Abstract
She was a dark skinned cunt double of somebody for sure. Can you guess who? One day, just before Labor Day, little Reno Heimlich, I mean Oli North Jr. (this is me when I was a little white boy wanting to be a hero) set out for the midway. I never really wanted to be George Bush, although I did want to be a top secret agent. I guess this was because I wanted to rise to the top rather than start at the top. I was a good little cute white boy, kind of skinny and uncertain, but I imagined myself far more. I had a haircut just like Oli North Jr. I was Oli North Jr. And, since my dead father was a sign and my alive father was a sign-maker, I got into the State Fair without paying. Or at least I thought I wasn’t paying. Who was paying? Somebodies must be paying? In the back of a company vehicle. LYING low, kee** secret(s). It was the 1950s.
Frightening scenes of uncanny literature are produced by hidden anxieties concealed within the subject, who then interprets the world in terms of his or her apprehensions.—Rosemary Jackson1
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Notes
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion, New York: Methuen, 1981, p. 64.
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Stachey, London: The Hogarth Press, 1961, p. 237.
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. A.A. Brill, New York: Vintage Books, 1918, p. 207.
Rosiland Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject, Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977, p. 101.
See, for instance, Judith Lewis Herman, Father-Daughter Incest, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Unlike the ritual reversals of power implied by my genealogically informed use of the term incest, Herman notes that within contemporary (patriarchal) society, “there is nothing subtle about power relations between adults and children. Adults have more power than children.... Children are esssentially a captive poulation, totally dependent upon their parents or other adults for their basic needs. Thus they will do whatever they perceive to be necessary to preserve a relationship with their caretakers” (p. 27).
Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984, p. 114.
For a theoretical elaboration of this suggestion see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge, 1990. Butler here draws upon a mix of feminist, critical psychoanalytic and Foucaultian thought in theorizing the construction of sexual dispositions as psychic and material effects of the performative enactment of prohibitive laws which, in turn, function to congeal the genealogy of their own productive power.
While the phrase TOTAL WAR refers, in part, to Paul Virilio’s descriptions of militaristic social technologies dominating contemporary society, I mean also to direct attention to the relationship between imperial social forms and the prohibition on intimate homosexual exchange. This relation is suggested by A.L. Kroeber in an early review of the ethnological merits of Freud’s theory of the incest taboo. See A.L. Kroeber, “Totem and Taboo: an Ethnologic Psychoanalysis,” American Anthropologist, 22 (1920), pp. 48–55. In contrast to the “neurotic anxiety” surrounding both heterosexual incest and homosexual relations in “Hellenistic, Roman Imperial and recent eras,” Kroeber points to the institutional acceptance of homosexuality by “North American and Siberian natives” as well as during Western Middle Ages. Although not explicit in Kroeber’s account, one particularly fruitful line for theorizing culturally specific taboos on ecstatic forms of “homosexual” expression and upon the excesses of “nonuseful” or non (re)productive eroticism in general is to examine the genealogical relations between such taboos and the disciplinary rituals governing (male) bodies in imperial or military guided social formations. This, perhaps, is a way of understanding the corpus of Michel Foucault’s (w)ritings.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in R.R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975, pp. 191–192.
Teresa de Lauretis, “Through the Looking Glass,” in Tereas de Lauretis and Stephen Heath, eds., The Cinematic Apparatus, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980, p.190.
Helene Cixous, “Sorties,” in Helene Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, p. 149.
Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin, St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981, p. 150.
Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” in Selected Writings, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 120.
Allon White, “Hysteria and the End of Carnival,” in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennehouse, eds., The Violence of Representation, New York: Routledge, 1989, p. 163.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalywood, San Francisco: City Lights, 1986, p. 218.
Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977.
Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison, New York: Norton, 1967, p. 74.
For a feminist discussion of the merits and limitations of Bataille’s contradictory critique of patriarchy see Michèle Richman, “Eroticism in the Patriarchal Order,” in Paul Buck, ed., Violent Silence: Celebrating Georges Bataille, London: The Georges Bataille Event, 1984, pp. 91–102.
Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.
Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy: Sex Roles and the Madness of Dionysos, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988;
and Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978.
Alice Jardine, Gynesis, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
For a critique of the commodified character of “New Age” social technologies, see Andrew Ross, “New Age Technoculture,” in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 531–555.
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 139.
Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, p. 105.
Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant, Montreal: New World Perspective, 1984, p. 58.
For a related discussion of modernity and uncanny contact with the real see Mladen Dolar, “‘I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night’: Lacan and the Uncanny,” October, 58 (Fall 1991), pp. 6–23.
Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, trans. Philip Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), 1991, p. 12.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, p. 51.
Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brian, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.
Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, trans. Brian Singer, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990, p. 1.
Marshall McLuhan, Counter Blast, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969, p. 26.
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, New York: Bantom Books, 1967, p. 26.
Catherine Clément, The Weary Sons of Freud, trans. Nicole Ball, New York: Verso, 1987, p. 54.
Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities... or The End of the Social, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and John Johnston, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
Michael Schrage, “The Media is the (Corporate) Culture,” The Boston Sunday Globe, November 4, 1990, p. A2.
Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918),” in Three Case Histories, New York: Collier Books, 1963, p. 295.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain, New York: The Free Press, 1915, pp. 122, 107, 106, 255.
Jacques Attali, Noise: the Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, p. 22.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 88, 89, 90.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage Books, 1980, pp. 57–62.
Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver, New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Sheila Balken, Ronald J. Berger and Janet Schmidt, Crime and Deviance in America: a Critical Approach, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1980, p. 231.
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Random House, 1965, pp. 15–16.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan, (New York: Pantheon 1970), pp. 3–16.
Stephen Pfohl and Avery Gordon, “Criminological Displacements: a Sociological Deconstruction,” Social Problems, Vol. 33, No. 6 (October/December 1986), p. S101.
Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 166.
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© 1992 Stephen Pfohl
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Pfohl, S. (1992). Totems and Taboo Hyper-Narcissism, Death and the Uncanny. In: Death at the Parasite Cafe. Culture Texts. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22129-5_9
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