is Being Beaten” than one of . . . “Beating-off.”
18. Joyce’s neologism—“litteringture”—occurs in Finnegans Wake [1939] (London: Penguin, 1999), 570.
. . . But literary education, we must not forget, is to a great extent a
[second-hand—C.H.] substitute. What we have lost is the [first-hand—C.H.]
organic community with the living culture it embodied . . . . Those who in school
are offered (perhaps) the beginnings of education in taste are exposed, out of school,
to the competing exploitation of the cheapest emotional responses . . . immediate
pleasures, got with the least effort. (Leavis 1-2; emphasis added)
. . . I stood up abruptly. Lest I should betray my agitation I delayed a few moments
pretending to fix my shoe properly and then, saying that I was obliged to go, I
bade him good-day. I went up the slope calmly but my heart was beating with
fear that he would seize me by the ankles. (D 28)
17
Fig. 3.9: Joyce, on a pedestal,
plucks a guitar string (1915).
47
What is threatening in mimesis, understood in these terms, is
exactly that kind of pluralization and fragmentation of the “subject”
provoked . . . : nothing more than a series of heterogeneous roles . . .
multiple borrowing[s] . . . . In short, what is threatening in mimesis is
feminization . . . .
—PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE
“Typography” (1975)
. . . just as people whom nothing moves or touches any longer are
taught to cry again by films.
—WALTER BENJAMIN
“One-Way Street” (1928)
Chapter Four
Mimetic Jerks:
Hugo Münsterberg <<<“Movies”>>> Masturbating Hand
Jerk, n. and vb. (15c) a. To move (anything) by a sharp suddenly arrested motion,
like that with which a whip is wielded; to thrust, pull, shake
by such a motion.
Jerk, n. and vb. (19c) a. To move the limbs or features in an involuntary spasmodic
manner. b. Physiol. An involuntary spasmodic contraction of
muscle, due to reflex action of nerves from external stimulus.
To jerk off (c. 1930) To masturbate. Slang.
—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
Jerk, n. (c. 1930) A male masturbator; a fool; an idiot; a failure.
—CASSELL DICTIONARY OF SLANG
Pull yourself together.
Isn’t it a cheap shot to set up “modern education” (“training taste and sensibility”) as
simply a counter-education, as F . R. Leavis says, aimed against the environment of mass-produced,
second-hand pleasures “outside the class-room,” i.e., those “immediate pleasures, got with the least
effort”? After all, for early-twentieth-century social reformers and educators like Hugo Münsterberg,
as Scott Curtis has recently argued, “The urge to protect children from the ‘degeneracy’ of mass
entertainments went hand-in-hand with the desire to educate the general public” (446).
1
Indeed,
for progressive reformers, who “hoped to use cinema for educational purposes” (450), the “movies”
were “both scourge and cure” (Curtis 448). Münsterberg, for example, in an article written for
Mother’s Magazine in 1917, “Peril to Childhood in the Movies,” begins by conceding that “steady
contact” with the “movies” (trashy photoplays) may constitute a “danger for excitable nerves” (195):
48
1. Scott Curtis, “The Taste of a Nation: Training the Senses and Sensibility of Cinema Audiences in
Imperial Germany,” Film History 6 (1994): 445-469. All further references appear in the text.
2. Hugo Münsterberg, “Peril to Childhood in the Movies,” Mother’s Magazine 12 (1917), reprinted in
Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 191-200. All further references appear in the text.
The mind easily becomes accustomed to such an atmosphere of vulgarity and
triviality, just as man becomes adjusted to poor air; but this does not contradict
the demand of hygiene for fresh air and good ventiliation . . . . [T]he boy or girl
who has been in steady contact with good books from childhood will feel the
blessing of it throughout life. But it is still more true that the steady contact
with trash gives the stamp of lasting mediocrity. Just as the hearing of much slang
ruins the sense for the subtle shades of language, the seeing of stupid and silly
photoplays destroys the finer and deeper values of existence. (194)
2
And yet, despite these “stupid and silly photoplays,” which—like exposure to “slang”—accustom
“the mind to haste and superficiality” (194), i.e., “immediate pleasures, got with the least effort,”
Münsterberg claims that the benefits of this new technology outweigh its negative affects. “We taboo
the saloon and the cigarette for the child,” says Münsterberg, but to taboo the “movies”
Far from being “outside the class-room,” the “movies” are already a potential “public school”
(“with splendid influence on every boy and girl”). And yet, for this pedagogical self-realization to
happen, as Münsterberg argues, in no way depends on screening explicitly-aimed “educational films.”
Indeed, to force such “pictorial schoolbooks” on “young minds” would be a great mistake:
More than exposing “young minds” to “facts,” what is needed is the “teaching of beauty implanted
early in every heart,” cinematically: “No lesson is more needed than that of wholesome emotion and
pure feeling and sentiment.” In short, the “greatest mission” of the “movies,” as Münsterberg writes
in the conclusion to his ground-breaking study, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), is
“aesthetic cultivation” (“aesthetic training”):
Of course, the notion that a technological apparatus (the “movies”) can teach the “great difference
between real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses” is anything but self-evident, especially in
1916. Indeed, for a Harvard Professor to write what is today considered the first “serious” work of
49
3. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study [1916] (New York: Routledge, 2002), 158.
All further references appear in the text.
. . . would be shortsighted and inexcusable. It would mean to overlook the
tremendous amount of good which the screen theater may bring to every child.
It would mean to ignore that the moving picture may be a public school
with splendid influence on every boy and girl. (Münsterberg 195-196)
The motion pictures are, first of all, great teachers . . . . Yet, it would be
one-sided if we were to think only of the so-called educational films as sources
of knowledge. No doubt, many a boy and girl has an instinctive dislike for
such outspoken pedagogical means. When they go to enjoy themselves they
do not want to feel that pictorial schoolbooks are forced on them . . . . [T]he
young mind has to learn more than facts. No lesson is more needed than that
of wholesome emotion and pure feeling and sentiment . . . . We need the
teaching of beauty implanted early in every heart. (197-199)
. . . the greatest mission which the photoplay may have in our community is
that of aesthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience daily, no aesthetic
influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame of mind. On the other
hand, no training demands a more persistant and planful arousing of the mind
than the aesthetic training . . . . The people still have to learn the great difference
between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and the
mere tickling of the senses. (emphasis added)
3
“film theory” in 1916 is remarkable,
4
given that another Harvard Professor, I. A. Richards, in 1924,
was still holding “movies” responsible for the “immature” “emotional adjustment” of his students and
their “stock responses” (“artificial fixations”).
5
As Richards writes in Principles of Literary Criticism:
If “wholesome emotion and pure feeling” are indeed what is needed, as Münsterberg and Richards
agree, Richards seems to be less optimistic that this apparatus of “aesthetic training” (the “movies”)
can ever teach the difference between “real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses,” when even
the most “natural and personal” (aesthetic) “decisions” (i.e., those of attraction: “what constitutes a
pretty girl or a handsome young man”) are now determined (mechanically) by “artificial fixations.”
We can perhaps understand why Münsterberg felt compelled to confess that before writing his book:
50
4. See Allan Langdale, “S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg,” in Hugo
Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings (New York: Routledge, 2002), 2.
5. I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism [1924] (London: Routledge, 2001), 188-189. All further
references appear in the text.
6. Hugo Münsterberg, “Why We Go to the ‘Movies,’” The Cosmopolitan (1915): 22-32, reprinted in The
Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), 172.
At present, bad literature, bad art, [and] the cinema [tout court] . . . are an influence
of the first importance in fixing immature . . . attitudes to most things. Even the
decision as to what constitutes a pretty girl or a handsome young man, an affair
apparently natural and personal enough, is largely determined by magazine covers
and movie stars. (189)
I should have felt it as undignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving-
picture show, just as I should not have gone to a vaudeville performance or to a
museum of wax figures or to a phonograph concert.
6
Fig. 4.1: Hugo Münsterberg (second from left) with colleagues from the Harvard Philosophy Department (c. 1905):
William James (seated); Josiah Royce (second from right); George Palmer (far left).
A museum of wax figures? a phonograph concert? That Münsterberg would initially classify
the “movies” with fairground attractions—artificial s(t)imulations of the real thing—is not surprizing,
given that, in 1914, as we shall see, the “movies” were still largely associated with “lower-class”
carnival rides and hand-cranked peepshow arcades, or what Tom Gunning has called a “cinema of
attraction.”
7
And yet, as Richards notes (alluding to “coenesthesia”), such “stimulating situations
[despite their artificiality] give rise to widespread ordered repercussions throughout the body” (89),
hence his concern (like Münsterberg’s) for the triggering of (im)proper “impulses” in the student
body (52), or what Münsterberg calls its “planful arousing.” Indeed, in a chapter on “Synaesthesis”
from his book, Foundations of Aesthetics (1922), Richards cites Münsterberg on the artful triggering
of such (“disinterested”) “impulses”:
Not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”
9
Although a “book is a machine to think with,” as Richards says
(vii), “the pleasure [of reading], no matter how great it may be, is no more the aim of the activity
in the course of which it arises, than, for example, the noise made by a motorcycle . . . is the reason
for its having been started” (88). Aimless triggering? Here, in a nutshell, is the problem Münsterberg
encounters when he (accidentally) falls under “the spell” of these “artificial fixations” (the “movies”),
having “risked,” as he says, seeing moving shots of Annette Kellermann in Neptune’s Daughter (1914):
51
7. See Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide
Angle 8 (1986): 63-70.
8. I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden, The Foundations of Aesthetics [1922] (New York: Lear Publishers,
1948), 77-78.
9. William Wimsatt and Cleanth Brooks summarize Richards’ Schillerian theory of synaesthesis as follows:
See William K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Vintage, 1957).
10. Hugo Münsterberg, quoted in Donald Laurence Fredericksen, The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory:
Hugo Münsterberg (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 20.
Any experience must involve the arousal and interplay of various impulses, but in the experience
of beauty Richards contends that our impulses are organized in a peculiar way. In this peculiar
organization which constitutes synaesthesis, the rivalry of conflicting impulses is avoided, not by our
suppressing [repressing—C.H.] the impulses, but, paradoxically, by our giving them free rein . . . .
Synaesthesis is . . . a harmonization: the competing impulses sustain not two states of mind but one.
They do not split the ego in two, but complete and enrich it. (616)
Last year, while I was traveling a thousand miles from Boston, I and a friend risked
seeing Neptune’s Daughter, and my conversion was rapid. I recognized at once that
here marvelous possibilities were open, and I began to explore with eagerness the
world which was new to me. Reel after reel moved along before my eyes—all styles,
all makes . . . . Surely I am now under the spell of the “movies” and, while my case
may be worse than the average, all the world is somewhat under this spell.
10
As we realise beauty, we become more fully ourselves the more our impulses are
engaged [aroused—C.H.] . . . . [when] our interest is not canalised in one direction
. . . [but] becomes ready to take any direction we choose . . . . [However] When works
of art produce . . . action, or conditions which lead to action [triggering it—C.H.],
they are . . . called not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”
8
52
Fig. 4.2: Advertisement for Annette Kellermann in Neptune’s Daughter (1914), “A Gorgeous and Thrilling Spectacle.”
Kellermann, whose “measurements” were said to perfectly mimic those of the statue Venus de Milo
(Fig. 4.2), was a champion swimmer before becoming a “star,” and was notorious during her day
for doing the first “nude scene” in a feature-length film, A Daughter of the Gods (1916), as well as
for inventing the fitted one-piece bathing suit (Fig. 4.3), which she was arrested for wearing on
a Boston beach in 1907. (Not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”)
To raise the question of “Pygmalionism” here, as Lynda Nead has recently done in relation
to early cinema,
11
seems particularly suited to Münsterberg’s audacious attempt, in 1916, to elevate
the “movies” from a mere fairground “attraction” to an autonomous “art” capable of teaching the
difference between “real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses.” Indeed, because the mimetic
suggestion of “depth” and “plasticity” (the reel thing) is so strong in the interaction between the
moving image and the mind of the spectator, as Münsterberg claims, he is constantly returning to
the example of sculpture as if to prove to himself that the “movies” (like statues on a pedestal)
never really become, for us, “starting points for imitation and other motor responses” (154):
53
11. Lynda Nead, “Pygmalionism and the Image,” in The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c.
1900 (New Haven: Yale UP , 2007), 58-103.
As soon as a work of art tempts us to take it as a piece of reality, it has been
dragged into the sphere of our practical action, which means our desire to put
ourselves into connection with it. Its [autotelic] completeness in itself is lost, and
its value for our aesthetic enjoyment has faded away . . . . [T]he marble statue has
Fig. 4.3: Pin-up picture postcard of Annette Kellermann (c. 1905).
Thus, despite any mimetic suggestibility, the unreal “whiteness” of the statue functions as a kind
of automatic safety-mechanism against anyone mistaking it (“her”) for the real thing. And yet,
Münsterberg still feels it necessary, here, to invoke one more mechanism: i.e., the spectator’s own
aesthetic response-ability. “We do not respond,” says Münsterberg, to “the smile of the marble girl,”
“bringing a chair or a warm coat for the woman in marble,” because to do so would be to drag
“her” (it) into the “sphere of our practical action,” violating the perfect (autotelic) isolation of “art”:
The (“sexual”) “violation of statues,” however, as Richard von Krafft-Ebing called it in
Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), suggests that while the artist may “ cut off every possible connection
. . . [by placing] his statue on a pedestal, so that it cannot possibly step into the room and walk
around” (Münsterberg 117), this is still no guarantee that it (“she”) will not become, for us, a
“starting point for imitations and other motor responses.” Thus, Krafft-Ebing, while conceding that
the “sexual influence is . . . potent in the awakening of aesthetic sentiments” (31), states:
Of course, in 1914, the year Münsterberg saw his first “movie,” Neptune’s Daughter, this type of
“violation” of “art” was not limited to men seeking “orgasm and ejaculation,” as Krafft-Ebing says,
but also included several militant suffragettes, like Mary Richardson, who repeatedly stabbed a Diego
Velazquez nude, The Rokeby Venus, in the National Gallery, London, on March 10, 1914. Protesting
54
12. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-Forensic Study [1886], trans. Harry E.
Wedeck (New York: G. P Putnam’s Sons, 1965).
not the colors of life, but a whiteness unlike any [real] human being. Nor does it
appear a deficiency . . . . [E]very work of art has its frame or its base [pedestal] . . .
[i.e.,] the separation of the offered experience from the background of our real life
. . . . We have no thought of bringing a chair or a warm coat for the woman
in marble. The work which the sculptor created stands before us in a space into
which we cannot enter, and because it is entirely removed from the reality toward
which our actions are directed, we become aesthetic spectators only. The smile of
the marble girl wins us as if it came from a living one, but we do not respond
to her welcome. (Münsterberg, 123-124; emphasis added)
Just as she appears in her marble form, she is complete in herself without any
relation to us or to anyone else. This very difference from reality has given her
that self-sustained perfect life. (Münsterberg 124)
. . . the violation of statues . . . from ancient to modern times . . . always gives the
impression of being pathological . . . . Clisyphus . . . violated the statue of a goddess
in the Temple of Samos, after having placed a piece of meat on a certain part.
In modern times, the Journal L ’événement of March 4, 1877, relates the story of
a gardener who fell in love with a statue of the Venus de Milo, and was discovered
attempting coitus with it . . . . These cases stand in etiological relation with . . . the
so-called voyeurs (spectators), i.e., men who . . . seek to have orgasm and ejaculation
at the sight of an excited woman. (434)
12
the arrest of fellow suffragette, Emily Pankhurst, Richardson attacked Valazquez’s nude with a small
axe, later claiming: “I didn’t like the way men visitors to the gallery gaped at it all day.”
13
Following
this sensational “wounding” of the “national body,” as Lynda Nead says, Richardson was pathologized
in the press, nicknamed “Slasher Mary” and the “Ripper,” as if to connect her (deliberate?) actions
with those of notorious murderers, i.e., “deviants” who acted with a kind of “demonic possession”
(38). The most famous “attack” on a nude, however, occurred a year earlier, February 17, 1913,
when Marcel Duchamp—a leading figure of Dada—exhibited his Nude Descending a Staircase, No.2
in New York (“a cyclone in a shingle factory”). With his fellow Dadaist, Francis Picabia, who was
himself producing a kind of anti-art called “mechanomorphs” (Fig. 4.5), Duchamp, as Amelia Jones
has argued, was attempting to undermine the very institution of “art” through an attack on post-
Kantian assumptions of spectatorial “disinterestedness,” hence his “sexualization and eroticization of
the subjects and objects of art.” (Not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”)
14
Ironically, then, it is at the
very moment when Dadaists begin challenging the institution of “art” through “overt sexualizations
55
Fig. 4.4: Cartoon. “Now Ain’t That a Shame” (Donald McGill, 1914).
13. Mary Richardson, quoted in Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London:
Routledge, 1992), 37. All further references appear in the text.
14. Amelia Jones, “Eros, That’s Life, Or the Baroness’ Penis,” in Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York,
eds. Francis Naumann and Beth Venn (New York: Whitney Museum, 1996), 239. All further references appear
in the text.
of the artist/viewer relationship” (Jones 239) that Münsterberg, a neo-Kantian Harvard Professor
of Applied Psychology, will attempt to argue that the “movies” are not only a legitimate “art,” but
a vehicle of “aesthetic cultivation” (“aesthetic training”) capable of teaching the difference between
“real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses.”
15
Or as Münsterberg writes in an essay entitled
“Sex Education” (1914), “It would be wonderful if the aesthetic culture of our community had
reached a development at which the aesthetic attitude . . . would be absolutely controlling”:
“If the mind is aesthetically cultivated . . . .” But, in the “planful arousing” of “young minds,” can the
“movies” ever avoid a certain triggering (“starting points for imitations and other motor responses”)?
56
Fig. 4.5: Portrait of a Young American Girl in a State of Nudity (Francis Picabia, 1915).
15. Münsterberg raised in Germany, studied under Wilhelm Wundt (“the father of psycho-physiology”) at
the University of Leipzig. At the urging of William James, Münsterberg came to Harvard in 1892 to chair the
Psychology Lab. His numerous publications in applied psychology include: Psychology and the T eacher (1909);
Psychotherapy (1909); Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913); and Psychology and Social Sanity (1914).
Philosophically, however, Münsterberg was a “neo-Kantian” who wrote texts like The Principles of Art Education
(1905) and The Eternal Values (1909). Whence the bi-partite tensions that (de)stabilize The Photoplay: A
Psychological Study (1916). For a reading of Münsterberg’s film theory through the prism of his neo-Kantianism,
see Donald Fredericksen, The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory: Hugo Münsterberg (New York: Arno, 1977).
16. Hugo Münsterberg, “Sex Education,” reprinted in Psychology and Social Sanity (New York: Doubleday,
1914), 29. All further references appear in the text as SE.
The nude marble statue is an inspiration, and not a possible stimulus to frivolous
sensuality, if the mind is aesthetically cultivated . . . .
16
“Art is Dead” (“Bang Bang”)
Far from being a perfect autotelic “artwork,” the “Dadaist chair” will leave a “moist, sticky, and
smelly” residue on the “finger” of anyone who interacts with it. This (shitty) residue is unavoidable.
Like a series of black cuts left on the “nude body” of The Rokeby Venus, or a black “moustache”
left on the Mona Lisa’s “shit-eating grin,” these gestures expose “art” to “the kinaesthetic responses
of pornography” (Nead 42).
20
Or rather like a “Mutt” (i.e., the black signature left on Duchamp’s
“ready-made” urinal, Fountain), these gestures expose “art” as inextricably (“mechanomorphically”?)
mixed with “the kinaesthetic responses of pornography.” Ironically, it is as if the Münsterberg who
was trained in “psycho-physiology” and who thus worries about the “planful arousing” of what he
calls “our mental mechanism” (78) already knows this. That is, the Münsterberg who writes the first
part of The Photoplay, the part where he merely tries to put his finger on the psycho-physiology of
57
We don’t believe in God any more than we do in Art . . . .
—FRANCIS PICABIA
17
DADA remains . . . shit, but from now on we want to shit in different
colors so as to adorn the zoo of art . . . .
We are circus ringmasters and can be found whistling amongst the winds
of the fairgrounds . . . . ohoho, bang bang.
We declare that the motor car is a feeling that has quite pampered us in
the slowness of its . . . noises . . . .
—TRISTAN TZARA
18
The Dadaists are against Art. Meaning?
Put your finger on a Dadaist chair, take it away and it is moist, sticky,
and smelly.
—GEORGES RIBEMONT-DESSAIGNES
19
17. Francis Picabia, “Art,” Littérature 13 (1920) (“Twenty-Three Manifestos of the Dada Movement”),
reprinted in The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2006), 188-189.
18. T ristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto of Mr. Antipyrine” (1916), reprinted in The Dada Reader: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2006), 191-192.
19. Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, “Buffet,” Littérature 19 (1921), trans. Ian Monk, reprinted in The Dada
Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Dawn Ades (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2006), 203-204.
20. One of Marcel Duchamp’ most famous “ready-mades,” L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), involved afixing a black
“moustache and goatee” to a cheap reproduction (postcard) of Leonardo de Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Duchamp’s title,
L.H.O.O.Q., when read quickly in French, as several critics have pointed out, sounds like: “She has the hots.”
Donald Kuspit, however, goes further, noting, “It is a multilayered pun: the letters become words which become
a devaluing male comment on the beautiful, dignified woman—she’s just another slut. She’s smiling because
she’s thinking of being fucked—more probably, of masturbating, that is, fucking herself” (111). See Donald
Kuspit, “Using Art to Laugh Oneself Sick: T wo Examples of Punning in Early Avant-Garde Art,” Art Criticism
13.1 (1998): 107-113.
“kinematoscopic perception,” or what he calls “the elementary excitements of the mind which enter
into our experience of the photoplay” (65), already knows that the (reel) feelings of plasticity and
(e)motion triggered by the “movies” depend on the inextricable (“mechanomorphic”) interpenetration
of the spectator’s aesthetic response-ability with a cinematic apparatus. Indeed, for Münsterberg, this
“mixture,” as he calls it, is what distinguishes the “art” (techne) of the “movies” from “live” theater:
Like the “Dadaist chair,” then, the (“mechanomorphic”) “mixture” that constitutes “kinematoscopic
perception” depends on arousing the “interest” of whoever “risks” this interaction (the “movies”),
since in order for us to “furnish to them more than we receive,” as Münsterberg says:
Unlike Dadaists, however, who welcomed “the crises provoked in the arts [by cinema]
when it became impossible to separate technology from technique,” as Thomas Elsaesser has noted,
21
the Münsterberg who writes the second part of The Photoplay, the part which tries to elevate the
“movies” to “art,” will struggle to prove that the “aim” of this “new form of true beauty” (160)
is “separate from our practical life and is in complete agreement within itself” (128). An aimless
triggering? And yet, such an autotelic “orchid in the land of technology,” as Walter Benjamin says,
“has become the height of artifice” in “the shooting of a film.”
22
Indeed, the aim of “Dadaists,”
according to Benjamin, was to accelerate the (cinema’s) “ruthless annihilation of the aura in every
object they produced, which they branded as [‘ready-made’ ‘mechanomorphic’] reproduction” (238):
58
21. Thomas Elsaesser, “Dada/Cinema?” in Dada and Surrealist Film, ed. Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1996), 14. All further references appear in the text.
22. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [1936], trans. Harry
Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 232-233.
All further references appear in the text.
What is the difference between seeing motion in the photoplay and seeing it on
a real stage? There on the stage where the actors move the eye really receives a
continuous series . . . . But if he faces the film world, the motion which he sees
appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind . . . . We see
actual depth in the pictures, yet we are every instant aware that it is not real depth
and that the persons are not really plastic. It is only a [mimetic—C.H.] suggestion
of depth . . . . Depth and movement alike come to us in the moving picture world, not
as hard facts but as a mixture . . . . We see things distant and moving, but we furnish
to them more than we receive; we create the depth and the continunity through
our mental mechanism. (Münsterberg 77-78)
[T]he work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the
spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It
thereby fostered the demand for film . . . which is also primarily tactile, being based
on . . . a percussive effect on the spectator. (Benjamin 238; translation modified)
[the “movies”] must stir up our feelings and emotions, they must play on our
suggestibility, they must start ideas and thoughts . . . . (Münsterberg 79)
But if Dadaist anti-art—like an “instrument of ballistics”—attempts to mimic the “percussive effect”
of the cinematic apparatus by penetrating its spectator “like a bullet,” then, as Elsaesser argues, these
“forms of spectatorship and pleasure might be associated not so much with watching Dada films
[like René Clair’s Entr’acte (Fig. 4.6)] but watching films as Dada” (14). What this entails, then, is
“conceptualizing the art-work as event, rather than as object, no longer as products but as circuits of
exchange for different energies and intensities” (Elsaesser 14). (Not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”)
Indeed, Benjamin already recognized that “Before the rise of film, the Dadaists’ performances tried
to create an audience reaction which Chaplin later evoked in a more natural way” (250). Beyond
simply triggering spasmodic bursts of laughter, however, what attracted Dadaists like Ferdnand Léger
to Chaplin’s “little tramp” (a marionette of which appears in Léger’s film, Ballet méchanique [1924])
was the way his gestures seemed to explode familiar “human motor actions.” Or as Benjamin states:
59
Fig. 4.6: Firing a cannon at the spectator. Francis Picabia (right) and Erik Satie (left) in Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924).
23. Walter Benjamin, (unpublished) Notes to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1991), 269-270. For more on Benjamin, Léger, and Chaplin, see my essay, “Eating/Machine: Discipline,
Digestion, and Depression-era Gesticulation in Chaplin’s Modern Times,” Spectator 21.2 (Spring 2001): 40-55.
What is new in Chaplin’s gestures: He breaks apart human motions of expression
into a series of the smallest innervations. Every single one of his movements is
put together from a series of hacked-up pieces of motion. Whether one focuses
on his walk, on the way [he] handles his cane, or tips his hat—it is always the
same jerky sequence of the smallest motions which raises the law of the filmic
sequence of images to that of human motor actions.
23
“Always the same jerky sequence” (which raises the law of the filmic sequence to that of
“human motor actions”). What attracts Benjamin and Dadaists to the (inhuman) mimetic gestures
of Chaplin’s “little tramp,” I want to suggest, is precisely what worries Münsterberg, and why he
must struggle in the second part of The Photoplay to prove that the “movies” (although “vehicles”
of “aesthetic training”) never become “starting points for imitations and other motor responses”:
And yet, such demands for autotelic (narrative) “unity,” as Münsterberg himself notes in the first
part of The Photoplay, are impossible for early cinema, when what we call the “movies” are still
dominated by hand-cranked Mutoscope arcades (Fig. 4.7). Indeed, when Edison’s Kinetoscope made
60
Fig. 4.7: Cartoon. Hand-cranked Mutoscope and its Spectator/User (Anonymous, c. 1900).
Nothing can be more injurious to the aesthetic cultivation of the people than
such [“movies’], which hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail
yet destroy their aesthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the fundamental
principle of art, the demand for [autotelic] unity . . . . We annihilate beauty when
we link artistic creation with practical interests and transform the spectator
into a selfishly interested bystander . . . . All the threads of the [photo]play must
be knotted together in the play itself, and none should be connected with our
outside interests. (Münsterberg 137)
its debut at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, as Münsterberg states, “The visitor dropped his
nickle into a slot, the little motor started, and for half a minute he saw through the magnifying
glass a girl dancing or some street boys fighting” (45). Such were the repetitive single-shot loops
that characterized early cinema. “In Edison’s small box into which only one at a time could peep,”
Münsterberg says, “nothing but a few trite scenes were exhibited” (45). Yet, the “tactile quality” of
these early coin-op machines made explicit what, for Benjamin and the Dadaists, was implicit in
film in general. Thus, as Benjamin states: “Before the advent of film, there were photo booklets
that could be made to flit by the on-looker under the pressure of the thumb, thus portraying a
boxing match or a tennis match. Then there were coin-operated peepboxes, with image sequences
kept in motion by the turning of a handle” (249). With its internalized flip-book loop (Fig. 4.8),
the hand-cranked Mutoscope epitomized what Erkki Huhtamo has called the “tactility” of many
such fin-de-siècle “proto-interactive machines” (arm-wrestling machines, shooting galleries, etc.):
61
In the case of the proto-interactive machines . . . . their operating principles were
based on the user’s repeated and continuous action to which the machine
responded in various ways. The tactility of the relationship was essential: to
activate the machine, one had to touch it by means of an interface . . . . an
intensive feedback loop connecting the player to the device . . . . Different from
its motor-driven predecessor, Edison’s Kinetoscope, the Mutoscope was hand-
cranked. The frames of the moving pictures had been copies on paper slips
Fig. 4.8: Interior of Mutoscope (Albert Hopkins, 1897).
And yet, when exhibitors like the Lumière brothers began projecting their single-shot “actualites”
on screen, it was precisely the reversal of these loops—what Elsaesser calls their “defamiliarization
strategies”—which astonished early spectators.
25
Thus, rather than demonstrating (narrative) “unity,”
the early cinema of attraction, as Gunning says, was more about shocking (dis)plays of machinery:
Such mechanical (dis)plays, however (like the early motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge
and the “optical toys” that emerged from similar scientific studies at the turn of the century),
while helping explain the psycho-physiology of “kinematoscopic perception,” as Münsterberg says,
62
24. Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of T rouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Handbook of
Computer Games Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 8-9.
25. Thomas Elsaesser, “Louis Lumière—The Cinema’s First Virtualist?” in Cinema Futures: Cain, Abel or
Cable? The Screen Arts in the Digital Age, ed. Thomas Elsaesser et al. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP , 1998), 53.
attached to a rotating cylinder. Viewers could freely adjust the cranking speed,
and interrupt the session at any point to observe a particularly interesting frame
(perhaps a half-naked lady). The only limitation was that the movement could
not be reversed. Of course, this was an economic rather than a technical
imperative. For just one coin, the user could not be allowed to spend too much
time with the device; the profit had to be maximized.
24
[I]n the earliest years of exhibition, the cinema [apparatus] itself was an attraction.
Early audiences went to exhibitions to see machines demonstrated, (the newest
technological wonder, following in the wake of such widely exhibitied machines
and marvels as X-rays or, earlier, the phonograph) rather than to view films . . . .
[Thus] Many of the close-ups in early films differ from later uses of the technique
precisely because they do not use enlargement for narrative punctuation, but as an
attraction in its own right. (Gunning 65-66)
Fig. 4.9: From Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion (1887).
would never move beyond the “mere enjoyment of the technical wonder” (53) unless they realized
their story-telling potential, i.e., “from trivial routine to a new and most promising art” (53). Still,
Münsterberg will devote the first part of The Photoplay to these trivial “little playthings” (71)—
Phenakistoscopes and Stroboscopic Disks (Fig. 4.10)—because, as he says, “the scientific principle
which controls the moving picture world of today was established with these early devices” (48),
i.e., with a series of black slits moving across the eye (“I”). Or as Münsterberg states:
Flip-books, Phenakistoscopes, Mutoscopes. The “trivial routine” of these (mere) “technical wonders,”
as Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault have pointed out, “established a form of attraction based
essentially on rotation, repetition, and brevity” (228): “the action began in medias res and ended
in medias res” (241).
26
And yet, in the second part of The Photoplay, Münsterberg will attempt
to somehow extricate the “movies” from the (aimless?) repetitive loops of these “little playthings,”
which, as Dulac and Gaudreault note, could only operate by virtue of a trigger(ing) (hand):
63
Fig. 4.10: Use of Phenakistiscope before a Mirror.
26. Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault, “Circularity and Repetition at the Heart of the Attraction:
Optical Toys and the Emgerence of a New Cultural Series,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda
Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP , 2006), 227-244. All further references appear in the text.
[T]he impression of continued motion [is secured] by cutting fine slits in a black
disk in the direction of the radius. When the disk is revolved around its center,
these slits pass by the eye of the observer. If he holds it before the mirror and
on the rear side of the disk pictures are drawn corresponding to the various slits,
the eye will see one picture after another in rapid succession at the same place
. . . . the whole series of impressions will be combined into the perception . . . .
The smaller the slits, the sharper the pictures. (47)
[P]eople manipulated them, altered their speed . . . . This “interactive” aspect is
central to the attractional quality of optical toys. The pleasure they provided had
as much as to do with manipulating the toy as it did with the illusion of move-
(Aimless) repetitive loops triggered by a “user” who becomes part of the mechanical (dis)play? If
Gunning is right, it was precisely this “freedom from the creation of diegesis [and] its accent on
direct stimulation” (66) which attracted the avant-garde to early cinema’s “radical heterogeneity”;
yet, as Gunning notes, this “tactile” “attraction” cannot be simply opposed to “narrative cinema”:
It appears, then, that attempts, like Münsterberg’s, to elevate the “movies” on the pedestal of “art”
will always be vulnerable to the cheap shots of Dadaists like Picabia and Duchamp, for whom
“art” is an “instrument of ballistics.” Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913), for instance, already makes
fun of such elevation attempts.
27
Inviting “users” to give it a spin, Duchamp’s “ready-made” reveals
the disinterested spectator to be an impossible (auto-erotic) (self-)triggering revolver (“bang bang”).
64
Fig. 4.11: Bicycle Wheel (Marcel Duchamp, 1913).
27. See Erkki Huhtamo, “T win-Touch-Test-Redux: A Media Archeological Approach to Art, Interactivity,
and Tactility,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 71-101.
ment. The device obligatorily supposed that its “user” would become part of its
very functioning, not merely a viewer watching from a distance. (233)
. . . it is important that the radical heterogeneity [of] . . . [the] early cinema [of
attraction] not be conceived as a truly oppositional program, one irreconcilable
with the growth of narrative cinema . . . . A film like The Great Train Robbery
(1903) points in both directions, towards a direct assault on the spectator (the
spectacluarly enlarged outlaw unloading his pistol in our faces), and towards a
linear narrative continuity. (Gunning 70)
65
Fig. 4.12: Natures mortes (Francis Picabia, 1920). Toy monkey and ink on cardboard.
“Masturbating Hand”
One story behind the toy monkey affixed to Francis Picabia’s anti-art assemblage, Natures mortes
(Fig. 4.12), is that it was initially supposed to have been a “live monkey,” which, as George Baker
has argued, would have escaped from its inanimate cage (“still life” [natures mortes]) when Picabia
presented it to an audience, “escaping thereby the paralysis of representation, the inert lifelessness
of the aesthetic, for the immediacy of life itself.”
31
Unfortunately, for Baker,
66
The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part
of our bodily organism. But the hand can never be determined, or
explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have
organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands.
—MARTIN HEIDEGGER
27
The vice of self-abuse [i.e., masturbation] seems to be almost entirely
confined to the human species. It is readily acquired, however, by some
animals, particularly the monkey, though it is doubtful whether in this
case the animal has not been instructed by some vicious human being.
—J. H. KELLOGG, M.D.
28
Kant speaks of imitation as “aping” [singerie]: the ape knows how to
imitate, but he does not know how to mime in the sense in which
only the freedom of a subject mimes itself.
—JACQUES DERRIDA
29
The monkey is the only animal except man that practices [the science
of onanism]. Hence he is our brother.
—MARK TWAIN
30
27. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? [1951-1952], trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2004), 16.
28. J. H. Kellogg, M.D., Man, The Masterpiece, Or Plain Truths Plainly Told about Boyhood, Youth, and
Manhood (Battle Creek: Health Publishing, 1892), 369.
29. Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis” [1981], trans. R. Klein, in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances,
ed. Julian Wolfreys (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P , 1998), 272
30. Mark T wain, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” [1879], in On Masturbation, ed. Sammy
Conner (Uncensored Classics Library, 2007), 23.
31. George Baker, The Artwork Caught By The T ail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2007), 99. All further references appear in the text.
In the end, Picabia was forced to go to the toy store instead of the pet store,
where he purchased a stuffed monkey, a monkey that soon found itself attached
to . . . an otherwise blank canvas. Words were scrawled around this monkey. (99)
The (logocentric) implication of Baker’s account, of course, is that Picabia was “forced” to settle
for a fake imitation (a toy monkey) because he could not find the real thing. Thus, instead of
Picabia’s canvas suddenly becoming animated with the “immediacy of life itself,” as Baker says
(mimicking a common allegory of cinema), it remained stuck, arrested in “inert lifelessness.” This
turn of events, however, according to Baker, provided Picabia with an opportunity to ridicule the
“reification” of “art” by copy cats: Cézanne, Rembrandt, Renoir. These three masters of painting’s
attachment to nature (“its copying of sensuous appearance”) are “depicted as a leering monkey”:
The problem with this reading, however, is not only that Picabia had Natures mortes
mechanically-reproduced (i.e., photo-copied) for the cover of his magazine, Cannibale (Fig. 4.13)
(the only trace we have of Natures mortes, since the “original” no longer exists, if it ever did),
67
Fig. 4.13: Natures mortes reproduced on the cover of Francis Picabia’s magazine, Cannibale (1920).
[The] allegiance of painting to mimetic activity, its very foundation in the act of
copying, Picabia now declares bête . . . . nothing more than a lifeless stuffed
animal . . . . Picabia’s monkey pulls its tail through its legs, grasping its generous
length and ridiculously proffering it straight toward the viewer. . . . . a—typically
Dadaist—visual pun. For the word in French for tail is queue . . . one of many
French slang terms for the penis. (Baker 102)
but he also repeated another version of this monkey gesture for the cover of Littérature in 1922
(Fig. 4.14). If the “fake” toy store monkey on Natures mortes can be read as Picabia’s attempt to
put his own spin on the anti-art gesture of the Duchampian “ready-made,” as Baker himself notes
(101), then the claim that “Picabia’s monkey pulls its tail through its legs” to ridicule “mimetic
activity” (“copying”)—in the name of “the immediacy of life itself”—not only ignores the “lifeless”
mechanical-reproduction at the heart of Picabia’s own repeated monkey gestures, but also how this
“lifeless” “mechanomorphic” animality gets repeatedly figured as a (mimetic) “masturbating hand,”
or “trigger finger” (Fig. 4.14). This, too, I want to suggest, can be read as an allegory of cinema.
But what kind of cinema? An apparatus of “aesthetic training”? “planful arousing”? This is
the question that haunts Münsterberg in part two of The Photoplay, because the kind of cinema
capable of teaching the difference between “real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses” i.e.,
the kind of cinema that qualifies as an (autotelic) “art” in itself, must never arouse (trigger)
“impulses” that it cannot “satisfy” in itself, by itself. So, on one hand, Münsterberg admits:
68
Fig. 4.14: Francis Picabia’s cover image for Littérature 5 (October 1922).
The horror we see [at the “movies”] makes us really shrink, the happiness which
we witness makes us relax, the pain which we observe brings contractions in our
muscles, and all the resulting sensations from muscles, joints, tendons . . . . (105)
We are moved at the “movies.” Our senses are “tickled.” The question, for Münsterberg, is never
how to repress this arousal, but rather how to make the “movies” into a vehicle of what he calls
“planful arousing” (158). So, yes, we are indeed moved at the “movies,” but, on the other hand,
as Münsterberg says: “the spectator responds to the scenes on the film from the standpoint of
his independent affective life” (105). Even though his “muscles, joints, tendons” shrink at the
scene of an armed robbery, as Münsterberg says, the spectator will not be motivated to intervene
(despite its mimetic suggestibility) if “nothing is suggested which is not fulfilled in the midst of
this same [cinematic] experience” (119). “Art,” in other words, does not need a helping hand:
Instead of a kind of trigger (a “starting point for imitations and other motor responses”), the “art”
of cinema “satisfies by itself every demand which it awakens.” The demand to see more (closer),
for example, is satisfied “internally” by the invention of the “close-up,” and not by the spectator
physically getting up and moving (closer). Indeed, for Münsterberg, the “close-up,” more than any
other shot, proves the cinema’s status as an “art” independent from theater, since, unlike theater,
which requires the “external” effort of the viewer’s attention, the “close-up” satisfies this by itself:
69
Fig. 4.15: Francis Picabia cover image (close-up).
[T]he aim of every art is to isolate some object of experience . . . in such a way
that it becomes complete in itself, and satisfies by itself every demand which it
awakens. If every desire which it stimulates is completely fulfilled by its own
parts, that is, if it is a complete harmony, we, the spectators . . . are perfectly
satisfied, and this complete satisfaction is . . . aesthetic joy. (Münsterberg 121)
[T]he hand movements of the actor catch our interest . . . [and] we see only the
fingers of the hero clutching the revolver with which he is to commit his crime.
Our attention is entirely given up to the passionate play of his hand. It becomes
the central point for all our emotional responses. We do not see the hands of
any other actor in the scene . . . It is as if this one hand were, during this pulse
beat of events, the whole scene and everything else had faded away. On the stage
Since the “close-up” satisfies (by itself) the spectator’s demand to see more (closer), and
thus eliminates the need for anyone to physically stand up and move (closer), Münsterberg can
confidently claim that the “art of the photoplay”—in contrast to a mere “cinema of attraction”—
begins with this “nervous hand which feverishly grasps the deadly weapon,” i.e., with a shot in
which “we see only the fingers of the hero clutching the revolver.” A close-up shot of a trigger
finger, in other words, designates the birth of cinema as an autotelic “art” which, unlike theater,
is able (via its own technological apparatus) to both mimic and satisfy its viewer’s “fixation” (86).
And yet, what if we mix up this “primal scene” of cinematic “art” with another close-up shot
of a mimetic “trigger finger” (Fig. 4.16)? Here, we also see “the fingers of the hero clutching the
revolver,” but, in this case, one hand clutches the revolving hand-crank of a Mutoscope, while the
other feverishly attempts to mimic what the Mutoscope apparatus cannot satisfy in itself, by itself,
as if giving it a helping hand. Or as Linda Williams has argued in her reading of this (reel) scene
of a man masturbating with a Mutoscope, it is as if “one hand [is] cranking the machine and the
70
Fig. 4.16: Masturbating with a Mutoscope. From A Country Stud Horse (Anonymous, c. 1920).
[however], this is impossible . . . . The dramatic hand must remain, after all, only
the tenth thousandth part of the whole stage; it must remain a little detail . . . .
[T]he stage cannot help us . . . .
Here begins the art of the photoplay. That one nervous hand which
feverishly grasps the deadly weapon can suddenly for the space of a breath or two
become enlarged and be alone visible on the screen, while everything else has
really faded into darkness . . . . The close-up has . . . furnished art with a means
which far transcends the power of any theater stage. (Münsterberg 86-87)
other [is] ‘cranking’ himself.”
32
A (self-)triggering revolver? As Williams notes:
Like the (inhuman) mimetic gestures of Chaplin’s “little tramp,” then, it is hard to tell whether a
man revolving a hand-cranked Mutoscope while masturbating raises the law of the filmic sequence
to “human motor actions,” as Benjamin says, or vice versa. It is “always the same jerky sequence.”
Münsterberg recognized “the intensity with which [photoplays] take hold of an audience”
due to “the pressure of the realistic suggestions” (154). But it is only “unwholesome photoplays”
(154), as Münsterberg says (i.e., those which do not satisfy every desire they awaken “internally”),
which excite audiences to excess by planting “suggestions” which are abruptly cut off:
To jerk the audience around like this—to arouse them with “suggestive pictures” only to abruptly
cut away before “completion”—is to risk letting such “suggestions” linger and fester “unsatisfied,”
i.e., as “starting points for imitations and other motor responses.” This is why Münsterberg, in
“Sex Education” (1914), advocates an “old-fashioned policy of silence” vis-à-vis “young minds,”
since the mere suggestion of “sexual processes” triggers “psycho-physiological reverberations in the
whole youthful organism” (SE 13), and thus sparks a “desire for satisfaction” in “the sexual organ”:
71
32. Linda Williams, “Corporealized Observers: Visual Pornographies and the ‘Carnal Density of Vision,’”
in Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1995), 19. All
further references appear in the text.
[T]he idea of sexual processes produces dilation of blood vessels in the sexual
sphere [i.e., erection] and this physiological change itself becomes the source and
stimulus for more vivid sexual feelings, which associate themselves with more
complex sexual thoughts. These in turn reinforce again the physiological effect on
the sexual organ, and so the play goes on until the irritation of the whole sexual
apparatus and the corresponding sexual mental emotions reach a height at which
the desire for satisfaction becomes stronger than any other ordinary motives of
sober reason . . . . The average boy or girl cannot give theoretical attention to the
thoughts concerning sexuality without the whole mechanism for reinforcement
automatically entering into action . . . . (Münsterberg SE, 15-16)
[E]ven on the stage, the hero may talk, the revolver in his hand, until it is fully
suggested to us that the suicidal shot will end his life in the next instant, yet
just then the curtain falls . . . . The photoplay [too] . . . can cut off in the service
of suggestion . . . . Again and again, with doubtful taste, the sensuality of the
audience has been stirred up by suggestive pictures of a girl undressing, and when
. . . the last garment was touched, the spectators were suddenly in the marketplace
among crowds of people or in a sailing vessel on the river. (Münsterberg 97-98)
It is entirely possible . . . to deride such stimulation; it seems so . . . mechanical. But
sexual activities have an element of the mechanical, of the body as machine, that is
always easy to dismiss, unless, of course, one is caught up in these motions, and
emotions, oneself. . . . . [In] flipping, cranking, and manipulation . . . the body itself
becomes a machine . . . . (19-20)
Of course, Münsterberg himself never tells us what exactly this “automatic entering into action” of
the “whole sexual apparatus” might entail. He merely suggests that it involves a certain “play” with
the “sexual organ,” and then abruptly cuts away, leaving this “suggestive picture” to linger with his
reader, “unsatisfied.”
One consequence of “unwholesome photoplays” that “cut off in the service of suggestion,”
as Münsterberg says, is, however, brilliantly dramatized by Jean Cocteau in Blood of a Poet (1930),
his fable of the mimetic “masturbating hand” (Fig. 4.17). Cocteau’s film begins with a young man
drawing (copying) the outline of a woman’s face on a canvas. He stops and starts again, obsessively.
We do not see the “original” model for this “secondary” imitation. No one else is there. Suddenly,
however, there is a knock on the door, and the young man is interrupted, caught red-handed, as
it were, with his (“female”) mimetic (re)production. And it is precisely in this threshold moment
before answering the door, i.e., in the ambiguous interval opened up by the movement of responding
(ambiguous because a response always entails a paradoxical active receptibility to something other),
that the “mouth” of the woman on the canvas begins to move. The young man, amazed—i.e., now
moved himself—quickly tries to erase the “mouth” by rubbing it out with the palm of his hand,
before answering the door. The horror in the eyes of the man at the door, however, signals to us
and the young man that the “mouth,” rather than simply being rubbed out, has instead become
affixed to the palm of his hand. Like a contagious virus, in other words, the “mouth” has spread
to young man’s hand through contact, becoming a strange new orifice: a parasitic “hand-mouth.”
72
Fig. 4.17: From Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930).
73
Fig. 4.18: By himself, the young
man examines the “hand-mouth,”
as if his own hand has become
invaded by a parasite.
Fig. 4.19: The young man kisses
the “hand-mouth” (i.e., his “own”
hand) and begins to rub it over
his chest and nipples (as if to
“mimic” the caresses of an other?
“auto-erotically”?).
Fig. 4.20: As the “hand-mouth”
moves lower and lower towards
the young man’s “sexual organ,”
Cocteau abruptly cuts off in the
service of suggestion.
What happens, then, when this strange mutt—the “hand-mouth” (Fig. 4.21)—moves down
over the young man’s chest and nipples towards his “sexual organ”? According to Münsterberg,
Cocteau, by cutting off in the service of suggestion, risks triggering in his audience members the
very action that this “unwholesome” scene both “suggests” and leaves “unsatisfied.” And yet, the
mimetic contagion of this parasitic “mouth,” which seems to have a life of its own despite being
affixed to the young man’s hand, calls into question the very distinction an audience would need to
identify this action as “auto-erotic,” if by that we mean an action aimed at (received by) “oneself.”
After all, it is precisely the notion of “oneself”—one’s autotelic self-possession, as if occupying a
space exclusively “one’s own” (idiotic private property)
33
—which gets mixed up here in the improper
(male? female? active? passive?) “hand-mouth,” making explicit, as Leo Bersani argues, the implicit
in “masturbation,” i.e., that “the hand produces an excitement indissociable from . . . surrender.”
34
74
Fig. 4.21: The “hand-mouth.” Jean Cocteau, Blood of a Poet (1930).
33. On the etymology of the word “idiot” (from the Greek idiotes, meaning a private and separate person)
in relation to the modern experience of self as “ownness” and “mineness,” see John R. Wikse, “The Production
of Idiocy,” in About Possession: The Self as Private Property (London: Pennsylvania State UP , 1977), 1-16.
34. Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1995), 103. All further references appear in the text.
On the figure of the “masturbating hand,” see also Murat Aydemir, Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity,
Meaning (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2007), 127-130.
Who are you when you masturbate? It is conceivable that the body of another
person would be able to excite mine without hooking up to my fantasy network
. . . but I find unimaginable a successful session of what the disciplinarians know
as self-abuse without [the alterity of] fantasy. (Bersani 103)
If the “hand-mouth” simultaneously mimics and calls into question any “auto-erotic” action
triggered in the audience members when Cocteau’s “unwholesome photoplay” cuts off in the service
of suggestion, what happens when the young man attempts to get rid of this parasitic “mouth”
by returning it back to its (“proper”) place on the face of an inanimate (“female”) “work of art”?
For Münsterberg, of course, such a (narrative) resolution would constitute “aesthetic joy,” since the
harmonization of parts, as he argues in “The Problem of Beauty” (1909), is the aim of all “art”:
And indeed, there is a look of joy on the young man’s face when he seemingly puts an end to
this (aimless?) mimetic play of contagion by pressing “his” “hand-mouth” to a similar part on a
(“female”) statue and somehow getting it to stick (Fig. 4.22). But something remains “unwholesome”
even in this apparent harmonization of parts. Not only does the young man not return the “mouth”
to its “original” owner (the “woman” on the canvas copy), but, by animating an otherwise inanimate
statue (autotelic “artwork”) with the “life” of (“his”) contagious touch, the young man has made it
impossible to tell, as Münsterberg’s colleague Josiah Royce put it, which is the “original imitation.”
36
75
Fig. 4.22: Getting rid of the “hand-mouth”? Jean Cocteau, Blood of a Poet (1930).
35. Hugo Münsterberg, “The Problem of Beauty,” The Philosophical Review 18.2 (March 1909): 121-146.
36. See Josiah Royce, “The Imitative Functions, and Their Place in Human Nature,” Century Illustrated
Magazine (May 1894): 144.
. . . every relation to anything beyond the content must be cut off; the whole
must be entirely isolated; it must have its own [autotelic] form; this form must
harmonize with the content; all the suggestions of the parts of form and content
must agree with the aim of the whole. (139-140)
35
Postscript: (Aesthetic) T raining
Ten years before Münsterberg’s attempt to deploy the “movies” as a “vehicle of aesthetic education,”
George C. Hale, an ex-fireman, filed a patent for what he called the “Pleasure Railway” (Fig. 4.23),
which, as Raymond Fielding has noted, was “the first permanent, ultrarealistic cinema attraction” in
the United States, taking the form of an “artificial railway car whose operation combined auditory,
tactile, visual, and ambulatory sensations to provide a remarkably convincing illusion of railway
travel.”
41
Along with other “Phantom Rides,” the Hale’s Tours, as they were known, quickly spread
throughout the country. Between 1905-1907, according to Fielding, there were 500 such Hale’s Tours
in operation, particularly in amusement park settings, providing many spectators not only their first
experience of projected motion pictures, but, for some, their first “experience” of riding in a train,
still a novel “technical wonder” in 1905. Thus, with the aim of cinematically simulating a speeding
76
[T]he aim of Education should be to train each individual . . . .
—GRANT ALLEN
37
[N]o training demands a more persistent and planful arousing of the mind
than . . . aesthetic training . . . . Of course, there are those who would deride
every plan to make the moving pictures the vehicle of aesthetic education.
—HUGO MÜNSTERBERG
38
The “paradigm” of the railroad prepared a path for the institutionalization
of a certain kind of subject or spectator that cinema would claim as its
own . . . . [h]urtling through space in the body of the train (conceived as
a projectile), as if being shot through the landscape . . . .
—LYNNE KIRBY
39
The early descriptions of the train journey as an experience of being
“shot” through space (with the train as projectile) no longer seem merely
accidentally associated with the military realm.
—WOLFGANG SCHIVELBUSCH
40
37. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877), 50.
38. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study [1916] (New York: Routledge, 2002), 158.
39. Lynne Kirby, Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke UP , 1997), 24 & 45.
40. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th
Century [1977] (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986), 159. All further references appear in the text.
41. Raymond Fielding, “Hale’s Tours: Ultrarealism In the Pre-1910 Motion Picture,” Cinema Journal 10.1
(Autumn 1970): 34. All further references appear in the text.
train ride, the Hale’s Tours projected a series of single-shot loops of scenic locales which had been
photographed from the cowcatcher or rear platform of a moving train, while a revolving belt and
pulley mechanism underneath the “Pleasure Railway” caused the “theater” to bounce and jerk in
mimetic rhythm to the looping film sequence (Fig. 4.23). As Fielding explains:
With its belt-driven “clickety-clack” noises and abrupt “starts, stops, accelerations, and decelerations,”
the Hale’s Tour, for Tom Gunning, epitomizes early cinema’s “lack of concern with creating a self-
sufficient narrative world upon the screen” (65). And yet, if such “viewing experiences relate more
to the attractions of the fairground than to the traditions of legitimate theater” (Gunning 65),
should we then read the Hale’s Tour—and its revolving mechanism of mimetic jerks—simply as a
transitional “bridge,” as Fielding says, between “primitive” peep shows and later movie theaters (47)?
According to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, however, a train ride is more like an instrument of ballistics:
77
Fig. 4.23: Patent for the “Pleasure Railway” (George C. Hale, 1905).
. . . an endless belt with projecting lugs moved continuously over rollers and shafts
during the performance. The lugs came into contact with a metal piece under
the car, thereby creating the typical clickety-clack sound of real railway wheels as
they passed over joints in the tracks. The speed of the belt could be regulated at
will in order to allow for starts, stops, accelerations, and decelerations which occurred
in the motion picture. An artificially produced rush of air was to be provided, and
the whole car was to be pivoted on its longitudinal axis so that the operator
could, by throwing a lever, sway the car from side to side . . . . (40)
The train was experienced as a projectile, and traveling on it, as being shot through
the landscape—thus losing control of one’s senses . . . . [T]he rails, cuttings, and
tunnels appeared as the barrel through which the projectile of the train passes. The
traveler who sat inside that projectile . . . became . . . a mere parcel. (54).
Reduced to just another “parcel” shot through space and time inside a mechanical projectile, the
early rider, as Schivelbusch notes, was subject to the railroad’s “peculiar jerking vibrations” (122):
Schivelbusch’s description, here, of the “rapid succession” of jolts “no longer felt as individual jolts
but as a condition of continuous vibration” not only uncannily mirrors Münsterberg’s description of
“kinematoscopic perception” (the “impression of continued motion” secured by a series of black slits),
but also turns the train into a kind of “vibrator.” (“Always the same jerky sequence.”)
Indeed, the Hale’s Tours, by attempting to s(t)imulate these “peculiar jerking vibrations” of
the railroad on the body of its spectator (rider) through a revolving mechanism of mimetic jerks,
makes explicit what is already implicit in both “Disneyland” and so-called “pornography.” Namely,
that, as Jane Gaines has recently argued, “every porn spectator [desires] to obliterate the distance
between (him)self and the machine’s screen . . . . to reach out and touch the image, to ‘come’
78
[T]he specific mechanical vibration peculiar to the motion of the locomotive and
the train . . . produced a new kind of vibration that was quite different from the
jolts experienced on a coach journey on the highway. The vibration resulted from
the exact interaction between steel rail and steel wheel, from the speed and,
particularly, from the distance between the rails. What differentiated it from pre-
industrial forms of mechanical shock was the train’s velocity, which caused the
jolts to be so brief and to follow in such rapid succession that they were no
longer felt as individual jolts but as a condition of continuous vibration. (114)
Fig. 4.24: Inside a Hale’s Tour “train.”
simultaneously with the porn actors and actresses who seek this obliteration with invitations to
‘come all over me.’”
42
To “come” with the actors on screen (to “arrive” with the train) is thus to
mimic (by “oneself”?) what the apparatus “awakens” but cannot “satisfy” in itself, by itself:
“Asking its viewer to ‘really’ come” (74), as Gaines says, “pornography” becomes a “starting point
for imitations and other motor responses.” (Not “beautiful” but “stimulative.”)
It should not surprise us, then, that Münsterberg was forced to write a letter of denial
to The New York Times on September 14, 1913 after a story appeared in The Moving Picture World
regarding his use of a “cinematograph” inside the Harvard Psychology Laboratory. In particular, it
was reported that Münsterberg invented a test that used “moving pictures to determine whether
a man is qualified to operate an automobile.” According to The Moving Picture World, this test for
potential chauffeurs involved the following set up:
At the wheel of a fixed “auto,” the subject must “handle his car as if it were really in motion,” so
that his responses—triggered by the images “suddenly flashed upon screen”—can be recorded and
trained. (“As if . . . really in motion.”) T wo years before he writes The Photoplay, then, Münsterberg
was forced to respond to this story of cinematic s(t)imulation, which he called “fake”:
79
42. Jane Gaines, “Machines That Make The Body Do Things,” Polygraph 13 (2001): 71-92. All further
references appear in the text.
Pornography asks for the impossible from the spectator. It asks that he both
treat the representation as a representation and that he (again he) not treat the
representation as a representation. Why else does the female porn star ask the
viewer not to “come all over my image” but to “come all over me”? (Gaines 74)
A man is at the wheel of an automobile in a darkened room, and the “auto” is
so fixed that, although all the machinery may be used and is movable, the car
will not move. Just in front of the machine, there is a screen upon which pictures
are projected. A spotlight is thrown upon the embryo chauffeur, and a picture is
suddenly flashed upon the screen, showing a child or a dog running into the street,
just in front of the stationary automobile. Now comes the test. The chauffeur must
handle his car as if it were really in motion, about to reach the child or dog.
(Qtd. in Fredericksen 22)
The statement recently made that Prof. Hugo Münsterberg of Harvard University
was starting a new kind of school for chauffeurs has been denied by the professor
in a letter to The New York Times . . . . [The] so-called “cinematograph nerve test”
calculated to reduce motor car accidents . . . . consisted of placing the chauffeur in
a motor car . . . . In front of the car was a white wall . . . [where] motion pictures
were to be displayed—life size. The student, seated directly before them in the car,
was instructed . . . to act as he would in real life . . . . Prof. Münsterberg says in his
letter of denial . . . : “Let me say that this whole story is one of the many fake
reports concerning my laboratory. I have never arranged any test for chauffeurs
and have never used the cinematograph in any experiment whatever.” (x)
80
. . . it may be said that all auto-erotic phenomena are unnatural,
since the natural aim of the sexual impulse is sexual conjunction,
and all exercise of that impulse outside such conjunction is away
from Nature. But we do not live in a state of Nature which
answers to such demands; all our life is unnatural.
—HAVELOCK ELLIS
Female Auto-Erotic Practices (1940)
Chapter Five
Digital Manipulation:
The Vibrator, Women’s Liberation, and Masturbation (as) Re-education
When Hugo Münsterberg (having, he says, fallen under the spell of the “movies”) began writing
The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916), arguing for the aesthetic autonomy and pedagogical
potential of this new technology (the “movies”), which he himself had only a few years earlier
considered a cheap imitation of “live” theater (“Those who could afford to visit the true theater
felt it below their level to indulge such a cheap substitute which lacked the glory of the stage
with spoken words”),
4
advertisements for yet another “moving” technology (“cheap substitute”)
began appearing in women’s magazines and mail-order catalogues: the portable electromechanical
vibrator (Figs. 5.1-5.3). In the Preface to her book, The T echnology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator,
and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (1999), Rachel Maines notes how she first encountered these ads
—by accident—while doing archival research in the 1970s on the history of needlework:
81
Because of its near infallibility, the vibrator has become a popular
teaching aid for women who have never experienced orgasm.
—VIRGINIA E. JOHNSON
“What’s Good—and Bad—About the Vibrator” (1976)
1
. . . woman’s autoeroticism is very different from man’s. In order to
touch himself, man needs an instrument: his hand, a woman’s
body, language . . . . As for woman, she touches herself in and
of herself without any need of mediation . . . .
—LUCE IRIGARAY
“This Sex Which Is Not One” (1977)
2
The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.
—AUDRE LORDE
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotics as Power” (1978)
3
1. Virginia E. Johnson, “What’s Good—and Bad—About the Vibrator,” Redbook Magazine (March 1976),
136. All further references appear in the text.
2. Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One” [1977], in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine
Porter (Ithaca: Cornell UP , 1985), 24.
3. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotics as Power” [1978], in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Berkeley, California: Crossing Press, 1984), 59.
4. Hugo Münsterberg, “Why We Go to the ‘Movies,’” The Cosmopolitan (December 15, 1915), 22-32,
reprinted in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge,
2002), 172. All further references appear in the text.
Like Münsterberg’s accidental encounter with Annette Kellermann in Neptune’s Daughter (1914),
Maines encounter in the margins of the Woman’s Home Companion would eventually result in
one of the first “serious” studies of the vibrator (an initial essay was published in 1989),
6
in which
Maines would tie the emergence of the electromechanical vibrator in the late-nineteenth century
to a long history of medical treatments of “hysteria”:
82
As I doggedly turned the pages of Modern Priscilla and Woman’s Home Companion
in search of trends among the needlework patterns, my attention frequently strayed
to the advertisements along the sides of the pages . . . . When I saw vibrator
advertisements as early as 1906 for equipment stongly resembling the devices now
sold to women as masturbation aids, my first thought was that this could not
possibly be the purpose of the appliances sold in the pages of the Companion.
The second thought was that 1906 was very early for any kind of home appliance.
Telling myself I’d never follow up on the topic . . . . I showed a few of the ads
to my feminist friends, who were . . . delighted.
5
5. Rachel P . Maines, The T echnology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 1999), x. All further references appear in the text.
6. Rachel P . Maines, “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator,”
IEEE T echnology and Society Magazine 8.2 (June 1989): 3-11.
When the vibrator emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument at the
end of the nineteenth century, it evolved from previous massage technologies in
response to demand from physicians for more rapid and efficient physical therapies,
particularly for hysteria. Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of
medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the
time of Hippocrates until the 1920s . . . . (Maines 3)
Fig. 5.1: Portable vibrator and vibrator attachments (Sears, Roebuck and Co., 1918).
83
Fig. 5.2: White Cross Electric Vibrator, Physician’s Model (1907).
84
Fig. 5.3: The Star Vibrator: “For Use in Your Own Home” (Cosmopolitan, 1919).
If massage to orgasm of female patients (especially unmarried women, widows, and nuns)
was indeed a staple of medical practice in treating “hysteria,” at least since Galen (A.D. 129-200),
7
what happened in the 1920s? One answer, according to Maines, is that the vibrator began to
lose whatever aura of medical legitimacy it may have had as a therapeutic instrument when it
began appearing as an overt masturbatory device in “stag” films—i.e., those early, underground
proto-“pornographic” films that date back to the very “birth of cinema” (Figs. 5.4-5.5).
8
Maines, for
example, cites the stag film, Widow’s Delight (ca. 1920), in which a woman rejects a male suitor
only to dash upstairs to her bedroom where she “produce[s] one of the first vibrators on the
market, with the motor largely exposed, and applies it liberally to her privates” (108). It is
this kind of “exposure” of the vibrator as an explicit vehicle of female auto-eroticism which,
according to Maines, “helped to drive the vibrator from the medical and respectable home markets,
85
Fig. 5.4: Image from The Nun’s Story (Anonymous, ca. 1930).
7. See Helen King, “Once Upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates,” in Hysteria Beyond Freud, eds.
Sander L. Gilman, et al. (Berkeley: U of California P , 1993), 41. All futher references appear in the text.
8. See Al Di Lauro and Gerald Rabkin, Dirty Movies: An Illustrated History of the Stag Film, 1915-1970
(New York: Chelsea House, 1976), 43. Both stag films and vibrators quickly became associated with brothels
and prostitutes. As Linda Williams notes, the major function of the stag film in brothels was economic: “to
arouse the viewer to the point of purchasing the services of the women of the house” (74). As if a prelude
to “real” sex with a “live” prostitute, it was this “context of foreplay” (20), as Gertrude Koch calls it, that
seems to define the early connection of “cinema and brothel” (24). See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power,
Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: U of California P , 1999); and Gertrude Koch, “On
Pornographic Cinema: The Body’s Shadow Realm,” Jump Cut 35 (April 1990): 17-29.
As far as vibrators are concerned, Roger Blake notes: “European prostitutes have traditionally relied
on a ‘soapsuds massage’ of the penis when involved with clients who cannot achieve erection easily. But as far
back as the 1930s, American whores were using the massagic vibrator for the same purpose” (34). For this
reason, Blake asserts that: “The massagic vibrator, the same type used by masseurs, barbers, and beauticians for
facial massage . . . is by far the oldest sex gadget of the twentieth century” (33). See Roger Blake, Sex Gadgets
(Cleveland, Ohio: Century Books, 1968). All further references appear in the text.
since it made social camouflage very difficult to maintain” (108).
9
In the early-twentieth century,
then, when neither the “vibrator” nor the “movies” had yet to crystallize into their current
seemingly self-evident forms, it was the vibrator that was losing a certain respectability, while
the movies—thanks to scholars like Hugo Münsterberg—were claiming a certain autonomy as “Art,”
a certain liberation from the derivative status of “cheap substitute.” Or as Münsterberg writes:
It is a question, therefore, of difference. If the movies, according to Münsterberg, have an
“original task” (173)—an “art of their own” (173)—different from and not an imitation of “live”
theater, then “it is clear that the one cannot be measured by the other” (173). The automobile
is not a simple horse-carriage “moved by machinery” (though we still call automobiles “cars”),
but that which finds its movement in itself. These questions of “autonomy” and “liberation”—
or what we might call, following Münsterberg, the auto-motive—will recur again when both the
vibrator and the stag film “resurface” in the 1970s, as if in some “pornographic” challenge to
the autonomous status of cinematic “Art.” The X-rated film, Deep Throat, for example, opens
86
Fig. 5.5: Image from A Free Ride (Anonymous, 1915).
9. Maines defines the notion of “socially-camouflaged” technologies with an analogy between the sale
of vibrators (“massagers”) and drug paraphernalia (bongs and Zig-zags): “Certain commodities are sold in the
legal marketplace for which their expected use is either illegal or socially unacceptable . . . . I refer not to goods
that are actually illegal in character, such as marijuana, but to their grey-market background technologies, such
as cigarette rolling papers” (3). See Maines, “Socially Camouflaged Technologies” (1989).
It is only natural that [“movies”] began with a mere imitation of the theater, just
as automobiles were at first simple horse-carriages moved by machinery. Any new
principle finds its own form slowly. The photoplay of today is already as different
from those theater imitations as a racing automobile is from a buggy. (174)
the summer of 1972, while Joani Blank opens Good Vibrations, “a vibrator store for women,”
in 1977, although, as Blank notes, “the first electric vibrator openly advertised for sexual use
was an American-made, multi-attachment model, repackaged with a clitoral stimulator tip, and
sold almost exclusively through the mail in the early 1970s.”
10
But since Maines’ genealogy
ends with the disappearance of vibrator ads in the 1920s, she does not follow these threads.
And yet, a question remains: Why, in the 1970s, were Maines’ “feminist friends,” as she says,
“delighted” to see her accidental discovery in the margins of Women’s Home Companion? Or as
Blank says: “Interesting, isn’t it, that vibrators which lost their respectability once they were shunned
by the medical profession are now seen as an important tool for women taking control of and
enhancing their sexuality” (7). As if no longer a “cheap substitute”? “moved by machinery”?
I. “The Little Girl is a Little Man”
Another reason for the delegitimizing of the vibrator in the 1920s—at least as a therapeutic tool
in the hands-on treatment of “hysteria”—is, of course, the rise of psychoanalysis and the apparently
radical re-configuration of “hysteria” as a disease paradigm in the later work of Sigmund Freud,
87
So far as the auto-erotic and masturbatory manifestations of
sexuality are concerned, . . . the sexuality of little girls is of a
wholly masculine character . . . . The leading erotogenic zone in
female children is located at the clitoris, and is thus homologous
to the masculine genital zone of the glans penis.
—SIGMUND FREUD
11
. . . everything advanced in psychoanalysis—especially since the
masturbation of little girls is conceived according to the model
of “doing what the little boy does”—leaves completely aside
whatever women’s “self-affection” might be.
—LUCE IRIGARAY
12
Hysteria is thus like an accident along the “woman’s” path in
the process that is to lead from bisexuality to femininity: a more
or less inevitable accident . . . .
—SARAH KOFMAN
13
10. Joani Blank, Good Vibrations: The Complete Guide to Vibrators [1977] (San Francisco: Down There
Press, 1989), 7. All further references appear in the text.
11. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic
Books, 1962), 85-86. All further references appear in the text as TS.
12. Luce Irigaray, “Questions” [1977], in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca:
Cornell UP , 1985), 132-133.
13. Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings [1980], trans. Catherine Porter
(Ithaca: Cornell UP , 1985), 125.
particularly in the case of “Dora” (“Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”) published in
1905, and the so-called “great debate” on the specificity of “female sexuality” in the mid-twenties
and thirties.
14
Indeed, on the debt psychoanalysis owes to “female hysterics,” Jacqueline Rose writes:
Without the difficulty of this difference—embodied by the “female hysteric”—there would be no
psychoanalysis. For if the motive in assuming (“one’s”) normative sexuality is not biological, as
the difficulty encountered by female hysterics seems to show, then what drives “the girl” into
“femininity”? What a “frigid” patient like “Dora” reveals to Freud in her hysterical refusals of
male suitors—that is, when Freud is able to hear her, for he (apparently) listens rather than
manipulates her—is that the drive to assume a “normal” femininity is anything but a natural or
automatic one. Instead, what Freud discovers in the many confessions (fabrications?) of “Dora,”
according to Philip Rieff, is a “painful tangle of motives”:
88
14. On the “great debate” (also called the Freud-Jones debate), see Juliet Mitchell, “Introduction-I,” in
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York:
Norton, 1985). According to Mitchell, this debate concerned Freud’s theory of the “castration complex” as
the motive for driving subjects into their specific sexed positions, with “penis-envy” distinguishing the female
motivation. Resistance to this (non-biological?) theory of “sexual difference,” according to Mitchell, led some
of Freud’s disciples into a kind of naive biologism. Karen Horney, for example, countered Freud with a
“biological principle of heterosexuality” (21). Yet, it is still unclear whether Freud’s notion of “penis-envy” is
itself a kind of biologism, based on the supposedly empirical difference of a “boy’s” and a “girl’s” anatomy.
15. Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction-II,” in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds.
Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), 28.
16. Philip Rieff, “Introduction” [1962], in Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed.
Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997), viii-xii.
The history of psychoanalysis can in many ways be seen entirely in terms of its
engagement with . . . feminine sexuality. Freud himself started with the analysis
of the hysterical patient (Freud and Breuer, 1893-5) . . . . But it was his failure
to analyse one such patient—“Dora”—in terms of a normative concept of what
a woman should be, or want, that led him to recognise the fragmented and
aberrant nature of sexuality itself. Normative sexuality is, therefore, strictly an
ordering, one which the hysteric refuses (falls ill). The rest of Freud’s work can
then be read as a description of how that [non-biological—C.H.] ordering takes
place, which then led him back, necessarily, to the question of femininity, because
of its persistence as a difficulty . . . .
15
[“Dora’s”] unconscious Lesbian tendencies were allied to a painful tangle of motives
that only a master of detection like Freud could have picked apart—and yet held
together in their true pattern [as if fingering a knot?—C.H.] . . . . Yet, just beneath
this apparently simple scheme there is a labyrinth into which the narrative thread
soon disappears . . . . [T]he mystery of character never submits entirely, even to the
greatest masters. There are fresh reserves of motive which unexamined, will not
yield to reason . . . . Moreover, reason itself depends upon motives that are not
themselves rational . . . . Indeed, what distinguishes the patient from the therapist
is just this capacity to handle the complexity of motive. (Emphasis added)
16
With his theory of “female sexuality” as a specific “task” prone to hysterical failures,
Freud appears to be a hinge (a knot? a spool?) between Maines’ early history of the vibrator as a
nineteenth-century labor-saving device for the (otherwise digital) manipulation of female hysterics
by male physicians and the later re-appropriations of the vibrator as an overt sexual aid and
educational device by the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s. Yet, while many texts of
second-wave feminist theory are indeed tied-up with (questioning) Freud’s motives, as we shall see,
it is still not clear to what extent Freud’s “talking cure” manages to re-configure “hysteria” as a
disease paradigm. The very word “hysteria,” of course, is said to derive from the Greek hysteros,
meaning “womb” or “uterus.” And although Freud does not believe—with Plato—that the womb
(“an animal within an animal”) can cause illness by wandering around the female body,
17
he does
seem to believe—with Galen’s (sexual) etiology—that “hysteria” is tied to the retention of certain
dammed-up matters, which must be liberated through a “cathartic” method. As Helen King states:
Here, a woman rubs a scented ointment onto the “external genitalia” with her finger in order to
liberate some retained matter (menstrual blood or “seed”),
18
since, as King explains, “Retained seed
can rot, causing noxious humors to affect the rest of the body through ‘sympathy’” (43). If this
sort of digital manipulation was indeed intended to induce “orgasm,” as Maines argues (and which
seems to account for Galen’s androcentric assumption that sexual intercourse was the best cure for
“hysteria”), it was not until the publication of Realdo Colombo’s treatise, De re anatomica (1559),
that the “clitoris,” in particular, was identified as the seat of a specific female sexual pleasure:
89
17. As Plato states in Timaeus: “The womb is an animal which longs to generate children. When it
remains barren too long after puberty, it is distressed and sorely disturbed, and straying about in the body
. . . it impedes respiration and brings the sufferer into the extremist anguish and provokes all manner of diseases
besides.” Quoted in Lana Thompson, The Wandering Womb: A Cultural History of Outrageous Beliefs about Women
(Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1999), 33-34.
18. The belief that women too contribute “seed” (ejaculate) necessary for human reproduction is an ancient
one that is not challenged until the eighteenth century. See Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the
Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Gender / Sexuality Reader, eds. Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 219-243.
Galen’s new etiology was . . . to prove the most influential in the history of
hysteria. [Galen] accepts that the womb is indeed the origin of the condition, but
in place of movement to another part of the body, or inflammation, he blames
retention of substances within the womb . . . . In a passage from On the Affected
Parts . . . Galen describes the case of a woman who had been told by a midwife
that her symptoms were due to her womb being “drawn up.” The woman applied
to her external genitalia “the customary remedies” . . . and passed a quantity of
thick seed; the suggestion appears to be that rubbing in the traditional scented
ointments causes orgasm, and thus releases the retained matter. (41-43)
[The clitoris] is the principal seat of women’s enjoyment in intercourse . . . . so that
if you not only rub it with your penis, but even touch it with your little finger,
If it is “only with a name [that] the clitoris come[s] into being,” as Valerie T raub argues, then the
move from a vague notion of the “womb” in Galen to the specific designation of the “clitoris”
as the seat of female sexual pleasure would seem to incorporate this organ in a “modern” domain
of knowledge which, as T raub says, is “increasingly fixated on the clitoris as the disturbing bodily
emblem of female erotic power” (90-91).
20
And, indeed, when Freud writes to Wilhelm Fliess that
“the discharge of sexual excitation for the most part removes the possibility of hysteria,”
21
he is
undoubtedly not advocating some Galenic purgation of “seed” from the retentive “womb.” But
what, then? And if we want to argue that certain figures of digital manipulation (Fig. 5.6) and
“discharge” continue to tie Freud’s hysterical texts to the history of the vibrator articulated by
90
19. Katharine Park, “The Rediscovery of the Clitoris: French Medicine and the T ribade, 1570-1620,” in
The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, eds. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New
York: Routledge, 1997), 170-193.
20. Valerie T raub, “The Psychomorphology of the Clitoris,” GLQ 2 (1995): 81-113. T raub’s essay is in
dialogue with (and offering a critique of) Thomas Laqueur’s history of clitoris as developed in his essay,
“Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur,” in Fragments for a History of the Body, Part 3, ed. Michel Feher et al.
(New York: Zone, 1989), 90-131.
21. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 27, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess,
1887-1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 275.
the pleasure causes their seed to flow forth in all directions, swifter than the wind,
even if they don’t want it to. (qtd. in Park, 177)
19
Fig. 5.6: A six-year old thumbsucker and
masturbator, the daughter of a bookkeeper,
from Freud’s source, S. Linder, “Das Saugen
an den Fingern . . .” (1879). Reproduced
in Sander Gilman, Sexuality: An Illustrated
History (N.Y.: John Wiley & Sons, 1989),
265.
Maines, must we then subscribe to Jean-Michel Oughourlian’s formula that “we need only replace
the word ‘retention’ in the theory of Galen . . . with the term ‘repression’ . . . and replace ‘purgation’
with ‘catharsis’ to discover in all its supposed originality the Freudian theory of sexual neurosis”?
22
I don’t think so. At least, I don’t think it’s that simple.
As evident in his collaborative work with Josef Breuer on Studies on Hysteria (1893-1895),
Freud’s initial interest in “hysteria” was as a student of “organic diseases of the nervous system,”
which he treated according to the dominant techniques of the day: hydrotherapy, electro-therapy,
massage, and the Weir-Mitchell rest-cure.
23
Take the case of “Elisabeth von R.,” for example, who
was sent to Freud in 1892 after complaining of “great pain in walking” and “fatigue.” Although
Freud notes that her pain is of “indefinite character,” he examines her legs for an “organic cause,”
stating: “In this area the skin and muscles were . . . particularly sensitive to pressure and pinching
(though the prick of a needle was, if anything, met with a certain amount of unconcern)” (135).
Indeed, it is while pricking her legs in this style of needlework that Freud cannot help noticing a
difference between “Elisabeth’s” (“hysterical”) responses to his digital stimulation as compared to
someone with a genuine “organic illness” who “flinches and draws back from the examination” (137):
Having touched upon a “hysterogenic zone” with his needling, Freud nevertheless continues to
probe the “numerous hard fibres in the muscular substance,” concluding that, indeed, there could
be “an organic change in the muscles . . . which the neurosis [has merely] attached itself to” (138).
At this point, as if still holding fast to the possibility of an “organic cause,” Freud recommends
a treatment of massage and electro-therapy. As he states:
Freud, of course, would later confess in his Autobiographical Study (1925) how crushed he was to
discover that electro-therapy was “merely the construction of a phantasy,” noting, in particular,
91
22. Jean-Michel Oughourlian, The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession and Hypnosis,
trans. Eugene Webb (Stanford: Stanford UP , 1991), 145.
23. See Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria [1893-1895], trans. James Strachey, in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. II (London: Hogarth Press, 1955),
xi. All further references appear in the text
In the case of Fraulein von R., however, if one pressed or pinched the hyperalgesic
skin and muscles of her legs, her face assumed a peculiar expression, which was one
of pleasure rather than pain. She cried out—and I could not help thinking that
it was as though she was having a voluptuous tickling sensation—her face flushed,
she threw her head back and shut her eyes and her body bent backwards . . . .
[This response] could only be reconciled with the view that her disorder was
hysterical, and that the stimulation had touched upon a hysterogenic zone. (137)
We recommended systematic kneading and faradization of the sensitive muscles,
regardless of the resulting pain, and I reserved to myself treatment of her legs with
high tension electric currents, in order to be able to keep in touch with her. (138)
how “painful” it was to “put my electrical apparatus aside.”
24
The point here, however, is not how
“wrong” the young Freud was in personally treating “her legs with high tension electric currents,”
as he says, “in order to be able to keep in touch with her,” but rather how in recommending
the “systematic kneading and faradization of the sensitive muscles, regardless of the resulting pain,”
Freud reveals some of the sutures that tie him to a nineteenth-century “medical model” which,
according to Maines, also made possible the rise of the electromechanical vibrator as a device
for treating “hysteria” as a “nervous disorder,” i.e., one whose main symptom (“frigidity”) Freud
calls, tellingly, (sexual) “anaesthesia.”
25
If the image of “hysteria” had indeed shifted “over the course of the eighteenth century,”
as Michel Foucault has argued, from one of (retained) “humors” and “animal spirits” to “the more
strictly physical but even more symbolic image of a tension, to which all nerves, vessels and the
whole system of organic fibres were subject” (270; emphasis added), Foucault nevertheless cautions:
92
24. Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study [1925], in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York:
Norton, 1989), 9.
25. See Sigmund Freud, Letter to Wilhelm Fliess, October 27, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund
Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 274-
275. On the “frigidity” (or “sexual anaesthesia”) of the “female hysteric,” Ernest Jones writes in 1918 that the
“persistence of clitoris masturbation is one of the most important agents leading to (sexual) anaesthesia because
it means fixation on the infantile, male form of sexuality.” Ernest Jones, Papers on Psychoanalysis (1918), quoted
in Rachel Maines, The T echnology of Orgasm (1999), 36.
[This shift] was not so much a question of getting away from the age-old uterine
association as it was of discovering the principle and the paths taken by a diverse,
polymorphous malady [“hysteria”] that seems to spread throughout the body.
Fig. 5.7: Applied general faradization (L) and central galvanization (R). From George Beard and
A.D. Rockwell, A Practical Treatise on the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity (1881).
And, indeed, one “reason” (motive?) for “hysteria”—having become a “disease of the nerves”—was
found precisely in the irritability and intensity of the so-called “fibres” that constitute the peculiar
susceptibility of this (an)aesthetic body.
27
Thus, in a clinical lecture on the pathological relationship
between the female genitalia and the sympathetic nervous system delivered at Cincinnati Hospital
in 1899, Dr. Charles A.L. Reed states that:
If the “genital organs of women” are figured here as a “central telegraphic office” radiating “wires”
to every corner of the (nervous) “system,” it should probably not surprize us that, as late as 1921,
Dr. Howard Humphris, in a chapter on “Electricity in Gynaecology,” was advocating the possible
re-vitalization of a diseased uterus—i.e., a uterus of “insensitive nerve supply” (145)—by the direct
application of electrodes to the “organs of the female pelvis.” Or as Humphris puts it:
As “good conducting media,” the “organs of the female pelvis” were not only “peculiarly
susceptible” to clinical electro-therapy, however. Since “electricity” was seen as “duplicating the
motive force of the nervous system and perhaps even the ‘spark’ of life itself,” as Tim Armstrong
has argued in a recent study, “[p]opular electricity flourished in the nineteenth-century with a
variety of patent devices, galvanic belts, electric baths, for purposes including control of headache,
93
26. Michel Foucault, History of Madness [1961], trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London:
Routledge, 2006). All further references appear in the text.
27. See Erec R. Koch, The Aesthetic Body: Passion, Sensibility, and Corporeality in Seventeenth-Century France
(Newark: U of Delaware P , 2008). As Koch describes the title of his project: “The body here is aesthetic, in its
etymological sense, since its physiological functioning is directed toward the production of sensibility, that is, to
sensation and passion or affect” (12).
28. Quoted in F . G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community: 1870-1910
(Urbana: U of Illinois P , 1987), 98.
29. Howard Francis Humphris, M.D., Electro-Therapeutics For Practitioners: Being Essays on Some Useful
Forms of Electrical Apparatus and on Some Diseases which are Amenable to Electrical Treatment (London: Oxford
UP , 1921), 145.
A reason was needed for this condition, which might as equally affect the head as
the legs, or manifest itself as a paralysis or disordered movements, catalepsy or
insomnia, in short, a sickness that could affect the whole corporeal space . . . .
(285; emphasis added)
26
Many diseases of the organs of the female pelvis are peculiarly susceptible to
treatment by electricity, for it is comparatively easy to apply electrodes directly to
the lesion, and whether we wish to apply a drug by ionization, or electricity qua
electricity, we usually have a readily accessible part and good conducting media.
29
[T]he genital organs of women, considered in the aggregate, are nothing more or
less than a central telegraphic office, from which wires radiate to every nook and
corner of the system, and over which are transmitted messages, morbific or
otherwise, as the case may be; and it should be remembered right here that
telegraphic messages travel both ways over the same wire; that there are both
receiving and sending offices at each end of the line. (emphasis added)
28
94
Fig. 5.8: Vaginal and rectal electrodes. Keystone Electro-Therapeutic Appliances Catalogue (ca. 1900).
paralysis, the stimulation of organs, skin, and muscles, urinary and sexual problems, constipation,
[as well as] the treatment of hysteria.”
30
If the first portable electromechanical vibrator (Fig. 5.9)
was thus one of many devices premised on the curative powers of electrical currents, pulsations,
and vibrations, then these new electric devices not only attempted to duplicate “the motive force
of the nervous system” through their specific modes of stimulation (Figs. 5.10-5.11), but also helped
transform the very lexicon of “sexuality.” In particular, according to Armstrong,
And yet, if “the libido is the first concept that can be said to be both energic and nonanatomical,”
as Paul Ricoeur argues in a chapter on Freud’s “energy concepts,” entitled “An Energetics Without
Hermeneutics,” then how can Freud’s construction of this concept (i.e., as a “psychical elaboration
of sexuality”) be as “decisive,” as Ricoeur says it is, in “detaching Freud from any . . . organic
explanation [of hysterical symptoms]”?
31
Is this “great discovery” (Ricoeur 83)—coupled with Freud’s
early “disappointment with electro-therapy” (Ricoeur 83)—enough to transform psychoanalysis into
“An Energetics With a Hermeneutics,” as Ricoeur believes? And, if so, what are the consequences
of this re-configured “hermeneutic subject”?
95
Fig. 5.9: The Weiss Portable Electromechanical Vibrator and Battery Pack (ca. 1880).
30. Tim Armstrong, “Electrifying the Body,” in Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14-15. All further references appear in the text.
31. Paul Ricoeur, “An Energetics Without Hermeneutics” [1970], in Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale UP , 1977), 83-84. Emphasis added. All futher references
appear in the text. On Freud’s electrical lexicon, see also Siegfried Bernfeld, “Freud’s Earliest Theories and The
School of Helmholtz,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 13.3 (1944): 341-362.
[Metaphors of electricity] altered conceptions of motivation . . . . [S]exual energy,
conceived in electrical terms, becomes the force of life, constantly seeking discharge.
The body was resolved, in the new biophysics, into a system of impulses and flows,
circuits, and blockages . . . . Freud’s theories are heavily electrical in this way, using
a vocabulary of “excitation,” “discharge,” “sexual current,” which persists even as he
moves away from physiological explanations. (18; emphasis added)
96
Fig. 5.10: Title page to Dr. Leslie D. Smith’s Vibratory T echnique and Directions for Treatment (1917).
97
Fig. 5.11: Excerpt from The Illustrated Catalogue of the White Cross Vibrator (ca. 1907).
For Foucault, the consequence is clear: “A dynamics of corporeal space gives way to a
moral theory of sensitivity” (286). And it is out of this moral theory of sensitivity that Freud’s
“hermeneutic subject” emerges with the assimilation of “hysteria” to “mental illness” (Foucault 295).
Or put another way: “what had been error becomes fault” (Foucault 296). When “nervous diseases”
had been associated with “organic movements in the lower regions,” then “hysteria” was merely the
“revenge of a body that was too unrefined” (Foucault 295). But with the new thinking, as Foucault
states, “illness was a result of excessive sensation, and patients suffered from an excessive solidarity
with the beings that surrounded them,” i.e., to all that “solicited the body and soul [psyche]” (295):
And, indeed, don’t Freud and Breuer have this susceptibility in mind when they concern themselves
with hysterical “hypnoid states” that “grow out of day-dreams which are so common even in healthy
people and to which needlework and similar occupations render women especially prone”?
32
If so,
such a concern with day-dreams, novel-reading, and needlework—i.e., the handiwork of “spinsters,”
as Cynthia Russett has shown
33
—would only seem to bolster Foucault’s claim that the notion of
“irritated fibres” also permitted a “decisive distinction to be made in pathology,” such that:
Here, then, as if tied up in a knot, are the two “mechanisms” that Foucault will later call
famously the “hysterization of women’s bodies” and the “pedagogization of children’s sex,” tangled up
98
32. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1893-1895), quoted in Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones:
Digital Women + The New T echnoculture (New York: Double Day, 1997), 111-112.
33. See Cynthia Eagle Russett, “The Machinery of the Body,” in Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction
of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1989), 104-129. When nineteenth-century medicine identified “nerve
force with electricity,” as Russett argues, a “new therapeutics of mental health” emerged that was particularly
concerned with the “bodily economy” of the female reproductive system, which was imagined as a potentially
overtaxed “closed-circuit.” Thus, those women (“spinsters”) who devoted too much of their limited “energy” to
brainwork made themselves susceptible to “nervous exhaustion” (“neurasthenia” and “hysteria”). As Russett states:
“Energy spent in cerebration was of course lost to reproduction, and the intellectual maiden became a sterile
matron. Such a conclusion flowed directly from a fixed-energy conception of the human body” (118).
As a result, people were at once more innocent and more guilty. More innocent as
they were swept along by the total irritation of the nervous system . . . . But more
guilty, more guilty by far, as everything to which they were attached in the world
. . . the passions and fantasies that they had nourished with excessive indulgence . . .
melted into an irritation of the nerves, where they found their natural effect and
moral punishment. All life ended up judged against the degree of irritation: the
abuse of non-natural things, the sedentary life, the reading of novels . . . . (295)
Women who have “weak fibres” and who are easily carried away, in their idleness,
by rapid leaps of their imagination, more often suffer from their nerves than men
. . . . as though the sensitivity of the [female] nervous organ itself was greater than
the capacity of the soul [psyche] to experience sensation . . . . What takes shape [then]
is the idea of a sensibility that is not sensation [but rather a kind of “hysterogenic
zone”—C.H.] . . . which is as much of the soul [psyche] as it is of the body . . . .
The unconsciousness of the hysteric is the converse of her sensibility. (294)
in the hysterical images of young female readers (and) masturbators, like “Dora,” whose highly
susceptible (an)aesthetic body, as Freud points out, “had been over-excited by such reading.”
34
But
even earlier, in 1897, Freud was already confessing this secret to Fliess:
And, indeed, when Freud finally puts his finger on the “painful tangle of motives” driving “Dora’s”
“hysteria” (namely, her “masturbation” in early childhood), it is precisely against the “obstacle” of
her “symptomatic” denials that his suspicions are confirmed (digitally). Or as Freud recalls:
99
Fig. 5.12: Female masturbator. From Dr. Rozier’s Of Secret Habits, or the Ills Produced by Onanism in Women (1830).
34. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)” [1905], in The Freud Reader,
ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 182. All further references appear in the text. Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction [1976], trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 103-104.
35. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, December 22, 1897, in The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm
Fliess, 1887-1904, trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1985), 272.
It has dawned on me that masturbation is the one major habit, the “primal
addiction,” and that it is only as a substitute and replacement for it that the
other addictions—for alcohol, morphine, tobacco, etc.—come into existence. The
part played by this addiction in hysteria is quite enormous; and it is perhaps
there that my great, still outstanding, obstacle is to be found, wholly or in part.
35
I added that she was now on the way to finding an answer to her own question
of why it was that she had fallen ill—by confessing that she had masturbated,
probably in early childhood. Dora denied flatly that she could remember any
such thing . . . . [A]s she lay on the sofa and talked, she kept playing with [her
purse]—opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again, and so on. I looked
on for some time, and then explained to her the nature of a “symptomatic act.”
(215)
A “symptomatic” digital manipulation? But if “Dora’s” purse is a kind of vagina that is repeatedly
fingered (“opening it, putting a finger into it, shutting it again”), one wonders how far Freud’s
re-configuration of “hysteria” has really strayed from the age of Galen, when he is still holding fast
to a “wandering womb.” The answer to this, of course, depends on how (where?) we understand
this (digital) movement. Does “Dora’s” purse have a clitoris? For, as Freud points out:
If the handing over of clitoridal “sensitivity”—“wholly or in part”—constitutes “normal femininity”
(F 126), as Freud says, then the “obstacle” to this by no means automatic transmission of affect
(i.e., as figured in the hysterical fixation of “Dora’s” fingers) would seem to also involve, ironically,
a very specific (“feminine”) grinding of gears, so to speak, “either from the hand or by bringing
the thighs together” (Freud TS, 54). And yet, while the female is indeed “[Freud’s] model for the
necessary shift in the site of stimulation . . . from the clitoris to the vagina,” as Sander Gilman says,
37
when it comes to this particular grinding of gears in the (manual) shift of affect from the clitoris
to the vagina—i.e., in the handing over of clitoridal “sensitivity”—Freud will insist that, far from
constituting a specific (“feminine”) model, “the little girl is a little man” (F 118):
As evident in Freud’s language, here, the “task” of discovering the “truly feminine vagina”
(i.e., of no longer settling for a “cheap substitute,” like “Dora”) must not only involve a certain
handing over of “sensitivity,” but, more specifically, must be “learnt” as a kind of aesthetic education,
in the etymological sense (a sort of disciplined arousal of the senses). Or as Freud states:
100
36. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity” [1932], trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXII (London: Hogarth Press, 1955], 118. All further references
appear in the text as F .
37. See Sander L. Gilman, “Touch, Children, and Freud,” in Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1989), 264. Emphasis added.
Before this transference can be effected [i.e., the handing over of sensitivity from
clitoris to vagina], a certain interval of time must often elapse, during which the
young woman is anaesthetic. This anaesthesia may become permanent [“frigidity”
—C.H.] if the clitoridal zone refuses to abandon its excitability . . . . Anaesthesia in
women . . . is often only apparent and local. They are anaesthetic at the vaginal
orifice but are by no means incapable of excitement originating in the clitoris or
even other zones . . . . [Thus] When erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation has been
With the change to femininity the clitoris should wholly or in part hand over
its sensitivity, and at the same time its importance, to the vagina.
36
[B]oys . . . have learnt how to derive pleasurable sensations from their small penis
and connect its excited state with their ideas of sexual intercourse. Little girls do
the same thing with their still smaller clitoris. It seems that, with them, all their
masturbatory acts are carried out on this penis-equivalent [“cheap imitation”—C.H.],
and that the truly feminine vagina is still undiscovered . . . . (F 118; emphasis added)
For a woman’s (aesthetic) “susceptibility to stimulation” to be properly aroused, then, she must
learn to shift “excitement originating in the clitoris” to her otherwise anaesthetic “vaginal orifice,”
thus preparing it for a (passive? receptive?) “purpose” in heterosexual intercourse. In other words,
the “normal” woman must learn to feel what isn’t there, turning her “vaginal orifice” into kind of
“phantom limb,” or “hysterogenic zone.” The irony of this Freudian aesthetic education is not lost
on Thomas Laqueur, who notes that while “the continuity of the species and the development
of civilization” depend upon each woman adopting this “redistribution of sensibility,”
It would appear that we have finally arrived at a position to make some pronouncement
on the question of Freud’s re-configuration of “hysteria” and its relation to certain movements of
women’s liberation. After all, if not “neurology,” what could possibly motivate such a hysterical
“redistribution of sensibility” in which, as Freud says, “passivity now has the upper hand” (F 128)?
“Penis-envy,” of course, is usually evoked here as the “main vehicle,” to use Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s
phrase,
39
driving the female renunciation of auto-erotic “childish masculinity.” As Freud states:
The question of women’s “liberation,” however, only really gets going with the failure (breakdown)
of this “vehicle,” i.e., with Freud’s account of those girls still “trying to get free from masturbating”
(F 127) and who thus “make it responsible” for their “faulty development” (F 127). Hence Freud:
101
38. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Amor Veneris, vel Dulcedo Appeletur,” in Fragments for a History of the Body,
Part 3, ed. Michel Feher et al. (New York: Zone, 1989), 121-122. Emphasis added.
39. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, “Introduction,” in Freud on Women: A Reader, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
(New York: Norton, 1990), 21. Emphasis added.
I can give you the example of a child herself trying to get free from masturbating.
She does not always succeed in this. If envy for the penis has provoked a powerful
impulse against clitoridal masturbation, but this nevertheless refuses to give way,
a violent struggle for liberation ensues in which the girl . . . gives expression to her
entire dissatisfaction with her inferior clitoris . . . . [Thus] Disposing of early infantile
masturbation is truly no easy or indifferent business . . . . (F 127-128; emphasis added)
. . . neurology is no help. On the contrary. Thus, the move is hysterical, a recathexis
that works against the organic structures of the body. Like the missing limb
phenomenon, it involves feeling what is not there. Becoming a sexually mature
woman is therefore living an oxymoron, becoming a lifelong “normal hysteric” . . . .
38
Her self-love is mortified by the comparison with the boy’s far superior equipment
and in consequence she renounces her masturbatory satisfaction from her clitoris.
(F 126)
successfully transferred by a woman from the clitoris to the vaginal orifice, it implies
that she has adopted a new leading zone for the purposes of her later [mature,
reproductive—C.H.] sexual activity . . . . . which, as it were, puts aside [her] childish
masculinity . . . . (TS, 87; emphasis added)
What makes this “struggle for liberation” such difficult “business”—i.e., a liberation that apparently
no longer involves the (digital) release of some dammed-up matter from the hysterical “womb,”
but rather a movement of getting free from the grip of this “primal addiction”—is, of course, the
peculiar fact that the “excitability of the clitoris,” as Freud says (TS 86), continues to function (or
malfunction) despite the event of wounded “self-love” aroused in the female by the sight of the
“boy’s far superior equipment.” Indeed, as Freud concedes, in a remarkable passage:
Without biological or teleological “purpose,” this “very variable” piece of hysterical “equipment”
(“her inferior clitoris”) is thus constantly aesthetically susceptible, as Foucault said, to an “excessive
solidarity” with the beings that surround her (animate and inanimate), including books, swings,
bicycles, and sewing machines. In his “Varieties of Auto-erotic Phenomena” (1900), Havelock Ellis,
for example, notes how factory girls are able to stimulate innumerable clitoral orgasms at work
by squeezing together their thighs while riding old industrial sewing machines:
102
40. Sigmund Freud, “Female Sexuality” [1931], in Freud on Women: A Reader, ed. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
(New York: Norton, 1990), 324.
41. Havelock Ellis, “Varieties of Auto-erotic Phenomena” [1900], in Sexual Self-stimulation, ed. R.E.L.
Masters (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1967), 293-294. All further references appear in the text. Ellis here
relies on the observations of one M. Pouillet, whose eye-witness account is cited as follows:
During a visit which I once paid to a manufactory of military clothing . . . I witnessed the following
scene. In the midst of the uniform sound produced by some thirty sewing machines, I suddenly
heard one of the machines working with much more velocity than the others. I looked at the
person who was working it, a brunette of eighteen or twenty. While she was automatically occupied
with the trousers she was making on the machine, her face became animated, her mouth opened
slightly, her nostrils dilated, her feet moved the pedals with constantly increasing rapidity. Soon I saw
a convulsive look in her eyes, her eyelids were lowered, her face turned pale and was thrown
backward; hands and legs stopped and became extended; a suffocated cry, followed by a long sigh,
was lost in the noise of the workroom. The girl remained motionless a few seconds, drew out her
handkerchief to wipe away the pearls of sweat from her forehead, and, after casting a timid and
ashamed glance at her companions, resumed her work . . . As I was leaving, I heard another machine
at another part of the room in accelerated movement. The forewoman smiled at me, and remarked
that that was so frequent that it attracted no notice. It was especially observed, she told me, in the
case of . . . those who sat on the edge of their seats, thus facilitating friction of the labia. (294-295)
. . . the clitoris, with its virile character, continues to function in later feminine
sexual life in a manner which is very variable and which is certainly not yet
satisfactorily understood. We do not, of course, know the biological basis of these
peculiarities in women; and still less are we able to assign them any teleological
purpose.
40
Several writers have pointed out that riding, especially in women, may produce
sexual excitement and orgasm . . . . The early type of sewing machine, especially . . .
involved much up-and-down movement of the legs . . . [T]o work a sewing machine
with the body in a certain position produces sexual excitement leading to the
orgasm. The occurrence of the orgasm is indicated to the observer by the machine
being worked for a few seconds with uncontrollable rapidity. This sound is said to
be frequently heard in large French workrooms, and it is part of the duty of the
superintendents of the rooms to make the girls sit properly.
41
With this scene of young women—together—mechanically stimulating clitoral orgasms by
(ab)using some “very variable” “equipment,” we have come to a crossroad (cross-legged cross-stitch?)
in our question regarding the movement of women’s liberation, the movement here, of course, being
the “uncontrollable” spinning of one’s wheels in a sterile, aesthetic free-play that leads nowhere (the
aimless “production” of day-dreaming factory girls). Yet, Ellis here suggests something more: namely,
the invention of a technique. As Ellis says, the “essential movement in working the sewing machine
is the flexion and extension of the ankle” (295), not the squeezing together of the thighs. This extra,
added-on part of the “movement”—i.e., the squeezing together of the thighs—is thus a sort of
(“feminine”) supplementary technique that is not dictated by the “machine itself,” nor its operating
instructions. As Ellis says, a “special adjustment of the body” is needed in order to “act upon the
sexual organs,” and thus “the muscles of the thighs are held together,” but “this is by no means a
necessary result of using the sewing machine” (295). Can we, then, speak of a de-liberate female
technique (auto-motive?) when it comes to this “uncontrollable” “primal addiction”? Freud, of course,
held that the one “technique” women “may have invented”—i.e., weaving—was really just mimicry:
103
Fig. 5.13: Freud’s daughters (Anna and Sophie). The back of the photo reads: their first attempt at “feminine” needlework.
It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions
in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have
invented—that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to
guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to
have given the model which this achievement imitates by causing the growth at
maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be
taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick
into the skin and are only matted together. (F 132; emphasis added)
A “painful tangle of motives,” indeed. But if women invented “plaiting and weaving” by copying
the movement of their “pubic hair”—i.e., imitating the (automatic?) “model” of “Nature herself”—
then the only de-liberate thing women can take responsibility for, as Freud says, is the “step” of
“making the threads adhere to one another” (i.e., on purpose), since on the body the pubic hairs
“stick into the skin and are only matted together” (i.e., not on purpose).
Knot on purpose? As we shift to the question of the de-liberate re-appropriations of the
electromechanical vibrator as an overt piece of sexual and educational equipment by the Women’s
Liberation Movement in the 1970s, these aporias of the auto-motive (or what Freud above calls the
“unconscious motive”) will increasingly occur around pedagogical motifs. This is nothing new, of
course, as a report on “Masturbation” in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1842) suggests,
since the “congregation of females together” often involved hysterical images of some older female
“in the habit of teaching the practice to every girl she met.” Hence:
But what does it mean to be “in the habit” of “teaching” a “primal addiction” to a “congregation”
of copy-cats? Can it be done in a de-liberate movement of women’s liberation? And, similarly, if
“error becomes fault” in this “moral theory of sensitivity,” as Foucault said, then who (or what) is
to take responsibility for such a hysterical “step” of aesthetic (s)educ(a)tion?
Let us return, then, one last time, to the (an)aesthetic legs of “Elisabeth von R.” in what
Freud calls “the first full-length analysis of hysteria undertaken by me” (139). Not only does Freud
conclude, after treating her legs, that “local diagnosis and electrical reactions lead nowhere in the
study of hysteria” (160), but, more shockingly, “she seemed to take quite a liking to the painful
shocks produced by the high tension apparatus” (138). It is with this shocking revelation that Freud
—as if himself stumbling backwards in shock—“invents” (instead?) his (new?) “cathartic treatment”:
104
42. “Masturbation,” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 14 September 1842, 104.
Self-pollution is a vice, more than any other, of a highly contagious and virulent
character, and the congregation of females together in the various manufacturing
establishments is a most fruitful source of moral contamination. One female may
thus spread the habit among hundreds. In one school district it was a frequent
custom among the female schoolmates to visit each other and pass the night
for the purpose of self-pollution. One female, in another district in the same town,
was in the [deliberate?—C.H.] habit of teaching the practice to every girl she
met who had not previously acquired it. Most of the cases mentioned above were
taught the habit by one older. It is impossible to conceive the full extent of such
corrupting influence. (emphasis added)
42
Thus it came about that . . . I arrived at a procedure which I later developed into
a regular method and employed deliberately. This [“cathartic”] procedure was one
of clearing away the pathogenic psychical material layer by layer, and we liked to
compare it with the technique of excavating a buried city. (139)
By clearing away “psychical material” from this concealed “buried city,” Freud’s “cathartic treatment”
now involves soliciting “the story” from the hysteric so that she will “yield up her secret” (138)
and thus “discharge” the “motives” for her illness. This liberating process Freud calls “abreaction”
(148). By giving the female hysteric “an opportunity of getting rid of the excitation that had been
piling up so long, by ‘abreacting’ it” (158), as Freud says, he would “penetrate into deeper layers”
(139) with questions that “she answered . . . under the pressure of my hand” (152). Under the
pressure of his hand, then, “[her pain] would reach its climax when she was in the act of telling
me the essential and decisive part . . . and with the last word of this it would disappear” (Freud 148).
In this way, then, Freud would take away “her motives”:
If there is a deliberate movement of women’s liberation implied in the case of “Elisabeth von R.,”
it would seem to be a very paradoxical one, based on the “taking away” of certain cherished (auto-)
“motives” (i.e., “Elisabeth’s” taboo love for her “brother-in-law”), and adding only, in consolation to
the mortified moral sensitivity of this resisting “hermeneutic subject,” that: “we are not responsible
for our feelings” (Freud 157).
II. “We Are Not Responsible For Our Feelings”
105
During this period of “abreaction,” the patient’s condition, both physical and
mental, made such a striking improvement that I used to say, only half-jokingly,
that I was taking away . . . her motives for pain . . . . (148-149; emphasis added)
43. Betty Dodson, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love (N.Y.: Bodysex Designs, 1974), 13.
All further references appear in the text.
44. Luce Irigaray, “Volume-Fluidity” [1974], in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca:
Cornell UP , 1985), 232.
Sexual skill and the ability to respond are not “natural” in our
society. Doing what “comes naturally” for us [women] is to be
sexually inhibited. Sex is like any other skill—it has to be learned
and practiced. When a woman masturbates, she learns to like
her own genitals, to enjoy sex and orgasm, and furthermore, to
become proficient and independent about it.
—BETTY DODSON (1974)
43
If machines, even machines of theory, can be aroused all by
themselves, may woman not do likewise? Now a crisis breaks
out, an age in which the “subject” no longer knows where to
turn, whom or what to turn to, amid all these many foci
of “liberation” . . . . [T]hese objects of mastery have perhaps
brought the subject to his doom.
—LUCE IRIGARAY (1974)
44
In her essay, “Free Space” (1970), which was anthologized in Radical Feminism (1973) under the
section “Building a Movement” (along with essays on “Consciousness Raising”), Pamela Allen warns
that “in building a women’s movement” and attempting “to separate ourselves from dependence on
male values and institutions,” there may be a “temptation to transfer our identities onto the group,
to let our thinking be determined by group consciousness rather than doing it ourselves” (271).
45
Accordingly, she names four group techniques “to help us in our endeavor to become autonomous
in thought and behavior” (272), including the practice of “Opening Up.” As Allen argues:
Far from “taking away” certain cherished (auto-)“motives,” then, Allen’s version of Freud’s “cathartic
treatment” (“opening up”) would seem to involve (instead?) a kind of deliberate movement of
aesthetic education whose aim (purpose?) is to “deepen our contact with our feelings,” and not to
106
45. Pamela Allen, “Free Space” [1970], in Radical Feminism, eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, Anita Rapone
(New York: Times Books, 1973), 271. All further references appear in the text.
Our society alienates us from our feelings . . . . [But] It is imperative for our
understanding of ourselves and for our mental health that we maintain and
deepen our contact with our feelings. Our first concern must not be with whether
these feelings are good or bad, but what they are. Feelings are a reality. To deny
their existence does not get rid of them. Rather it is through admitting them that
one can begin to deal with her feelings. Opening up is an essential but difficult
process . . . . (273)
Fig. 5.14: Image from Spare Rib 23
(1974); “Clitoral Truth,” Margaret
S. Chalmers, Spare Rib 39 (1975).
Reproduced in Women’s Health: A
Spare Rib Reader, ed. Sue O’Sullivan
(London: Pandora, 1987), 365.
“get rid of them.” Indeed, in the “endeavor to become autonomous,” as Allen says, it is only by
“admitting” “our feelings”—coming to grips with them—that women might be able to “take their
destinies into their own hands” (276). Into their own hands?
It would be easy, at this point, to ignore the rest of Allen’s argument—what she calls
“training ourselves to get out from under our subjective responses” (277)—and to cite (instead?)
the many “self-help” manuals that seem to arise out of this (Schillerian) “Consciousness-Raising”
paradigm (invention?) of the Women’s Liberation Movement. In Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971), for
example, the Boston Women’s Health Collective advocate various techniques of “body education”
with the deliberate aim of reconciling women to their alienated “feelings,” or, as they say, “getting
in touch with human qualities in ourselves that had been taboo.”
46
Hence:
If “body education” aims to help women be “more autonomous” by teaching them to “accept” and
“be responsible” for their “sexual drives” and “untapped energies,” thus becoming “more whole” (3),
is it surprising that “masturbation” should now be invoked in these manuals as both an end and a
means (a deliberate manual exercise) for “getting in touch with human qualities in ourselves”? What,
if anything, has become of Freud’s hysterical “primal addiction”? As Shelia Ernst and Lucy Goodison
argue in their self-help manual, In Our Own Hands (1981), it is thanks to “the women’s liberation
movement [that] . . . . women are asserting our right to a full and pleasurable sexuality on our own
terms . . . asserting our pleasure in the clitoris . . . [and] masturbating to give ourselves pleasure instead
of being dependent on another.”
47
And yet, to get free from this dependence (addiction?) entails what
Ernst and Goodison call “homework” (5), i.e., “a rigorous programme of daily exercises” (5), since so
many women are still “experiencing our sexuality in an alienated way” (5). Thus:
107
46. Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves [1971] (New York: Touchstone, 1976), 6.
All further references appear in the text.
47. Shelia Ernst and Lucy Goodison, In Our Hands: A Women’s Book of Self-Help Therapy (Duluth: Whole
Person Press, 1981), 6. Emphasis added. All further references appear in the text.
For us, body education is core education. Our bodies are the physical bases from
which we move out into the world [auto-motives?—C.H.]; ignorance, uncertainty
—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation from
ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be . . . . [W]hen
[a woman] does not understand nor enjoy sex and concentrates her sexual drives
into aimless romantic fantasies, perverting and misusing a potential energy, [this
is] because she has been brought up to deny it. Learning to understand, accept, and
be responsible for our physical selves, we are freed of some of these preoccupations
and can start to use our untapped energies . . . . [and be] more autonomous . . . . (3)
[T]eaching us to develop a better relationship with our bodies and to learn new
patterns of [autonomous] behaviour . . . . usually includes a rigorous programme of
daily exercises. This homework involves getting to know your body by touching it
A similar note of “awakening” is struck by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, who state: “We
found that it was helpful to use a mirror to see ourselves. For the first time some of us could say,
‘I feel good about touching myself, even tasting myself’” (14). Indeed, as they continue,
Far from being a “primal addiction,” then, it would appear from this women’s educational manual
that the (digital) movements of “masturbation” can, indeed, serve as a kind of deliberate vehicle of
a woman’s aesthetic “awakening” (an auto-erotic auto-motive?).
And yet, to merely “awaken” a woman’s (an)aesthetic “pelvic area” through this daily regime
of “body education” is not enough, according to the Boston Women’s Health Collective, when her
“sexual feelings” (24) are still imagined as “that alien part of us residing below the neck that has
needs and responses we don’t understand” (24). Thus, Ernst and Goodison, as if attempting to bring
back this alienated (hysterical) “wandering womb” into the home of a woman’s responsible hands,
108
Fig. 5.15: Image from Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971), 14.
and looking at it in the mirror; physical exercises to awaken the pelvic area; [and]
making love to yourself as the basis of knowing what pleases you sexually . . . . (5)
Masturbation . . . is the first and easiest way to experiment with your body. It’s a
way to find out what feels good . . . . Some women masturbate by moistening their
finger (with either saliva or juice from the vagina) and rubbing it around and over
the clitoris. You can rub or tweak the clitoris directly; you can use one finger or
many. You can rub up and down or round and round. Pressure and timing also
vary. Some women masturbate by crossing their legs and exerting steady and
rhythmic pressure on the whole genital area. Some of us have learned to develop
muscular tension throughout our bodies resembling [imitating?—C.H.] the tensions
developed in the motions of intercourse. (31; emphasis added)
recommend a meditative exercise they call “The Story of My Vagina,” which, although similar to
Allen’s group version of Freud’s “cathartic treatment” (“Opening Up”), also involves a slight twist:
No “cheap imitation,” here, like “Dora’s” hysterical purse (pursonality),
48
which refused to stay open
(and thus had to be repeatedly fingered). Here, apparently, is the real thing (which must be grasped).
“Feelings are a reality,” as Allen said, and it is only by saying “yes” to them (“admitting them”) that
a woman can become “cunt positive” (Dodson 18).
109
48. “Pursonal: (purse + personal)” is one of James Joyce’s neologisms listed by Jorge Luis Borges in his
reading of Finnegans Wake (1939). See Jorge Luis Borges, “Joyce and Neologisms” [1939], in Borges: A Reader,
eds. Emir Rodriguez Monegal and Alastair Reid (New York: E.P . Dutton, 1981), 104.
Sit, close your eyes and imagine that you are your vagina. Include your clitoris and
the whole of your genital area. Let your mind trace through the history of this
part of your body—the beginnings of its awareness, the pleasant and unpleasant
experiences it has been through, times when it has been in conflict and in harmony
with the rest of your body. After several minutes, open your eyes. Now each takes
turns to tell the group or a partner the story of your vagina. Tell it in the first
person as if you were the vagina: “I am Pat’s vagina. She used to touch me but
felt guilty . . . .” [ . . . ] Be aware when it is hard for you to speak honestly . . . . This
exercise also works at home alone, where you can speak out loud to yourself . . . .
(Ernst and Goodison 143; emphasis added)
Fig. 5.16: Image from a series
of “cunt positive” drawings
by Betty Dodson. Liberating
Masturbation: A Meditation
on Self Love (1974), 29.
110
Fig. 5.17: Images from Getting In Touch: Self Sexuality for Women (1972), by Carolyn Smith, Toni Ayres and Maggie Rubenstein. In The Yes
Book of Sex series (San Francisco: Multi Media Resource Center), 23-24 & 30-31.
Of course, this is only half the story. (“The Pursonal is Political.”) If the electromechanical
vibrator “resurfaces” in the 1970s as an explicit vehicle of female auto-eroticism within a certain
“Consciousness-Raising” paradigm of aesthetic reconciliation and self-realization (Fig. 5.17), it would
be a mistake to read these do-it-yourself manuals of Women’s Liberation solely in terms of some
pre-existing “clitoral truth” of cunt positivism. Although a “therapeutic ethos of self-realization,” as
T.J. Jackson Lears calls it,
49
has dominated the popular socially-camouflaged image of the vibrator
from the 1920s to the 1970s (Fig. 5.19), when Allen argues that women’s “endeavor to become
autonomous” must include “training ourselves to get out from under our subjective responses and
to look at reality in new ways” (277), she insists that this “training” is “not therapy” (278):
If Allen’s “training” program implies a “politics,” then, it would seem to be one based on certain de-
liberate techniques of (aesthetic) re-education, or counter-education (i.e., unlearning), which would
distinguish it (apparently) from the popular “therapeutic ethos,” described by Lears, which “offered
harmony, vitality, and the hope of self-realization . . . . without fundamental social change” (11). Yet,
as Lears notes, there is “something self-defeating” about the “deliberate cultivation of spontaneity”
that ultimately leads “in circles” (16). Indeed, we will have to try to hold fast to this “self-defeating”
(digital?) movement (“in circles”), since even the so-called “straightforward use of the vibrator,” as
Jane Gaines has recently argued, “is nothing more nor less than the voluntary production of the
involuntary” (77).
50
A s(p)in(i)ster orgasm as if (a) knot on purpose?
No one, perhaps, is more responsible (response-able?) for the de-liberate re-appropriation of
the vibrator for women’s liberation and aesthetic re-education than Betty Dodson, who writes in 1974:
111
49. T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the
Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980,
eds. Richard Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (N.Y.: Pantheon, 1983), 4. All further references appear in the text.
Lears notes that popular advertisements for electromechanical devices like vibrators “took their place alongside
other mass diversions—the amusement park, the slick-paper romance, the movies” (28)—in promising intense
“real life” to their consumers: a therapeutic “renovation of sensuality” (28).
50. Jane Gaines, “Machines That Make The Body Do Things,” Polygraph 13 (2007): 71-91. All further
references appear in the text.
The advantage of the vibrator is its strong and consistent stimulation. If a woman
has had little or no experience with childhood, adolescent or adult masturbation,
she needs to train the nerve pathways from her genitals to the brain. She has literally
CUT OFF sensations from her genitals in her desire to be a “good girl.” Learning
how to say “NO” to genital sensations. A woman can reverse that conditioning at
The . . . group process is not therapy because we try to find the social causes for
our experience and the possible programs for changing these. But the therapeutic
experience of momentarily relieving the individual [auto—C.H.] of all responsibility
for her situation does occur and is necessary if women are to be free to act [auto-
nomously?—C.H.] (278; emphasis added)
Here, although a female has been “conditioned” to be a “good girl”—i.e., has “CUT OFF sensations
from her genitals”—Dodson maintains that it is possible to shift this conditioned anaesthesia into
“reverse” (manually) through a practice of “physical reconditioning”: namely, “orgasmic masturbation”
with a vibrator powerful enough to stimulate and “train the nerve pathways from her genitals to the
brain.” “Sexual consciousness-raising,” indeed (Dodson 12). But the point of this “reconditioning,”
as the Boston Women’s Health Collective remind us, is “not to produce bigger and better spasms
in orgasm” (23), but to “unravel the myths that put us down” (23). And it is this feminist interest
in re-writing the dominant scripts of “female sexuality” that (apparently) separates Dodson’s manual of
aesthetic counter-education from The Sensuous Woman (1969), a best-seller of the “sexual revolution,”
which also prescribes “masturbation workouts” for women in a “training camp” of their own:
112
51. “J,” The Sensuous Woman (New York: Dell, 1969), 40-41. All further references appear in the text.
any stage of her life—by saying “YES” to her body, her genitals, her pleasure. The
physical reconditioning is positive, joyful, orgasmic masturbation. (48-49; emphasis
added)
To awaken your body and make it perform well you must train like an athlete for
the act of love. Your training camp is the privacy of your bedroom . . . . Masturbation
workouts will teach you which places of your body arouse the most pleasure in
you when caressed, what kind of manipulation in the clitoral area gives you the
quickest response and/or most exquisite one . . . . If you can teach your body to
reach orgasm in three minutes, say, just think what that responsive body of yours is
going to do when he is caressing it.
51
Fig. 5.18: Betty Dodson with her electromechanical vibrator.
Yes, just think what your “responsive body” will do when “he is caressing it,” when you are having
“real sex” (i.e., with a man). For Dodson, who “had become convinced more than ever that sexual
liberation was crucial to women’s liberation, and that masturbation was crucial to . . . sexual
consciousness-raising” (12), it is precisely this kind of socially-conditioned script of “compulsory
heterosexuality” within The Sensuous Woman that needs to be manually “reversed” (physically re-
inscribed otherwise) with the vibrator’s clitoral stimulation, since, as Dodson says, “the only available
script is the missionary position (man on top) and the cock in the hole” (3). And indeed, since the
vibrator “produces these results without penetration,” as Jane Gaines argues, it tells us that “women’s
pleasure organs are located on the outside, not the inside” (77). But can we really guarantee that the
vibrator thus enters the history of Western sexuality as a “deeply subversive machine” (Gaines 77)?
Note, for example, the subsection on “Mechanical Manipulation” from The Sensuous Woman,
where we find the following advice to a woman on buying the right vibrator for “achieving orgasm”:
Not only does this woman not have to worry about becoming “entangled in electric cords,” but,
because she purchased a cordless “massager”—“shaped rather like a penis” (Fig. 5.19)—she can now
let her “fantasy man” rule her mind and body by imagining the vibrator to be “his hand and penis.”
At least, that is the scenario prescribed by The Sensuous Woman in the following (hysterical) exercise:
“Very variable equipment,” indeed. And yet, as is evident from photographs of Dodson (Fig. 5.18),
and in the drawings that illustrate her manual, Liberating Masturbation: A Mediatation on Self Love
(Fig. 5.20), Dodson clearly has another vehicle in mind for her sort of crash-course in auto-erotic
“reconditioning.” Although agreeing with The Sensuous Woman that “the vibrator has proven to be an
excellent erotic toy for women . . . who have never had an orgasm” (48), Dodson nevertheless insists:
113
I have found that the most popular style for masturbatory activity is a battery-
operated (no worry about becoming entangled in electric cords) vibrator, shaped
rather like a penis. It is an effective clitoral stimulator and can be inserted into the
vagina. Since the machine is advertised as a facial massager, you can purchase it
without embarrassment. The sales clerk isn’t going to know what you intend to use
it for. (43; emphasis added)
Imagine him looking at you stretched out naked on the bed, your body open and
hungry for him . . . . Let the vibrator be his hands and penis. Take your time. You
have all night to savor these sensations. Let yourself go. Be swallowed up in the
continuous, rhythmic stimulation of the vibrator as it moves up and down and
around your clitoris and vagina. Let your fantasy man rule your mind and body
. . . . If you have trouble conjuring up a fantasy, pick a sexy section from a book
and re-read it while using the vibrator. (44-45)
The plastic penis-shaped battery vibrator is . . . too hard and uncomfortable and has
weak vibrations. If a woman desires penetration she can use her fingers or a peeled
cucumber. I heard one woman say she preferred a wilted carrot. Many women don’t
want huge things inside their vagina, contrary to male fantasy. (49)
114
Fig. 5.19: Cordless “Massager.” House & Garden Magazine (December 1971). Note the wedding ring.
“Many women don’t want huge things inside their vagina, contrary to male fantasy.” Indeed,
if a woman desires “penetration,” as Dodson says, “she can use her fingers,” but why would she?
“The vibrator” (Fig. 5.20), as Gaines said, tells us that “women’s pleasure organs are located on the
outside, not the inside” (77), and thus it is “designed for use on the clitoris in its actual location”
(78; Gaines’ emphasis). Apparently, then, it is only a woman who has “CUT OFF sensations from
her genitals in her desire to be a ‘good girl,’” as Dodson says, i.e., a woman in a (hysterical) state of
conditioned (sexual) anaesthesia, who would even want such a fictional thing. But this “thing,” of
course, is what Freud calls “normal femininity,” and its motive (“penis-envy”). This, at any rate, was
his “male fantasy,” or “myth,” as both Anne Koedt and Susan Lydon call it in two seminal texts of
feminist theory: “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1968)
52
and “The Politics of Orgasm” (1970).
53
Ever since Freud’s “incredible invention” (200), as Koedt says, “frigidity” has been hysterically defined
as “the failure of women to have vaginal orgasms” (198), even though “orgasm necessarily takes place
in the sexual organ equipped for sexual climax—the clitoris” (199). Thus, as Koedt urges feminists:
115
52. Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” [1968], in Radical Feminism, eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen
Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: Times Books, 1973), 198-207. All further references appear in the text.
53. Susan Lydon, “The Politics of Orgasm” [1970], in Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings
From the Women’s Liberation Movement, ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage, 1970), 197-205. All further
references appear in the text.
What we must do is redefine our sexuality. We must disgard the “normal” concepts
of sex and create new guidelines which take into account mutual sexual enjoyment
. . . . We must begin to demand that if certain sexual positions now defined as
“standard” are not mutually conducive to orgasm, they no longer be defined as
standard. New techniques must be used or devised which transform this particular
aspect of our current sexual exploitation. (Koedt 199; emphasis added).
Fig. 5.20: Hitachi Magic Wand. Drawing by Betty Dodson. Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love (1974), 46.
Heeding Koedt’s call to “redefine our sexuality” by devising “new techniques,” Dodson, in the 1970s,
turns to the transformative possibilities of the “electric orgasm” as generated by the motor-driven
clitoral stimulation of the Hitachi Magic Wand (cord attached),
54
as if deliberately throwing into
“reverse” Freud’s hysterical “task” of (manually) shifting the “sensitivity” of clitoridal “nerve endings”
to a “poorly supplied” (anaesthetic) vaginal orifice (Koedt 202). Thus as Dodson states:
Like Koedt and Lydon, who counter Freud’s “myth of the vaginal orgasm” with the “clitoral truth”
of William Masters and Virginia Johnson’s anatomical research in Human Sexual Response (1966),
Dodson will claim that clitoral masturbation is simultaneously “our first natural sexual activity” (13)
and “a way of discovering and developing orgasmic response patterns” (13). Which begs the question:
If this is so “natural”—a “basic drive” (13), as Dodson says—why should it need to be deliberately
“discovered” and “developed” auto-erotically, let alone mechanically via motor-driven stimulation? It
would seem we have returned to that “self-defeating” movement (“in circles”): i.e., “the deliberate
cultivation of spontaneity.” How could such a “self-defeating” auto-motive ever entail a “politics”?
116
54. As Joani Blank states, “The Hitachi Magic Wand has been a best-seller at Good Vibrations [a feminist
operated vibrator store] ever since we opened our doors in 1977.” See Good Vibrations: A Complete Guide to
Vibrators [1977] (San Francisco: Down There Press, 1989), 16-17.
Masturbation finally puts an end to the concept of frigidity [sexual anaesthesia—
C.H.]. If a woman can stimulate herself to orgasm, she is orgasmic and sexually
healthy. “Frigid” is a man’s word for a woman who cannot have an orgasm in the
missionary position in five minutes with only the kind of stimulation that is good
for him [i.e., vaginal]. We must no longer cling to the notion that we “should”
have orgasms from intercourse alone. (28)
Fig. 5.21: Hitachi Magic Wand. Drawing by Betty Dodson. Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love (1974), 46.
Shulamith Firestone, in 1970, famously announced that “feminism, in truth, has a cyclical
momentum all its own . . . . [F]eminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a
technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles.”
55
Like
Dodson’s vibrator-driven orgies of “sexual consciousness-raising,”
56
Firestone holds fast to a promise
that certain technologies (“artificial reproduction”) will eventually liberate women from the tyranny
of the “biological family” (reproductive sex) such that: “In our new society, humanity could finally
revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality . . . . [O]ne could now realize oneself fully, simply in the
process of being and acting” (209). A similar note of liberal-humanist reconciliation is struck in the
final sentence of Dodson’s manual, which states: “Masturbation can help return sex to its proper
place—to the individual” (55). Revert, return, realize. Far from a “self-defeating” auto-motive (“in
circles”), it is as if, as Arthur Frank has argued, “masturbation is not only taken for granted as
something ‘natural,’ but its history has a potentially positive value for dyadic sexual involvement.”
57
Hence the critique voiced in Jill Johnston’s “The Myth of the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1973):
“Until all women are lesbians there will be no true political revolution” (Johnston 505). Here, with
Johnston’s final “solution,” we seem to have a properly “self-defeating” political auto-motive driven
beyond any “dyadic sexual involvement,” for as Johnston states: “Feminism will no longer need itself
[i.e., will self-destruct—C.H.] when women cease to think of themselves as ‘other’ in relation to the
117
55. Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist Revolution [1970] (New York: Bantam
Books, 1972), 31. All further references appear in the text.
56. Dodson recalls one of her first vibrator-driven consciousness-raising groups in the early 1970s thusly:
57. Arthur W. Frank, III, “The Anatomo-Politics of Positive Prescription: Materials from the History of
Masturbation,” SEC Reports II (1982): 55-76. Emphasis added. Thanks to Peggy Kamuf for this reference.
58. Jill Johnston, “The Myth of the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” [1973], in Sexual Revolution, ed. Jeffery
Escoffier (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 507-510. All further references appear in the text.
We went around the circle, each describing how she felt about group sex and where she was
personally . . . . At the end of the evening I announced that we were setting up an all-female orgy on
the following Saturday night (prime time). Nine women showed, all of us heterosexual . . . . Several
brought vibrators and creams . . . . We rapped a little about how we felt, most of us admitting we
were extremely nervous, but happy . . . . We exchanged masturbation techniques and vibrators, doing
ourselves first and then each other. We also got into oral sex . . . . One of the many beauties of that
historical evening was that everyone of us there had at least one orgasm and, for several of the
women present, it was the first time they had been able to come in a group setting. (20-21)
[In their] refutation of Freud’s thesis of sexual maturity in the woman consisting
of her . . . shifting of orgasmic location in the clitoris to the “mature” vagina . . . .
feminists were basically making a common complaint in the new terminological
context of feminism. That the man was no good in bed. That he was insensitive to
the essential clitoris . . . . [and] that a woman . . . would henceforth refuse to accept
responsibility for a frigidity that wasn’t her own fault. [But] The solution has still
not been posed within feminist theory. It can’t, because feminism is not a solution.
It’s a complaint that got the movement going. When the feminists have a solution
they’ll be Gay/Feminists. (Emphasis added)
58
‘other’ [i.e., to men] and unite with their own kind or species” (510; emphasis added). And yet,
even Johnston’s final “solution” would exclude the vibrator (a mere “cheap imitation”) in favor of
this species-specific (re)union with her “own kind”—especially a vibrator shaped like a “penis.”
59
As
Johnston states, “no technological solution will be the answer to the spiritual needs of the woman
deprived of herself [i.e., of her “own kind”—C.H.]” (505). Thus:
“She doesn’t need any artificial substitute.” But if lesbian women are not “equipped to
oppress [their] own kind,” as Johnston says (to the chagrin of Gayle Rubin),
60
then what about
those “Feminists who still sleep with the man [and who] are delivering their most vital energies to
the oppressor” (Johnston 506)? Couldn’t the vibrator help re-educate these (heterosexual) feminists,
“delivering their most vital energies” back where they belong (i.e., “with their own kind or species”)?
118
59. On the (de)stabilizing implications of the “penis”-shaped vibrator, see June L. Reich, “Genderfuck:
The Law of the Dildo,” Discourse 15.1 (Fall 1992): 113-127.
60. On this idealized “Lesbian Separatism” of the early 1970’s, Gayle Rubin states: “What angers me most
about this is the assumption that lesbianism is not a social construct. The fact is that lesbianism is as much a
social construct of the current system as anyone else’s sexuality” (450). Although Rubin notes that “Lesbianism
at that time was presented as the oppressed getting together, as if women were the proletariat getting together
to relate to each other instead of the oppressor,” the unintended consequence of this necessary justification of
“lesbian experience” was that “it made heterosexual feminists into second-class citizens and created decades of
problems for heterosexual women in the radical women’s movement” (449). In this 1970’s “hierarchy,” as Rubin
says, “lesbians were better than straight women” (449). To which Deirdre English asks: “How did it serve a
heterosexual feminist to adopt a theory that was—on the surface—so self-denying?” (451). See Gayle Rubin,
Deirdre English, and Amber Hollibaugh, “Talking Sex” [1980], in Sexual Revolution, ed. Jeffrey Escoffier (New
York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003), 444-464.
Genitalorgasmic sex between women is absolutely consistent with our total sensual
and emotionally mutually reflecting relations with each other. The lesbian woman
is not properly equipped to oppress her own kind. But she is equipped to give
herself pleasure, and she doesn’t need any artificial substitute for the instrument of
oppression to give herself that pleasure. (Johnston 512; emphasis added)
Fig. 5.22: Vibrator cartoon (part 1). From Sheba Feminist Collective, Our Bodies and Sexuality (1981).
Indeed, despite Johnston’s criticism, Koedt’s early essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” (1968),
had already anticipated that “Lesbian sexuality could make an excellent case, based on anatomical
data, for the irrelevancy of the male organ” (206), which would then force (heterosexual) feminists
“to discard many ‘physical’ arguments explaining why women go to bed with men” (206). Or, as
Koedt states:
And yet, if the only way the “clitoral orgasm” threatens the “heterosexual institution” is by showing
that “sexual pleasure” can be obtained from “either men or women,” as Koedt says, then she, too,
excludes the vibrator from the conceptual “confines” of what she calls “human sexual relationships.”
Thus, while the “clitoral orgasm—now perceived as the truth of female sexuality—frees women from
heterosexuality and paves the way for their resocialization as, perhaps, radical feminists,” as Jane
Juffer argues,
61
the role of the vibrator in this “resocialization” is anything but “straightforward”:
119
61. Jane Juffer, “Mainstreaming Masturbation? Making Domestic Space for Women’s Orgasms,” in At
Home With Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 79. All further reference
appear in the text.
For lesbians, the debate about vibrators and dildos . . . centered on whether using
a vibrator with a partner and enjoying penetration meant that you were over-
determined by heterosexual assumptions about what constituted good sex. [Thus]
Assuming the “butch” role through . . . the use of vibrators and dildos was . . . a
patriarchal contamination of lesbian sexuality [in the 1970s]. (Juffer 90)
The recognition of clitoral orgasm as fact would threaten the heterosexual institution.
For it would indicate that sexual pleasure was obtainable from either men or women,
thus making heterosexuality not an absolute, but an option. It would thus open up
the whole question of human sexual relationships beyond the confines of the present
male-female role system. (206; Koedt’s emphasis)
Fig. 5.23: Vibrator cartoon (part 2). Sheba Feminist Collective, Our Bodies and Sexuality (1981).
More than the threat of being stigmatized as “male-identified” (addicted to men), however, was the
ever-looming danger of becoming dependent on the vibrator (“cheap imitation”) for one’s own
“sexual pleasure,” one’s own “self-realization” (as if trading one addiction for another). After all, if the
“clitoral orgasm” teaches the liberated woman that going to bed with men is but a conditioned
“option” (which can be “reversed”), then what is to keep this “very variable” piece of equipment,
without “teleological purpose,” as Freud said, from not only entangling “compulsory heterosexuality”
in (k)nots, but from tripping-up any claim made for (autonomous) “human sexual relationships,”
including Johnston’s species-specific “genitalorgasmic sex between women”? Indeed, why should the
fact that “the clitoris has no other function than that of sexual pleasure” (202), as Koedt says, be
solely “a threat to masculinity” (Koedt 205)?
As Dodson recalls: “Many women I talked to said they were reluctant to use the vibrator
because they were afraid they’d ‘get hooked’” (13). And although Dodson dismisses these fears in her
manual, the mere fact that she had to include a paragraph on “Vibrator Addiction” (51) is telling.
Telling of what? According to Juffer, the “anxieties” surrounding the figure of the “vibrator junkie”
in the 1970s constitute an “early articulation of the fear of the cyborg” (90):
“Robots addicted to endless orgasms”—as if without (an) “end”? Juffer, here, seems to have in mind
Linda Williams, who argued that as long as sexual pleasure is viewed as having a proper “end”—
whether that end be reproduction, love, control over another, or even orgasm as a “goal-driven”
release—it tends to reside within a “masculine economy of production,” i.e., one apparently made
anxious by (female) “vibrator junkies.”
62
On the other hand, as Williams states:
With Williams’ notion of an end-less “feminine economy of consumption”—i.e., without “teleological
purpose”—we are perhaps closer to the usual sense of “addiction,” since, like “food,” the “drug” is
usually “consumed” (on purpose?). Indeed, as Dodson states: “Of all my addictions—the vibrator
120
62. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: U of California
P , 1999), 273. All further references appear in the text.
. . . the paranoia that women using machines would turn into women as machines
—robots addicted to endless orgasms . . . . The vibrator assumed the status of
a household appliance run amok, complete with visions of women endlessly
masturbating and eliding the romantic “process,” which stereotypically distinguishes
female pleasure from the quick male orgasm. (90-91)
. . . when sexual pleasure begins to cultivate (already inherent) qualities of perversion;
when it dispenses with strictly biological and social functions and becomes an
[autotelic? Kantian?—C.H.] end in itself . . . then we are in a realm of what must
now be described as a more feminine economy of consumption, an economy best
represented by . . . the orgasmic woman [deliberately?—C.H.] masturbating “with
the aid of a mechanical-electrical instrument.” (273)
is the mildest and least destructive of them all. After I have the food addiction under control, I’ll
take a look at my vibrator addiction” (51). If the opposition between “substances” that are natural
(“food”) and those that are artificial (“drugs”) is related, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued,
63
to
the modern taxonomy of “desires” that are natural (“needs”) and artificial (“addictions”), then it is
not surprizing that Virginia E. Johnson, who, like Dodson, was an early advocate for the deliberate
use of the vibrator as a vehicle of female auto-eroticism and aesthetic re-education, should also
address the “problem” of the vibrator in terms of “food” metaphors. Thus, in “What’s Good—and
Bad—about the Vibrator” (1976), Johnson begins by noting that, ironically, the very success of
the Women’s Liberation Movement has created women who not only feel entitled to their orgasm,
but who now make it their “overwhelming goal” (auto-motive?):
“Like convenience foods of the ready-mix, just add water variety,” such motor-driven (automatic?)
orgasms provide a “usable end product,” but, like an artificial “cheap imitation,” “a lot is left out by
the process.” Like what, for instance? Ironically, as Johnson states, “feeling” can be lost:
With this looming threat of self-induced “tactile anesthesia” hanging over her aesthetic re-education,
the over-zealous vibrator user, according to Johnson, must remember three things: (1) the vibrator
is always a “last resort”; (2) the vibrator’s ultimate purpose is to help a woman to respond properly
in “intercourse” with her (male) partner (i.e., the “real thing”); and (3) the vibrator, as a therapeutic
tool or supplement, will no longer be needed (will wither away like a vanishing mediator) once
“the couple” is harmoniously re-established. But the most important thing, as Johnson states:
121
63. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Epidemics of the Will,” in Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford
Kwinter (New York: Zone, 1992), 589.
Such a woman . . . may see orgasm as a goal to be worked for, forced or learned,
like ballroom dancing. A vibrator may reward her with a quick and easy achieve-
ment. But it also may create a whole new problem of dissatisfaction, since it can
be a bit like convenience foods of the ready-mix, just add water variety; there is a
usable end product, but a lot is left out by the process. (136; emphasis added)
The vibrator’s intensity (especially when it is used to induce multiple orgasms) can
give ecstatic sensual pleasure to a woman, but . . . . if applied to the same favorite
area with great frequency, the vibrator may induce tactile anesthesia in that area on
occasion; and over long periods of time it may even reduce susceptibility of the area
to response . . . . (136; emphasis added)
Most important, the vibrator should be seen objectively for what it is for each
individual: a toy, a bridge, a crutch—the means [and not an “end”—C.H.] to a
desired response, or a substitute for an absent partner in a time of need. Objectivity
is the key element, perhaps, because over-indulgence with a vibrator, like over-
indulgence in food, can so easily become a way of masking real needs and genuine
feelings. (136; emphasis added)
Like over-indulging with food, then, the vibrator addict loses “objectivity” with her vibrator
(her “substance of choice”). No longer simply “a toy, a bridge, a crutch”—i.e., a mere “means” to a
healthy “end” (a mere “substitute for an absent partner in a time of need”)—the vibrator becomes an
“end in itself,” which the “user” prefers over “real needs and genuine feelings.” Such, at least, seems
to be the case with “Lillian,” whose story is recorded in Roger Blake’s Sex Gadgets (1968). To prove
his point that “the Lesbian-oriented female does not need or want anything reminiscent of a male
[dildo]” (74), Blake notes the (hysterical) case of “Lillian,” a married woman who has invented a
unique “gadget” (“cheap substitute”) to satisfy her “Lesbian desires.” Or as “Lillian” states:
Beyond the ingeniousness of this “artificial mouth” (which “Lillian” fancies to be her “female lover”),
what is really interesting about this “invention” is Blake’s response to it, which I now quote at length:
A “self-defeating” movement (“in circles”)? What people like Blake fear about “addiction,” as Jacques
Derrida has argued, is not the (drug) “user’s” pleasure per se, but a “pleasure taken in an experience
without truth.”
64
Like an experience of fiction, “Lillian” is “living in a faraway dream world, a never-
never land of erotic impossibility.” But such a structure of fictionality is not only “inauthentic,” it is
“self-defeating” in its de-liberate-ness. Indeed, if one cannot mention “addiction” without mentioning
dictation, or what Derrida calls “the asymmetrical experience of the other (of being-given-over-to-
the-other, of being prey to the other, of quasi-possession)” (238), then perhaps one cannot begin to
grasp the “pleasure” of the technical supplement without coming to grips with “originary alienation,”
or what Derrida calls: “irresponsibility itself, the orphanage of a wandering and playful sign” (234)?
122
64. Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” trans. Michael Israel, in Points . . . Interviews, 1974-1994,
ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford: Stanford UP , 1995), 236. All further references appear in the text.
My special invention, my very own creation, is the artificial mouth that I can
fancy is my female lover. I made it from the bulb off a little portable douche
outfit, attaching an inch-wide piece of foam rubber about a half an inch thick
around the opening with household cement. I fill the bulb with warm cream to
simulate saliva or vaginal secretions. When I rub it over my lips and slip it in
places, it sucks my clitoris as I squeeze it slow or fast according to my wishes. (79)
Although Lillian has a sexually active husband who is able to satisfy her Lesbian
desires occasionally [cunnilingus], she otherwise fits the stereotype of the lonely
spinster so obsessed with sexual fantasies that “normal” activities will not suffice
to satiate her passions . . . . [S]he is living in a faraway dream world, a never-never
land of erotic impossibility. By the use of gadgetry, Lillian is actually denying the
need for any participation by another human being except in the capacity of a
machine. Her husband’s physical contact with her in cunnilingus is of no more
real use to her than just another gadget. She uses him as she would some inanimate
object . . . . But the gadgets have become master . . . . No human being, male or
female, will be truly able to satisfy her needs, and at the same time, her gadgets
are making her more and more insatiable. (79-80; emphasis added)
123
Art has no biological source. It’s addressed to a taste . . . .
it’s a little like masturbation. I don’t believe in the essential
aspect of art.
—MARCEL DUCHAMP
Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp (1967)
Chapter Six
“Pleasure is a Very Difficult Behavior”:
A Note on Foucault and the Auto-(Erotic)
In a 1982 interview (conducted in English), Michel Foucault responds to a question prompted by a
certain conception of taste, namely, that of his supposedly unsophisticated preference for American
fast-food: “A good club sandwich and a Coke. That’s my pleasure. It’s true.” It’s true, he says, almost
automatically, almost immediately: “That’s my pleasure.” But then he seems to shift gears:
124
Fig. 6.1: Foucault in Sweden
with his Jaguar automobile
(1958).
1. Michel Foucault, “An Ethics of Pleasure” [1982], in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed.
Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext[e], 1996), 371-381.
Actually, I think I have real difficulty in experiencing pleasure. I think that pleasure
is a very difficult behavior. It’s not as simple as that [Laughs] to enjoy one’s self.
And—I must say that’s my dream—I would like and I hope I’ll die of an overdose
[Laughs] of pleasure of any kind. Because I think it’s really difficult, and I always
have the feeling that I do not feel the pleasure, the complete total pleasure, and,
for me, it’s related to death. [ . . . ]
Because I think the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure
would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would
die. I’ll give you a clearer and simpler example. Once I was struck by a car in the
street. I was walking. And for maybe two seconds I had the impression that I was
dying and it was really a very, very intense pleasure. The weather was wonderful. It
was seven o’clock on a summer day. The sun was descending. The sky was very
wonderful and blue and so on. It was, and still is now, one of my best memories.
[Laughs]
There is also the fact that some drugs are really important for me because
they are the mediation [the vehicle? mode of transport?—C.H.] to those incredibly
intense joys that I am looking for and that I am not able to experience, to afford
by myself [immediately? auto-erotically?—C.H.] (378)
1
Arnold Davidson quotes these “shocking remarks,” as he calls them, near the end of his book
on Foucault, as if a closing reminder to us that Foucault did not underestimate—nor should we,
his readers, underestimate—“the severe difficulty of dissolving the subject” (215): a rupture that
“will be experienced as a kindof death” (215).
2
A “kind of” death? And yet, what strikes me about
these “shocking remarks”—about precisely the pleasure of being struck (in this case, by an auto)—is
precisely what Davidson excludes—or strikes—from his quotation of them: the bursts of laughter
which repeatedly mark (re-mark) these remarks as if so many parenthetical pot-holes in the road—a
laughter, in other words, which is less like the spontaneous expression of the autos (self, I, ipseity)
responsible for these auto-biographical remarks than like the reiterative trace (inhuman laugh-track)
of a “kind of ” (uncontrollable? unmasterable?) cracking-up:
“It’s not as simple as that [Laughs] to enjoy one’s self.”
And, indeed, to what extent does Foucault’s problematization of “pleasure” as “difficult”—which is
marked not only by these 1982 remarks but by the pivotal “shift” in Foucault’s terminology in
the 1980s towards “technologies of self” [techniques de soi]—necessitate a Derridean deconstructive
thought of the technical supplement (prosthesis), such that “canned laughter” (i.e., the artificial
laugh-tracks mediating comical moments in TV sit-coms) could no longer be simply dismissed as
a mere second-hand copy of a supposedly original, spontaneous expression of the “subject” and its
“immediate” pleasure?
3
If “deconstruction gets going by attempting to present as primary what
metaphysics says is secondary,” as Geoffrey Bennington has argued, then a Derridean thought of the
“dangerous supplement” would require the difficult (impossible? aporetic?) task of thinking “the
originarity of the secondary” (Bennington 40).
4
The uncanniness of canned laughter, therefore: not
simply a mechanical “demand to enjoy” imposed from above, alienating us from “living pleasure,”
distracting us from “the real thing,” like so many pipe-dreams (opium for the masses), or so many
flashing roadside billboards (Enjoy Coke! Enjoy Coke! Enjoy Coke!), empty promises diverting our
“complete” arrival, empty pot-holes “perverting” our path.
5
So, yes, a “kind of” death, which is to
say, a “kind of” life, which is to say, neither (totally)—or both . . . at once? Coke is The Real Thing!
(“A good club sandwich and a Coke”)?
“It’s not as simple as that [Laughs] to enjoy one’s self.”
125
2. Arnold I. Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts
(Cambridge: Harvard UP , 2001), 215. All further references appear in the text.
3. For Derrida’s reading of the “dangerous supplement” (masturbation, writing, etc.) in Rousseau, see
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP , 1976), 141-152.
See also Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge: Harvard UP , 2001).
4. Geoffery Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffery Bennington (Chicago: U of
Chicago P , 1993), 42 & 40.
5. For a counter-reading, see Terry Eagleton, “Enjoy!” Paragraph 24.2 (July 2001), 40-51.
When Sigmund Freud speculates about the “long indirect road to pleasure” in his own
shocking remarks on Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), one of the first difficulties he encounters
in questioning the dominance of the “pleasure principle” [Lustprinzip], i.e., whether or not the
“course” taken by “mental events” is automatically regulated by “pleasure” [Lust] (3), is not the
“difficulty of dissolving the subject,” but rather what Freud calls the “difficulties of the external
world” (7).
6
The loss of the mother’s breast (a “kind of” death) is a striking example of one such
difficulty motivating a shift in the “main course,” so to speak, of the suckling infant and (thus) its
“auto-erotic” attempt to hallucinate (immediate?) satisfaction “by itself,” i.e., by the mobilization—
or auto-mobilization—of its “own body” as a vehicle. Such a convenient (easy) “solution,” however
(as in the prototypical figure of auto-eroticism: lips kissing themselves), seems to be no more than
wasted mechanical movement (“hot air”; “speculation”; spinning one’s wheels), nothing but a kind
of empty fast-food (a prosthetic junk-food), which is to say, a “highly-addictive,” “habit-forming”
joy ride (if not a death drive): “getting wasted.”
7
But if the suckling infant is to survive (since one
cannot live by sucking “hot air” alone, as Freud, a smoker, well knew), i.e., if it is to live on to
enjoy “the real thing” (in this case, oral nutrition), it must come to grips with the “difficulties of
the external world.” Or as Freud states:
126
6. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], trans. James Strachey (London: Norton, 1961).
All further references appear in the text.
7. “Pleasure” as a figure in Marxist-Humanist cultural criticism, as Fredric Jameson notes, has been a
paradoxical technical supplement: simultaneously a disposable bourgeois “drug” and an indispensible hegemonic
“glue.” See Fredric Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” in Formations of Pleasure, ed. Tony Bennett (London:
Routledge, 1983), 1-14. See also Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1975], in Narrative,
Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia UP , 1986), 198-209.
Fig. 6.2: Freud with one hand on his c(ig)ar.
Image reproduced on cover of Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961).
On Freud and Coke, see Anna Alexander,
“Freud’s Pharmacy: Cocaine and the Corporeal
Unconscious,” in High Culture: Reflections on
Addiction and Modernity, eds. Anna Alexander
and Mark S. Roberts (Albany: State U of New
York P , 2003), 209-232.
Under the influence of the ego’s instincts of self-preservation, the pleasure principle
[its dominance—C.H.] is replaced by the reality principle. This latter principle does
Let’s try to ignore the difficulty Freud introduces here by describing a “reality principle” that both
“demands and carries into effect” (as if its own vehicle) a postponement of the “pleasure principle,”
as if doing it “by itself,” i.e., auto-erotically! After all, coming to grips with this difficulty would
mean questioning (dissolving?) the very distinction between “reality” and “auto-erotism,” between the
“difficulties” of “external reality” and the “convenience” of “masturbation,” i.e., the very distinction
Freud conveniently mobilizes in 1908 to pathologize certain non-(re)productive “easy” pleasures
as “perversion.” Or as Freud says:
But not so fast, I hear someone say (Foucault, perhaps? Didn’t he find Freud hard to swallow?):
“It’s not as simple as that [Laughs] to enjoy one’s self.”
Indeed, how can I simply recite this 1908 text from Freud—in which the “damage” of masturbation
is figured as a “pervert’s” indulgence, i.e., as a kind of lingering in the vitiating mush of “psychical
infantilism”
9
—when everyone knows that Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a pivotal “shift” in
Freud’s thinking about “pleasure,” one that complicates all his post-1920 texts? Moreover, isn’t this
precisely what I am attempting to claim for Foucault’s post-1980 texts: i.e., that “pleasure” becomes
“difficult,” or “hard,” there?
In the case of Freud, of course (but for Foucault, too?), the historicity of this “shift” is
marked by the striking scene(s) of (an) (auto) accident(s), i.e., by a historically-specific being struck.
The return of shell-shocked WWI veterans and other survivors of “severe mechanical concussions,
railway disasters and other accidents involving a risk to life” (10) is thus how the second chapter
of Beyond the Pleasure Principle begins (“gets going”): with a “return.” What strikes Freud about
these “returning” survivors—i.e., how their dreams repeatedly drive them back to the situation of
127
not abandon the intention [auto-motive? drive?—C.H.] of ultimately obtaining
pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect: [1] the postponement
of satisfaction [“kind of” death; sublimation—C.H.]; [2] the abandonment ofa
number of [easy? auto-erotic?—C.H.] possibilities of gaining satisfaction; and [3]
the temporary toleration of unpleasure [difficulty? detour?—C.H.] as a step [a pot-
hole?—C.H.] on the long indirect roadto pleasure. (7)
Masturbation . . . vitiates [debases; softens; dissolves—C.H.] the character through
indulgence . . . . it teaches people to achieve important [difficult? hard?—C.H.] aims
without taking any trouble and by easy paths instead of through an energetic
exertion of force [auto-motive mastery?—C.H.] . . . . (199)
8
8. Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” [1908], trans. James
Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 9 (London: Hogarth P , 1959),
199. Freud describes “auto-erotism” here as “pleasure” gained from “convenient” parts of the body (188).
9. Sigmund Freud, “Contributions to a Discussion on Masturbation” [1912], trans. James Strachey, in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 12 (London: Hogarth P , 1959), 252.
being struck—is also what strikes him about the auto-erotic activity of his grandson (also in the
second chapter): namely, how his grandson’s “disturbing habit” of playing with himself in his
mother’s absence (“kind of” death) takes the form of a repeated misuse (abuse? mishandling?
striking?) of his wood (toy) (13). Throughout the second chapter, then, it is as if Freud himself is
repeatedly struck by these (compulsive) manners (or techniques) of responding to—or of repeating—
the “difficulties of the external world,” all of which refute his previously held hypothesis regarding
the “pleasure principle” as a dominant (auto-)motive in “life.” Thus, as Freud states:
But can’t we say the same thing about Foucault and his “shocking remarks” on the pleasure
of being struck—of taking a hit (as if “taking a hit” from a bong or a crack-pipe, as if cracking-up,
so to speak, “in the street”)? Isn’t Foucault, too, “endeavouring to master” the difficult alterity of the
event of being struck by mobilizing—or rather auto-mobilizing—what he calls a “clearer and simpler
example,” namely, the memory of “his own” (auto) accident, as if precisely a “kind of” taking a hit
(“it was a very, very intense pleasure”)? “It was, and still is now, one of my best memories,” Foucault
says. It is difficult not to hear here another scene of being struck “in the street,” namely, that of
Louis Althusser’s famous scene of “ideological interpellation,” where one is struck by the hailing
address of a cop in the street: “Hey, you there!”
10
For Althusser, of course, it is the very (f)act
of responding—of turning around—that marks (or re-marks) this insidious moment of ideological
“subjection,” in which a being struck in the street (mis)recognizes “itself” as the autos (self, I, ipseity)
of the address. And indeed, isn’t this deluded attempt of in-haling, so to speak, the hailing address
of the other—i.e., as if “one’s own” auto-nomy, as if “one’s own” auto-motive for taking a hit—
precisely what Foucault does (overdoes: overdoses)—with pleasure? A jubilant assumption: “It was,
and still is now, one of my best memories,” Foucault says, as if with the easy thrill of a bungee-
jumper who repeatedly leaps into the abyss (“kind of” death) knowing he will spring back (re-turn
safely to the point of de-parture). Auto-matically?
Yet, once again, this reading of Foucault’s “shocking remarks” is possible only by striking
(out) the ex-haling burst of laughter which marks this particular remark like an ex-appropriating
spasm, like a moment of choking backfire out of the tailpipe of Freud’s c(ig)ar (carburetor):
“It was, and still is now, one of my best memories. [Laughs]”
128
[I]t is not in the service of that principle [the “pleasure principle”] that the dreams
of patients suffering from traumatic neuroses lead them back with such regularity
to the [difficult; hard—C.H.] situation in which the trauma occurred [the accident;
battlefield; “kind of” death—C.H.] . . . . These dreams are endeavouring to master
the stimulus [being struck—C.H.] retrospectively . . . . (36-37; emphasis added)
10. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation)” [1969],
in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-186.
Thus, while Foucault does, indeed, seem to take a certain pleasure in repeating versions of (his)
being struck —i.e., of (his) taking a hit—as Didier Eribon reports,
it is still not clear what Foucault means by pleasure being “difficult,” and to what extent this
“hard” pleasure is not just another version of Freud’s grandson mastering his wood—becoming “stiff”
(“getting stoned”). After all, what is so hard about “getting hard,” about “getting stoned”? Where is
the difficulty—the rigor (mortis?)—in this pleasure of getting “stiff,” if not in the easy reassurance
of a deluded “auto-affection,” or what Derrida calls an irreducible metaphysics of self-possession,
i.e., the capacity of a self [autos] to affect itself immediately with its own self-presence, as if without
detour?
12
Indeed, isn’t this is precisely the point of Freud’s “Medusa’s Head” (1922), where the
“severe difficulty” of (en)countering the Medusa’s severed head (“kind of” death) is mastered by the
reassuring “hard” pleasure of (“one’s own”) “stiffening” arousal. Or as Freud says:
A “transformation of affect,” Freud calls it. But if the stimulus of an originally shocking situation
(being struck)—experienced “passively” and with “terror”—is shifted (manually?) into a reassuring
(auto-)affect (a feeling of “one’s own” auto-nomous self-possession), can we say that the “pleasure”
129
Fig. 6.3: Ceci n’est pas une pipe (René Magritte,
1926). Image reproduced on cover of Michel
Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James
Harkness (Berkeley: U of California P , 1983).
Foucault told [his former student and close friend] Paul Veyne that he was under
the influence of opium when he was hit by a car in July 1978 . . . in front of
the building where he lived . . .
11
The sight of Medusa’s head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to
stone. Observe that we have here once again the same origin from the castration
complex and the same transformation of affect! For becoming stiff means an
erection. Thus in the original situation it offers consolation to the spectator: he is
still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.
13
11. Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault [1989], trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1991), 315.
12. On “auto-affection,” see Derrida, Of Grammatology, 166-167; Terada, Feeling in Theory, 17-40; and
Henry Staten, “Derrida and the Affect of Self,” Western Humanities Review 50 (1997): 9-37.
13. Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head” [1922], trans. James Strachey, in Writings on Art and Literature
(Stanford: Stanford UP , 1997), 264-265.
of “actively” taking a hit constitutes a kind of “mastery”? Should we, then, speak of masturbation
as “masterbating,” as if “auto-affection is the theory, masturbation the practice”?
And yet, that anyone could be reassured by such a “stiffening”—or assume that it is “one’s
own” (my responsibility, my response-ability)—is anything but self-evident. In fact, it is precisely
this “problem of erection” that Foucault raises in an essay entitled, “Sexuality and Solitude” (1981),
one of the first of his later works to shift its terminology towards a new (reassuring?) thinking of
“Western technologies of self.”
14
By analyzing how the “sexual act” gets historically-constituted in
ancient texts (most notably Artemidorus’ handbook on dreams), Foucault argues that the “problem
of erection” (arousal) is not a concern for Greco-Romans as it will be for later Christians. Thus:
It is this relational Greco-Roman problematic of “the aphrodisia” that Foucault will juxtapose with
a Christian problematic of “the flesh.” In a reading of St. Augustine’s description of the “sexual act”
before (and after) the Fall, for example, Foucault argues that the “problem of erection” (arousal) only
arises within this particular (Christian) “technology of self.” Or as Foucault writes in a remarkable
passage, which I will quote at length:
130
Artemidorus interprets dreams in a way contrary to Freud . . . . [I]t is not important
. . . whether you have sex with a girl or with a boy. The problem [difficulty—C.H.]
is to know if the partner is rich or poor, young or old, slave or free, married or
not . . . .The only act [Artemidorus] knows or recognizes as sexual is penetration. For
him, penetration [being struck? taking a hit?—C.H.] is not only a sexual act but
part of the social role of a man in a city . . . . [Thus] for Artemidorus, sexuality is
relational . . . . (Foucault 180)
Before the Fall, Adam’s body, every part of it, was perfectly obedient to the soul
and the will. If Adam wanted to procreate in Paradise, he could do it in the same
way and with the same control as he could, for instance, sow seeds in the earth.
He was not involuntarily excited. Every part of his body was like the fingers, which
one can control in all their gestures. Sex was a kind of hand gently sowing the seed.
But what happened with the Fall? He rose up against God with the first sin; he
tried to escape God’s will and to acquire a will of his own [an auto-motive?—C.H.]
. . . . As a punishment for this revolt, and as a consequence of this will to will
independently of God, Adam lost control of himself. He wanted to acquire an
autonomous will and lost support for that will . . . . [T]his weakening of Adam’s will
had a disastrous effect. His body, and parts of his body, stopped obeying his
commands, revolted against him, and the sexual parts of his body were the first to
rise up in this disobedience. The famous gesture of Adam covering his genitals with
a fig leaf is, according to Augustine, due not to the simple [easy—C.H.] fact that
Adam was ashamed of their presence but to the [“hard”—C.H.] fact that his
sexual organs were moving by themselves without his consent [autonomously?
14. Michel Foucault, “Sexuality and Solitude” [1981], in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential Works of
Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997), 180. All further references
appear in the text.
If Foucault used to valorize “bodies and pleasure” against (Freudian) “sex-desire” in the 1970s, then
here, in “Sexuality and Solitude” (1981), he seems to juxtapose two different “regimes of pleasure”
(a Greco-Roman “ethical” problematic of penetration and a Christian “hermeneutics” of self) as well
as the ascetic and monastic techniques that make them possible. Foucault, then, not only suggests
that the practice of scrutinizing “oneself” as a subject of libido in order to discover one’s “truth”
(“Tell me what you desire, and I’ll tell you what you are”) is a relatively recent “technology of self,”
but that its Christian problematic (“the relationship between one’s will and involuntary assertions”)
will also make possible other configurations, in which, as Foucault states,
It is this ensemble of hermeneutic techniques, in other words, that Freud will later adopt and call
“sexuality,” as if hailing an auto-erotic grandson. (“Hey, you there!”)
131
automatically?—C.H.]. Sex in erection is the image of man revolted against God
. . . . [For Christianity] the main question is not, as it was in Artemidorus—the
problem of penetration—it is the problem of erection. As a result, it is not the
problem of a relationship to other people, but the problem of the relationship
of oneself to oneself, or, more precisely, the relationship between one’s will and
involuntary assertions [a problem of response-ability—C.H.] . . . . The principle of
autonomous movement of sexual organs is called libido by Augustine . . . . [and it
obliges] a permanent hermeneutic of oneself. (181-182; emphasis added)
. . . sexuality, subjectivity, and truth [are] strongly linked together. This . . . is the
religious framework in which the masturbation problem—which was nearly ignored
or at least neglected by the Greeks, who considered masturbation a thing for slaves
and for satyrs, but not for free citizens—appeared as one of the main issues of the
sexual life. (183)
Fig. 6.4: “Hard” pleasure—Greco-Roman aphrodisia. Fig. 6.5: “Hard” pleasure—Christian flesh.
When Jacques Derrida (who has himself admitted that the “scene of the car accident is
imprinted or overprinted in quite a few of my texts”)
15
returns to a re-reading of Foucault’s work on
the “history of sexuality” in 1991, what strikes him is the ambivalent way Freud is (mis)handled—
or abused—by Foucault.
16
In effect, Derrida reads Foucault as playing fort/da with Freud: sometimes
Freud is embraced as a friend [da] whose theory of the unconscious disrupts “the subject”; other
times, Freud is pushed away [fort] as a foe who normalizes “sex-desire” only to pathologize its
“perverse” deviations. Thus, with the insinuation that Foucault is behaving like Freud’s auto-erotic
grandson in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, it is not surprising that Derrida ends his essay with
the speculation that Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project has perhaps all-too-easily ignored the
difficulty of Freud’s “enigmatic text,” Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Or as Derrida states:
One response to Derrida’s provocation here is perhaps buried in a footnote (pot-hole?) appended
to Freud’s reading of his grandson’s “disturbing habit,” i.e., Freud’s observation that “the child had
found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror
which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror
132
Fig. 6.6: Jacques Derrida in his “first
car,” a 1930 Citroën C4 (1956). Image
reproduced in Geoffery Bennington
and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1993), 343.
[Beyond the Pleasure Principle] problematizes, in its greatest radicality, the agency of
power and mastery. In a discreet and difficult passage, an original drive for mastery
[Bemachtigungstrieb] is mentioned. It is very difficult to know if this drive for
power is still dependent upon the pleasure principle, indeed, upon sexuality as such
. . . . How would Foucault have situated this drive for mastery in his discourse on
power . . . ? How would he have read this drive, had he read it, in this extremely
enigmatic text of Freud? (Derrida 95; emphasis added)
15. Jacques Derrida, “Others Are Secret Because They Are Other” [2000], in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel
Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford UP , 2005), 153.
16. Jacques Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis”
[1991], trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, in Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: Chicago
UP , 1997), 57-96. All further references appear in the text.
image ‘gone’ [fort]” (14). What we have here is not simply the “hard” pleasure of a boy driven to
master his wood (toy), I would argue, but that of a boy turning himself into a vehicle (a machine?
a piece of wood? a stone?) which he then throws away—i.e., deliberately crashes—with pleasure!
“Deliberately”? Listen to Foucault:
Rather than Freud’s (instinctive) “death drive” [Todestriebe], Foucault, here, seems closer to the
paradoxes explored by Andy Warhol in his series of mechanically-reproduced (auto) “accidents,”
5 Deaths (1963). Warhol’s silkscreen series is both a “deliberate” repetition—auto-mobilization—of
an “original” shocking situation (being struck), as well as its mechanical—auto-mated—crack-up: a
“deliberate” overdosing on multiple hits (see Figs. 6.7-6.8). A paradoxical “mastery,” indeed, as if
repeatedly taking a hit in a de-liberate “art” [techne] of refusing “what we are”—a cracking-up, so
to speak—with pleasure. It’s not simply the case, then, as Jean Baudrillard once quipped, that:
As Foucault’s later texts on ascetic and monastic techniques suggest, it is not that “easy” to turn
oneself into a vehicle. A lot of work went into fashioning that post-Kantian “self” [autos] capable
of giving itself the “law” [nomos], as if “all by itself,” i.e., that self-governing [auto-nomous] vehicle
of Western liberal-humanism. And it is, no doubt, even “harder” to (de-liberately) overturn such
an autos. Hence Foucault’s interest in the techniques of Zen Buddhism—which “reveal the self as an
133
Fig. 6.7: “Original” news photo of
automobile accident used by Andy
Warhol in the silkscreen series, 5
Deaths (1963).
17. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power” [1982], in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984,
Vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000), 336.
18. Jean Baudrillard, “Forget Artaud” [1996], in The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays, trans.
Ames Hodges (New York: Semiotext[e], 2005), 236.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we
are.
17
What separates us from Andy Warhol, for instance, is that he was lucky enough to
be a machine. And we are not.
18
illusion” (178)—as well as other mechanisms of “auto-critique” (177), including the American S/M
movement. In a 1982 interview with Foucault, for example, it is as if S/M replaces (repeats and
displaces) his previous “shocking remarks” on the pleasure of being struck in the street by an auto-
mobile, i.e., of taking a hit. As Foucault states:
Perhaps Foucault’s “shift” in the 1980s towards different (ancient) ascetic and monastic techniques
was like Friedrich Nietzsche’s, who in a late notebook invokes “asceticism” as a “transitional training”
for disrupting the present:
134
Fig. 6.8: Black and White Disaster
#4, (detail) (Andy Warhol, 1963).
19. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” [1982], in Foucault Live, 384.
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Notebook 15 [spring 1888], in Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. Kate
Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP , 2005), 272.
I don’t think this movement of sexual practices [S/M] has anything to do with
the disclosure or the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our unconscious
[as in a Freudian hermeneutics of sex-desire—C.H.] . . . . They are inventing new
possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization
of the body. . . . These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with
very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations [ . . . ]
. . . if you look at the traditional construction of pleasure, you see that
bodily pleasure, or pleasures of the flesh, are always drinking, eating, and fucking.
And that seems to be the limit of the understanding of our body, our pleasures
. . . . [But] drugs must become a part of our culture . . . . As a pleasure. We have to
study drugs. We have to experience drugs. We have to do good drugs, which can
produce very intense pleasure [as vehicles for taking a hit?—C.H.].
19
The task of this asceticism [is] . . . a transitional training . . . . To learn, step by step
. . . as a preliminary exercise: to become ludicrous, make oneself ludicrous.
20
To “make oneself ludicrous.” Although it is unclear where Foucault’s late work was going
(he died of AIDS in 1984, in the midst of research), Paul Veyne has vividly described his final
“encounter” with Foucault—or rather, with Foucault’s auto—thusly:
A fast-moving metallic “crypt” on wheels: a bit like canned laughter, or shaking up a can of Coke?
22
Like Foucault, Warhol shared a certain taste for mass-produced American fast-food (“junk-food”):
“A good club sandwich and a Coke”? . . . . . . “It’s not as simple as that [Laughs] to enjoy one’s self.”
135
21. Paul Veyne, “The Final Foucault and His Ethics,” trans. Catherine Porter and Arnold I. Davidson, in
Foucault and His Interlocutors, ed. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: Chicago UP , 1997), 232-233.
22. In-securely cocooned (encrypted), or conspicuously ex-posed? Foucault’s strikingly green hearse-like
automobile is like a tomb on wheels, speeding (recklessly? compusively? joyously?) after death? after pleasure?
after mastery? a “death drive”? a joy ride? mere “child’s play”? Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok write of such
hallucinated fantasies of incorporation (“memory entombed in a fast and secure place”) thusly: “[M]elancholics
cherish memory as the memory of their most precious possession” (136). Hence: “Faced with the danger of
seeing the crypt crumble, the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt . . . the ego begins the public
display of an interminable process of mourning” (136). See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “‘The Lost
Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic Identification” [1975], in The Shell and the Kernel, Vol. 1, trans. and ed.
Nicholas Rand (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1994), 139-156.
But I wonder about this eccentric automobile (“crypt”) of Foucault’s: Was it equipped with an auto-
matic transmission? Does it matter if this car was equipped with a manual shift—i.e., the kind that forces you
to loosen your grip on the wheel and drive with one hand, while the other hangs at your side, as if ready to
manipulate “the stick,” or the free-play (spacing) between the stick and clutch? Of course, one eventually learns
to shift easily (without difficulty? with pleasure?) without grinding the gears, without stalling or starting in
sputtering jerks and spasmodic lurches forward. One masters the clutch. But there’s also a certain pleasure in
“popping the clutch,” in “burning out.” No? Ah, yes, you say, but that too is just another illusion of mastery,
i.e., the auto-affective “feeling” of the car “responding,” as if “immediately,” to your will (as when we say: “this
car handles well”). And yet, it’s not as simple as that to “peel out”—there’s a certain technique to (mis)using
(abusing?) an auto like that.
23. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) [1975] (San Diego:
Harvest Books, 1977), 100-101.
All at once I saw that I was being passed at a high rate of speed by a powerful
car, green and joyous, that had axles wider than its chassis, and thick tires. The car,
of an unusual make, had a large rectangular window in the rear, which allowed one
to see inside. Just as it overtook me, I recognized Foucault as the driver; surprised,
he turned his head quickly toward me and smiled at me in passing with his thin
lips. I immediately pressed down on the accelerator in order to catch up with him,
then let up just as quickly. In the first place, the strange car was going too fast;
and then its appearance did not have the look of a perception but rather had
the scent of a hallucination. The car disappeared in the distance . . . . I had not even
understood that the curious rear window was that of a hearse . . . .
21
America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same
things as the poorest . . . . A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you
a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are
the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows
it, the bum knows it, you know it . . . .
23
136
In the exihibition halls, the car on show is explored with an
intense, amorous studiousness: it is the great tactile phase of
discovery . . . . The bodywork, the lines of union are touched,
the upholstery palpated, the seats tried, the doors caressed, the
cushions fondled; before the wheel, one pretends to drive with
one’s whole body.
—ROLAND BARTHES
“The New Citroën” (1957)
Chapter Seven
(S)cars:
Auto-erotic Resignification in David Cronenberg’s Crash
The mechanism of “stigma” as defined by the OED contains the seeds of its own subversion, or
transvaluation. On one hand, “stigma” is defined as a “mark of disgrace” impressed, branded, cut, or
otherwise externally inscribed on (into?) the corporeal body of a person or thing. On the other
hand, “stigma” is also defined as those “marks resembling the crucified body of Christ, said to have
been supernaturally impressed on the bodies of certain saints and other devout persons.” It is
precisely this (congenital?) ambiguity of the “stigma” that continually conditions the possibility of
its resignification, i.e., of turning the stigma back on its head. David Cronenberg’s film Crash (1996)
—based on J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel of the same name—can be seen as doing precisely this on a
number of levels, not the least of which involves the resignification of the stigmatized “disabled” or
“abnormal” body. For Crash, after all, involves a group of variously “disabled” car crash survivors-
137
Stigma: 1. A mark made by pointed instrument, brand; [root: to prick,
puncture]; 1a. A mark made upon the skin by burning with a hot iron
(rarely, by cutting or pricking), as a token of infamy or subjection; a
brand; 2. A mark of disgrace or infamy; a sign of severe censure or
condemnation, regarded as impressed on a person or thing; a “brand.”
2a.. A distinguishing mark or characteristic (of a bad or objectionable
kind); a sign of some specific disorder, as hysteria. 3. Marks resembling
the wounds of the crucified body of Christ, said to have been super-
naturally impressed on the bodies of certain saints and other devout
persons.
—OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY
It may be for this reason that Freud claims that every orifice, every
external organ, and possibly even the internal organs—including the brain
itself—are capable of becoming an erotogenic zone. Any part of the body
is capable of sexualization, although which parts become erotocized is
determined by the individual’s life history (and especially the history of
its corporeality).
—ELIZABETH GROSZ
1
[T]he car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event . . . .
—VAUGHAN, from Crash
2
1. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP , 1994), 54.
2. David Cronenberg, Crash (Script) (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), 42. All further references appear
in the text.
cum-fetishists whose (auto)erotic sex-lives become increasingly intertwined around the scarred and
wounded body of Vaughan (Elias Koteas), his beat-up 1963 Lincoln (the same model of automobile
that John F . Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated), and Vaughan’s mysterious project
of re-staging traumatic car-crash death scenes (James Dean, Jayne Mansfield) for the purposes of
“benevolent psychopathology.” Or as Vaughan explains to his newest initiate, James (James Spader):
“[My project] is something we’re all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by
modern technology” (35).
To suggest, however, that the “disabled body” is auto-erotically resignified in Crash—
i.e., that it is subject to a certain process of cinematic transvaluation—is not simply to point to
the inversion of a “negative” stereotype by a “positive” one. Indeed, as Paul Darke explains in
“Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability” (1998), the figure of the “disabled body”
—whether “positively” or “negatively” represented—will always serve a much broader constitutive
function within the dominant (“non-disabled”) cultural value system, as it is the very existence
of the supposedly “disabled body” (our belief in it) which naturalizes the apparent reality of the
so-called “normal” or “whole” body. Thus, whether “positively” of “negatively” represented, it is the
very “existence” of the “disabled body” (our belief in it and its “abnormality”) which makes the
“normal body” possible, thinkable, believable. Or as Darke explains:
If the simulacrum of a “healthy” “normal body” is created and naturalized through the
cinematic deployment of a stigmatized “disabled body” which serves as the “reality of abnormality,”
then can we say something similar about stigmatized “film genres” and their “apparent reality”?
Take “pornography,” for example, and its supposedly “obscene” depiction of “cold,” “mechanical,”
“staged” sex scenes, devoid of any “genuine feeling.” Hasn’t “pornography” served a very similar
discursive function for its (“art”) critics? Just like the belief in the stigmatized “disabled body,”
hasn’t the belief in the reality of “pornography” and its auto-erotic spectator (traditionally, but not
exclusively, a masturbating male figure, as in the stigma of the “emotionally-disabled,” “anti-social,”
“infantile” rain-coater) functioned to create and naturalize a similar simulacrum of “healthy,”
“mature,” “romantic love” (or what Freud called “genital love”) through which supposedly “normal
138
3. Paul Darke, “Understanding Cinematic Representations of Disability.” in The Disability Reader: Social
Science Perspectives, ed., Tom Shakespeare (London: Cassell, 1998), 181-200. All further references appear in the
text.
. . . abnormality is used in cultural imagery to define the parameters of normality,
not vice versa; it creates the simulacrum through which most apparently “normal
people” live their lives. Thus, there is a coherence, I feel, to disability imagery that
has been ignored through a failure to see the role abnormality plays in creating
normality; through creating the illusion of normality out of the apparent reality of
abnormality. (183; emphasis added)
3
(heterosexual) people” live their lives and imagine their sexual couplings as “endogenous” (warm,
natural, instinctive, biological, intrinsic, whole), i.e., not perverse, not fetishistic, not artificial, not
“exogenuous”?
4
But if this is how the belief in the reality of “pornography” functions for its (“art”) critics,
then what about those fans (readers) who claim to enjoy and make use of “pornography”? Don’t
they, too, problematically perpetuate the illusion of its “reality”? Indeed, as David Buchbinder
suggests, the illusion of “pornography” depends on the “successful” interpellation of “able” users:
By taking up the lures of the “pornographic” text—i.e., what Jacques Lacan calls being “entirely
caught up in [an] imaginary capture” (107)—the “successful” user becomes an “active” “participant”
in an (autoerotic) viewing practice in which it is normalized through an interpellation process,
(mis)recognizing itself as a “spontaneous”—“endogenous”—“desiring subject.” This, in short, is one
way in which the “reality” of the stigmatized genre of “pornography” can be seen as functioning
for its fans and users: shoring up their own sense of themselves as “normal” “desiring subjects.”
6
Yet, since texts (like autos) do not always work properly, since they can (be) crash(ed),
perhaps we can imagine a de-familiarized “pornography,” i.e., a text that instead of shoring up the
cherished categories of the “normal” would call them into question. For example, instead of simply
139
4. On the difference between an “endogenous” and “exogenous” conception of sexuality in Freudian
psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and J. -B. Pontalis have argued that, for Freud, “sexuality is not a ready-made
mechanism”: “Sexuality cannot therefore be explained solely in terms of the endogenous maturation of the
instinct—it has to be seen as being constituted at the core of intersubjective structures which predate its
emergence in the individual” (421). Thus, instead of a purely “endogenous” theory of sexuality, Freud grants
importance to a notion of “seduction.” While sexuality is “endogenous inasmuch as it follows the course of
development and passes through different stages,” Laplanche and Pontalis insist that it is ultimately
“exogenous inasmuch as it invades the subject from the direction of the adult world [i.e., from without]”
(421). See “Sexuality,” in J. Laplanche and J. -B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 418-422.
5. David Buchbinder, Performance Anxiety: Re-Producing Masculinity (Australia: Allen & Erwin, 1998).
6. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1978).
[I]n order to work and produce pleasure, the [“pornographic”] text must include
a broad spectrum of erotic possibilites and fantasies in order to appeal to the
greatest number of the readership or audience. Hence the frequent changes of
partner . . . of sexual activity (fellaio/cunnilingus, vaginal/anal penetration) . . . of
locale (city/country, indoor/outdoor) . . . . These are all intended to engage certain
fantasies in the audience, but not necessarily of every member simultaneously.
Viewers and readers thus can dip in and out of the text, registering interest when
one of their particular or idiosyncratic fantasies is activated . . . .
Such lures . . . demand . . . that the text leave gaps in the narrative so that
consumers may enter and “inhabit” it, by inserting themselves into the narrative
at the various points where their own individual erotic interests and fantasies are
triggered and aroused. (107-108)
5
substituting “positive” images of the “disabled” for “negative” stereotypes—i.e., a strategy which
ultimately leaves the presumed “normality” of the viewing audience uninterrogated—a text of
de-familiarized “pornography” would attempt to throw that very audience’s own sense of “normalcy”
into question. David Cronenberg’s Crash, I want to suggest, and its auto-erotic resignification of
the “disabled” body through the trope of the (s)car (its vehicle), can be read as just such a text
of de-familiarized “pornography.”
Resignifying Stigma: The (S)car as Fertile Wound
In his essay, “Wound Culture: T rauma in the Pathological Public Sphere” (1997), Mark Seltzer cites
J. G. Ballard’s 1973 novel, Crash, as indicative of the emergence of a postmodern “pathological
public sphere,” characterized by its endless fascination with torn and opened bodies, its rushing to
the scene of the accident and its milling around the point of impact (3).
8
The key figure in Seltzer’s
analysis of this “pathological public sphere,” of course, is the traumatic “wound,” or what he calls
the “switch point between bodily and psychic orders . . . . the crossing point of private fantasy
[inside] and collective space [outside]” (5):
140
In driving, the car becomes part of the body image, a body shell for
the subject; its perils and breakdowns . . . are all experienced in the
body image of the driver . . . .
—ELIZABETH GROSZ
Vaughan devised a terrifying almanac of imaginary automobile
disasters and insane wounds—the lungs of elderly men punctured
by door handles, the chests of young women impaled by steering-
columns, the cheeks of handsome youths pierced by the chromium
latches of quarter-lights. For him these wounds were the keys to a
new sexuality born from a perverse technology.
—J. G. BALLARD
7
The switch point, or crash point, between inside and outside is, above all, the
wound. This is nowhere more incisively set out than in the work of J.G. Ballard,
one of the compulsive cartographers of wound culture. Thus, in Ballard’s novel,
Crash, the shock of contact between bodies and machines (erotocized accidents;
real, planned, simulated) is also the traumatic reversal between private fantasy and
the public sphere . . . . (Seltzer 15)
7. J. G. Ballard, Crash [1973] (New York: Noonday Press, 1997), 13.
8. Mark Seltzer, “Wound Culture: T rauma in the Pathological Public Sphere,” October 80 (Spring 1997):
3-26. All further references appear in the text.
Although Seltzer is right to emphasize the importance of the figure of the “wound” in Crash as a
kind of eroto-traumatic point of impact or bodily inscription (a stigmatic “mediation”) between
“inside” and “outside” (“body” and “machine”), his reading of this trope as evidence for some
“pathological” public sphere is, however, highly problematic. By pathologizing the “wound,”
Seltzer’s analysis continues to rely on (and prop up) a medical-model of “disability.” And as
Darke points out, it is precisely this medical paradigm which in-forms the dominant, binary
conceptual framework of the “normal” versus the “pathological,” i.e., one in which the “wound”
designates a referential rather than duplicit stigma: i.e., a real “mark of disgrace” inscribed on a
“broken” body to be “fixed,” “cured,” or “overcome” by the individual. This (implicit) reliance
on a medical-model paradigm—in which “wounds are always pathological and the pathological
are always wounded”—is, as Darke argues, one of the most common motifs of dominant-culture
cinema and its deployment of “disability” as an individualized, pathological “problem”:
Unlike Seltzer’s pathologized “wound” (and its implicit support of a certain medical-model
representation of “disability” as an individualized stigma of “abnormality”), a reading of Crash as a
text of de-familiarized “pornography” would be premised instead on what I am calling here the
trope of the (s)car as “fertile wound.” This trope of the “fertile wound” is enabled (disabled?)
precisely by the duplicity of the mechanism of stigma, a duplicity which is always disavowed in
medical-model representations of the “reality of abnormality.” In Crash, then, the resignification of
the mechanism of stigma happens first via the transmutation of the car crash. The car crash—itself
resignified as a “benevolent” mode of eroto-traumatic inscription for the characters in Crash—thus
designates a generalized, transvaluated process of stigma, i.e., one no longer premised on a medical-
model paradigm, and, hence, de-pathologized and de-individualized. Or as Vaughan explains to James:
“It’s something we’re all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern
technology.”
Of course, this de-pathologized and de-individualized mechanism of stigma in Crash is only
made possible by Cronenberg’s (Ballard’s) “perverse” foregrounding of the duplicity of the (s)car as
141
The key elements of a medical-model representation of disability concentrate on
impairment (abnormality) as an individual, pathological, problem to be either
overcome or eradicated; the social elements of impairment (i.e., disability) are
almost totally absent. Thus, such representations are often very literal and place the
impaired character in a medical (hospital) setting even though they are not “ill”
or dealing with a specific medical issue. Equally, one of the least problematic ways
in which to individualize an impairment narrative is to produce a story that claims
to be based on, or from, a “true story,” or a simple biopic (such as My Left Foot,
Born of the Fourth of July, and The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, amongst
hundreds of others) . . . . (Darke 184; emphasis added)
a “fertile wound.” In Crash, it is precisely the duplicity of the (s)car as eroto-traumatic stigma
(the corporeal inscription of the auto) which simultaneously “enables” and “disables” its various
“perverse” “sexualities.” In other words, the typical medical-model expectations regarding the
traumatic wounding of the body in a car crash—i.e., that such a “wounding” (or “perversion,”
or “deformation”) should solely “disable” the impacted body—simply do not hold in Crash. Indeed,
that this confounding of expectations could cause confusion in the minds of a “mainstream”
(“able-bodied”) audience is something that Cronenberg seems to not only have anticipated, but
to have strategically provoked, as he states in a 1996 interview regarding his adaptation of Crash:
Cronenberg’s comment here, while perhaps indicative of his own situatedness within a medical-
model paradigm (i.e., he seems to pathologize the relationship between James and Catherine when
he states “there’s something wrong with them right now”), nonetheless seems to be articulating
a cinematic strategy based on challenging his audiences’ presumptions of “normality” auto-erotically,
i.e., via a radical resignification of the car crash. Rather than being a solely “disabling” event,
the car crash, as Cronenberg states, “introduces [James and Catherine] to these horrible people
[Vaughan, Gabrielle and Dr. Helen Remington]” who then seduce them into an (auto-)eroticism
of the (s)car. As Vaughan explains to James: “the car crash is a fertilizing rather than destructive
event . . .” (42).
Of course, the duplicity of the eroto-traumatic (s)car or “wound” has long been a central
trope in Freudian psychoanalysis, particularly as reconstituted in the work of Jean Laplanche (1976),
Serge Leclaire (1998), and Didier Anzieu (1989).
10
For each of these theorists, the eroto-traumatic
inscription of the infantile body is an inevitable result of the various tactile “handlings” of the
142
9. David Cronenberg, “From Novel to Film,” in Crash (Script) (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), vii-xix.
10. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP , 1976); Serge Leclaire, Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and Practice of the Letter, trans. Peggy
Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP , 1998); Didier Anzieu, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris T urner (New Haven: Yale UP ,
1989). All further references appear in the text.
I have . . . characters who are exhibiting a psychology of the future. I think that’ll
be tricky for some people. If they try to apply the normal movie psychology to
these characters, they’re doomed to be confused, baffled and perhaps frustrated by
Crash. Where are the sympathetic characters? Where is the recognizable domesticity
that is then destroyed by Vaughan?
Some potential distributors said, “You should make them more normal at
the beginning so that we can see where they go wrong.” In other words, it would
be like a Fatal Attraction thing. Blissful couple, maybe a dog and a rabbit, maybe a
kid. And then a car accident introduces them to these horrible people and they
go wrong. I said, “That isn’t right, because there’s something wrong with them right
now . . . .” [Ballard’s] novel is uncompromising in that way. Why shouldn’t the movie
be? (xi)
9
attentive care provider (or [m]other) and thus functions to mark—or stigmatize—the baby’s skin
in such a way that “erotogenic zones” become, as Anzieu states, “localized in certain erectile . . .
orifices (protuberences and cavities) where the surface layer of the epidermis is thinner than
elsewhere . . .” (104). Laplanche refers to this inevitable eroto-traumatic stigmatizing of the baby’s
“bodily envelope” as the “implantation of adult sexuality in the child” (46). Like Anzieu,
Laplanche views this implantation of adult sexuality as a kind of enabling “seduction” that is
intimately linked to the organic duplicity (or dual function) of certain bodily orifices as “contact
zones.” Because certain sphincteral orifices (the mouth, anus, and genitals, for example) necessarily
demand “loving” attention from the primary care provider ([m]other), such “innocent” handlings
inevitably become the earliest mediatiors of “adult desires,” or what Laplanche calls “focalizers”
of parental fantasies. This implantation of “sexuality”—as if a series of detours and tactile impacts
traced across the infant’s “bodily envelope”—is described by Laplanche as follows:
“Everything comes from without in Freudian theory,” says Laplanche (42-43). And, indeed, we can
say the same about his own “general theory of seduction”: namely, that “sexual excitation,” for
Laplanche, is figured ultimately as an “exogenuous” rather than “endogenuous” phenomenon.
But if “sexual excitation,” for Laplanche, is implanted in the infant as an “alien internal
entity” through a series of eroto-traumatic stigmatizations from without, then, for Serge Leclaire
(who is even less biological in his interpretation of Freud than Laplanche), the “polymorphously
perverse” infant is figured in such a way that “any part of the body can constitute an erotogenic
zone” (Leclaire 48). Pushing Laplanche’s “exogenuous” model of sexual excitation, Leclaire declares
that: “What must be emphasized is that the order of pleasure [sexual excitation] really is inscribed in
counterpoint to the organic order and as such . . . it constitutes strictly speaking the subversion of
that system” (48; emphasis added). Indeed, the inscription of “sexuality” on the bodily envelope—
the implantation of the “alien internal entity,” as Laplanche calls it—is, for Leclaire, reformulated
143
. . . sexuality . . . in the human infant . . . lies in a movement which deflects
[disables—C.H.] the instinct, metamorphizes its aim, displaces and internalizes its
object, and concentrates its source on what is ultimately a minimal zone, the
erotogenic zone . . . . [This erotogenic zone] is a kind of breaking or turning point
within the bodily envelope, since what is in question is above all the sphincteral
[duplicit—C.H.] orifices: mouth, anus, etc. It is also a zone of exchange, since the
principle biological exchanges are borne by it (the prime example is . . . feeding,
but there are other exchanges as well). This zone of exchange is also a zone for
care, namely the particular and attentive care provided by the mother. These zones,
then, attract the first erotogenic maneuvers from the adult . . . . These zones focalize
parental fantasies and above all maternal fantasies, so that we may say, in what is
barely a metaphor, that they are the points through which is introduced into the
child that alien internal entity which is, properly speaking, the sexual excitation. (23-
24; emphasis added)
in Lacanian terms as a kind of stigmatic writing that re-marks the child from without as the
desire of the (m)other. Or as Leclaire explains:
With his notion of the “erotogenic zone” as “the interval of an exquisite difference” inscribed
across the flesh by the letter-holder of the (m)other’s auto-erotic “caressing finger,” Leclaire here
has extended Laplanche’s general theory of seduction to the extent that “sexuality” is now figured
not simply as a movement of eroto-traumatic stigmatization, but as an auto-erotic “perversion”—or
“disabling”—of the body’s organic order (its “vital functions”): i.e., a drive lacking a real object.
For Laplanche, of course, a similar auto-erotic “perversion” of the body’s “vital functions”
will revolve around the figure of the “fantasmatic breast.” Since, for both Laplanche and Leclaire,
“sexuality” entails an inevitable “perversion”—or “disabling”—of the instinctive needs, it is the
infant’s pattern of feeding at the (m)other’s breast that is one of the first “vital functions” to
become deflected from its “real” referent (nourishment), and, thus, to become “sexualized” (or
“autoerotic”), i.e., transformed into “the sheer enjoyment of sensual sucking” (Laplanche 20). Having
become deflected from its “real” object (nourishment = milk = satisfaction), the infant’s “natural” pat-
tern of feeding is forever thereafter con-fused in what Laplanche calls the “autoerotic turn”
toward the “fantasmatic breast”—the “fantasmatic breast” being one of the earliest “objects” of
a “perverted,” “disabled,” and therefore properly “sexual” drive:
144
The inscription in the body happens when . . . sexual value is projected by
another onto the place of satisfaction [bodily orifices—C.H.] . . . . The process of
erotogenization allows for, curiously enough, a more rigorous description if
one takes into consideration the linked moments that lead up to the “opening”
or the “inscription” of an erotogenic zone . . . . Let us imagine . . . the softness of
a mother’s finger playing “innocently,” as during lovemaking, with the exquisite
dimple next to the baby’s neck, and the baby’s face lighting up in a smile. We
can say that the finger, with its loving caress, imprints a mark in this hollow,
opens a crater of jouissance, inscribes a letter that seems to fix the indiscernible
immediacy of the illumination. In the hollow of the dimple, an erotogenic zone
is opened, an interval is fixated that nothing will be able to erase . . . .
In this example, we can see more clearly that what makes the erotogenic
zone possible is the fact that the caressing finger is itself, for the mother, an
erotogenic zone . . . a “letter-holder” . . . to the extent that . . . a letter fixes into its
flesh the interval of an exquisite difference. (49-50)
It should be understood that the real object, milk, was the object of the function,
which was virtually preordained to the world of satisfaction. Such is the real object
which has been lost, but the object linked to the autoerotic turn, the breast—
become a fantasmatic breast—is, for its part, the object of the sexual drive. Thus,
the sexual object is not identical to the object of the function, but is displaced in
relation to it; they are in a relation of essential contiguity which leads us to slide
almost indifferently from one to the other, from the milk to the breast as its
symbol. (Laplanche 19-20)
If we can understand the sliding (mal)function of the car crash along similar lines to
Laplanche and Leclaire’s auto-erotic inscription of sexual excitation through a “breaking . . . within
the bodily envelope” (Laplanche 21), then the trope of the (s)car in Crash becomes a kind of
duplicit trace of this simultaneous disabling and enabling—(dis)enabling—of the “normal” body
brought about by (the) accident, i.e., a “fertile wound.” Thus, in the initial crash scene involving
James and Dr. Helen Remington (Figs. 7.1-7.2), we see a Laplanchean “autoerotic turn” (or swerve)
leading to the traumatic impact of “bodies” and “machines” in a radical “perversion” of their
“normal” functionality, such that it is precisely this (dis)enabling “perversion” of functionality—and
its stigmatized (s)car—which opens up the “erotogenic zone.” Or as Leclaire says: “an interval is
fixated that nothing will be able to erase” (50). The “autoerotic turn” depicted in this initial crash
145
Fig. 7.1: The first shot of a shot/
reverse shot sequence following
the initial car crash in Crash, a
head-on collision that involves
James (right) and Dr. Helen
Remington, whose husband is
killed in the accident. In this
shot, we see James transfixed
by the “enigmatic signifier” of
Helen, whom he sees through
the shattered windshield of his
now “disabled” auto.
Fig. 7.2: Second shot of a shot/
reverse shot sequence following
the inital car crash in Crash.
In this shot we see Dr. Helen
Remington transfixed by the
vision of James, whom she sees
through the shattered windshield
of her now “disabled” auto. In
an effort to remove her seat-belt,
she (accidentally?) rips open her
blouse, exposing her breast to
James. For both “victims,” this
initial car crash will serve as an
eroto-traumatic stigmatization—
the kind that leaves (s)cars.
scene, then, can be seen as implanting (in) the sex lives of both James and Helen Remington an
“alien internal entity” (Vaughan), who will become increasingly incorporated into their respective
and soon-to-be-conjoined auto-erotic activities. As prefigured in the accidental exposure of the
“fantasmatic breast” (Fig. 7.2), this initial collision (or stimulation) of “bodies” and “machines” makes
visible the trope of the (s)car as a de-pathologized, de-individualized trace in the de-familiarized
“pornography” of Crash. Or as Laplanche states:
It is in the aftermath of their accident, then, that James and Helen Remington will first
“encounter” Vaughan at the hospital. But rather than a typical medical-model representation of the
hospital (where “disability” is “overcome” as a depressing condition), the hospital setting here serves
more as a site of seduction. Thus, it is in the hospital hallway where James (now “disabled” on
crutches) misrecognizes the “pockmarked” Vaughan (dressed in a white coat) for a real medical
doctor (Figs. 7.3-7.8). This (accidental) encounter in the hallway between two scarred crash-survivors
will later be re-staged in the backseat of Vaughan’s beat-up 1963 Lincoln, where, having both just
received fresh tattoos (the tattoo being yet another trope of eroto-traumatic stigmatization), the two
will engage in “sex” (Figs. 7.9-7.11). According to Cronenberg’s description of this “sex scene” in his
script: “James and Vaughan show their wounds to each other, exposing the scars on their chests and
hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium
ashtrays, to the curtain of wheel covers hanging on a web of twisted wires just outside the car
window” (55-56). As a (deliberate?) re-staging of their initial (accidental) encounter in the hospital,
this “sex scene” between James and Vaughan—in which the two caress and kiss each other’s freshly
scarred tattoos—is significant for the way in which James now appears to take on the role of the
“active” seducer from his previously “passive” (or “infantile”) role in the hospital hallway, where it
was Vaughan who played the “active” (“maternal”) care provider, i.e., as if the one who implants
“adult sexuality” into the child from without (see Figs. 7.3-7.11).
11
146
. . . far from being simply a biochemical process localizable in an organ or in a
collection of differentiated cells, the “source” of sexuality can be as general a process
as the mechanical stimulation of the body in its entirety; take, for example, the
rocking of an infant or the sexual stimulation that may result from rythmic jolts,
as in the course of a railroad trip; or the example of sexual stimulation linked to
muscular activity . . . . (21)
11. Kaja Silverman’s analysis of the spectacle of the castrated (“disabled”) male body in William Wyler’s
post-WWII film, The Best Years of Our Lives, is helpful in thinking about the apparent homoeroticism of this
“sex scene” between James and Vaughan. Silverman notes how Wyler’s decision to cast a “real” amputee (Harold
Russell) for the part of the wounded veteran (Homer), while serving to help the (male) spectator disavow the
figure of the castrated male body, nevertheless also opened up a space which “not only situates Homer in a
classically ‘feminine’ position, but communicates to its male spectator a dangerous fantasy—the fantasy of
occupying a subordinate sexual position” (72). See Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York:
Routledge, 1992).
147
Fig. 7.3: The first shot of the
initial encounter between James
and Vaughan (Vaughan posing
in a white lab coat as if a real
doctor).
Fig. 7.4: The (mis)recognition
of Vaughan as a real doctor
prefigures the fantasmatic role
Vaughan will come to play
in James’ auto-erotic sex-life,
as if an “alien internal entity”
Fig. 7.5: Vaughan’s attraction to
James is mediated—enabled?—
precisely by James’s “disability,”
designated by his wounded leg,
which is the fantasmatic object
of Vaughan’s intense gaze. Note
Vaughan’s “pockmarked” face.
148
Fig. 7.6: Vaughan’s tactile handling
of James here recalls the attention
given by the primary (maternal?)
care provider in Laplanche’s “general
theory of seduction.”
Fig. 7.7: James’ lingering look as
Vaughan disappears down the hall
suggests the eroto-traumatic nature
of this (accidental?) “encounter.”
To counter the potential loss of
Vaughan, he will be increasingly
incorporated into auto-erotic sex-life
of James and his wife, Catherine
(Vaughan, again, as if the “alien
internal entity” that enables/disables
James’ “sexuality”).
Fig. 7.8: Vaughan’s lingering look
back designates his own attraction,
as if he were a kind of primary
(maternal) care provider—i.e., the
one who implants “adult sexuality”
in the child from without.
149
Fig. 7.9: In a re-staging of their
accidental encounter in the hall,
it is James who now intensely
examines the “wounded” body of
Vaughan—the fresh tattoo of a
steering wheel imprinted over his
scarred chest.
Fig. 7.10: In this re-staging of
their accidental encounter in the
hall, it is James who is now the
“active” seducer of Vaughan. Note
the “maternal” handling.
Fig. 7.11: It is precisely through
the accidentally “wounded” auto-
body that James and Vaughan
seduce each other. The “source”
of their “sexual excitation” comes
from without, inscribed on the
skin of their “bodily envelopes.”
Note how James kisses Vaughan’s
“pockmarked” face.
Reading Crash as De-familiarized “Pornography”
In The Cinematic Body (1993), Steven Shaviro argues that unlike classic horror films Cronenberg’s
brand of “horror” is less about the threat of external things—i.e., the spectacular attack of some
terrifying foreign body or monster, as in The Mummy (1932), The Blob (1958), or Jaws (1975)—
than it is the “monstrous ambivalence” of “our own” “familiar” “human body.” Since modern
ideologies of “health” and “normality” are grounded in the denial or expulsion of “monstrosity,”
says Shaviro:
But, if Shaviro is right, why has Cronenberg’s relentless exploration of this “obscene” ambivalence
at the heart of “the body” raised such a fuss in Crash? Barbara Creed’s contribution to “The
Crash Debates” published in the Summer 1998 issue of Screen (“Anal Wounds, Metallic Kisses”),
provides something of a clue.
13
Like the other essays in “The Crash Debates,” Creed spends a lot of
time trying to situate Cronenberg’s film in order to answer a basic ontological question, namely,
What is this film? Although Creed suggests its theme is a familiar one—“that the human psyche and
body have been profoundly shaped by technology”—she nevertheless goes on to trace an elaborate
genealogy from the Italian Futurists to Luis Bunuel’s surrealist film Un Chien andalou (1929)—which
“depicts a man becoming sexually aroused by the sight of a young woman being run over by a
speeding automobile”—to disaster epics like Airport (1970) and Titanic (1953, 1997), to sci-fi films
that explore the relationship between humans and robots, like Metropolis (1927) and The T erminator
(1984). Ultimately, however, she says that “Crash draws on this rich heritage but in a radically
different manner. In an extended, detailed exploration, Crash fuses and eroticizes two key motifs of
modernity: technology and the wound” (176).
150
What is sex?
—DAVID CRONENBERG
We feel panic at Cronenberg’s vision of the body, its stresses and transformations,
the bizarre intensity of its physical sensations. But at the same time, we may also
find this vision to be deeply hilarious. Terror and humor alike are rooted in
Cronenberg’s refusal to idealize: his presentation of the body in its primordial
monstrosity and obscenity . . . . It is obscene, and by that very fact it testifies to
an extreme vulnerability, something of which we can only be the uncomfortable
witnesses . . . . We are denied the luxuries of objectification and control; fascination
is mingled with disgust. Our response is violently ambivalent on every level. (132)
12. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
13. Barbara Creed, “Anal Wounds, Metallic Kisses,” Screen 39 (Summer 1998): 175-179. All further
references appear in the text.
Given that every major character in Crash is, in fact, a “crash victim” dealing with some
form of physical impairment, it is interesting that Creed, in her elaborate genealogy, never attempts
to situate Crash as a “disability film.” This blindspot to “disability”—in virtually all of the essays
in The Crash Debate—is significant, particularly in the way that this disavowed “disability” then
returns as the (implicit) visible marker of Crash as a “perverse,” indeed “pornographic,” film about
“desire in the postindustrial, postmodern age” (Creed 175). Or as Creed states:
That this metonymic chain of associations is motivated by an implicit figure of “disability” in
Creed’s analysis of Crash (“disability” as the death of “wholeness”) seems clear from the way that
the (dis)enabling auto-eroticism of Crash—i.e., its series of visibly marked “bodies” simultaneously
wounded and eroticized by technology—becomes, for Creed: “simulation,” “brutality,” “obscenity,”
“perversity,” and ultimately “death.” It is this metonymic chain which in-forms Creed’s analysis of
what is arguably the most radical scene in Crash, namely, the “sex scene” (Figs. 7.12-7.14) between
James and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette)—Gabrielle being the film’s most visibly coded figure of
conventional “disability” and “auto-eroticism” (Fig. 7.15). Here is how Creed describes the scene:
Note, however, how Creed’s translation of this scene—the language this scene elicits from her—
radically diverges from the way Cronenberg describes this very same scene in his script for Crash:
151
The most confronting episode [in Crash] occurs when the character rather cheekily
called James Ballard (James Spader) has to fuck a wound in Gabrielle’s (Rosanna
Arquette) shattered leg. In contrast to virtually all of the other sex scenes, this one
does not involve anal penetration. (178)
James makes love to Gabrielle in the front seat of her small invalid car,
deliberately involving the complex hand controls in the mechanics of their
sex . . . . Amid this small forest of machinery, James explores Gabrielle’s new and
strange body, feeling his way among the braces and straps of her underwear,
the unfamiliar planes of her hips and legs, the unique culs-de-sac, odd declensions
of skin and musculature . . . . Gabrielle’s hand moves across his chest, opening his
shirt, her fingers finding the small scars below his collarbone, the imprint of the
instrument binnacle of his own crashed car . . . . She spreads her left leg and
exposes a deep, trench-like wound-scar in her inner thigh. She directs his hand
to this neo-sex organ . . . . Gabrielle rotates over him so that he can see the
wounds of her right hip. James turns her back, pulls her thigh in between his
own thighs and enters her scar. With his mouth fastened on the scar beneath
her left breast, his tongue exploring its sickle-shaped trough, he comes almost
immediately. (52-53)
Desire [in Crash] represents the opposite of the Romantic ideal of truth, beauty
and wholeness; the postmodern desiring subject yearns for experience marked by
crash culture—division, simulation, brutality, obscenity, perversity, death. (175)
152
Fig. 7.12: In the front seat
of her invalid car, James
encounters Gabrielle’s scar.
Fig. 7.13: A close-up shot
of James’ hands exploring
the contours of Gabrielle’s
“neo-sex organ” ([s]car).
Fig. 7.14: James kisses the
invaginated scar, before “he
has to fuck . . . the shattered
leg,” as Barbara Creed puts
it.
My point in appealing to Cronenberg’s script, here, is not to assert some putative “authority”
or “authenticity” to his version, but simply to illustrate the assumptions elicited by this scene—
assumptions which appear to be motivated (driven?) by implicit notions of “normality”: What is
“normal sex”? What is a “normal body”? For Creed—and from an “able-bodied” cultural value
system, in general—Gabrielle’s leg can only be “shattered,” and therefore it is as if James is forced to
“fuck” it, as Creed says: “[James] has to fuck a wound in Gabrielle’s . . . shattered leg.” For Cronenberg,
however, it is not Gabrielle’s leg that is “shattered,” but her auto that is “invalid.” And far from
having to “fuck” Gabrielle’s “shattered” leg, James “makes love” to her “neo-sex organ” and “comes
almost immediately.” The point, again, is not that Cronenberg’s version is more “authentic,” but
rather that much of the criticism which claims that Crash depicts a “perverse” dystopian sexuality
of the future seems to implicitly link “perversity” with “disability,” such that the “disabled body”
becomes associated with “division,” “simulation,” and “death”—everything that a so-called “normal,”
“healthy,” “whole” body would dread.
In order to designate texts (movies) that operate according to this presumptive logic, Darke
has hypothesized the existence of what he calls a “normality genre.” As Darke explains:
What is interesting about Crash, however (a movie not discussed by Darke, and one in which
“abnormal” characters out-number “normal” characters), is how it works against the conventions
of this “normality genre” previsely through its interpellation of “normal” (“able-bodied”) spectators
as “desiring subjects.” Crash, in other words, behaves like an anti-normality drama, challenging the
supremacy of the “normal” through its ambivalently (dis)enabling “pornographic” transvaluations
of “perversity.” Thus, the supposedly “normal” (“able-bodied”) viewer is continually being sutured
into “subject positions” involving what Manuel Camblor has called (following Julia Kristeva):
“frayage.”
14
But if frayage designates that nameless dread which precedes a subject’s (mis)recognition
of itself in the “symbolic order”—i.e., which precedes the image that unifies and reassures the
“subject position” of its viewer (Camblor 6)—then Crash, in its deployment of frayage, would seem
to undercut the mechanisms of suture that guarantee a subject’s illusory sense of intelligibility,
safety, and wholeness in the “symbolic order.” In this way, according to Camblor, Crash becomes
a prime example of what Kristeva calls an “anti-film” (1).
153
. . . two explicit generic themes are clear: first, that the state of abnormality is
nothing other than tragic because of its medical implications; and, second, that the
struggle for normality, or some semblance of it in normalization—as represented
in the film by the other [“normal”] characters—is unquestionably right owing to its
axiomatic supremacy. (187)
14. Manuel Camblor, “Death Drive’s Joy Ride: David Cronenberg’s Crash,” Other Voices 1.3 (January
1999): 1-14. All further references appear in the text.
And yet, the designation of Crash as an “anti-film” misses the extent to which Crash
(as more of an “anti-normality drama”) seems to depend precisely on the mechanisms of suture for
its “disturbing” affects, its “monstrous ambivalence.” Crash, in other words, depends on the capture
or lure of its “normal” (“able-bodied”) viewer’s investment of “desire,” i.e., something impossible
without the provisional constitution of sutured “subjectivity” within its “symbolic order” (since,
from a Lacanian perspective, it is only as a sutured “subject” that one learns how and what to
“desire” within the discourse of the Other).
15
Or as Kaja Silverman notes, “suture” not only refers
to the process by which “subjectivity” is constantly being reactivated by cultural texts—i.e., with
the subject always already “agreeing” to take up the shifting pronoun positions in the grammar
of the “symbolic order”—but also to the manufacturing of “desire” in the discourse of the Other;
we are not simply interpellated as “speaking subjects” by a cultural texts, but as “desiring subjects”
(Silverman 178). To read a text like J.G. Ballard’s Crash for the first time, as Cronenberg himself
says, is thus to be interpellated as a “desiring subject” in a very strange way:
What Cronenberg is describing here—as Camblor points out—is a very different conception of
what makes “pornography” (un)intelligible to its viewers (4). Indeed, if Cronenberg’s assault on
“normality” is characterized by precisely this kind of (auto-erotic) resignification of the intelligible,
then the strategy of Crash is not to move outside the “symbolic order” (as in Kristeva’s impossible
“anti-film”), but to bewilder its critics (and viewers) into “successfully” recognizing the “pornography”
of Crash—or rather (mis)recognizing it. This is the provocative strategy of Crash: constantly working
to suture its “normal” (“able-bodied”) viewer as “desiring subject” only to then arouse (as if “from
within”) these anxious moments of ambivalent (mis)recognition, i.e., of both “itself” and its status as
“normal.” In (mis)recognizing Crash as “pornographic,” it is as if critics and viewers have merely
ex-posed “their own” “perversity”—“their own” tenuous grasp on “normality.”
If Crash operates on its viewers in this mode of sutured bewilderment (rather than in
the detached denunciation of Kristeva’s “anti-film”), this is particularly evident in a scene from Crash
that takes place in a Mercedes-Benz showroom. In this scene (Figs. 7.15-7.21), Gabrielle takes James
to an automobile dealership to test whether she can “fit into a car designed for a normal body.”
What the scene quickly turns into, however, is a rather elaborate staging of “sexual foreplay,”
154
. . . Crash is not written like porn at all; it’s all very clinical and very medical in
its descriptions of everything, including sex. But at some point you find yourself
being turned on by it and you say to yourself, “Oh my God, I’m capable of being
turned on by this?” It’s unbelievable. I would love to have that happen with this
movie. (Cronenberg 6)
15. Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford UP , 1983). All further references appear in
the text.
in which one of the film’s only “normal” characters (a car salesman) finds himself increasingly
implicated. That this salesman—who is drawn further and further into a “perverse” auto-eroticism—
should be one of the only “normals” in Crash is significant, both in reversing the conventions of
Darke’s “normality genre” (which typically isolates a single “abnormal” person with an impairment
in order to shore up the “normalcy” of the other characters by contrast), and in terms of the way
the Crash works to engage its “normal” (“able-bodied”) viewer through suture. As Silverman states,
“The classic cinematic organization depends upon the subject’s willingness to become absent to itself
by permitting a fictional character to ‘stand in’ for it, or by allowing a particular point of view
to define what it sees” (205). In this Mercedes-Benz scene, it is the “normal” (“able-bodied”)
car salesman who serves as the viewer’s stand in, focalizing a point of view on the spectacle of
Gabrielle’s entrance into the showroom (Fig. 7.15). Filmed in a long shot to accentuate an initial
sense of distance from the spectacle of her “disability,” this distance is quickly ruptured as the car
salesman (and, by proxy, the viewer) becomes increasingly implicated in the fantasy scenario of
Gabrielle and James’ auto-eroticism. Moving from this initial long shot to series of medium shots
(Figs. 7.16-7.18) and finally to an intricate play of fragmented close-ups of hands, canes, crutches,
and crotches (Figs. 7.19-7.21), Cronenberg’s shot selection ruptures our distance and point of view.
“Bodies” which were initially framed as visually distinct (“wholesome”), become increasingly indistinct
and implicated through the cinematic exchange of the cut, until the final scene, in which the car
salesman, now down on his knees, struggles to free Gabrielle’s leg brace from a loose thread in the
automobile’s upholstery. He “succeeds” in freeing Gabrielle’s leg, but only at the cost of tearing a
gash (“wound”) in the front seat of the expensive new auto, saying only: “Fuck, this is not good.”
155
Fig. 7.15: Visibly marked by her leg braces and cane, Gabrielle enters the Mercedes-Benz dealership.
156
Fig. 7.16: Medium rear shot
of Gabrielle’s (s)car, barely
concealed by the straps of her
leg braces as she flashes the
showroom salesman.
Fig. 7.17: Medium shot of
the showroom salesman as
he contemplates the auto-
erotic spectacle of Gabrielle.
The salesman is one of the
few “normal,” “able-bodied”
figures encountered in Crash.
Fig. 7.18: Medium shot of
Gabrielle, acknowledging the
salesman’s inquiry: “Is there
something here that interests
you?” Gabrielle’s relpy: “This
interests me. Could you help
me into it, please. I’d like to
see if I can fit into a car
designed for a normal body.”
157
Fig. 7.19: Close up shot of
Gabrielle’s hand and cane,
which conceals her crotch
as she struggles to get her leg
brace inside the front seat of
the showroom Mercedes.
Fig. 7.20: Medium shot of
the showroom salesman as
he contemplates Gabrielle’s
phallic crutch in moment of
ambivalent (mis)recognition.
The shots of the “normal”
salesman will become tighter
and more fragmented as he
is lured further and further
into Gabrielle and James’s
“perverse” auto-eroticism.
Fig. 7.21: Close up shot of
the salesman’s hand on
Gabrielle’s inner thigh, as
he struggles to free her leg
brace from the front seat
upholstery. As he tugs at
her leg, Gabrielle massages
James’s crotch (as he watches
beside her). The salesman
finally yanks her leg free
with the sound of ripping
upholstery. Salesman: “Fuck,
this is not good.”
Contrary to Laura Mulvey’s now classic formulation of suture and sexual difference, in
which “mainstream” films are said to set up a relay of complicit glances between male characters
in a film and male viewers in the audience around a passively exchanged female in an effort to
displace castration anxiety,
16
the Mercedes-Benz showroom scene from Crash (and the tearing of
the “wound” in the auto’s upholstery) seems to designate, instead, a way in which “the fetish can
become indistinguishable from the phallus” (Silverman 230).
17
Gabrielle’s ambivalently (dis)enabled
body, for example, seems less to disavow castration than to flaunt it. The way she hands over her
cane (phallus/crutch) to the salesman seems to provoke both a look of ambivalent (mis)recognition
(excitement and dread) (Fig. 7.20), as well as an initiation into the “perverse” scenario of Gabrielle
and James’ auto-eroticism. Indeed, by making castration—the (s)car—a privileged site of (auto-)
erotic attraction and excitement (the phallus), Crash seems to throw the “normal” (“able-bodied”)
“desiring subject” into a state of bewildered uncertainty, not by foreclosing the “symbolic order”
but by (its) radically resignifying “auto-eroticism.”
158
16. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1975], in Narrative. Apparatus, Ideology: A
Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen (New York: Columbia UP , 1986), 198-209.
17. As Fred Botting notes, the “upholstery button”—or “quilting point” [point de capiton]—is Lacan’s
metaphor for metaphor (and hence key to unravelling the Lacanian notion of “suture”). As Botting writes:
See Fred Botting, Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the Future Present (Manchester:
Manchester UP , 1999).
While metaphor, in specific instances, serves as the temporary quilting allowing meaning to
emerge, it does so only as an element of an immense network, a tracery of differences and
relations in which subjects are positioned at particular points of interconnection. An excess
[a (s)car?—C.H.] remains, however: metaphor is established in the gap [the “wound”?—C.H.],
the site of loss and lack, which leaves something [the (s)car?—C.H.] of the subject inassimilble
to signification . . . . Metaphor, then, does not simply describe the imposition of a system on a
resistant body but sketches the manner [the technique?—C.H.] in which, through identification
and internalization, bodies become speaking subjects. A metaphor, paternal or otherwise, must
be recognized for it to mean, that is, to have effects. But due to the gap [the “wound”?—C.H.]
. . . these effects are neither singular nor stable . . . . Sexuality, too, is scarred by this ambivalence
for, as the trace of the Other and the internal knot of self-difference, the navel [as “upholstery
button”—C.H.] remains on and beyond bodies [like a (s)car?—C.H.]. (56-60)
159
A woman is sometimes quite a serviceable substitute for
masturbation . . . .
—KARL KRAUS
Dicta and Contradicta (1909)
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Asset Metadata

Creator Hite, Christian (author)

Core Title Technologies of arousal: masturbation, aesthetic education, and the post-Kantian auto-

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 06/16/2009

Defense Date 05/13/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag aesthetics,auto-affection,auto-eroticism,Autonomy,Cronenberg,Derrida,Foucault,masturbation,Munsterberg,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Reading,Technology,vibrators

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), Kamuf, Peggy (committee member), Tiffany, Daniel (committee member)

Creator Email chite@usc.edu,christianhite@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2302

Unique identifier UC1487037

Identifier etd-Hite-2956 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-247811 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2302 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hite-2956.pdf

Dmrecord 247811

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hite, Christian

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu