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Vadim Linetski Other Voices, v.1, n.3 (January 1999)
Copyright © 1999 by Vadim Linetski, all rights reserved
... Twins ... cannot be described because we should be sure to be describing the wrong one. As the tale goes, there are many poststructuralisms. But are they compatible, can they co-exist? Apparently, the answer is yes, meaning that the differences within poststructuralism evidence the validity of its basic claims as regards the irreducible heterogeneity. In other words, it is crucial to the whole enterprise to preserve heterogeneity within theory in order to ensure its appeal for the profane world without. And yet already the fact that the becoming-fashionable of the Deleuze/Guattarian version is concomitant with the demise of the deconstructive one should give us pause. However, a certain intellectual effort is necessary in order to divulge in what appears to be a historical contingency the workings of the logic which is the logic of the poststructuralist difference itself. If there should be a difference between Derridaean différance and Deleuzean différence, between the parergonal n+1 and the schizoid synthesis of "... and ... and...", then first and foremost from the standpoint of socio-political application: as is generally believed, the fault of deconstruction is precisely its inability to contribute anything to the ethico-political debate fostered by the urgent necessity to hear the (repressed) voice of minorities, to secure for them the possibility of expression (cf. Holub; Weimer). The imperative has nothing surprising about it. If the (revolutionary) deterritorialization/reassemblage should not wind up with an act of exclusion/scape-goating which grounds logocentric tradition, then the new assemblage has to be an over-inclusive system (Braidotti 195-196; Deleuze, Logic 203-204; Kristeva 214- 218). However, the over-inclusiveness runs the danger of collapsing into/merging with the logocentric notion of wholeness. The only way to avoid this danger which postmodernism is able to imagine is to ground excess in lack, in the primordial need for the other, i.e. to define excess negatively: as an excess of lack/need. But by the same token the system thus advanced comes to be grounded in impression, rather than in expression, for the Otherness which comes first mutilates the subject, impresses upon it a trace. Since the trace-inscription is an infinite process, an act of expression itself is infinitely postponed. It follows that on these premises the world (read: the Third World, the world(s) of minorities) is only promised an expression but in actual fact exists outside of expression, cannot still express itself. The problem which will be addressed in this paper is whether, if at all, the promise of expression can be realized. But first of all let us see whose promise is it that we are speaking of? The notions of trace and inscription seem to be unambiguous pointers. Since they are inscribed in the concept of pharmakon, it is rather tempting to conclude that the Derridean model, whatever its deconstructive merits, fails to produce an effective alternative. In fact, the applications of the scapegoat-model explain how the images produced for mass consumption are impressed upon the public mind (cf. Feldstein 1996) but have nothing to say about the latter's expressing itself. This fact alone suggests that the fault may well lie with the pharmakon itself which fosters the misrecognition of logocentric strategies. The pharmakon is a foreign body in the body of tradition, an entity which the tradition has tried but failed to expel. In other words, the possibility of deconstruction is bound up with the impossibility to perform an act of expulsion, of sacrifice: the tie is not severed irreparably, from time to time the pharmakon returns: as a specter or ghost it haunts the tradition. The question is whether this ghost deconstructively impresses itself upon the haunted, or rather expresses it. The scapegoating mechanism functions on the Lacanian mirror-stage where an identification can only be a misidentification, a recognition -- a misrecognition: "Thus, monoculturalists manufacture the scapegoated other through an oppositional process that is not dialectical but imaginary, since it is brought into being at the level of sadistic fantasy that cannot be owned by right-wing reactionaries intent upon disavowing aspects of their own personality ... Neoconservatives ... are forced to disidentify with any rebellious counter-identification that surfaces as a dissident counter-image" (Feldstein 1996: 147; italics added). Logically, this can only mean that the excluded scapegoats, or, actually, their images manufactured by the dominant cultural forces, are the true expressions of these latter, their better and/or true selves. Therefore, contrary to popular prejudice, not only has deconstruction everything to do with ethics, it is an ethical enterprise -- at least so long as the current applications of grammatology are concerned. Forsooth, the latter is a pedagogy (cf. Ulmer), unfortunately in the patently humanistic sense of the term. For the narrative of deconstruction is the didactic narrative of melodrama aimed at bringing the (logocentric) villain to recognize his better (postructuralist) self. Since it may be argued that ethics is not such a bad thing after all, let us more closely attend to the poststructuralist pedagogy. At the face of it there is a difference between the logocentric construction and its deconstruction, and it is this difference which, to believe the postructuralist advocates, makes all the difference in the world. The post-psychoanalytic and post-deconstructive ethics is "an ethics of lack concerned with the gap between signs and objects and how this gap is bridged" (Feldstein 1996: 130; italics added). It is this gap, the space in-between, which poststructuralism bares and cherishes, whereas the production of the unified phallogocentric selfhood is allegedly bound up with its erasure. In Derrida's theory this gap is known as khora "which is neither 'sensible' nor 'intelligible'" (Derrida, On the Name 89) and has exactly the function of making compatible heterogeneous series (80,92) that Deleuze allots to his mot blanc (Logic 84) or élément vide (214) that by virtue of its "non-belonging to either of the series is their point of convergence, their 'differential'"(67; cf.39,49,55,124,140,198-202). What it should allow for is the hypercompatibility which preserves the singularity of heterogenous elements, that is, negotiates between difference and repetition in a way allegedly subversive of the metaphysics of presence in which the Western hermenutic project is rooted. The phallogocentric drive for an unambiguous meaning is an attempt to erase the non-presence of khora signaled by the gaps in the narrative. (Re-)read, say poststructuralist theorists, Freud's case histories. Let us! The authors of the celebrated volume In Dora's Case are in accord that the gaps in Freud's account of Dora testify to Freud's failure to master his own discourse as well as that of his patient (cf. Hertz 233; Ramas 152-158; Sprengnether 254-277). Whence the celebration of gaps, silences, raptures and other discontinuities as a distinctive features of an écriture feminine (cf. Bal, "Mise en abyme" 116-128, Lethal Love 88; Cixous 53; Craft- Fairchild 6; Gossy). However, it is sufficient to glance at the history of Little Hans in order to divulge the real function of the khoraic pause. Since the ego-ideal/superego plays a prominent part in phobic performance, it is not surprising that the mechanism of phobia is that of scapegoating, splitting of the non-compatible elements which come to haunt the subject in the manner of Derridaean pharmakon. The aim of the psychoanalytic cure is to expose the phobic symptom not as a foreign body which impresses itself upon the patient's mind but as a patient's own production, to wit, as a pathogenic expression of his/her personality. The irony of the matter is that to conceive of a phobic representation as an expression means to transform the spectral pharmakonic structure of undecidability into a structure of interpretability par excellence, to wit, into the Oedipal structure. The sine qua non of this transformation is precisely the insertion of gaps into the narrative of as well as on Hans. This insertion is necessitated by the fact that the phobic representation is an exaggeration, an excess: phobia makes use of the natural discrepancy (Hans's relative smallness and the relative bigness of heavy, dray horses) and exaggerates it. Logically, this means that if we conceive of phobic exaggeration as a continuous process the patient would either gradually cure him/herself (in a "natural" way by outgrowing the fear-provoking objects or "culturally": by gradual familiarization[1]), or go mad, in both cases escaping the analysis. And this is precisely why Freud has to punctuate the narrative of Hans's illness with gaps, pauses, moments when phobia is allayed or disappears (261, 263, 271, 333 etc.) and to subject his own account to the same procedure in order to vindicate his writing on Hans[2]. The result of this khoraic punctuation, of introducing discontinuities is the impossibility to make head or tail of Hans's fear, for on Freud's own premises, only a constant/continuous tension can produce unpleasure (1914: 151). Or, to be more precise, the only possibility of understanding now left is precisely to conceive of the whole affair along the lines of the poststructuralist "ethics of lack", which vainly strives to differentiate itself from the Oedipal ethics. In other words, the Oedipal interpretation is not just one among many other possible translations (of the discontinuous narrative), as poststructuralism would like us to believe (Weber, Institution 106), but the only interpretation precisely because it acts-out the movement of its production. The irony of the matter is that it is this theatricality, so dear to the poststructuralist heart (cf. Weber "Einmal"), which thwarts the subversive claims of rhizomatic anti- or contra-semiotics. According to poststructuralist readers, the narrative gaps, silences and similar discontinuities are the marks of repression (Craft-Fairchild 1993: 15, 165, 169). Basically, a repression is a failed repression, it testifies to the desire to erase the gaps and the impossibility to do this. Whence its hermeneutic value. This explains why the gaps inserted into the narrative of Hans's illness resemble not so much bottomless abysses as broken bridges, for their function is to tame the excess, to introduce an element of expressivity into the phobic representation. But by the same token the expression remains underdeveloped. In Freud's case this vindicates the recourse to childhood as a proof text of psychoanalytic theory in general, that of neuroses in particular: the neurotic is the one who has remained a child, who has refused to grow up. However, precisely this model is what Deleuzean semiotics, which heralds as a discarding of Oedipus and repression, boils down to, for the gap (élément videom which "one speaks", i.e. which allows for expression, is an element "of one's own sous-développement à soi [under-development to/or within oneself]" (Deleuze, Pourparlers 30). Little wonder, then, that after everything has been said and done by way of elaborating the concept of "minor literature" (cf. Kafka), Guattari concedes that the latter as well as "minor discourse(s)" in general, can be seen only "in its nascent state" ("Pragmatic/Machinic"), to wit, in a state of an underdeveloped discourse, whose subject is doomed forever to remain a child, a poststructuralist Peter Pan. As Jacqueline Rose would have it, the case of Peter Pan testifies to the impossibility of children's fiction (1984: 1) insofar as "there is no child behind the category 'children's fiction', other than the one which the category itself sets in place, the one which it needs to believe is there for its own purposes" (10). That is, the child is an objectified image, a cultural myth: "suppose, therefore, that Peter Pan is a little boy who does not grow up, not because he doesn't want to, but because someone else prefers that he shouldn't" (3). The brute fact is that it is the poststructuralist strategy which, aiming to remove this patriarchal prohibition, imposes it far more effectively than the tradition was ever able to do. Barrie's narrative, says Rose, at one and the same time confirms the patriarchal paradigm and deconstructs it (141) in the same way and manner as the women writers of the last two centuries did (Craft-Fairchild 1993: 164). In both cases deconstruction is collated with khoraic gaps (Rose 1984: 16), moments when "there is no clear distinction between the narrator and the child [or woman] he [or she] describes" (68). Consequently we cannot proceed without deciding whether and to what extent these gaps are intentional, for it is the problem of appropriation on which the theory of a double-voiced discourse stands or falls (cf. Craft-Fairchild 21-22,164- 167). In other words the recourse to cultural studies, far from being a break with deconstruction (cf. Brantlinger), is inscribed in, or even prescribed by the deconstructive quest. Momentarily we shall see that this problem turns out to be an impasse of deconstruction as well as of cultural studies[3]. To make of an Oedipal repression a tool of deconstruction we have to assume that the discontinuities are unintentional, unconscious[4], i.e. to conceive of them as instances of Deleuzean pre-subjective expressionism. The irony is that in so doing we have to conclude that the latter produces the "good form" (Barrie) which is the form of all logocentric myths, that of the childhood included. "The fundamental desire, or even fantasy" which underpins the myth of Peter Pan is the desire for "the eternal return of the same (the same child and the same literature) which has been one of the drives behind the very persistence of a work like Peter Pan"(Rose 1984: 133). The paradox is that so long as we are bent to treat Peter Pan as "one of the most salient representatives" (134) of the mentioned desire we have to concede that neither Freud's unconscious nor Deleuze's reformulation of the Nietzschean eternal return as a difference qua repetition (1968) offer "a decisive challenge to [the idea of] sameness", to "the idea that psychic life is continuous, that language can give us mastery, or that past and future can be cohered into a straightforward sequence, and controlled" (134). Witness the perfectly Deleuzean manner of Peter Pan's "becoming an animal". The animal in question is a crocodile that had swallowed a clock which continues to tick in his belly. On his way to rescue the children captured by Captain Hook Peter "decided to tick, so that wild beasts should believe he was the crocodile and let him pass unmolested ... Peter reached the shore without mishap, and went straight on; his legs encountering the water as if quite unaware that they had entered a new element. Thus many animals pass from land to water, but no other human being of whom I know ... He had ticked so long that he now went on ticking without knowing that he was doing it" (Barrie 1993: 122; italics added). Obviously the "becoming a crocodile" which implies a regression on a pre-subjective, unconscious level would have satisfied Deleuze. However, in Barrie's narrative this becoming is synonymous with the acquisition of the "good form" which, equally, is incompatible with the conscious ego[5]. Ironically, this is precisely how the Western tradition has always conceived of aesthetic activity: the best art is the one that is unaware of its being art. Whence the place allotted to the notion of imitation/mimesis and the celebration of the artistic as an eternal childhood: the child who is neither self-conscious nor self-reflexive is so close to nature that it can express the latter in a natural way. The current belief which gave rise to the cultural studies is that in order to deconstruct this myth it suffices to bare the (natural) "good form" as a cultural construction (cf. Wood), to expose "the artificial at the very heart of the most humanistic of discourses, the artistic" (Wills 13). To do this means to show that the acquisition of the "good form" is never "good" enough, that the promise of eternity implied in our notion can never be maintained. Which is to say that to break "good form" is to break the life-continuity, to introduce a gap. The problem is, however, that the "good form" itself derives its seductive power from being precisely such a break/gap: childhood and its adult substitutes (vacations etc.) are intervals, pauses, gaps. At its Deleuzean and Derridaean best poststructuralism is able to challenge the logocentric adversary only at the level of the latter's promise that these pauses are in the nature of things, that they are regular, that their return is guaranteed. Whence the apparent undecidability which is as often hailed as it is rebuked: what seems to be undecidable is whether the difference between logocentric and poststructuralist paradigms is that of difference qua resemblance or resemblance qua difference? (Derrida, Name 43). Deleuze's différence is the difference between two kinds of repetition: the one which reconfirms the moral and natural law and the other which transgresses both (1968: 9), "the hazardous repetition as difference without regularizing concept" (363). As J. Rose suggests, the logocentric myth, for instance the myth of Puer Aeternus, hinges vitally upon the first kind of repetition. As Barrie's narrative shows, it is the second Deleuzean repetition which makes of Peter Pan the modern incarnation of the mentioned myth. The seductive power of Peter Pan, of the logocentric myth in general, is the seductive power of the "repetition without concept", to wit, of the Derridaean letter, and stems from the fact that it/he "does not always arrive [return] at [the promised] destination" (Derrida 1988: 201; original italics). Having once promised Wendy/nostalgic adult reader to return in order to take "Wendy for a week every year to do his spring cleaning" (143), Peter sometimes returns, sometimes forgets to. Thus the gaps are everything else than "gut tempeririert": rather than being "measured" they are rythmic (Deleuze 1968: 33). In other words, precisely the insecurity of Peter's returning next year secures the children for culture/society and, by the same token, transforms Peter into a myth: if he would not have forgotten to return the children would have never begun to doubt his existence, would never have grown up. Which explains why the poststructuralist throw of the dice (repetition without concept) fails to eliminate the Oedipal structure. The only sense in which we are allowed to speak about the deconstruction of the Oedipus complex in schizoanalysis is qua its resolution in a most conventional way. If "it is so easy to give an Oedipal reading of Peter Pan" (Rose 35), then only because the main narrative prop, Peter's rivalry with Captain Hook, so obviously resembles the Oedipal rivalry with the Father figure. From this standpoint, Peter's killing the pirate is what makes of the tale the celebration of a fantasy of eternal childhood, i.e. corroborates Rose's claims. However, the matter is complicated by the fact that this rivalry is depicted as rivalry not over the mother, but over the "good form". If the latter was to remain Peter's property (cf. Deleuze 1969: 32-33), the brunt and thrust of our preceding discussion would have been of the sophists' type. However haphazard, provisional and inconstant the moments of acquisition of the "good form" might be, it would have been still possible to argue that Peter is inconstant and forgetful as a true child of nature, as nature itself. Even the fact that the "good form" is a temporal structure of Deleuzean "immaterial event" (1969: 14-17) rather than the spatial one of Lacanian Imaginary order, could not have really improved matters: our analysis still would have remained open to suspicions that we are exploiting mere resemblances. To make matters worse Barrie's narrative, at first glance, seems to justify these suspicions, for Captain Hook's, in fine, the adult's, inability to acquire the "good form" any more and his "retained passion for it" (115) is precisely what seems to make of Peter an object of ardent nostalgic desire, i.e. triggers logocentric myth-making. Consequently, to maintain our charge we have to disappropriate Peter, that is to break/split the "good form" in a properly Deleuzean manner by inscribing "difference in the very heart of the differentializing differential itself" (1968: 154). Fortunately for us, this disappropriating inscription happens to be the outcome of the Oedipal rivalry in Barrie's novel.
Thus the Father retains the last word. The irony of the matter is that it is the poststructuralist readers who allow him to do this once and for all. "The paradoxicality of true repetition", says Deleuze, "is that 'once' stands for 'all' [une fois pour toutes]" (1968: 127). Having failed once to maintain the "good form", Peter is disappropriated forever: we cannot claim that he has ever possessed or would have ever possess it. Appearances notwithstanding, this does not mean the immortalization of desire and the endangering of the law but the immortalization of the latter and the deconstruction of the former. Paradoxically put, the élément paradoxal which makes the different trends of poststructuralism converge and resonate is the structuralist Lacanian theory of desire that stresses the complicity of the latter with the law: "aggression against the Father is at the very heart of the Law ... the Law is in the service of the desire that Law institutes through the prohibition of incest" (1996: 418). As we shall momentarily see, Derridaean deconstruction as well as Deleuzean schizoanalysis are "forms of psychotherapy which infantilizes adults, without recognizing children any better" (418). Ironically, thus far nobody has bothered to note that, from the Lacanian standpoint, on which poststructuralist theories of visuality so heavily rely (cf. Brennan and Martin; Salecl and Zizek; Silverman), all the talk about the patriarchal reduction/subjection of the child/woman to an object of the male's desiring gaze/discourse (Rose 2) makes no sense because, according to Lacan, the essence of desire is to have no object. Hence in order to be able to speak "of what the adult desires ... in the very act of construing the child as the object of its speech" (2) we have precisely to disobjectify the object, in case of Peter Pan, to disappropriate him, i.e. to expose him as lacking and desiring the same what the Father figure lacks and desires. Since this is what Lacan's dictum "desire is desire for desire" (418) implies, it follows that the party which really has reasons to criticize Lacan for promulgating political sexism is the neoconservative phallocrats and not the feminist theorists, for the (in)famous bar which grounds the discourse of desire privileges the woman. In effect, logically, the threat of castration can only bar the subject from speech -- the boy that has something to loose more surely than the girl that does not. So long as castration is a door to civilization, the boy, prompted by the instincts of self-preservation, is more likely to reason that, whether or not the mother has a penis, in any event it is far more secure to renounce speech as such. The unruly subject of the patriarchal Law is a male one, for, contrary to what the feminist orthodoxy would like us to believe, in case of a female little or nothing bars her access to the symbolic order. The problem of patriarchy is therefore how to force the male subject to speak? The only solution is exactly the one suggested by poststructuralism, namely to conceive of parole as prior to langue, of jouissance as prior to desire. And this is what Lacan does in his Twentieth Seminar. Witness his stress that the unconscious is structured not so much as the language in the sense of Roman Jacobson as "maternal lalangue" (1975: 126). Unfortunately, the solution appears promising only at first glance. For to foreground jouissance means to allow for total satisfaction, to wit, for an incest, and in so doing to make of the emergence of civilization, let alone of the discontent in it, a puzzle. In other words, if within the discourse of desire the male subject has all reasons to fear to speak, within the discourse of jouissance he has no reason to speak at all. To avoid this impasse we have to privilege the position of the female subject, for in case of the female subject the coercion to speech seems to be no coercion at all. In effect, the Penisneid which is a feminine analogue of the incestuous wish of the male can be satisfied in a most natural way, to wit, by an act of giving birth. As the psychoanalytic orthodoxy would have it, the child is a woman's substitute for the penis she lacks, i.e. a fetish, an imaginary product. Therefore to possess it, to achieve jouissance by its means seemingly does not imply a transgression of the Law. The irony is that this solution implies the destruction of the Law, for to shift onto the Imaginary plane means to admit that the phallus can signify only as a fetish, to wit, that it does not signify at all. In other words, whatever the hierarchical reversals the problem would have haunted psychoanalysis up to this day, were it not for the schizoanalytic "discourse of support" (Derrida) which is nothing else than an attempt to fulfill the promise of conventional psychoanalysis. As we have seen, the trouble emerges the moment desire is allotted the role of the motor of Symbolic signification, is posited as a desire for recognition and at the same time is barred from ever attaining satisfaction (Lacan 1996, 418-419). Since to recognize is to name (419) this means nothing else than the Symbolic Order leaves no chance for expression. Consequently, to juxtapose desire and jouissance is not enough: the only way to trigger the process of signification is precisely to split Lacanian desire into two desires (the one to be named, the other -- a blank desire, forever unsatisfied, striving for more) and to introduce jouissance as their (dis)connecting conjunction: "desire lacks nothing and ever strives for more" (L'Anti-Oedipe, 335). Which means that the discourse of the Anti-Oedipal desire is the underdeveloped discourse capable of infinite development. The irony is that the advanced concept of desire applies all too well to the discursive strategy of "minor literary genres", say, of children' fiction as exemplified by F.H.Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy, but compels us to see in this strategy, i.e. in the Anti-Oedipal desire itself, an expression of the mute phallogocentric world unable to name itself. In effect it is precisely Cedric's "sous-development a soi" which forces him to play the role of the mediator between the discourse of his mother and grandfather, to bring about their reconciliation which bridges/satisfies their desires (grandfather's desire for the lack and mother's desire to be recognized/named) and yet leaves them to desire more. Far from being scapegoated, to wit, excluded from the bliss of événement incorporel (Deleuze 1969: 15, 160), Cedric also has his share in it. However, the entrance-ticket is paid by the underdevelopment of his own discourse: his function as a mot blanc (Deleuze 1969: 55) is to allow the adult's wishes to impress themselves upon him and eventually give them an inadequate articulation. The same holds for Little Hans and Peter Pan: only the child can ensure the convergence and resonance between heterogeneous discourses of (conflicting) adult's desires. The child is welcome not as an object of gaze, but as a mouth-piece/mediator[6]. Meaning that the myth of the child's innocence which, as Rose was quite astute to point out is the linguistic myth (42-66), does not have anything to do with the authenticity of expression: rather the child is admired for its mysterious ability to express anything at all in the world where the Law allows only for impression, since, as Freud has taught us, it is the impression (introjection) of adult's voices (those of parents, tutors) which produces super-ego/conscience (1914: 163). As a result the adult world, the discursive world of desire, to wit, of the Symbolic Order, by necessity appears as the world of silence, muteness wherein the child is bound to be kept from growing up, for only from the position of Puer Aeternus can a subject hope to utter anything. Which means precisely the universal infantilization of which Lacan has warned us and to which he himself was the first to fall prey. And yet this is not the last word of poststructuralism. Nor it is ours. Suppose, write poststructuralist theorists, that the child's expression is deliberately inadequate, that its discourse/tongue is forked, double-voiced (Myers 1995), in short, that our little lords are active adepts of de Certeau's "practice of everyday life". However striking the resemblance between the latter and the theories of Derrida and Deleuze, it is not surprising that thus far nobody has bothered to examine it, for such an endeavor would question one of the fundamentals of current theorizing, namely the belief that "taking in" (impression) is a form of "talking back" (expression), that "subjects create themselves and their cultures ... through collage", that "bricolage is a strategic resistance" (68). Obviously the rhizomatic anti- or contra-semiotic of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the basics for which were laid in Repetition et Difference and Logic du sense, is an instance of bricolage, an over-inclusive system of hyperconnectivity. However, the anti-Oedipal brunt and thrust would have been impossible without allotting a more active role to the conjoining "element of void", to the differential(izing) mot blanc. Now it is no longer just "le verbe infinitif" (1969: 216): "'Between things' does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again [e.g. Cedric's role], but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle" (Thousand 25; italics added) [7]. So long as the "in-between" remains passive it can foster the conjuncture between the two series only at the price of its own effacement, meaning that the conjuncture itself remains a "passive synthesis" with which Deleuze was still quite satisfied in Logic du sense (142) and which, as we have just seen, reinstates, or, more correctly, for the first time states, the Symbolic Law (of silence). Since the true repetition is said to be of a theatrical order (1968: 30-34), the theater of early Deleuze is a traditional one in which an actor effaces himself to make the on-stage and off-stage heterogeneities resonate in the fundamentally impressive manner envisaged by Stanislavsky. The deconstructive analogue offers the deManian practice of juxtaposing two series/readings, in themselves quite complete and developed. Whence the dependence on an underdeveloped third party, on the latter's inability to decide. Which means that appearances notwithstanding the undecidability is an affair of infantilization and the theater in question is the theater of the primal scene which baffles the child with mutually exclusive meanings: for its level of comprehension, is this an act of violence or caress?. Recently it has been noticed by some feminists that aporia is a method of silencing, one of the strategies of patriarchal subjection (Trites 203). Which is precisely why the (theater) of logocentric semiosis is a theater of phobic terror and dread that stems precisely from the primacy of impression (of the Name/Law of the Father) over expression with the result that neither affects can find verbal representation nor the latter express anything (Kristeva 42, 48): "By juxtaposing drives and discourse, the pervert tends to neutralize them. As a result of this compromise, the analyst sees the pervert's fantasy as a dramatization, a staging, or an artifact" (22). In respect to his drives as well as his discourse the pervert effaces himself but the result is a paraesthetic[8] acting-out which is nothing else than a rhizomatic bricolage of verbal, pre-verbal and extra-verbal elements (cf. Maggiori 18). If the irony of Lacan's theory is that it hinges upon the inability of the Law and its subject to express themselves, the irony of post-Lacanian analysis stems from the fact that it allows the former to express itself and consequently silences the latter. According to Kristeva, especially in cases of phobia, the success of the cure depends upon the analyst's rejection of the temptation to identify with the patient, since such an identification would make the neutralization irrevocable: "analysts must ... put aside the neutrality and abeyance that are all too similar to obsessional defenses" (62). However in order to preclude the analysts's becoming a "subject-presumed-to-know" this activity should be conceived of as "withdraw[al] from the allocution" (88), to wit, from the non-place of khora. Which boils down to an acknowledgment that the act of scapegoating (for within the analytic discourse the analyst is a scapegoat) is a self -willed one[9]. And this is precisely why instead of transforming the constative of the symbolic castration into a question (Kristeva 87- 103), experiment (Derrida 1995: 93) or problem (Deleuze 1969: 67-73), the withdrawal[10] makes the verbe infinitif undergo a transformation into a phallic imperative ... according to the best wishes of Lacan whose dictum "the woman does not exist" (1975: 68) is scandalous only insofar as it exposes the Semiotic (lalangue) as the expression of the Symbolic, i.e. far from barring the woman from signification, bares her disobjectified/desubstantivized status as a signifier which is "primarily an imperative" (33). To allow for the element of intention in the parapraxis/practice of everyday life means to stress the gap between an actor and his role, i.e. to conceive of khora as "not referring to the gesture of a donor-subject, the support or origin of something which would come to be given to someone" (Derrida 1995: 100). The paradox of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging of khora/élément vide to the series which it coordinates (Deleuze 1969: 66; Derrida 1995: 126) evaporates the moment we remember that this is precisely the function of the actor in Brecht's theater of political education to which the theatricality of Deleuze and Derrida's theories boil down[11]. The didactic practice of making-strange presupposes that the actor occasionally (read: khoraically, haphazardly) steps out of the role and takes the place among the spectators. In so doing he triggers the disequilibrium between the two images/series which were neutralized by juxtaposition (cf. Deleuze 1968: 31, 140). As a result the auditorium, viewed as a child to be educated, is forced to make a decision, moreover, the right one. In like manner, the decision is brought about in Peter Pan: as a mot blanc, to wit, as an actor in the mimetic theater, Peter acts as a "'Betwixt-and-Between' who hovers between the island of birds [Neverland] and the nursery [in which we are all supposed to be]" (Rose 27), but once he steps out of his role ["good form"] he introduces the disequilibrium between these two worlds, both equally seductive for children. The result of his becoming the imperative forces us to read the Neverland as an order never (to) land (there), i.e. to grow up, to renounce the Oedipal struggle. Thus, the resolution of the Oedipus complex, impossible on the mimetic scene, is achieved auf einer anderen Szene, to wit, in the theater of poststructuralist theory which certainly breaks the "good form" of the myth of eternal childhood, but in so doing leaves no chance to conceive of non-didactic literature, to wit, of a literature for adults[12]. This outcome is only too logical, since the recourse to theater is implied in the interpretive strategy which privileges gaps, ruptures, silences in/of the narrative. Whence the vogue enjoyed by the notion of transference (cf. Felman). Whatever its theoretical deficiencies, J. Rose's book supplies invaluable historical material which allows us to clear the crucial problem that continues to haunt cultural studies, namely the problem of appropriation of the most subversive narratives by the cultural edifice. What enables this appropriation is precisely the poststructuralist theatricality: it is not by accident that Peter Pan "acquired that status [of a children's classic] only by being performed as a play" (97). In order to appreciate this fact let us remember that Freud's appropriation of Little Hans followed the same route: only after having traced down Hans's phobia to a play (328-331), Freud was able to claim the Oedipal interpretation and the resolution of the castration complex. It follows that if the great subversive novels sooner or latter are found palatable by the dominant culture then this is precisely due to inscription of the theatrical structure[13]. Meaning that the fact that theatrical adaptations of "adult's" classics have never prevailed in the repertoire and more often than not turn out to be failures testifies not to the complexity of the originals but to the superfluousness of adaptation of the texts which have already adapted themselves. On the other hand, the fact that eventually every children's novel has a theatrical version along with the fact that theater is so rarely thematized in children's fiction, suggests that children's fiction is far more threatening to the cultural edifice than is generally believed. To prove our charge let us examine the elements which cannot be placed on stage, and for that reason are the first to be effaced in theatrical adaptation. Significantly, the elements we are speaking of are central from a narratological standpoint. Thus, the element which propels the narrative of Peter's rivalry with Captain Hook is Peter's "cockiness" that is not effaced even in sleep which is the khoraic gap par excellence, and it is this persistence of exaggerative discourse which precludes the didactic twist, i.e. the victory of the "better self" qua another "taming of the shrew" [14]. Peter shares this cockiness, which, rhetorically, is an exaggeration, with Cedric and Hans, and eventually, with all heroes of children's fiction. Certainly it is all too tempting to try to explain it away as an instance of infantile narcissism the celebration of which the logocentric myth of childhood is supposed to be, since it is narcissism which makes the child an object of the desiring gaze of the adult. And yet the obvious impossibility of making this feature visible on stage should give us pause which will be prolonged if we utilize it to reread Freud's introduction of narcissism. At first glance, Freud's paper does not contain anything challenging to the poststructuralist assumptions, being as it is an attempt to expose narcissism as an adult's construction, as an expression of his desire for a lost innocence, an imaginary reward for unavoidable disappointments and discontents, a reward "bound up with denial of an infantile sexuality" (157). The paradox is that the would-be deconstruction of logocentric mythology reconfirms its basic assumption as regards "the child's non-accessibility [Unzugänglichkeit]) " (155) upon which such myth-making so vitally depends. Put crudely and bluntly, instead of the child which seeks a way to express itself we are left with the "inexpressible child"[15]. The result is the self-deconstruction of the theory of infantile sexuality. "One of the main premises" of the latter "is the assumption of the primal narcissism of the child" (157) of which the adult's narcissism is said to be a revitalization: "what the adult projects [von sich hin projiziert] as his ideal is a substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood when he was his own ideal" (161). However to speak about an ideal means to evoke the notion of repression (160, 163), meaning that if the child has an ideal there was repression at work. It follows that the primal narcissism presupposes the developed ego and a successful repression accomplished at a stage which even the Kleinians have never claimed to access. Whence the necessity of keeping narcissism distinct from repression. The Oedipal, to wit, Lacanian way to do this is to conceive of narcissism "as the amorous captivation of the subject by the image" (Laplanche and Pontalis 256) and thereby to give primacy to impression with the result sketched above. The Anti-Oedipal solution of Deleuze and Guattari is the conflation of narcissism and auto-eroticism. This solution owes its irony not so much to the fact that it happens to be quite an orthodoxical one, being as it is propounded by Freud himself (256), but to the implied denial of infantile sexuality, for narcissism thus conceived becomes an affair of sublimation, especially in the context of polymorphous, i.e. essentially object-oriented desire celebrated by Deleuze and Guattari[16]. Fortunately, there is another possibility, namely to surmise that primal and secondary narcissisms differ qualitatively: if the latter allows only for impression, the former is essentially expressive. The value of the suggested innovation, which has been always already practiced by the authors of children's fiction, becomes immediately apparent in our context. As we have seen, J. Rose's charge of the impossibility of children's fiction, far from being original or whimsical, follows logically from the very premises of poststructuralist theory which Rose adopts without questioning. And yet the pursuit of this train of thought compels us to wind up claiming the direct opposite of the initial charge. Which means the self-deconstruction, or better yet, the self-inhibition which postructuralism imposes upon itself in order not to develop into deconstruction proper, not to grow up. If children's fiction is impossible then because it never speaks to the child, save the child within us (Rose 66- 87; Kristeva 143). My contention is that the matter is precisely not to speak to the child but to allow the child to speak, to express itself. And this is precisely what the primal narcissism as a writerly practice allows us to do. Which explains why children's fiction, along with "minor discourse(s)" in general if properly read, subverts the discourse of desire, to wit, ethics and aesthetics of the gap along with (post)pedagogy and hermeneutics grounded in the same notion. The fact that Peter's cockiness makes him present when he is absent (sleeping) suggests that primal narcissism has nothing to do with the metaphysics of presence. Witness the rage of the Father Figure, the rage which stems from the fact that this narcissism makes the Father doubt his own existence:
They [pirates] were his [Captain Hook's] dogs snapping at him, but, tragic figure though he had become, he scarcely heeded them. Against such fearful evidence it was not their belief in him that he needed, it was his own. He felt his ego slipping from him (78; italics added) It remains to spell out the promise of this passage for the on-going debate on the (im)possibilities of deconstructing the logocentric identities/gender roles and reconstructing them beyond patriarchal paradigm. If the most radical attempts in this direction constantly fail, then because, contrary to general belief (cf. Cixous 48; Williams 134), it is not symmetry but disbalance, disequilibrium that logocentrism has always been about. To acquiesce with the Oedipal imperative means to concede to the exchange which is far from being "equal", to accept the promise that the losses are lesser than the gains. Were it not for this basic disbalance of the discourse of desire, the founding act of logocentric epistemology, an act which posits one term as a norm, the other as lacking, would have been impossible[17]. From this point of view it seems that Deleuze and Derrida by introducing the third party as a khoraic element, as a "minimum shared by the real, possible and impossible"[18] (Logic 49; Name 99-100), highlight the way to circumvent the difficulty. Suppose that the adult binary defines itself against the childhood sexuality without excluding/scapegoating it. However, as our recourse to Burnett's novel has proved, this would leave untouched the most demanding problem -- that of the third party expressing itself. For the third discourse should remain underdeveloped, to wit, share the fate of Kristevan "maternal". Ironically, critiques leveled at this notion (Lichtenberg-Ettinger; Welchman; de Zegher) miss the point in the same way and for the same reasons as the praises of it do (Doan and Hodges; Jacobus). What invalidates both is inability to discern the real face of the patriarchal adversary. The paradox is that, far from being "unsymbolizable", Kristevan semiotic "maternal" is the only possible symbolization of the patriarchal Symbolic Order. The only way to trigger signification within the discourse of desire is precisely to conceive of the phallus as an underdeveloped penis or as a clitoris, for only on these premises there will be signification qua dissemination of meaning (the possibility of finding maternal or phallic imagery everywhere). Therefore it is not surprising that the proper deconstruction of the patriarchal discourse of the symbolic desire will start with subverting its semiotic effigy[19]. The subversive promise of childhood sexuality stems from the fact that the latter cannot stand for anything save itself. In other words, it undermines the very mechanism of defining/identifying qua referring/relating, to wit, that nucleus of rationality with which poststructuralism has tempered but failed to do away with entirely[20]. The subversion is triggered by the simple fact that it is neither possible nor impossible to define oneself against the child, for such a definition will have neither semiotic nor anti-semiotic value. This impossibility leads to the confusion between the Imaginary, Real and the Symbolic, as well as between repression, denial and sublimation, ultimately, to the confusion between the basic concepts of Western semiotics: something, nothing and anything[21]. The paradox is that, far from becoming unnamable, this confusion allows the child to express, or, to be more precise, to represent itself, and to do this in a manner which the over-inclusive Deleuzean semiotics was bound to find inadmissible. What primal narcissism boils down to is the "representation hollowed out of expression [actually of impression] ... without which it could not be 'comprehended' save by chance [par hazard] or from without [i.e. by staging, fetishization]" (1969: 171). Obviously, the only way to make sense of a Freudian dictum which is reiterated all the more frequently the less it is understood, is to conceive of childhood's persistence as a constant gapless process of exaggerative representation[22], and in so doing to list narcissism as another vicissitude of the drive, the vicissitude which reaches beyond every kind of binarism, the sublime poststructuralist binarism of differentializing difference included.
Endnotes:
1 Since the
latter presupposes the former, and not the other way, as
poststructuralism would like it
to be, it seems that the "social constructionist" stance needs
rethinking.
2 "Strictly
speaking, I have not learned from this analysis anything new" (377).
Then why bother
to write it down, claiming moreover for the case history "exemplarity"
(377)? Alas,
there were khoraic moments of an "analyst's despair" when "the
situation was quite
obscure", when "analysis seemed to make no progress" (289).
Significantly, the same
spectacle is staged in one of Kristeva's recent analyses which attempts
to transcribe
the Oedipal Law into more palatable terms (87-103). We shall soon
return to this
translation in order to find its analogues in Derrida and Deleuze.
3 Cf.
Guattari's interview with C. Stivale:
CS: Aren't there writers in previous centuries who can also reveal
these kinds
of deterritorialization?
FG: Yes, certainly. It's a problem of familiarity. It's a little
difficult because . . . I
may be saying something stupid, but it seems to me that the examples
of eruption of
"becoming-minor" either have been completely buried, or have taken on
considerable
importance. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau could have been a minor
writer, but
on the contrary, he has a fantastic importance (as perhaps Artaud will
have tomorrow),
being classified as a principal writer of the twentieth century. I even
think this is
presently taking place.So, I don't know. One really has to see the
"minor" a bit in its
nascent state, one has to see it a bit closer to oneself because the
historically distant
"minor" has perhaps a different impact. I don't know, I haven't thought
about this question.
Significantly, Derrida, for his part
also has not considered the question which is the
question of poststructuralism's validity. No wonder that the
problem of what in Nietzsche's textuality has allowed for Nazi
appropriation receives no answer (Ear 30-31).
4 "...
the female plot . . . unconsciously . . . rewrites the
conditions and
assumptions of patriarchal culture" (Williams 138; italics added).
5 Cf:
"Most disquieting reflection of all, was it not bad form to think about
good form?"
(Barrie, 116).
6 So it
is not surprising that the recent reading of Little Hans focuses on
Freud's relation with
the parents (Putner 1995).
7 Whence the impossibility to
differentiate between Deleuzean difference and the Derridaean
différance by
stressing the temporality of the latter (Baugh). The irony is that
the alternative view
(Descombes) does not differ from the former in the most crucial point,
ignoring the
role of the khoraic gap in the production of difference.
8 For a
thorough critique of the poststructuralist paraesthetic in its relation
to Oedipality
consult Linetski 1996.
9
Derrida is quite explicit on this point, failing, obviously, to think
through the
consequences of his acknowledgement: "The duplicity of this self-
exclusion, the
simulacrum of this withdrawal ... The specialists of the nonplace
[khora] and of the simulacrum [the forerunners of deconstruction] ...
do not even have to be excluded
from the city, like pharmakoi; they exclude themselves by
themselves"
(Name 108).
10
Cf.: "What is a question? ... a withdrawal" (Kristeva 88).
11 No wonder that the pursuit of
deconstruction makes the Brechtian underpinnings more and more visible.
Thus,
Derrida's recent Spectres de Marx starts with a quite Brechtian
scene:
""Somebody, you or I, steps forward and says: 'I'd like at last to
learn and to teach to
live' ... To learn and to teach to live. A curious way to put it. Who
should learn? From
whom? To teach to live, but whom? Are we ever to know? Are we ever to
learn to
live? And first of all, what does it mean, 'to learn and to teach to
live'? And why, 'at
last'?" (13).
12 Understandably, contemporary
critics are reluctant to concede that it is the much hailed
theatricality of
poststructuralist theory which compels them to regard didacticism as an
intrinsic
feature of the poetics of children's fiction, which contested on one
level returns on the
other (Rose 42-66). However in order to read Barrie's novel as a
didactic narrative
we have to make an intertextual, to wit, theatrical connection with
Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew, for the novel as it stands carefully
avoids
moralizing transformation of Cedric into example to be admired and
imitated even at
the moments when such a transformation could have been made without
pushing the
point (cf. 192).
13
Cf. the role of theater in de Sade, Nabokov's Lolita, Joyce's
Ullyses.
14
"Mastered by his better self, he [Hook] would have returned reluctantly
up the tree but
for one thing. What stayed him was Peter's impertinent appearance as he
slept. The
open mouth, the drooping arm, the arched knee: they were such a
personification of
cockiness as, taken together, will never again, one may hope, be
presented to eyes so
sensitive to their offensiveness" (109). Significantly in the narrative
celebrating "the
amazing, pleasing object ... the king member indeed! [guess which]"
(Cleland 134)
sleep makes the innocent victim even more desirable (cf. 119-136).
15
The title of one of the essays from Kristeva's recent New Maladies
of the
Soul, which is pungently at odds with the text that treats the
child's difficulties
with expressing itself.
16 The irony is that the invalidation of
the rebuke recently leveled at Deleuze and Guattari for "adopt[ing] the
repressive
hypothesis wholesale" (Flieger) allows us to appreciate the critic's
insight which
cannot be maintained if Deleuze/Guattarian discourse was tainted by the
notion of
repression. That Anti-Oedipus is oedipal because Freud's Oedipus
is already
anti-oedipal means that Deleuze and Guattari foster the resolution of
the Oedipus
complex along the lines of sublimation for Freud's repression fails to
resolve it
(whence the anti-oedipality of Freud's Oedipus).
17
Lynda Hart's critique of Leo Bersani's "erotics of submission" (which,
rhetorically, is a hybrid conjunction of the underdeveloped and forked
discourses) can
be usefully incorporated into our analysis. The author convincingly
argues that, all the
rhetorical twists notwithstanding, Bersani's libido still remains a
masculinized one, i.e.
posits male sexuality as a norm, and, consequently, fails to sustain
its promise
to "take us out of the discourse of the symptom into a nonreferential
version of sexual thought", to wit, fails to trigger "the
representational crisis". However the proposed amendments
(elaborations on the theme "a lesbian strap-on as a perfect
simulacrum") turn out to be of no avail. Witness the concluding
sentence which is a perfect echo of the celebrated Lacanian
definition of the Symbolic Order: "In the lesbian imaginary, the
phallus is
not where it appears" (Hart), Lacan: "For it can literally be said that
something is
missing from its place only of what can change it: the symbolic" (1988,
40).
18 The triad is bound to remain
puzzling if we are not to align it with Lacan's Real, Imaginary and
Symbolic. And in
fact, the Lacanians are compelled to allot the phallus the khoraic
role, acknowledging
thereby its imaginary, to wit, semiotic (in the Kristevan sense)
status: "Lacan takes the
imaginary phallus as the 'at least one' [i.e. as a necessary
minimum] symbol
of difference ... the seeming impossibility of psychoanalysis rests on
the disbelief that
a minimal difference could give rise to maximal effects" (Ragland-
Sullivan 72). As
we have seen, poststructuralists cannot be accused of this kind of
scepticism.
19
Against the backdrop of the preceding discussion it is not surprising
that the
phallogocentric narrative will foreground exactly the semiotic (in the
Kristevan sense)
moments of the khoraic jouissance: "Louisa lay, pleas'd to the very
heart ... she went
wholly out of her mind into that favourite part of her body, the whole
intenseness of
which was so mightily fill'd, and employ'd: there alone she existed,
all lost in those
delirious transports, those ecstasies of the senses, which her
winking eyes, the
brighten'd vermillion of her lips and cheeks, and sighs of pleasure
deeply fetched, so
pathetically express'd. In short, she was now as mere a machine"
(Cleland 195-
196; italics mine). If the reader bears in mind the role allotted to
the extra-linguistic
semiotic material in the "disciplining and punishing/curing" discourse
of detection
(psychoanalytic and otherwise), s/he will not need our prompt to
recognize the
subversive force of Cedric's and Peter Pan's constancy in maintaining
the semiotic on
the same exaggerated level (cf. Burnett 133, 137).
20 Witness the poststructuralist notion
of the self as relational (cf. Benjamin; Braidotti 201;
Shapiro). Within the
framework of Peircean semiotics heralded as an alternative to the
Sausserean
structuralism such self takes the place of the interpretant as a
conjoining/articulating
in-between. Now it is precisely the focus on the interpretant which
makes Peirce's
project appear far more rationalistic than the Saussurean one wherein
the arbitrary
relation between signifier and signified has something mysthical about
it.
21 It is the latter notion
(khora) which is now in vogue. The unnoticed irony is that the logical
conclusion is
the total aphanisis of Anti-Oedipal desire since "the 'lost
object' [which
Deleuze does not want to lose (1969: 187-188)] ... is diffused so that
any
object and any part of the body can become an erotogenic zone"
(Hart; italics added).
22 The best illustration of the
subversive power of the constant exaggeration is Hans's phobia. If we
are at last to
allow Hans to speak, and not to hear him (Punter 1995) -- so far as
hearing is
concerned Freud remains unequaled -- we must believe that he was afraid
"of all
horses" (283) instead of dismissing his remark as a lie (283). The same
exaggeration
characterizes Cedric' discourse who finds that everyone is not just his
friend but his
"greatest friend". The way to tame the excess is to apply this term
only to the
grandfather, i.e. to see in it a process of ideal-building, to wit, of
impression. Whence
Deleuze's stress on the selectivity of the unconscious qua repetition
with difference
(1968: 381).
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