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Representing desire
in postmodernity
Paula Smithard & David Burrows
The politics of desire has been a prominent feature of much contemporary
art in London and elsewhere. Recent exhibitions in the capital, bearing
titles such as 'Popocultural' (Cabinet Gallery/South London
Gallery), 'Bonkers Bird', 'Goffick', 'Shut up
you Stupid Cunt' (BANK) and 'Belladonna' (ICA), have continued
to draw upon discourses which were important for the formation of identity
politics in the seventies and the eighties. In viewing these recent shows
one could conclude that the 'de-centring' of the subject and
the assault on repressive social institutions through a pursuit of pleasure,
remains a key concern for many contemporary artists. Some, informed by
post-structuralist theory, have gone further by radically investing in
libidinal economies thus implying that representation itself is a mechanism
of repressive power. Such practices have attempted to explore desire as
a drive (towards pleasure and the dissolution of subject/object boundaries)
rather than conceptualise desire as something oriented towards an object:
a move which has challenged the notion of desire as something produced
by the prohibition of pleasure.
One could further conclude from recent exhibitions that this particular
celebration of libidinal economy and its concomitant critique of representation
has been challenged, of late, by artists whose works have manifested the
limits of desire or the relationship of desire to the social realm. While
the various ruminations on the politics of desire by contemporary artists
are too diverse to map, we intend to identify two prominent, recent projects
with the positions outlined above. The purpose of this is to point towards
some of the implications of a libidinal economy as expressed in cultural
forms today.
The first example is Jake and Dinos Chapman's installation Chapmanworld;
a utopia populated by mutant infant mannequins created for the ICA in
the spring of 1996 in which Logos was banished, setting libidinal drives
free to run riot in a perverted Garden of Eden. The second example is
Larry Clark's film Kids which similarly presented pleasure-seeking
bodies in the form of very young people, though Clark's work differed
from that of the Chapman brothers as it contextualised the kid's
libidinal economies as a form of alienated consumption. In considering
these examples we will discuss the problematics of these two projects
which have developed out of Post-modern debates on pleasure and representation.
The comedian Jack Dee is not commonly thought to be an expert on matters
relating to the politics of desire; so perhaps it was just an accident
that he quipped: "they say that parents shouldn't smack their
children but I think they should stop fucking them first". Dee's
insight would not be wasted on Jake and Dinos Chapman who populated Chapmanworld
with mutant infant mannequins. It was claimed that the infants who sported
erect cocks, anus and vaginas where their mouths, noses and ears would
normally be found, were genderless. A further claim was made that these
beings were "reproductive" and "not representations" - a
declaration which owed much to the post-structuralist cultural discourses
of the seventies and eighties.
We understand a Libidinal economy1 as a force
that shatters the stage of representation, the rigours of production and
all value systems through a libidinal drive which recognises neither hierarchies,
ethics or history. Lyotard conceptualised this through the image of a
revolving bar. When static the bar serves to separate the subject or body
from the world but when the bar rotates at high speed all boundaries are
destablised and the surfaces that separate things (people, objects, genders,
substances) all dissolve. Such libidinal economies have been severely
criticised as risking too much but despite even Lyotard's own denouncement
of such 'philosophy', libidinal economies became an established
feature of eighties Post-Modern discourse. What then is a stake in a turn
to a libidinal economy? Is it that the promise of freedom can collapse
into the familiar consumption patterns of late capitalism, or is it that
such a move could not hope to escape the stage of representation? The
question is perhaps then, not 'how perfectly libidinal economies
fit with the patterns of consumption of late capitalism', but rather
can those desires, pleasures and excesses that might be set in flight
through a libidinal economy' escape capitalism? There is also a further
question of gender politics as it might be highlighted that Lyotard's
Nietzschean libidinal economy should be understood in the context of a
patriarchal society.
In Chapmanworld this Lyotardian discourse on pleasure and desire is examined
through various devices. The kids dressed only in Nike trainers, are 'polymorphous
perverse'. Perhaps they are visitors from a future where advanced
technology has eradicated the limits for libidinal excess, creating a
world where the libido is no longer confined to the imagination or the
literary, as in Bataille's 'The Story of the Eye': in this
future anus could become mouths and pricks could replace noses through
advanced genetic engineering.
Freud's definition of the 'polymorphous perverse' is premised
upon the pre-oedipal state of a child's body as a surface invested
with uneven sites of erotic intensities, sites which are limitless. In
Chapmanworld, the artists sign-posted these possible erogenous zones with
orifices and phallus that unexpectedly grow at surprising places all over
the angelic bodies of their creations. In Zygotic Acceleration, biogenetic
de-sublimated libidinal model (1995) the space between two heads becomes
a vagina and noses metamorphose into pricks, inviting the viewer to leave
the safety of voyeurism and plunge a penis or fingers into the orifices.
The ginger-haired Fuckface (1994) has both aroused cock and orifice offering
pleasure to any passing hermaphrodite. Within Chapmanworld there is a
nostalgia for the pre-oedipal and to take part in the delights of the
garden you must forget yourself, forget your history and leave your civilised
bourgeois subjectivity at home.
The Chapman's in their installation and through their polymorphous
perverse beings, challenged the western fantasy of the child: they implied
that their mutant infant beings didn't exist as subjects. Visitors
to Chapmanworld were offered the choice of either forgetting themselves
or acting as a responsible parent and condemning the whole affair. What
is lacking in the Chapman brother's gambit, though, is not only the
consequences of forgetting but the contingencies and circumstances that
form our desires. In this light, the Chapman's supposed abandonment
of representation is contradictory as on the one hand, it is strategy
designed to incur moral outrage and thus employs representation to this
end and on the other hand, formulates an idealised, abstract libidinal
universe.
Our uneasiness with the Chapman's abstract libidinal universe can
be expanded upon by considering Lyotard's critique of the subject,
brilliantly analysed by Peter Dews in his book The Limits of Disenchantment.
Dews quotes Lyotard's use of a Borges story 'The fauna of mirrors'
and suggests that for Lyotard, 'Subjectivity is presupposed by reflection'
and the consequence of this is that the specular world is lost (imprisoned)
through this reflection. For Lyotard, this reflection must be smashed
to unleash the specular world (libidinal economies). Lyotard, however,
recognised that there was a problem with his libidinal revolution: he
realised that one person's excess might be felt as an objectifying
force by someone else and in 'Au Just' and later in 'The
Differand' he refuted parts of his earlier thesis.
Contemporary culture, identity and even politics is often lived through
the activism of consumption in which bodies are empowered and identities
are shaped, changed and undermined; but what of alienated consumption?2
A reading of Larry Clark's film Kids offers a dystopian vision of
excess and consumption, something he blames on bad parenting.3
Either by chance or by design Kids evokes the concept of libidinal economies;
the anarchic, pleasure-seeking bodies in Kids are without order, the kids
are ciphers caught in an endless flow of consuming the next pleasure fix
in a perpetual present. The lead character, Telly, defines his identity
through a relentless pursuit of "pussy" and at the end of the
film he says:
'When you're young not much matters. When you find something
that you care about then that's all you got. When you go to sleep
at night you dream of pussy. When you wake up it's the same thing,
it's there in your face, you can't escape it. Sometimes when
you're young the only place to go is inside. That's just it,
fucking is what I love, take that away from me and I really got nothing'.4
Kids is a film about bodies in search of pleasure; the lives of the characters
are structured by drifting from one party to the next, the city is one
big concrete playground. The parents are elsewhere; only one parent is
seen, sitting at home nursing a baby, oblivious to her teenage son's
exploits and at various points in the film the kids act as one body - they
skate, drink, fuck, fight, steal, smoke, dance and swap stories about
sex and Aids in large groups. Two scenes capture this behaviour. The first
scene is in a park where the kids, united by their homophobia, bawl at
a passing gay couple whilst sharing a joint. Telly's sidekick Caspar,
high on weed, borrows a skateboard and collides with a passing stranger;
the confrontation leads to the unfortunate guy being brutally beaten by
Caspar and his friends as the camera circles around the faces of the baying
kids raining blows upon their victim. The second scene is at the end of
the film in which the camera passes over the overlapping, interlocking
bodies of the comatose party-goers, the morning after the pleasures of
the night before. They are a group burnt-out by pleasure and seemingly
undifferentiated by class, ethnicity, family or religion. The force that
unifies them is their hedonism encouraged by the absence of their parents
and the production of a social space which constitutes the kids network
of relationships. This network is defined, in the film, through consumption.
For the kids, the city is a series of sites for pleasurable encounters
and the lead character, Telly, is caught in an endless cycle of consuming
and drifting as he searches the city for virgins. He finds them, fucks
them and forgets them. His everyday life is governed by an economy in
which everything is spent, used up, beaten and fucked. In his first soliloquy,
whilst screwing another conquest only one year into her puberty, Telly
makes clear his motivation for his life style:
"Virgins, I love 'em. No diseases, no loose as a goose pussy,
no skank, no nothing. Just pure pleasure".5
The world of Clark's kids manifests itself through an alienation
from the adult world and Telly and Caspar either cannot aspire to, or
refuse to conform to, the values of production and responsibility. Instead
they create a social space in which they are not productive bodies but
consumers who steal, whether it be liquor, money or virginity.
The film presents another narrative interwoven with Telly's pursuit
of pleasure; that of Jennie one of Telly's previous conquests. Telly's
search for Darcy, (his next virgin), is paralleled by Jennie's search
for Telly which begins after a visit to a health centre. Jennie's
search is driven by a recent discovery: although Telly is the only boy
she has ever slept with Jennie has learned that she is HIV positive and
she tries to track Telly down before he infects yet another girl. Telly
however has forgotten Jennie, remembering past conquests is not part of
his vocation but Jennie is Telly's past catching up with him and
in that sense she occupies a different temporality to that of Telly: Jennie
is all too aware that there was a beginning and that death will bring
about an end to her present predicament. Clark here indicates gender differences
between the kids by reflecting on this difference in terms of temporality - Telly
caught in an eternal present and Jenny haunted by the past and future - and
by also presenting the male kids as possessing boundless libidinal energy.
What marks out the world of Kids from the utopia of Chapmanworld is Larry
Clark's insistence on highlighting the contingencies of excessive
behaviour; whereas the Chapman's abstract libidinal universe is unhindered
by social circumstance and the consequences of transgression. In Chapmanworld
the visitor could endlessly renew themselves through a stream of erotic
encounters in a world which offers no limits to pleasure, not even disease
despite their interest in mutation and filth. Clark is forever reminding
interviewers that his Kids are real kids and in his film, while blurring
the boundaries between realism and fiction, the kids often come up against
the limits of pleasure. The spectre of Aids is clearly one limit to Telly's
pleasure, the scenes of poverty, addiction and the mental ill-health filmed
in the estranged blue light of the dawn, are the spectre of another limit.
For Clark there is no escape from representation through a pursuit of
pleasure. In the final scene of the film a wasted Casper, gazing around
at a scene of devastation after raping Jennie, exclaims what one might
suspect to be Clark's own moral outrage, "Jesus Christ! What
happened?"
To agree with Clark, though, who believes that we need better parenting,
that is more understanding parenting, is to call for an ordering of pleasure
and such an ordering is never acceptable to kids. If the Chapman's
demand for a libidinal revolution is problematic then Clark's siding
with the parent, i.e. a Superego, is equally misplaced. The child which
is socialised by learning that certain drives should be repressed to win
parental approval will have those same repressed drives propel future
desires: as everyone knows the forbidden is always desirable. To seek
an escape from representation, parental law and an ordering of pleasure,
suggested by Chapmanworld, seems equally implausible: imagine the Chapman
brothers' world of reproductive beings existing beyond representation
where nothing is forbidden; would it not also be a world without desire?
Despite the limitations of both projects it must be recognised that Larry
Clark and the Chapman's have important insights into the politics
of desire and reveal the limits of each others practices when considered
together. While Clark foregrounds pleasure's relationship to specific
contingencies, a perspective lacking in Chapmanworld, the Chapman's
propose utopias and alternatives to the present, a concern unfortunately
absent in Clark's realism. The representation of the kids in Clark's
film is an interesting one though as it deals with the culture of an alienated
group whose only expression of non-productivity is a cycle of consumption
that at times risks death - indeed in one scene a boy laughs at the
possibility of "going out" fucking, a mood which seems to echo
the much fetishised annihilation of the subject sought by the Chapman's.
Adorno fantasised about some sort of reconciliation between libidinal
drives of the Id and the Ego by banishing the Superego.6
This would be a reconciliation between the spectral world trapped in Borges
mirror and the human world. As is true of all utopias, though, its hard
to visualise such a world as this would mean the pursuit of a sovereignty
without a forbidding Superego, which would no longer direct the subject
behind the subject's back so to speak.
Adorno's utopia is clearly appropriate when considering the pleasurable
economies of the kids in both Chapmanworld and Larry Clark's film
as these young people have no place in the adult world, alienated as they
are by its demands and restrictions which also demarcate the limits of
their pleasure. Their underworld of sex, violence, dress and behavioural
codes could be viewed as not so much a pursuit of freedom but the outlet
for desires and economies otherwise unrecognised. It is hard to imagine
a reconciliation of this conflict, for as Jack Dee implies, not only is
the child a fantasy but so is the good parent.
Notes
1. Jean-François Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris:
Minuit, 1974)
2. An empowered form of consumption, for instance, was delineated by Simon
Edge at a conference which accompanied the exhibition Imagined Communities.
He described a hedonistic life-style that worked, progressively (though
problematically) to further gay acceptability in his paper 'The Politics
of Visibility: hedonism in the gay nineties'. He suggested that the
recent commercial culture has seen less old-style political activism,
but more people coming out. Gay culture has moved from the "unhealthy"
subterranean leather images of Tom of Finland to the "healthy"
cappuccino bars of Old Compton St. While this new commercialism disempowers
those without a disposable income, and those whose consumption has been
curtailed by the Aids virus, the visibility and acceptance of homosexuality
has, in Edge's opinion, been increased. This has thus been achieved
by aligning gay culture, not with an alternative and marginalised politics,
but with capitalism. For Edge this is a new and positive activism.
3. Artforum, May 1995
4. Kids , faber & faber 1996
5. ibid.
6. discussed by Slavoj Zizek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays
on Woman & Causality Verso 1994
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