“They’re all copycats. They’re all copycats.” Peter Licata, former FBI Supervisory Special Agent, on CNN, 7:34 PM, July 4, 2022, commenting on the mass shooting of that morning in Highland Park, Illinois.
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I
My brother and I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago; he now lives in Glen Ellyn, due west of the city. I have visited many relatives in Highland Park, and my girlfriend’s mother still lives there. So the July 4th slaughter feels close by, even though I live in New York City. It feels appropriate, too—a fitting memorial of this nation’s birthday.
Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking about the white boys with their automatic weapons for 20 years and more, since Columbine. This has meant, for me, a troubling encounter with the violence that has saturated my own life—the beatings, given and taken, the brutish language that I learned in the locker rooms and, in my case, at home as well, the fears and the anger that have disfigured my development, even unto these later, retired years. It has also meant a sobering re-encounter with the violence that has engulfed American culture in the last 40 years, as Dad was downsized, patriarchy was declared dead, and masculinity became toxic where not extinct.
I have ridiculed the cops, profilers, pundits, and politicians who cite “mental illness” as the proximate cause of mass shootings because that “explanation” feeds our complacence about gun violence. Because that “diagnosis” lets us pretend that the white boys with the AR-15s are deviants from an unspoken norm, exceptions to the rule of law—you know, like those “bad apples” who sully the reputation of police forces in general. Or, what is the same thing, because it lets us think that these emotional adolescents are individuals acting on their own self-generated ideas rather than social selves acting out a part that has been scripted for them. [1]
We must remember that these avatars, these bearers of a political unconscious, aren’t self-determining moral personalities that make rational choices, no matter how well-planned their assaults look from a prosecutor’s standpoint—they are estranged from the world, but not ignorant of it. Nor are they uniquely or randomly afflicted by a rare disease subject to clinical diagnosis. They’re not even “evil” in any meaningful sense of the word, not any more than the cyborg sent from the future to kill John Connor in James Cameron’s “Terminator” franchise.
No, these killers are mentally ill, but they suffer from a pandemic social disease that demands cultural (not clinical) diagnosis. That’s what Special Agent Peter Licata meant last Monday evening on CNN, when Wolf Blitzer asked him about the danger of copycat shootings: “They’re all copycats.”
But thinking with or acting on that simple fact requires more than knowing gestures toward the Wild West or a militarized foreign policy—saying that violence is as American as apple pie or calling the US a Gunfighter Nation is as insightful and productive as announcing that the sky is sometimes blue. Invocations of evil, alienation, and other trans-historical dimensions of the human condition are equally insufficient, or worse: they are mere invitations to unearned complacence, for all they do is convince us that because nothing ever changes, nothing is to be done. They ask us to renounce reality, not acknowledge it.
How, then, to diagnose this disease as social, and as historically specific? The first step is to recognize that the unconscious, the repository of barely articulate dreams and drives which animates and regulates American (or any other) culture, is a public property, not a private state of mind. It’s always on display, a set of symptoms that is already an attempted cure, because it’s desublimated desire, not the mutilated remainder of repression (it’s already returned from those straitened precincts). It’s legible in the best novels and the worst romances, in the TV series that sell and the movies that don’t, in raucous hip-hop as well as dignified classical music. It’s composed of fictions and fantasies, but it is nonetheless real, as real as those more familiar material ones, and, beyond that, it produces reality.
The disease is perhaps most legible in the spastic political Id of American culture we call Trump World, or the MAGA crowd. Trump himself understands that he doesn’t so much lead as express his constituents—he personifies or embodies their grievances against a world that seems to have forgotten white men, or rather seeks to obliterate all memory of them in their once rightful place at the head of families and states. Let’s have a look at how he acts this part, and thus auditions as a new personality type, one that would carry the day against the alternatives bred in the hipster boroughs of Austin, Boston, Brooklyn, Chelsea, Palo Alto, and West Hollywood.
II
We begin five years ago, six months into Trump’s first term as president, when he was replying via Twitter to Mika Bzrezinski’s disparaging remarks about him on MSNBC. She “was bleeding badly” from plastic surgery, he tweeted.
These tweets and his earlier utterance during the primary campaign about FOX News anchor Megyn Kelly (she was “bleeding from wherever”) don’t prove he has a weak, childlike ego, or is a psychopath. Nor do his remarks about “dating” his daughter indicate that he’s incapable of sublimation according to the first Oedipal commandment, against incest. They prove something else—that he’s a fascist, pure and simple. To my mind, this diagnosis is more disturbing than the others. (For a summary of these tweets, see Glenn Thrush & Maggie Haberman, NYT June 29, 2017.)
When those tweets surfaced, I reached for Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (1977, trans. 1987-89) a massive 2-volume study of the Freikorps—the freelance German regiments assembled in 1918 to fight working-class insurrection wherever it appeared in Central and Eastern Europe—and its fascist progeny (the Freikorps supplied the Nazis with a surprisingly large proportion of leaders and officers).
I suppose I was remembering how Theweleit had enlisted Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari to revisit and revise Freud’s theories of the unconscious, repression, sexuality, psychosis, and, on that basis, to explain fascism as a highly specific mode of producing reality—and, as I now read them, to demonstrate that male masochism is a social disease that, as it has metastasized since Trump’s inauguration, is now the regulative principle of American culture. [2]
In their terms, fascism is to be understood not as a form of government or a social system or a psychological deviation or a personality disorder, but as the production of a reality in which females represent a red flood of blood that must be staunched—for that flood carries with it every contaminant of modern-industrial life, including socialism, and every threat to traditional, inherited hierarchies, including sexual freedom as defined by women themselves. The subtitle of Volume 1 is “Women, Floods, Bodies, History.”
Fascists, so conceived, are not men who can be treated for their symptoms and “restored” to rationality in the sense that the analyst makes them aware of their repressed and therefore unconscious fears, desires, wishes, and anxieties, or in the sense that they can be disabused of their fantasies by facing the facts. The return of the repressed to consciousness has no meaning for the fascist—for Donald Trump— because his “unconscious” has no interiorized content born of repression: his ego is not born of the renunciations we attribute to the resolution of the Oedipus complex (the incest taboo, to begin with).
The fascist’s fears of castration, of menstruation, of penetration, of the dissolution of ego boundaries, and so forth, aren’t buried deep within a psyche huddled against the external world. In fact, Trump speaks freely and frequently of these fears: his “unconscious” is already social, not a once-private state that, when made public, cancels his fantasies and returns him to rationality. For the fascist, there are no private states. How could there be?
Trump denies he has a small penis, he insults a journalist by insinuating that her unwanted questions flow from a menstrual source, he insists that neither Muslims nor Mexicans will pass through the barriers he imposes, and that China has had its way with us—has “taken advantage of us”—for too long. And now he insults another female journalist for, what else, bleeding. “Bodily fluids bother him,” his biographer says.
Here’s Theweleit, at the hinge of the argument in Volume 1.
“On the other hand, it would also be wrong simply to define these men [the Freikorps officers and their literary minions] as ‘psychotics.’ They do not, in fact, seem to possess the Oedipal ‘ego,’ and yet they are not, for that reason, in any way, ‘unadapted to reality,’ nor do they have ‘weak egos’ or any other such disorder. After all, they were triumphantly effective in founding their very own empire [their very own reality] in the future. In many respects, they were extremely successful; their mode of writing is controlled, in a manner which ‘psychotics’ would hardly be capable of . . . By what type of ego, if it is not the Oedipal, do these men stabilize and control themselves?” (1: 209-10)
That is the question: what type of ego does the fascist manifest, if not the Oedipal ego steeped in guilt and animated by fears of incest and castration? Here Freud’s late insights into masochism become indispensable, because the fascist is first and foremost the man who revels in his own suffering at the hands of the women who flood the world with their unruly desires and treacherous lies. The masochist loves the violence done to his body, literally and figuratively, because the perturbation, the dissolution, that follows puts his ego and his object choices in motion, all at once—he’s suddenly free of the past, returned to the (pubescent) state before the familiar Oedipal renunciations made him an adult.
Certainly the chronicles of the Freikorps, fictional and otherwise, suggest as much. The novels written by the veterans of their savage campaigns against working class insurrection frequently feature the excruciating rigors of boot camp—the military training designed to dismantle and reassemble the recruit’s ego around hierarchy, aggression, domination, and indifference to suffering by constant humiliation, deprivation, degradation, and abjection to proximate power. Every rendition of Trump’s childhood and adolescence reads like a parody of these formative episodes. His four years in exile at New York Military Academy—normal high school couldn’t contain his already egregious excesses—were amplified by his father’s incredible, outspoken cruelty, preparing Donald for what his niece Mary calls an “institutionalized” life, an existence that excludes empathy, of course, but also disallows any sympathy for one’s own self. [3]
The fascist is a sadist as well as a masochist, in real time as well as the slower motion of fantasy. In his world, there are only winners and losers because selfhood as such is a position created in a zero-sum game, a master-slave relation through which my gain of subjectivity must be your loss, and vice versa. In this world, the mutuality, reciprocity, and respect that could be produced by your recognition of me as an equal are laughable—these possibilities are for chumps. I impose my will on you, or you impose yours on me. It’s that simple.
But how does this work, this perturbation, this dissolution of the ego that masochism “accomplishes”? As always, Freud put it in terms of gendered identity. “In the case of the girl what was originally a masochistic (passive) situation is transformed into a sadistic one by means of repression, and its sexual quality is almost effaced. In the case of the boy, the situation remains masochistic.” Why? The boy “evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy [of being beaten], and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine [passive] attitude without a homosexual object-choice.”
So, Freud was fascinated by male masochism for a good reason. Two consequences follow from this subjection of oneself to humiliation as accompanied or enforced or explained by the endurance of violence at the hands of the unworthy—the female, to be sure, but also the larger, ignorant mass. First, an emotional solidarity of men is created: they become a category, a class-action set of victims who have succumbed to feminine wiles and to feminism as such. Second, “morality becomes sexualized once more [and] the Oedipus complex is revived.”
Or, as Gilles Deleuze and Kaja Silverman revise this scenario, masochism reactivates and reiterates the Oedipal moment, stretching the subject on the rack of identity choice indefinitely, interminably. In other words, the abjection experienced in masochism permits a revision of the ego determined by the typical binary resolutions of the Oedipus complex. That revision reanimates gender (and other) identities that might have been fixed without the revisit. [4]
Trump is the proverbial tip of this iceberg, the epitome of the death wish built into a culture animated by male masochism. As I’ve said, he doesn’t so much lead his constituents as express their grievances. He is constantly criticized for the lack of substance in his utterance—on policy, let alone the larger world as it actually exists—but the criticism misses the point: Trump is not the polite articulation of our policy preferences, he’s the embodiment of something that is freakish, crude, unspeakable, like the gods and monsters of our nightmares. For example, he didn’t propose to slow the rising tide of illegal immigration, he wanted to staunch the overflow of gangsters and rapists from below the waistline of the western hemisphere, that is, to stop the flood of losers from “shithole countries.”
In this respect, his persona is actorly or cinematic, conveyed in signature gestures, voice patterns, and stage business: he’s what Silverman calls an acoustic mirror. So we might find some clues to his popularity in the movies of our time, particularly in the extreme violence done to human bodies across the generic board, and in the undeniably masochistic cast of characters created by the franchise films of the late-20th century.
III
Many historians and critics have pointed to the profound sense of an ending that permeated American movies of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. But it was not just the American Century that was waning in Oscar-winning movies like The Deer Hunter (1978), which dramatized the military defeat of the US in Vietnam as a crushing blow to American manhood. [5]
The fin-de-siecle feeling built into the approach of a new millennium was compounded, then as now, by realistic reports—and hysterical fears—of pervasive criminality, random yet universal violence, maybe even ineradicable evil; by the decline of patriarchy (male-headed households), which still accompanies the decomposition of the “traditional” nuclear family and the deindustrialization of the American economy; by the rise of the new “post-feminist” woman whose moral capacity, bodily integrity, and sexual autonomy were validated by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), then contested and, as we now know, finally eviscerated by the rise of the evangelical Right and the counter-revolutionary jurisprudence of the Federalist Society; by corporate malfeasance and government corruption—incessant scandal, public and private, from Watergate on toward Iran-Contra and the dangerous liaisons of the Clinton years, now reanimated by the Great Recession, Covid-19, and Trump’s attempted coup; by damning revelations of the uses to which American power had been put during and after the Cold War, from Iran to Chile to Nicaragua, now made almost poignant by the deadly debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq; by the public, determined, sometimes flamboyant display of homosexual affection and solidarity in the name of gay rights, a movement both magnified and complicated in the 1980s by the eruption of a deadly new sexually transmitted disease, HIV/AIDS, and now even more deeply complicated by debates over trans-gender identities and LGBQT rights.
When everything is ending—law and order, manhood, fatherhood, womanhood, family, heterosexuality, even national honor—the apocalypse is now. At any rate this is the feeling that permeates the atlas of emotion etched by American culture in the late-20th century, and that now saturates our present. To illustrate this feeling, let’s take a look at what happens generically in American film from the late 1970s to the late 1990s; these are changes that persist to this day.
Probably the most important trend is the ascendance of the horror genre in all its weird permutations (slasher, possession, occult). It remained a low-brow, B-movie genre from the early 1930s into the 1970s, but then, withe the rapid expansion of the Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) franchises in the 1980s, it became the stuff of blockbuster box office. As Mark Edmundson and others have noted, by the time Silence of the Lambs, a tasteful, muted, sublimated—almost stuffy—slasher film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1991, horror had become the mainstream of American film. It had meanwhile reshaped every other genre, even Westerns, for example Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1972).
Another important trend is an integral part of horror’s ascendance. Where once female protagonists were hapless victims of violence unless they could rely on their fathers, husbands, and brothers—or the law as enshrined in patriarchy—to protect them from the slashers, psychopaths, and rapists, they now take the law into their hands and exact a new kind of revenge on a world of pervasive criminality coded as male. Here the cinematic movement “from the bottom up,” from truly awful to pretty good movies, is unmistakable. A terrifically bad movie called I Spit On Your Grave (1976) first installs the female victim of gang rape in the role of single-minded avenger, for example, and it thereafter presides, in spirit, over more polished, upscale movies like Silence of the Lambs and The Accused (1988). ].
Yet another important trend in late-20th century movies is the hypothesis that the family as such is dysfunctional, perhaps even destructive of social order and individual sanity. As Robin Wood has argued, the horror genre is the laboratory in which this indecent hypothesis has been most scientifically tested, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974-2019) to The Omen )1976) and Poltergeist (1982), all movies permeated or penetrated by unspeakable evil—families confused by the modern liberal distinction between private and public spheres. But the return of the repressed gangster, begun by The Godfather cycle in the 1970s, magnified by the 1983 remake of Scarface (the original appeared in 1931) and completed by “The Sopranos” on cable TV in the 1990s also demonstrated, in the most graphic terms, that strict devotion to family makes a man violent, paranoid, and finally unable to fulfill his obligations to loved ones. “Breaking Bad” (2008-13) reproduced the results of these experiments.
If all you inhabit or care for is your family, both these genres keep telling us, you are the most dangerous man (or woman) alive. At the very lest you’ll forget your loyalties to a larger community, contracting your commitments until they go no further than the boundaries of your own home; at that point, you will have destroyed your family and broken the rules that regulate life out there where everybody else lives. But how do you situate yourself as an individual in relation to a larger community—to the state, to the nation—in the absence of this middle term, the family? It was an urgent political question in late-20th century America, as the decomposition of the “traditional” nuclear family accelerated, and it was raised most pointedly on screen, by a culture industry supposedly out of touch with “family values.”
A fourth important trend in the movies of the late-20th century is an obsession with the ambiguities and consequences (of crime. Film noir of the 1940s and 50s was predicated on such ambiguities and consequences, of course, but the sensibility of that moment seems to have become a directorial norm by the 1980s. The difference between the good guys and the bad guys is at first difficult to discern in the battle between the criminals and the deputies staged by Arthur Penn in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), in part because it’s clear from the outset that our heroes are deranged. It gets more and more difficult in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, when Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise (1971-88) makes the detective less likable than his collars; when drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes become lovable characters in “blaxploitation” movies (Sweet Sweetback [1971[, Shaft [1971[, Superfly [1972[); when gangsters become the unscrupulous yet dutiful bearers of the American Dream (The Godfather [1972-74]); when Custer’s Last Stand becomes a monument to imperial idiocy (Little Big Man [1970]), even as the Indians become the personification of authentic America (Dances With Wolves [1990]); when the origin of civic renewal is a crime that appears as both domestic violence and foreign policy—it begins as incest and ends as colonization of “virgin land” (Chinatown [1974]—and when the assassination of a president becomes comparable to “the secret murder at the heart of American history” (JFK [1991]).
That not-so-secret murder is of course the American Dream itself—the dream that allows you to become father of yourself, to cast off the traditions and obligations accumulated in the “Old World,” to treat the past as mere baggage. If you are father to yourself, you don’t have a father except yourself: you don’t have a past tp observe or honor, or, more immediately, to learn from. But when you’re on your own in this fundamental sense, as most Americans like to be, you lean toward radical visions of the future and radical resolutions of problems inherited from the past. As D. H. Lawrence observed in his studies of classic American literature a century ago, the masterless are an unruly horror.
One more important filmic trend, which tracks the other four quite closely, is the exponential increase in spectacular violence done to heroes, victims, and villains alike. The analogue of video games is not very useful on this score, however, because the recipient of excruciating violence in the movies of the late-20th century is typically a female who then exacts revenge (I Spit On Your Grave, Ms. 45 [1981] or a male who revels in the torture he’s “taking like a man,” presumably because this debilitating experience equips him with the moral authority he will later need to vanquish the enemy without ceremony or regret. The Rocky (1976-2022) and the Rambo (1982-2019) franchises sponsored by Sylvester Stallone are the founding fathers of this latter movement, in which masochism finally becomes unmistakably male.
The Lethal Weapon (1987-98) franchise animated by Mel Gibson’s jittery impersonation of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”—Gibson’s cop character has to teach his stolid, middle-class African-American partner how to live in the moment, how to be existential if not suicidal—is the parallel film universe in which guys get crazy because they have to, because the world has excluded them from good wars and good jobs, where, as William James observed another hundred years ago, boys once learned how to be men. Fight Club (1999) is the final solution to this fear of male irrelevance, and so is the apogee of male masochism at the movies. In its moral equivalent of war, men keep trying to mutilate themselves, but we know it’s OK because they use their bare hands—until the ugly and inexplicable ending, these guys are purposeful artisans, not mindless machine herds.
IV
How to explain this spectacular increase in violence at the movies? How, then, to periodize the resonant, parallel increase in violence out there beyond the Cineplex, in the larger culture?
Film theorists of every persuasion have suggested that the extreme fury inflicted on the cinematic body should be understood in terms of a general unsettlement of subjectivity—of selfhood—and have suggested, accordingly, that by the 1990s, the signature of this unsettlement had become masochism, the pleasurable indulgence (or infliction) of pain, in character on screen, and out there, in the audience. This consensus makes sense in view of the new (more, better) life choices afforded by sexual/identity politics, on the one hand, and the new (fewer, worse) life chances determined by deindustrialization on the other; both of these have, in fact, made masculinity a problem rather than a mere fact—something to be restored or reconstituted rather than treated as a given dimension of everyday life.
In The Philosophy of Horror, a groundbreaking book of 1990, Noel Carroll argued that the ever more elaborate violence visited upon characters across the generic board—not just in his favored genre—is an “iconography of vulnerability.” Horror as such, he insists, is “founded on the disturbance of cultural norms.” The late-20th century festival of violence in movies of all kinds is, then, a visual depiction, a pictorial externalization, of the anxieties necessarily attached to the end of modernity, when an “overwhelming sense of instability seizes the imagination in such a way that everything appears at risk or up for grabs.” But the crucial cultural norm is question is the father of himself—the modern individual, the American Adam, the self-made man.
That is why Carroll correlates the “death of Man”—a.k.a. the author or the subject or the humanist self—postulated by post-structuralist theory with the “demotion of the person” expressed by the extraordinary violence of recent film, and again, not just in horror movies. The popular, colloquial, vernacular version of academic locution can be seen at the Cineplex, in other words, long before (or after) you are forced to read Foucault or Derrida by your demented professors. Carroll summarizes his argument as follows: “What is passing, attended by feelings of anxiety, is the social myth of the ‘American’ individualist, which, in the case of horror, is enacted in spectacles of indignity, directed at the body.” What is also “passing,” right before our very eyes in the artificial night of the local theater or the darkened living room, is that remnant of the 19th century, the bourgeois proprietor of himself. It’s a violent business, this cinematic execution of our former self, and it can never be completed. No wonder we want to prolong the agony on screen.
What is “passing,” more specifically, in the torrent of violence that floods every genre is manhood or masculinity or fatherhood—in a word, patriarchy—as it was conceived in the “era of the ego,” ca. 1600-1900, as it was then embalmed in the canonical novels and literary criticism of the 1920s, and as it was reenacted in the movies, mainly westerns, of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. The strong, silent types who inhabited that imaginary space west of everything give way, by the 1980s and 90s, to male leads who are anything but. Tony Soprano is the culmination of this cinematic species. And it is no accident that the backstory informing every episode is Tony’s search for meaning in a world turned inside out by race and gender. “Woke up this morning,/The blues—that is, the Blacks—moved in our town,” as the lyrics go over the opening credits). For it is here, in the world of therapy and the language of psychoanalysis, that the problem of male masochism becomes visible, remarkable, perhaps actionable.
This is Donald Trump’s world, where an endless, senseless stream of words, the spastic, birdlike chatter of an unconscious unbound by any grammatical or social or political protocol, defines the project of selfhood—which is to say manhood—in an epoch that seems to have no use for men. In this world, the extreme flux of identity available to and imposed upon most males by sexual politics and economic depravation (deindustrialization, “downsizing,” replacement by robots, immigrants, females, etc.) is re-enacted through masochism, and articulated in tweets.
As we have seen, Freud and his recent interpreters—these include Carol Clover, Kaja Silverman, Gilles Deleuze, David Savran, Barbara Creed, Klaus Theweleit, Judith Butler, Jaqueline Rose—treat masochism as a psychological space that permits, maybe even demands, male experimentation with an imaginary femininity, a space where the law of the father may not hold. Again, the boy “evades his homosexuality by repressing and remodeling his unconscious phantasy [of being beaten, penetrated by the father], and the remarkable thing about his later conscious phantasy is that it has for its content a feminine attitude without a homosexual object-choice.” In these psychoanalytical terms, masochism on screen and out of doors looks and feels like men trying to be women—trying to identify as women—but without cross-dressing and without coming out of a closet to renounce heterosexuality or patriarchy or male supremacy. [6]
These film theorists, philosophers, and critics disagree on many details, particularly when it comes to assessing the results of masochism in real time, but they converge, willy-nilly, on the notion expressed most flamboyantly in Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972, trans. 1981), viz., that the Oedipus complex or stage of psychological development has lost its explanatory adequacy in an epoch that has robbed it of its formative, binary gender effects. The violent sensorium of masochism made palpable and ubiquitous in movies, they agree, has let most us experience the end of modernity as the dissolution of male subjectivity and the realignment of the relation between what we took for granted as female/feminine and male/masculine—keeping in mind that this realignment may well prove to be regressive and destructive. The identities we discovered as we detached ourselves from a primal, emotional, physical connection to our parent(s)—as we worked through the Oedipal complex—are perturbed and perplexed, perhaps dismantled, by the horrific experience of masochistic violence at the movies.
I would amend and amplify this conclusion as follows. The violent sensorium of masochism has become palpable and ubiquitous in the larger culture, in real time, as the recurrent phenomenon of “mass shootings,” an orgy of punitive executions carried out by superfluous men—indeed, by now it has become the signature gesture of the “end of men.” Meanwhile its realignment of the relation between female/feminine and male/masculine, as expressed, for instance, in the sexualized language of an increasingly polarized politics—your opponent does not just disagree with you, he or ehe is a liar, an enemy of the people, and a pedophile—has, in fact, become regressive and destructive, to the point where the anal-sadistic stage of infantile development has returned from the region of the repressed and even threatens to rule the world.
I know, this sounds apocalyptic, perhaps even comically panicked. But we are living through an “end times” of some kind—an “extinction event” that applies to almost everything, including insects, reptiles, and sapiens. Let me quote Kaja Silverman to get us closer to that moment: “Freud makes the startling observation in ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ that there is no trace within the masochistic unconscious, whether male or female, of the wish to be loved by the father—of the taboo desire from which the entire condition of masochism is ostensibly derived. In regressing back to the anal stage of sexuality, the masochist apparently manages to erase all record of that variant of Oedipal genitality held to be positive for the girl and negative for the boy: ‘Whatever is repressed from consciousness or replaced in it by something else remains intact and potentially operative in the unconscious. The effect of regression to an earlier stage of the sexual organization is quite another matter. . . .’ [The masochist’s] sexuality, moreover, must be seen to be entirely under the sway of the death drive, devoid of any possible productivity or use value.” (Male Subjectivity, p. 210: my italics)
Silverman is answering Deleuze, who likes to think of masochism in utopian terms, as the means to the end of identification with the mother and the adjournment of the Oedipal Law of the Father—there’s a reason his treatise on masochism addresses, and is sometimes even bound with, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s erotic novel, Venus in Furs (1870). Silverman is warning us against the deadly possibilities residing in the regressions masochism “accomplishes.” But her warning raises two questions. Why does masochistic regression deliver us unto an anal-sadistic phase of infantile/ childhood development—how does that work? And why does it conjure the least understood of late-Freudian concepts, the fundamental urge toward biological stasis we call death?
For an answer, I turn to the best interpretation of Freud I know, that of Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1958), a book that, to my mind, is unique in its grasp of both anality—close to half of the book is a reading of modern capitalism that, while quite friendly to Marx, focuses on the irrational devotion to excremental accumulation it sponsors—and the death instinct. Here is how Brown summarizes his argument on the central role of the Devil in explaining Martin Luther’s obsession with money (“The world is ruled by the Devil, and the Devil’s word is money”):
“The Devil is [the] middle term connecting Protestantism and anality. . . . As against the orthodox Freudians, the pathogenic factor in anality is not real bodily toilet training, but peculiar fantasies (the Devil) connected to the anal zone. Furthermore, these fantasies are not private or individual products, but exist as social projections into the world of culture. It follows that the precipitating factor in a psychological upheaval such as the Protestant Reformation is not any change in toilet-training patterns, but an irruption of fresh material from deeper strata of the unconscious made possible by a large-scale transformation in the structure of the projective system (the culture). The dynamic of history is the slow return of the repressed.” (p.230, my italics)
Or its rapid return, such as we have seen since Columbine, 1999. Or should we say since August 13, 1997, when the debut episode of “South Park” aired. It was called “Cartman Gets an Anal Probe.” [https://southpark.cc.com/episodes/940f8z/south-park-cartman-gets-an-anal-probe-season-1-ep-1]
Like the horror genre, cartoons, comics, and graphic novels became mainstream cultural material by the 1990s. When Art Spiegelman won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his two-volume tale of his father’s survival of the camps as a bewildered then embittered mouse, any remaining lines between high and low art were obliterated. But “South Park” almost didn’t get produced because the execs at Paramount and FOX couldn’t bring themselves to green light a show that featured Mr. Hanky, the talking turd, as a kind of omniscient narrator.
This show was different in every way. It certainly borrowed from MTV, from the “bathroom humor” of Beavis and Butthead, but its creators pushed the abstraction of animation to an extreme by rendering every character as a little round cutout with eyes and a mouth, a circle that moves like a stage performer who is always face front, as if the world is a chorus line of buttons. The differences between the figures on screen are made of voice and color and hats, so there’s not much point in watching the “performances”; but if you listen in, you’ll get the joke, especially when Chef, the voice of black authenticity, speaks (performed by the late Isaac Hayes of “blaxploitation” fame). This conscious abstention from the realistic possibilities of visual representation in comics and cartoons—from the possibilities provided by Disney and Pixar—makes “South Park” a kind of radio show, almost all sound. It’s a television show for the blind.
But there’s something here that is remarkable, and its name is shit. This show is the most amazing set of studies in anality since Brown took the excremental visions of Martin Luther and Jonathan Swift seriously in Life Against Death—and, not coincidentally, it marks a moment in what we have come to know as globalization. We know that its creators are close readers of globalization because they made a feature-length movie, Team America, to debunk the so-called war on terror and to ridicule the larger contours of US foreign policy. We also know that they’re obsessed with how the world elsewhere always intrudes on the small-town life of their cartoon population (in this they follow the lead of “The Simpsons”). But this intrusion is famously depicted as an anal probe from outer space operated by those aliens who look like the oblong skulls from guitar picks. That intrusion from elsewhere is also depicted as Father Christmas from the sewer, the Santa—scramble the letters and you get Satan—who makes the once-sacred holiday an excremental, that is, commercial vacation from reality. And it is similarly depicted as a loquacious turd that gets its fifteen minutes of fame as the subject of an interview. Is it your imagination, or do the microphone and that piece of shit have the same shape? [https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Hankey,_the_Christmas_Poo]
Now, we could dismiss the scatological investments of “South Park” as the backward, frat-boy humor of the creators, who do, in fact, indulge every adolescent idiocy available to them. In other words, we could say that their relentlessly crude anality has nothing to do with the culture they interpret, and nothing to do with their purposes and results—it’s something we can ignore, it’s not important, it’s just there, like the privy in Luther’s moment of revelation as rendered by later theologians. But what if they’re onto something? What if “South Park”’s inexplicable popularity is, like Luther’s, a function of a new anality determined by and experienced as the universalization of exchange value—of finance capital—we call globalization?
There’s no way to answer the question without recourse to psychoanalysis, but I’ll keep it short. Freud’s general theory of sublimation—how we turn our desires into legible, acceptable demands on and requests of others—and his specific studies in “anal erotism” are immediately relevant and consistently productive in addressing “South Park.” Sublimation happens, he argued (and Geza Roheim demonstrated), insofar as particular bodily experiences are expressed and translated into the more accessible symbolic resources made available by the culture at large. Words and less complicated visual icons are the crucial symbolic resources in this sense, for we situate ourselves in the world beyond our bodies by talking or writing (or drawing), by depicting and changing the world with words and icons that others can understand, We feel and communicate our original experiences as bodily states or desires because as infants we can make sounds, but we have no intelligible words or icons to share. We grow up, then, as we grow out of our bodies by means of linguistic abstractions—we sublimate and sanitize those original experiences as we “rise above” our bodies by replacing sounds with words and icons. But of course the body’s urges always remain as ingredients in the mind’s eye. [7]
Money is the only symbolic resource that is comparable in scope to language. It is the universal commodity, exchangeable for anything; it works like a primal metaphor, thus allowing us to recognize and negotiate difference by equating unlike things (reducing a whole person, for example, to a bodily orifice, as in “he’s a real asshole,” or acknowledging the equivalent values of an expensive car and a cheap house). Psychoanalysis follows the lead of anthropology, however, in treating money not as the epitome of economic utility but as the extremity of irrationality. In Freud’s (and Sandor Ferenczi’s) terms, money is the sublimated, sanitized equivalent of shit. In other words, our desire for money—wealth in the abstract—is the enduring residues of the emotional attachment to excrement that comes with the anal-sadistic stage of infantile development, before the bodily sources of the child’s sexual pleasure are “elevated” and confined to the genitals by the rigors of the Oedipus complex.
The child’s feces are originally experienced and perceived as a detachable part of his body, as the first thing he can control with muscular effort and the first object he can give away, as a gift—by the same token, it’s the first approximation of his property, a separate, tangible, fungible asset he “owns” outright. No wonder anal erotism organizes his infantile sexual pleasure: his feces are the material evidence of his differentiation from himself and from the external world, but they also measure his mastery over his body, which is all the identity he knows. As he inevitably learns to rise above the pleasures of playing with the fecal masses he produces, that is, as he sanitizes the urge to accumulate and allocate more of his own shit, he gradually transfers his emotional attachment to other separate, tangible, fungible assets, like collectibles, coins, and eventually less solid forms of money.
By this accounting, the anal-sadistic urges are trans-historical dimensions of human being, but they remain recessive symptoms of infantile development, signs of childishness or deviance—”a somewhat disgusting morbidity,” as Keynes put it—until the advent of capitalism validates them as necessary, rational, even admirable character traits of adults (Freud and Max Weber were studying the corresponding personality type at exactly the same moment in the early 20th century). At that point, the anal-compulsive personality becomes normal; for when money mediates all social relations outside the family, however constituted, no one can avoid the urge to accumulate—as the lonely scrivener knew, to “prefer not to” is to suffer poverty and social disgrace, maybe even starve to death.
Let’s now revisit the question that was the occasion for this methodological manifesto. What if the creators of “South Park” are onto something—what if their inexplicable popularity is a function of a new anality determined and organized by the universalization of exchange value—of finance capital—we call globalization? What if this desublimation of money, which requires the return of the repressed infantile experience Freud named anal erotism, is both the means and the end of their mad cartoon abstractions?
In the 16th century, Martin Luther explained that “money is the word of the Devil”—this Evil One was the modern Protestant version of the ancient and medieval Trickster—so that bondage to the new world of capitalism meant surrender to the demonic: “There is therefore no worse enemy of mankind on earth, next to the Devil himself, than the covetous man and the usurer, for he wishes to become God over all men.” The Devil and commodity fetishism always go together, as Brown and Michael Taussig have more recently demonstrated, and they still do, as the creators of “south Park” remind us week after week. Like Luther, they explain that since money is more or less excrement—in dreams and in archaic cultures, money typically appears as some kind of shit—this surrender to the demonic is a way of dredging human beings in their own feces, their own filth. If the world is ruled by the Devil, everyone is unclean.
But the original Protestant revolt against the complacence of Catholicism—you’d better understand that your very own soul is at risk, don’t rust the priests!—and against the Devil’s dominion in this world became, by the end of the 17th century, just another contract with the Devil, an accommodation to the seemingly demonic forces that were reshaping every social relation to accord with the commodity form. That is the contract renewed and enforced by the unconscious Protestantism of “South Park.” We are all awash in our own shit, it tells us—suburban Americans are no less subject to the financial forces driving globalization than Mexican peasants—and in this sense the cartoon series is a primitive, anti-realist rendition of Karen Finley’s equally excremental vision of a world turned inside out.
If everything has a price, no matter where you are on earth, then everything has gone to Hell—no brand of authenticity is any longer available, not to anyone. Darkness falls on our brightly painted suburbs, the excremental Other invades, and there is nothing to be done about it, not even laugh. There’s nothing funny about “South Park,” Comedy Central’s flagship series—it’s been renewed through 2027—because its sense of humor derives from a cynical, satirical contempt for everything, the kind that thrives late at night in sophomores’ dorm rooms. Cartman dies in almost every episode, but there he is again next time: welcome to the repetition compulsion of Groundhog Day without the possibility of redemption by maturation. In the fourth season, the boys moved from the 3rd to the 4th grade; they’ve been there ever since.
Such is the death wish that is American culture. Such is the longing for boyish beginnings out there on a new frontier, call it Colorado for now, where the past can’t weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living because “textualism” means words lose their meaning after 1789, “original intent” excludes novel fact—even the end of chattel slavery or femme couverture—in favor of previous truth, where nothing happens and so nothing is to be done, where human rights are as fungible as futures on the commodities exchange, where regression means liberation.
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[1]. See my previous Substack columns on the ‘shooters,” as we now blithely refer to these killing machines, e.g., “Is Peyton Gendron a Man?”
[2]. See Theweleit, Male Fantasies 2 vols. (1977, trans. 1987-89); Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972, trans. 1981), with a preface by Michel Foucault.
[3] Theweleit, vol. 2: “Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror”; Mary Trump, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020).
[4} For Freud on masochism, see the citations in the Bibliographical Essay pertaining to chapter 4 of James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out (2009). See otherwise, Deleuze, Masochism (1967 as “Coldness and Cruelty,” trans. 1971), and Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1991).
[5] Section III of this essay is drawn from Livingston, Inside Out, chap. 4.
[6] For citations, see ibid., the Bibliographical Essay at chapters 4-5.
[7] See Geza Roheim, The Origin and Function of Culture (1944).