White God, the 2014 Hungarian film directed by Kornel Mundruczo, tells the story of a mixed-breed dog, Hagen, and his pre-teen guardian, Lili. They move into Lili’s father’s small apartment, where suspicious neighbors and police target the ‘unregistered mutt’. (Spoilers follow). 

The hostility comes to a head when Lili smuggles Hagen into her orchestra rehearsal. She secretly sequesters him in a storage closet. Hagen whines and freaks out, as dogs do. With the attention and ire of Lili’s maestro, Lili gets an ultimatum: leave the dog, or don’t come back. 

She quits, but the pair is doomed anyway. Daniel, outraged, drives to the outskirts of town and leaves Hagen on the side of the road. He drags Lili back into the car, swearing that she will return to find Hagen. 

The split sets up two parallel stories. One privileged, one revolutionary. This review looks at Lili, then Hagen, to study the film’s portrayal of an unlikely site of emergence for revolutionary consciousness. 

Lili.
Lili looks for her dog. She hangs posters and wanders the city, but soon gives up hope. On the home front, she shows little resistance or agitation against her unsympathetic father. Lili could rebel. She could run away, refuse to speak, or act out. As the film shows Hagen’s loyalty and corresponding struggle, Lili seems quick to surrender.

She returns to the orchestra, apologizing for her behavior. She lies that the dog bit her and that she placed Hagen in a kennel. Her loyalty is not with Hagen, but with her father, and for little reward. Daniel is an asshole for the entirety of the film. She hates her orchestra, and has no real friends there.  

She does skip a band retreat to visit a warehouse rave with a boy, which goes badly.  Drunk and passed out, she wakes up to a police raid with a pocket full of drugs. Her father is kind to her, and she apologizes. Together, they seem to build up their relationship. The rebellion ends, Lili promises to stay at home when Daniel goes to work. No more trouble. 

Lili behaves just as she has before, simply because she has behaved that way before. I am most interested in Lili’s rapid dissolve of resolve.  I find a some explanation in Althusser’s idea, here paraphrased by Geoffrey Pfeifer for The Zizek Dictionary (p7), that 

“By engaging in any material social practice, or with any material institution, we admit (unconsciously) that we are the object of such a practice, and in doing this we become the kind of subject that engages in this practice and thus are constituted by it.” 

In other words: Lili’s father and maestro don’t have to force her to behave. She already knows how to behave. 

That’s how Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus works. It’s not a violent fist, it’s a guiding hand. We see some of this established in scenes with Lili. When she arrives at her father’s, her mother issues the command: “Obey your father.” Like a dog: Obey. Lili shows that she has internalized this obedience: She behaves. 

Lili isn’t callous or insincere in her love of Hagen. That would be a less interesting film. Instead, her love is real, but she is a subject to her father and school. She has internalized her position as “daughter” and “student.” We may wish Lili would break free from it, but she can’t imagine alternatives.  

Hagen.
Early in the film, Lili and Hagen see a man training a dog in the distance. Lili says to Hagen, “I’ll never treat you that way.” So the film establishes a division between the ‘untrained’ Hagen, and Lili’s internalized training.

Once apart, the Disney adventure story plot of a girl and dog parted turns far darker. Wild dogs chase away Hagen. He’s threatened by butchers, kidnapped by a homeless man and sold to a dog fighter. Hagen is beaten, starved, and  abused. 

Lili finds her life, bleak as it is, too privileged to escape through self-radicalization. Hagen does not have that privilege. Hagen remembers a different world. He’s been treated with respect by Lili. Falling into secondary status is at odds with the privilege he once enjoyed. He can imagine the difference.

Lili is interpellated, in Althusser’s terms, as a “daughter” and “student.” She is called those things and so comes to see herself as those things. Likewise, she has internalized an ideology that human love is primary. Her love of Hagen is secondary. Hagen is interpellated as “servant,” “warrior,” etc. But he knows it is not hailing him. Literally, he’s called by a different name — Max, not Hagen. So he doesn’t answer that call.

Hagen’s consciousness and motivations are unknowable; he’s a dog. The initial tension of the film is to see if Hagen enters into humanity’s view of him, or if Lili’s view stays with him. The dogfighter chooses him because he still ‘has heart.’ He knows Hagen will fight to get somewhere, will fight to win his way out. He assumes Hagen is obedient. 

But the film turns all that around in its bizarre third act. 

Revolution.
Let’s fast forward the plot a bit. A local kennel is preparing Hagen for euthanization. He  attacks, freeing other kennel mutts and launching a citywide riot between species.

Fearing rabies, the organized dog militia terrorizes the city. Crowded city streets are empty but for dogs and street lamps — and Lili. 

But here’s the smartest piece of this film. Twice, we must confront Hagen’s emotional responses to acts of kindness. We all know why Hagen would fight those who beat, starved and humiliated him. But what is most compelling about the film is what sparks that revolution. 

In the kennel before the riots, a kind woman comes to see him. Her hair is short, perhaps from an illness. She smiles, enamored with Hagen. By all means, she is Hagen’s fastest ticket back to his normal life as a beloved pet. 

Hagen, smart enough to know better, doesn’t make nice with the poor woman. He literally bites the hand that feeds him. Why? 

In “The Ticklish Subject,” Zizek writes: 

“Lacan insists on the primacy of (negative) act over the (positive) establishment of a ‘new harmony’ via the intervention of some new master-signifier.” (p.159).

Hagen is engaging in a negation. The bite is his refusal to tolerate a larger structure of oppression. The woman hails Hagen as her pet, but Hagen is not a pet. The woman signifies a systemic arrangement that interpellates dogs as subservient pets. 

This is the ‘event’ in which a revolutionary discourse arises for Hagen. No human can liberate him. He once hysterically desired a return to the lost master signifier (Lili). Hagen recognizes that his desire for her has only stood in for his own liberation. That, in Lacanian terms, is a revolutionary discourse, the discourse of analysis. 

The revolution doesn’t start with Hagen’s rage. It begins in an outright rejection of the entire system. A system which keeps him at the mercy of one of two human hands: a fist to the face, or playful tummy rub. A negation which rejects that ‘new harmony.’ That’s a choice between the cruel master exploiting a subservient creature for pleasure, or the kind master exploiting a subservient creature for pleasure. 

Kind or unkind, both are interchangeable masters signifiers. Dogs are expected to identify with these masters. We watch the film and, while aware of Hagen’s intelligence, expect that he will comply with this system. Choose a kinder master, and steal away a bit of comfort which obscures a larger ideological system. A system which keeps dogs on the ground and humans in control.

When we associate our identities with these masters, we answer the name they choose. Student, daughter, pet. Hagen demands that the ‘master’ answer his call: a revolution, albeit a bloody one. 

By refusing to buy into that discourse of the master, Hagen becomes the master of himself. Hagen found the power to resist and refuse. A small army of dogs see him, and see a new master. 

Lili still operates in some constructive “harmonized” capacity. She loses Hagen, her only true friend, but keeps self-identifying as ‘daughter’ and ‘student’. The old roles rule her, and why not? Her life is comfortable and secure. Privileged, even if it isn’t. 

Which brings us to Hagen’s extraordinarily tense confrontation at the end of the film. White God poses the question, “Whose side will you be on when the revolution comes?”   

The dogs hunt and kill their former oppressors, then finally come for Daniel. But first, Lili  intervenes. Hagen is unimpressed. Above, we see Hagen between the dogs and Lili. Lili, too, is standing between herself and her father. This is not a reunion between lost friends, it is a confrontation of ideologies. And in recognizing that she is now under threat, we see that Lili’s kind-hearted affection was part of the system of oppression.

The reunion, which drove Hagen forward through the film, is laced with hostility. The ‘objet petit a‘ of Hagen’s desire, the symbol responsible for launching his struggle, had been Lili. Now, Lili-as-symbol has been replaced with Hagen-as-symbol, the desire to assert his own position. 

Lili knew Hagen was sentient, intelligent, compassionate, and capable of love. But she could not imagine him as an equal. When he was destined to be slaughtered, she was playing trumpet in an orchestra for the benefit of those who were indifferent to that slaughter. 

Had Hagen been a boy, a human friend, would Lili have been capable of playing a trumpet while he was lost in the streets? The answer is no; and it reflects the distorting power of an ideology. Her best friend, whom she knew to be as intelligent and kind as her own father, was nonetheless abandoned because she could not see him as a sentient consciousness, a *person*. Not for lack of compassion, but for a lack of imagination: The inability to see past the walls that had been imposed upon her internal world. 

It is the trumpet played for the dogs that calls the truce. Hagen had been expelled from the orchestra, now Lili plays for him. The dogs lie down. Lili lies down with them. In this gesture, she shows her understanding that she, and the dogs, are equal.

Doris Salcedo, “Untitled”

“Everything in the city is properly part of its story– its physical body of brick, stone, steel, glass, wood, its lifeblood of living, breathing men and women.” – Berenice Abbott, “Documenting the City,” 1942.

I recently visited the Institute of Contemporary Art in Chicago, which is holding two exhibitions of two unrelated artists, Doris Salcedo and Faheem Majeed, that are hard not to read as part of the same story.

Salcedo works in Bogota, while Majeed works local to Chicago. Both bodies of work point to a new form of migration and exodus. I see it across San Francisco neighborhoods and everyone seems to see it across every neighborhood: as economic gaps grow, rents rise, and the poor move out.

Faheem Majeed

Majeed’s work is built from particle board, a material embedded into the visual language of neighborhoods in the midst of transitions: shuttered up storefronts, renovations, foreclosed homes. Majeed chooses these materials through his experience of Chicago, where red-lining has created a legacy of economic disenfranchisement.

At first glance, Salcedo’s “Untitled Works” from 1989-2008 invite a similar reading. Salcedo uses old wooden chairs, cabinets, bed frames — the debris often left behind in an eviction, as families can’t afford to transport them when they’ve been priced out of a gentrified neighborhood. These materials are then encased in concrete; becoming symbols of displacement, of rickety furniture swallowed up into the concrete of new construction. This reading is an allegory of the “revival” of impoverished neighborhoods in building booms, in which the ghosts of the original residents are embedded into the marrow of the beast that evicted them.

Majeed is deliberately speaking to a social displacement of impoverished and socially excluded people of Chicago, but Salcedo, though seemingly a natural twin, is addressing victims of political violence in Colombia: The Desaparacedos (“the disappeared”).

There, 28,000 people are reported missing at the hands of the Columbian regime and a project of forced disappearance. International Law defines this act as “when a person is secretly abducted or imprisoned by a state or by a third party with the authorization, support, or acquiescence of a state or political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate and whereabouts, with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law.”

The connection is striking. The two artists form a kind of psychic rhyme in their visual language: between those who have disappeared through kidnapping and political marginalization in Colombia, and those who have disappeared through a very different form of exclusion– increasing property values. On one of Majeed’s pieces of particle board, he’s etched the words “Buy, my nigga,” a slogan he said was graffitied onto the side of a public installation he designed to engage a local community about its own displacement. The message had two readings: “Buy, my nigga,” as in those renting should buy their own property, or “Bye,” as in — see you later, poor folk.

These connections form a distressing echo to illustrate how, while mechanisms of displacement in authoritarian and capitalist regimes may function differently, the end result has an eerie semblance.

Doris Salcedo

Both works address the trauma of displacement. Back home in San Francisco, wandering through neighborhoods that once housed immigrant families, I’m surrounded by people just like me: white kids squeezing into crowded homes with newly renovated interiors, beds and a closet for $2200 a month. We squeeze in, and the families get squeezed out. They go to Oakland, where gun crime keeps middle class families moving on through to Berkeley.

Where in the Mission, a piece of plaster becomes a phrase for “renovation,” “construction,” and “growth,” in Oakland, the same words mean “decay.” Particle boards over abandoned businesses, dust gathered in the windows of “for rent” signs; nonetheless, the growth of San Francisco means an encroachment of those too poor for San Francisco who nonetheless depend on that growth to survive.

The same words, the same particle board and plaster and concrete, and two very different meanings across the same bridge.

You can see Doris Salcedo’s work at the MCA Chicago through May 24, 2015; and Majeem Faheed’s work through August 16, 2015. 

Miranda July’s first novel, “The First Bad Man,” begins as a foray into feminine nebbishness. It eventually grows into a dark, complex novel with a frenzied sexuality. It is also an excellent case study for reading alongside Lacan’s “Feminine Sexuality,” a collection of essays he gave to the ecole freudienne, the school he directed in Paris.

This post looks at Lacan’s controversial take on feminine sexuality using Miranda July’s novel as an illustration. We’ll touch on a few of Lacan’s aphorisms regarding sexuality: In particular, that there is no sexual relationship. But first, let’s read a lot of spoilers for The First Bad Man.

Other People’s Movies

When we meet Cheryl Glickman, she is working for a non-profit producing self-defense DVDs. She’s spineless as water, and has a sort of self-imposed asceticism called “the system,” in which she states, matter-of-factly, that a pile of dishes is enough to create a chain of events that lead a person to stop bathing, or ever leaving their house, soon, “the person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups” (July, 21). This seems like hyperbole, but in July’s world, it seems to be clear that this has been a past experience for Cheryl Glickman: “We’ve all been this person,” she states; and to avoid it, she keeps her house almost sterile, and protects this slide back into depression through extreme acts, such as reading books standing up by the bookcase with her finger on the spot it came from. This kind of thing prevents the domino effect back into her previous, casually referenced, past life of extreme depression and anxiety.

All of this nonetheless becomes upended with the introduction of Clee, the daughter of her two managers who more or less force the passive Cheryl to take their daughter in. Clee is 18 years old, but taller and bigger than Cheryl (who is middle-aged).

Cheryl is also infatuated with a man named Phillip, whose name we learn from the first sentence: “I drove to the doctor’s office as if I was starring in a movie Phillip was watching” (July,.1). This sentence sets the stage for us to begin analyzing Cheryl’s relationship with “the other,” which is symbolized through Phillip. Phillip does not reciprocate Cheryl’s feelings, but nonetheless, Cheryl is constantly maneuvering to ingratiate herself to him through impersonation. She uses words that she hears him use (p 6) or rejoices in trading chunks of “beefalo” meat they’re given at work, because it means he has her name in his refrigerator (16).

There is no such thing as a sexual relationship

Before I continue, I want to discuss Lacan, and his dictum that “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship,” which comes from Seminar XX. The most lucid, straightforward analysis of this Lacanian maxim comes from Alain Badiou: “in sex, each individual is to a large extent on their own. … Naturally, the other person’s body has to be mediated, but at the end of the day, the pleasure will always be your pleasure. Sex separates, doesn’t unite” (Badiou, 18). Furthermore, the physical activity of sex is always an image, the imagination. The orgasm, on the other hand, is intensely narcissistic and internal.

We can see this in Cheryl’s sexual fantasies about Phillip in The First Bad Man. As she comforts Phillip, she imagines some future event in which he comforts her, and the two begin to have sex:

“in a low, commanding voice, he would whisper: ‘think about your thing.’ I’d smile, grateful for the permission to go within, and shut my eyes — transporting myself to a very similar room where our pants were laid out on the floor and Phillip was on top of and inside me. In a low, commanding voice, he said, ‘think about your thing,’ and I was flooded with gratitude and relief, even more than the last time. I shut my eyes and was again transported to a similar room, a fantasy within a fantasy within a fantasy, and it continued like this, building in intensity until I was so far inside myself that I could go no further” (July, 39).

This Russian-nesting doll style of fantasy, an Inception-like level of dreams, captures this essence of Lacan’s suggestion that “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” There is no relationship in this fantasy, only the presence of the desired person, fulfilling their role in an imaginary placement in a fantastical space.

Here, I’ll very closely summarize Zizek (57), who puts it like this: We enter human sexuality through the intervention of the symbolic order, by grafting the fundamental deadlock of symbolization on to the biological opposition of male and female. … sexuality is a bricolage, a montage of two heterogeneous elements.

That is, all sex is sexual fantasy, which we enter into through a symbolic order. The other, our partner (I won’t assume this to be heterosexual) is the Other to us. Not themselves, but the symbol of the broader big Other, the collective organization of rules and external pressures we are anticipated to follow is what assigns us a sexual role articulated through the “language” of sex: this is the grafting of meaning onto our biological compulsions, which tell us how we are supposed to behave and feel desire.

But the partner is also the other, a stand-in for the projection of our internal sexual fantasies. We imagine ourselves in the desire of the other, yet they also become our symbols through which we articulate desire.

This complicates a pretty simple biological urge. Without our species’ dependency on meaning and our production of a symbolic and imaginary landscape, in which all things stand in for something else (and where we imagine ourselves in relation to those meanings), we end up registering sex in the same way. Monkeys have it easy.

Sex, then, is as close as we get to the “Real,” if you consider the Real a pre-symbolic state. The French famously refer to the orgasm as “la petit mort” because it is a small death, a moment in which language is banished from the brain and one skims closely to non-existence (but not enough to get bummed out — safety is assured by the rapid return to the world of language, description, and the language needed to convey the moment to the other person(s) there with you). Returning from that journey to a pre-symbolic space, meaning comes flooding back in.

The relationship to Phillip, then, finally consummates outside of the realm of fantasy. Phillip is not the ideal partner for Cheryl; in fact, he is immersed in his own elaborate and narcissistic rituals. The real Phillip is so distant that Cheryl has to re-imagine him over his physical body:

“It should have been easy but it took fierce concentration to imagine that he was on top of me. I had to erase him completely and reconstitute him, focusing on his imaginary weight as opposed to his actual heft” (July, 269).

There is no sexual relationship.

Pointedly, the first bad man is not about Phillip. It is about Cheryl’s relationship with Clee, the towering bully who moves into her anxiously ordered life and introduces Cheryl to a liberating chaos.

$ubjectivity

But first, I want to discuss Lacan’s idea of the barred subject. This is the unknowable, inarticulatable unconscious drive that leaks into our real-life actions and speech. The leaks are expressed wholly through symbols and signifiers. The origin, however, cannot be articulated, because it exists as a pre-verbal state of being.

Why pre-verbal? Because we cannot exist without being signified, without, for example, having a name. Neither can our desires be obtained without naming them. But by naming them, we have to follow the rules that are given to us by language, culture, etc: We must learn to say our name, even if it has nothing to do with our identity. We have to name our desires, even if our desire is beyond articulation. Yet, once we connect to another through language, we lose touch with the sensation of being detached from language. That’s a state we can never return to: the Real.

As Lacan puts it, we bear within ourselves the worm of what splits us (Lacan, Ecrits, “Position de l’inconscient,” 1966). We learn to communicate, and in the process, we learn to disconnect from anything which we cannot communicate. Language is the bridge that takes us to other people, but away from ourselves, and crumbles again every time a message gets delivered.

On that cheery note, we can dig a bit closer to a Lacanian conception of sexuality through “the sexual relationship does not exist,” and begin to understand more of what exists instead. That is: The impossibility of what we have imagined the sexual relationship to be. We imagine sex to be the bridge to these unknowable desires, and our partner becomes the method through which we can access them, past language and into the physical real. But this idea has its limits.

The partner, instead, stands in for whatever signifier we need, becomes a symbol, not unlike the function of a name, or a language. Because sex relies upon this symbolic function of the other, our own self-understanding becomes distorted. As I have shown, we may apply our self-understanding to the partner through the mediation of fantasy as Cheryl had through Phillip. In this section, I’ll analyze the relationship between Clee and Cheryl to see the function of sex as a kind of therapeutic discourse, rather than the discourse of the master, and how that can in fact serve as a form of Lacanian feminine sexuality.

Zizek, from Zizek’s Abercrombie and Fitch Catalog.

This begins, fittingly, with a discussion between Cheryl and her therapist. The therapist, she realizes, is a secretary in the same office when another doctor is in town. She inquires into the relationship: Is it sexual? Romantic? Does he pay her? “It’s a game we like to play,” her therapist responds, “an immensely satisfying adult game” (July, 61).

This is the key for Cheryl to understand her tolerance for the abuse that Clee doles out to her. Throughout the novel, Clee is insulting Cheryl, taking over her space, disordering her carefully maintained house. Cheryl, however, retreats, does not speak out. This conversation with her therapist is a breakthrough moment for Cheryl: she begins to instinctively understand that she is in a game.

“[I] watched the couple next to me feed each other bites of omelet. It was hard to believe they played adult games but most likely they did, probably with their coworkers or relatives. What were other people’s like? Perhaps some mothers and fathers pretended to be their children’s children and make messes. Or a widow might become her own deceased husband and demand retribution from everyone. It was all very personal, nobody’s game made any sense to anyone else” (July, 82).

This, then, brings forward a concept of that unknowable desire coming forth into the world, through activities which activate, and play with, an unknown source of pleasure. This neatly illustrates the concept of transgressing the pleasure principle. In other words, these “adult games” are an expression of jouissance, a way of poking through the barriers to pleasure which result from social, linguistic, and other constraints. Notably, this is a social form of pleasure, a pleasure experienced through Others, which is how Lacan describes his “feminine jouissance” in Seminar XX. This distinction is what sets it apart from Lacan’s phallic jouissance, a jouissance centered on items (even imaginary ones, such as ideas).

Cheryl quickly begins to become mediated by fantasy. She and Clee, empowered by Cheryl’s understanding that this violence is “an adult game,” begin to regiment it, allowing Cheryl to further explore her desires. She discovers that she longs to become the victims in the self-defense DVDs she helps produce (July, 85-86). She and Clee begin re-enacting these scenes, memorizing dialogue and gestures.

The inside cover of The First Bad Man, hardcover edition.

Clee becomes a fantasmic other for Cheryl; but of course, Cheryl is also serving the role as fantasy object for Clee. Each satisfies themselves in what is best understood as a sexual chemistry without sex. Each has a lack they desire to fill: One needs to attack, one needs to be attacked. They resolve this lack through each other. As Zizek writes, rather than two people coming together to form a whole, sex is always the coming together of two failures (59).

There are several levels of mediation at play: The fantasy of being on the DVD, the fantasy of sex in the absence of sex, the imagined connection of the relationship, the symbolic role that the other plays for each. Yet each shares a unique fantasy. They are not united in these attacks; they are distinctly isolated in their own imagination, alone in a shared fantasy. If the unconscious is structured like a language, then here, the language of desire is mutually inscribed on the other, and yet, incapable of being read.

Dick Jokes

Let’s talk about the phallus. Crucially, Lacan revises Freud and removes the phallus as the centerpiece of Western civilization. Unfortunately, Lacan still operates from just slightly off center of the phallic monolith Freud built, and much of his writing is from a male position. Nonetheless, he removes biology from the equation, acknowledging the cultural position of women as the one which defines them; leaving this phallocentrism as a cultural critique, more than a psychoanalytic one (Fink, 116).

Men, writes Lacan, “find themselves men without knowing what to do about it” (143), but with an awareness that they must be something because of what they possess (the phallus). Women, however, lack the phallus, and therefore, men — knowing that this phallic identity is constructed through the symbolic realm, is in fact “not-real,” then women, lacking a phallus, are therefore also “lacking the not-real” (see Zizek, 41). This creates a kind of mysterious essence of mystical femininity. And in fact, that’s precisely what Lacan speaks of: By being removed from the not-real phallocentric symbolic order, the feminine is closer to “the Real” than the masculine.

This might seem to reflect a perspective with very fine gendered lines. Lacan, though, suggests a concept of gender beyond sex: it isn’t that you have a penis, or don’t, that determines this masculinity or femininity, it’s how you think about the absence or presence. A masculine approach is represented by an identity with strong associations to a symbolic order (the phallus can be anything) whereas “femininity” is directed toward that which transcends the symbolic, and therefore reads as “mystical” (147).

Kubelko Bondy

Which brings us to Kubelko Bondy, literally a floating spirit who seems to signify, in the book, the primordial pre-verbal stage of development. Cheryl sees Bondy in the eyes of several babies throughout the book, the vision of a memory she had as a girl at age 9, in which she calmed the neighbor’s child, “in some real and permanent way he belonged to me. Because I was only nine it wasn’t clear if he belonged to me as a child or as a spouse, but it didn’t matter, I felt myself rising up to the challenge of heartache” (July, 8). Whenever she encounters Bondy, they communicate telepathically; they understand each other without actual words being spoken.

The connection between Cheryl and Bondy seems to suggest a feminine foothold into the mystical and ineffable. We can turn to this, again, to illustrate the feminine jouissance. It is an unexplainable excess of desire which transcends the symbolic realm; that is, the Real. Kubelko presents a connection to that Real, one which approaches pain (“the challenge of heartache”) and which is experienced with a child as the bridge between the gap of the Real and the object.

Yet, Cheryl only learns to articulate this sliver of the Real through her sexual desire, albeit not in the traditional method of conceiving a child. She must traverse the distance between her conception of herself as distant and unknowable, or knowable only through the language of the others, before she can come to name her desire, that is, to take on the child that results when Clee and Phillip have sex. She fantasizes about this relationship, even pretends to be Phillip fucking Clee (among many other men). “Fantasy,” writes Zizek, “is a way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the Other, in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire” (41).

In all of these fantasies, Cheryl is distant from herself, seeing Clee through the eyes of other men, and putting herself in the position of these men.

Overwhelmed by sexual urges, she refers to her lust as “Phillip’s lust” (July 111). Lacan points out that “Man serves here as a relay so that woman becomes an Other for herself, just as she is for him” (Ecrits, Fink translation, 732). So this allows us to see, from a Lacanian perspective, the feminist push in the story of Cheryl Glickman. As she begins to emerge from the frenzy of masculine sexuality attached to the phallus which is attached to Phillip (notably, there’s a semiotic rhyme, as well, with the ph and ll exactly where they need to be in each name), Cheryl works through being seen in the eyes of the other. And that’s why, at the end of the novel, the last sentence bookends with the first: We are in Cheryl and her son’s movie (July, 276).

Cheryl is reconciled from seeing herself through a phallic jouissance to a relational jouissance with her son; from feminine to masculine and back again. The ineffable pre-verbal spirit, the floating Kubelko Bondy, comes forth through the desires of the two people whom Cheryl saw herself through. The feminine is a mix of the symbolic and inexplicable, then, matching the Lacanian conception of a feminine sexuality.

Lacan wrote that analysis meant “to rewrite the history of one’s own life in such a way that everything that once seemed like a mistake—a wrong turn, a wasted year, a whole decade spent with a partner one came to despise—now seems necessary in order for the analysand to be what he or she is in the process of becoming” (Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, 62). This is clearly conveyed when Cheryl adopts Clee and Phillip’s son: “I didn’t make him, but I did each thing right so he would be made. That’s how much I wanted you.” (July, 270).

Kubelko is born (as Jack) through the leftover joy of her connections between two people. She did in fact make him happen through a history of necessary mistakes. Cheryl is nonetheless empowered to choose her anchor when she chooses to adopt Jack, rather than being driven through the demands or desires of Clee, or Phillip, or the world she’s so afraid of.

Conclusion

I was mostly interested in created an analysis of The First Bad Man as a Lacanian novel. Ideally, I’ve shown how certain aspects of July’s novel can be used to illustrate Lacanian concepts of feminine sexuality.

First off; I’ve shown that Cheryl’s relationships with Phillip and Clee can be conceptualized through Lacan’s maxim that there is no sexual relationship, and I’ve illuminated the role of the symbolic and imaginary in sexuality using examples from The First Bad Man.

Secondly, I’ve shown that The First Bad Man illustrates the presence of a feminine jouissance in which relationships between Others are negotiated by way of “adult games,” in contrast to masculine jouissance, which is played out through phallic objects. We see Cheryl perform both, which is supported by the Lacanian concept of identity based on attachment to a signifier, rather than the presence of a biological phallus.

Finally, I showed how The First Bad Man brings a feminist conception of sexuality through a Lacanian lens: whereas sexual experience is a means of working through desires toward an integration of feminine and masculine traits, or, if one chooses, through redirecting desire away from the desire of the other, once one has “played” with its recognition and understood it.

Books Referenced
The First Bad Man, Miranda July
In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou
Interrogating the Real, Slavoj Zizek
Ecrits, Jacques Lacan
Feminine Sexuality, Jacques Lacan (Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose)
The Lacanian Subject, Bruce Fink
Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely, Bruce Fink

What are we supposed to think of when we think of Alcatraz?

I visited Alcatraz specifically to see the Ai Weiwei installations on the island, making use of parts of the prison that haven’t previously been open to the public.

Weiwei is, if you don’t know, a Chinese artist and political activist who is forbidden from leaving mainland China. The installations at Alcatraz were designed remotely, through e-mail and architectural drafts of spaces: The New Industries building, where prisoners did manual labor, and the former medical building, particularly the psychiatric ward, the dining hall, and the A block row of prison cells.

It was also my first visit to the prison. The island is preserved where it is not in ruins, clearly marked with the emotional distance that decay can provide. I’m sure the myth of Alcatraz is different in every brain, but my mind has two references: The abandoned coal-digging city of Gunkanjima, ‘Battleship Island’, off of the coast of Nagasaki, and the Terezin concentration camp, outside of Prague.

The three have more in common that we might like to imagine. Attendance at these places is based on varying degrees of interest in what human beings can endure in terms of squalor and oppression. At Terezin, we can get a Coke next to an Arbeit Macht Frei sign; at Gunkanjima, we can remark at how many people squeezed lives into such a tiny amount of space; at Alcatraz, we can ponder the depths of misery reserved for “the worst of the worst.” All through the safe distance of time, rust, and debris.

One Way Ticket, Free Room and Board
Standing, looking at a clearly visible toilet facing out to the wall of prisoners across from it, I had to wonder: Why does anyone come to Alcatraz?

The only joyful myth of Alcatraz is the conservative desire to see a dismal ending for bad men in a heroic society. Alcatraz is said to be haunted by a number of spirits, not the least of which is the banjo-playing Al Capone, whose picture is repeated here and there, but the only real spirit that haunts the cells is, one might imagine, the spirit of tough justice.

There’s an inherent sadism in myths of the place. Alcatraz was a notoriously difficult prison. From a tiny cell, a prisoner could look out to see each of his block mates, but communication was punished: There was an enforceable order of silence. Alcatraz was said to be where you went when you needed to be broken; if other institutions couldn’t break you, Alcatraz would.

Yet, when we come here, we’re greeted by a joke-telling tour guide (I don’t mind, some of the jokes are funny) and it’s a pleasant outing, there are plenty of children and kitschy souvenirs. The place made famous for breaking men’s spirits is now part of a fun day out on holiday.

Stay Tuned

A wall inside a cell at Alcatraz.

The silence rule of Alcatraz was the first one being challenged by Ai Weiwei, across time in space, in his installation in the A block, “Stay Tuned.” As you enter each cell and face the wall, sound is piped in through the heating vent (notably, one of the only successful escape routes out of the place). These are the sounds of art made by political prisoners, from Fela Kuti to the Plastic People of the Universe (whose imprisonment inspired Vaclav Havel to write Charter 77, a manifesto against Soviet tactics) to Iranian poets and finally, Pussy Riot begging the Virgin Mary to hurry up and become a feminist.

Weiwei is doing something that struck me as somewhat subversive for a National Park Service art show: Rebelling against the rules of the place by placing the voices of prisoners, as loud as he could, into communication in a prison block where prisoners weren’t allowed to speak. But also to draw the contrast between political prisoners across the world with the political prisoners of the United States.

After all, the first prisoners in Alcatraz were military prisoners. This included those who fought against the Union in the Civil War, but also Native Americans, Chinese who fought the army during the Boxer Rebellion.

With Wind
The New Industries Building is where prisoners who were given the privilege of working spent 8 hours a day washing or making clothes, an early step in the prison-labor movement. Today, as you walk in to its dilapidated shell of peeling paint and broken windows, you are greeted by a flying paper dragon and several sparrow-shaped kites which make up Weiwei’s With Wind. Throughout the bleak New Labor Building paper kites float like magical beings over the squalor and rot; not only whimsical but splashes of color against fading lead paint and grime.

The seemingly transcendent appearance of these figures is tinted with some degree of irony, however, as the animals and flowers portrayed in With Wind are directly drawn from the state symbolism of 31 countries currently holding political prisoners or prisoners of conscience.

I like these because they represent fantasies of transcendence, and they’re situated in a building that some prisoners liked because it offered views of the city; though other prisoners would be frustrated by the same image.

Like everything, it reminds of this quote from Zizek:

Prison in effect destroys me, attains a total hold over me, precisely when I do not fully consent to the fact that I am in prison but maintain a kind of inner distance towards it, stick to the illusion that ‘real life is elsewhere’ and indulge all the time in daydreaming about life outside, about nice things that are waiting for me after my release or escape. I thereby get caught in the vicious cycle of fantasy, so that when, eventually, I am released, the grotesque discord between fantasy and reality breaks me down. The only true solution is therefore fully to accept the rules of prison life and then, within the universe governed by these rules, to work out a way to beat them. In short, inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.

This quote came to stand for a lot of the Ai Weiwei exhibit, which kept offering this idea of escape from political tyranny, but only as a fantasy. In this case, the idea that the images of escape were, in fact, drawn from the state symbols of oppressive nations. These transcendent sparrows were in fact co-opted. Just like we might dream of the possibility of transcendence in that space, the reality is outside.

Further back into the New Industries Building is Trace, portraits of 170 of these prisoners or exiles (Edward Snowden included) were crafted out of Lego blocks onto the floor, grounding us a bit further in reality. Each portrait is uniquely stylized and colored but connected to several others through a glistening white Lego space between them. Weiwei built the Chinese and Tibetan prisoner portraits himself, the rest — selected with help from Amnesty International — he designed and were built by assistants.

Elsewhere in the building, visible only from the guard’s overlook of the work floor, is Refraction, an assemblage of Tibetan solar heaters into a giant winged structure. The piece, which is shiny and silver and massive, is visible only from the position that a guard would watch the prisoners. As a result, the relationship with the work is really unsatisfying, suggesting the psychological reversal of freedom from the prisoners and the guards. I’m struck by reference to a guard who worked and lived on Alcatraz for four years, living in a small home on the back of the island, who called those four years a waste of his life. The relationship between the guards forced to live on the island, and the prisoners forced to live on the island, always stuck with me: two fates, quite intertwined.

Blossom
It’s the psychiatric hospital which is the most compelling moment in the collection, particularly Blossom. Set in the previously unaccessible psychiatric and medical quarter of the prison, where inmates who developed suicidal or other extreme behaviors were kept in cages (notably not on display). Toilets in the rooms were sometimes porcelain, sometimes concrete, and always flushed from outside of the cell, to ensure that suicidal inmates didn’t drown themselves, or break apart the porcelain toilet to forge a weapon to use on themselves or on guards.

In that space — yes, the toilets (and bathtubs) — Weiwei has designed elaborate porcelain flowers to fit perfectly into the water fixtures. That these flowers are offered as a symbol of freedom and placed directly into the basins that a prisoner would use to commit suicide is a compelling juxtaposition, ambivalent sure, but certainly open to a nihilistic reading. From my sense of the suicidal desperation of the inmates housed there, the idea of surrealistic transformations of these “escape routes” (from suicide) into a beckoning space of intricate beauty — made of porcelain, no doubt — which are also blocking the drainpipes, rendering any form of escape impossible?

I find the whole piece aesthetically gorgeous, but symbolically depressing, in a way that Weiwei certainly must have intended, but isn’t really hinted at in the literature about the work. (The guidebook suggests “other associations, such as offering a bouquet to a hospital patient”).

What does it mean when the toilet is clogged by porcelain flowers? You can’t shit, you can’t bathe, can’t clean yourself. The filth stays with you and on you. You are blocked, trapped. This is not a reassuring offer of condolence or comfort to a prisoner. No, this is clearly intended to represent what porcelain fixtures look like to a suicidal patient: The only escape. Break the porcelain and transcend: much as many of these suicidal prisoners did.

That Zizek quote again, this time turns a bit more chilling: inner distance and daydreaming about Life Elsewhere in effect enchain me to prison, whereas full acceptance of the fact that I am really there, bound by prison rules, opens up a space for true hope.

I understand why this interpretation would be left out of the guide book, which does acknowledge that many prisoners experienced mental illness while imprisoned in Alcatraz.

Elephants
Weiwei’s work was an interesting complication to the otherwise unchallenged visit to a notorious federal penitentiary, but there were some things that didn’t sit so well.

For one, the otherness of prisoners of conscience, for the American audience, was a pretty safe target. A hat-tip to Edward Snowden left America largely off the hook for its problems with domestic prisons, begging the rest of the world’s censorship and political prisoners on well-known bad-boy regimes.

Weiwei could have made a porcelain elephant for all of us to look at from the guard tower, naming it Guantanamo Bay, or, hell, Abu Ghraib. Certainly, that kind of political art is hardly challenging, or new, or likely to be exhibited any time soon in a space curated by the National Parks Service. Nobody would have gone for something like that.

But it was a reminder of how those omissions that come from playing it safe — even when working with a dissident artist, even when you’re cranking Pussy Riot out of a jail cell in a national park — omissions get filled in with assumptions drawn from the surrounding environment. And the surrounding environment was: Here’s a political dissident, being given a voice in America, which he wouldn’t be allowed to voice in China, and here are all these prisoners who can’t be given voices but we’re giving them voices, etc. It’s actually quite patriotic, quite land-of-the-free, which is wonderful aside from all the stuff that this kind of liberal patriotism obscures.

Again, with the Zizek: It’s that fantasy of escape that makes reality so hard to bare. And when we get to escape to Alcatraz, where our worst ideas of prisons and political oppression are literally crumbling, the wake-up call of what’s happening in shiny new jail cells is harder to comprehend.