XIV. JOUR MAL II: CRASH AESTHETICS, PART III OF IV
For your curiosity, quote-fetish, and general interest, here is the transcript for JOUR MAL Season I, Episode II, Part III: “CRASH AESTHETICS”.
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In Association with PHASMID PRESS
THE EMPTY SET PRESENTS:
JOUR MAL: SERIES I-TRASH
Written, Produced, and Narrated: D.K. V-B
Additional vocals: Clementine Robertson
Graphic design: Scott McCLure
Special thanks to Rob Scher
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EPISODE THREE (IN FOUR PARTS): CRASH AESTHETICS
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Alongside this nineteenth century understanding of fascination as a force that produces pseudo-supernatural alterations in the psyche that simultaneously liberate and enslave, is a decidedly aesthetic understanding of fascination. According to Hans Ulrich Seeber (1891), the value of fascination, its “raison d' etre, [is to] be justified by the degree of intense admiration it can, by means of its beauty, provoke, both in the artist and the recipient. But intense admiration means simply that the work of art must be an object that fascinates, that lives from the radiant power of its suggestion, its ambiguous surface” (Seeber 322: emphasis mine).
Similarly, specifically psycho-sexual fascination can have numerous modalities and flows, even if taken from a purely aesthetic standpoint; the body, its curves, sensuous movements and liniments, but also its scars, wounds, scents, and maladies. However, the psycho-sexual fascination of certain parahpilias takes the purely aesthetic dimension of fascination further into (oftentimes radical) haptic zones whereby fascination becomes sensationalized not merely aestheticiszed. Broadly speaking, in sadomasochistic interactions, for example, fascination is both seen and felt. It is brought into the body, its climactic capacities, and interior into the ephemeral zones of the subconscious, the innenwelt, in which the complexes of desire, passion, fantasy, and ethical negotiations of trust and consent in dominance and submissiveness are engaged. Here, there is a distinct difference between interest/liking and fascination. The former carries undertones of fleetingness, alterability, even its antonym boredom. The latter carries with it connotations of witchcraft and, at its most radical, obsession, fanaticism, and madness: “[w]hereas 'liking' designates a relatively mild feeling in the aesthetic sphere, 'fascination', like hypnosis, affects the whole personality perhaps to the point of unbalance” (Seebers 332). Due to this power to destabilize, inherent to fascination is always-already the suggestion that it also “contains an admixture of something potentially disturbing and powerful which makes it impossible for the beholder to retain an aloof, aesthetic stance” (Seebers 329). I'm thinking of Blanchet in Crystal Skull, at the end, in the Mayan ruins, yelling to the refleshed form of an intergalactic mummy: “I WANT TO KNOW, I'M READY!”... well. In my experience, often when people say they want to know, they mean they want to be told.
The feeling of being drawn forth in an irresistible manner as well as the intimated dangers of fascination may suggest a 'negativity' in/of fascination. However, it is also this very 'negativity' that is an essential part of the power and appeal of fascination itself. Importantly for sadomasochism is the fact that the state of being fascinated “does not necessarily have to be experienced as an oppressive loss of self-determination, but can take the form of a readiness to be invaded and/or borne away by exterior forces” (Weingart 97). The fascinating experience does not, however, occur in isolation. Implied in this definition is the notionof a transmission of emotions, a connective process between a subject and an exterior agency who, by being fascinating, cannot be fully appropriated (Weingart 74).
III: Verliebte Horigkeit: Freud and Fascination
In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freudian fascination takes as a part of its basic definition the etymological intimations of immobility, charm, dazzle, and enchantment. Freud uses the term in relation to lovers' paralysis of critical faculties, as well as the phenomena of (co)dependence, docility, submission, and psycho-emotional impressionability that occur when in love. Freud's earliest considerations of the relationship between fascination, love, and hypnagogic states appear as early as 1890 in his essay “Psychical, or Mental, Treatment”. Referring to the docility, obedience, and credulity of the hypnotized individual, Freud argued that a situation producing this type of “subjection on the part of one person towards another has only one parallel, though a complete one – namely in certain love-relationships where there is extreme devotion. A combination of exclusive attachment and credulous obedience is in general among the characteristics of love” (Freud 296). Freud returns to this reading in 1918 in his essay “The Taboo of Virginity” in which he discusses the the psychoanalytical aspects of love and sexual bondage. Here, “sexual bondage” refers to “the phenomenon of a person's acquiring an unusually high degree of dependence and lack of self-reliance in relation to another person with whom he [she] has a sexual relationship”, going on to posit that “this bondage can on occasion extend very far, as far as the loss of all independent will and as far as causing a person to suffer the greatest sacrifices of his [her[ own interests” (Freud 1905, 193).
What is most interesting to note here is how the principal functioning of fascination as an exchange is seemingly absent from Freud's thinking on the subject. It is an odd omission considering that inherent to the idea of binding one thing to another is the concept of co-operation which in turn is inherent to Freud's conceptualization of fascination as a state of amorous "bondage" (verliebte Horigkeit). In spite of this shortcoming, Freud's psychoanalytic understanding of fascination as a specifically psycho-sexual force is of greatest use here and will be combined with other psychoanalytic concepts – fascination as a type of transference, jouissance, and death-drive toward and beyond limit-experiences as demarcated by the pleasure principle – and will subsequently be brought to bear in my reading of Crash.
IV: Fascination, Pleasure, Excess, and Death: Lacan and Fascination
The most interesting and pertinent aspect of Freud and Lacan's respective discussions of fascination is fascination's relation to sadomasochism, the death-drive, and jouissance. While Freud identifies fascination, or fascinated states, with the death-drive and indeed amorousness and its devotions– that is as always-already tending toward termination and repetition – he does not explicitly associate the death-drive with sexual drives. In 1964, Freud and Lacan diverge on the status of the death-drive, the latter viewing the phenomena as an irreducible aspect of every drive. In Seminar 11 (1964), Lacan states that “the distinction between the life drive and the death drive is true in as much as it manifests two aspects of the Drive” (Lacan 257). He underscores this position in the Ecrits (1977), stating that “every drive is virtually a death drive” for three reasons, two of which are relevant to my discussion of psycho-sexual fascination (Lacan 848). First, every drive is a death-drive because every drive pursues its own extinction. Second, every drive is an attempt to go beyond the ideological prohibitions against the subject's pursuit of pleasure – known in psychoanalysis as the pleasure principle. In so doing, the subject seeks to transgress the stricture of the pleasure principle to a psycho-sexual zone of excess known as jouissance, where pleasure/enjoyment is experienced as pain/suffering.
What is most interesting to note here is that psycho-sexual fascination and the death-drive both operate through the action of a paradoxical undifferentiating ambivalence. While the essential exchange that occurs between fascinator and fascinated – for example between a Dominant and a submissive in the context of a BDSM relationship – may suggest a mono-directional flow of power from F to f (D to s), both are ultimately fascinated by each other. In this sense, the distinction between dominated and Dominator, as with the distinction between life and death drives, is ultimately symbolic, in the last instance. Denuded of their 'symbols of office', both the fascination and desire of the Dominant and submissive tend toward the same terminus. While one might assume from observing the symbolic behaviour of Master and slave practised in BDSM that it is only the submissive who somehow seeks transcendence from her/himself jointly through the radical acquiescence of submission and the violence and degradation of domination which when brought together in play results in a symbolic death, the Dominant is equally engaged in seeking symbolic death and transcendence in, through, and because of the submissive. Therefore, the submissive “makes himself the instrument of the Other's jouissance” just as much, albeit through different procedures, as the Dominant (Lacan 320). Here, both Dominant and submissive, Sadist and masochist, are fascinated by the same thing in their attempt to transgress the pleasure principle to its limit; both are ultimately trying to go “as far as [they] can along the path of jouissance” through, against, and because of one another (Lacan E, 323). As Pansy Duncan rightly notes, fascination's supra-subjective status ultimately suggests that “what fascinates [...] is always fascination itself” (Duncan 89).
From a psychoanalytical standpoint, Sadism and masochism are both modalities of the same fascinating Drive underpinning all human sexuality, albeit crystallized in psycho-sexual relationships involving power play up to and including death. BDSM practices that are considered ‘extreme’ or ‘dangerous’ are thus said to provoke the greatest risks of psychic and physical harm. As Downing (2007) suggests, the very notion of ‘edgeplay’ suggests that such practices function as being close to a ‘limit’, which simultaneously necessitates both their judicial and clinical prohibition and transgressive pursuit. In the case of extreme psycho-sexual fascinations which involve power play that potentiates death as an essential part of their eroticism, Downing suggests that the reason why psycho-sexual extremes of this and lesser natures still hold fascination – as well as controversy – over death-driven sexuality in this our contemporary milieu of so-called sexual liberalism is because “it is more specifically that we have a problem with the idea of validating the right to consent to a sexually pleasurable death” (Downing 10).
The relationship between psycho-sexual fascination and sadomasochism starts with Freud's interpolation of Kraftt Ebing's's 1893 coinage. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud's usage of the term similarly posited an inherent link between Sadism and masochism. Unlike Freud, however, who posited that sadism is primary, Lacan argued masochism is and that sadism is derived therefrom. In Seminar 11, Lacan states that “sadism is merely the disavowal of masochism” (Lacan 186). Lacan gives special privilege to masochism among the drives, regarding it as the 'limit-experience' in the subject's attempt to transgress the pleasure principle through a preferred experience of eroticized, and therefore psycho-sexually fascinating, pain. (Lacan 778). Therefore, the limit-experience being sought by the psycho-sexually fascinated in Crash expresses a specific degree of relative distance to this limit. In a movie like, say Secretary, the limit being sought to be overcome is the experience of eroticized pain as purely pathological. In Crash, the limit being sought is far more extreme namely an orgasmic death-by-automobile, where the limit between life and death is not merely grazed but absolutely obliterated.
Lacan's views on the nature of sexual relationships also helps elucidate an interesting aspect of psycho-sexual fascination; namely, successful, that is sustained, psycho-sexual fascination is predicated on ignorance. According to Lacan, the sexual drives are essentially partial in that they are not directed toward a complete or whole person but towards what he refers to as part objects. In this sense, the psycho-sexual relationship is not between two subjects but rather two partial objects, whose partiality is not only reciprocal but also reciprocally fascinating (Lacan S20, 58). In order for fascination to maintain itself as long as possible for both Fascinator and fascinated, each cannot fully know the other. The intimations of the mutual unknown precisely are, imprecisely, what compel the shared fascination produced and experienced between the two. Similarly in a sadomasochistic arrangement, the fascination of the sub in the Dom is partially based on the sub's ignorance of the depth of what we could call the Dom's Will or drive to death. It is this undisclosed potential, with all its connotations of danger, that excites the sub's fascination. Equally, the depths of the sub's submissiveness, that is, the sub's potential will to submit to death must also remain mysterious to the Dom in order to excite Her/His fascination in attempting to test this limit of death, both in Her/Himself and in/through the sub. While this position may seem extreme, Katherine Franke (2001) points out that psycho-sexual fascination is, in many ways and to many different degrees, a necessarily dangerous idea for what can oftentimes be a necessarily dangerous feeling:
Desire is not subject to cleaning up, to being purged of its nasty, messy, perilous dimensions, full of contradictions and the complexities of simultaneous longing and denial. It is precisely the proximity to danger, the lure of prohibition, the seamy side of shame that creates the heat that draws us toward our desires, and that makes desire and pleasure, not a contradiction of or haven from danger, but rather a close relation. These aspects of desire have been marginalized, if not vanquished, from feminist legal theorizing about women's sexuality. (Franke 207).
The truly extreme (and I argue beautiful) aspect of the above proposition is, in fact, located in the idea of the trust required to accept the ignorance and inherent potential danger of psycho-sexual fascination– up to and including death – as an essential part of the rapprochement of sadomasochistic relationships/power-play that should not be limned by either Dom or sub. In essence, therefore, while the Dom and sub are mutually undifferentiated by the supra-subjective force of fascination, they are also mutually undifferentiated by the necessity of ignorance in its exploration and pursuit.
