<<TRANSMATHOME

3.2 Regression and Aggression

Traversing the psychoanalytic theoretical realm of the death drive to what I call the corporeal version of the death drive is the next area I wish to discuss. Here I will take some very common psychoanalytic terms, such as aggression and psychosis, and look at the ways in which these terms are themselves death drives pointed away from the subject. Although they are corporal death drives and therefore refer to my argument, aggression and regression represent the re-gressive and a-ggressive externalized drive for a transformed flesh that continues the nihilism of the perfectly-formed male subject and psychoanalytic theorist. Regression and aggression have a far more horrific incarnation in the schema I am evolving of a creative utilization of death. Where I wish to extend selfhood from I/Other (internal/external) to continuous movement and division, regressive and aggressive drives confound this binary at the expense (rather than the affirmation) of (self and/as) others. Such affirmation is necessary in formulating an ethics of somatic death. Within such a vitalistic formulation of the utilization of death is the affirmation of the value of existence (force or Deleuze and Guattari’s haeccity) both within the self and within but not extricable from others. The force of the self is only one force amongst many that give each moment of force(s) a certain unique intensity. Without this vitalistic formulation a nihilistic version of the affect of death creates a self introspectively obsessed, and completely unaware of the haeccity of the self or of others, but only aware of the loss of the supremely valued object of its own subjectivity.

Aggressive and regressive drives, evinced originally through psychoanalysis, continue through the popular emergence of serial killers as sideshow subjectivities for analysis in novels and film. Serial killer ‘subjectivity’ (more correctly pathologization) poses a problem for my theories because of the grave ethical implications of ‘becoming’ destructive and aggressive in order to transform. [23] Although aggression and psychosis both antagonize normalized subjectivity and are processual without necessarily becoming fixed modes of being, they are regressive due to their privileging of the id and pre-symbolism, and destructive due to the reverberations of the actions which come from the aggressively affected subject. Aggression has particular problems that have been both repudiated and embraced in psychoanalysis. Melanie Klein exposes innate infantile aggression as basic to desire while Freud suggests that aggression be always written over with desire. But what both indicate is the necessary something which is infantile about aggression, which relates to the id, immediate satisfaction and demands which are not possible and, eventually, ethical. Aggression is, at its most basic level, desire that is supremely self-oriented in a different way to the self-orientation I am advocating through watching film. Aggression is the suffering of others, or the Other, as a means to achieve satisfaction and as a by-product of the demand for immediate satisfaction. For example, murder, which is an aggressive satisfaction of a desire, or robbery, an aggressive by-product which harms the other because of the fulfillment of the self’s desire regardless of its implications. Beginning my theories with a singular (albeit aggregate) self as opposed to a social or communitarian subject, primarily concerns introspective corporeality and consciousness, not those drives and transformative feelings which necessarily impinge upon others. For this reason aggression and psychosis do not possess the ethics that a positive form of ruptured or processual subjectivity should have. Aggressive and psychotic embrace of externalized death represents the very emphatic divide between representation and viewing and the closest one could ever get to a Real affect, that of causing a certain event which sees bodies and beings destroyed. Even at the most crucial point in the causing of death by one person of another, representation is still all we have and it does not take away from the visceral gravity of the situation. But this gravity cannot be opposed to ‘only’ representation; either fake or filmed, because even the aggressive act of murder still faces a representation of ‘death’ at the moment when the person becomes corpse.

Mark Seltzer in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture [24] focuses on the inability of the new American subjectivity of serial killer to differentiate the fissure between reality and representation, or rather, between the self and representation. The serial killer comprehends and fulfils (him/her [25] ) self through reading about what constitutes a serial killer. Rather than the non-serial-killer learning about serial killers through a study of ‘them’, the prior concept of ‘them’ is what enables a serial killer to fulfil a ‘me’. The public serial murderer of FBI profiles internalizes the maker of death in order to become the means by which to understand and be the self. Further the fascination by the ‘public’ for torn bodies, (and always in public, either in the home or in the street but never in the self,) is similarly internalized by the killer. However the self of the serial killer, Seltzer suggests, is murky territory. The killer is called the minus-man, the one-in-ten or person-next-door invisible man-who-performs-man man. [26] So two interdependent features constitute the killer for Seltzer; his not entirely formulated molar self, and his inability to comprehend this murky self divided from representation/ technology/ fantasy/ architecture and a whole gamut of other twentieth century topographies. In summary either the killer has not entered the (proper) world of symbols or rather, he has entered it too whole-heartedly. I am going to avoid this basic Lacanian interpretation without entirely doing away with psychoanalysis for the moment. Seltzer states “… the sex crime, more generally, is routinely experienced in terms of the violent passage of fantasy into act, private desire into public spectacle.” [27] The serial killer has private desire that becomes public spectacle. Seltzer says that the killer cannot differentiate between any form of public spectacle and private desire. The killer internalizes violent spectacle, yet later Seltzer states he externalizes private phantasy. This confusion is not, however, a contradiction. Rather it is evidence of the very fluidity of what constitutes inside and outside for the subjectivity of serial killer. Which posits two problems. First Seltzer points out

There is the permanent branding of potentially dangerous people: the formation of a permanent class of the stigmatized person, a brand of person, marked and identified for all time by his criminal acts. This enters the law despite the fact that rates of recidivism (that is, the rate at which acts reconfirm identities) are in fact lower for the high-risk offenders required to register themselves than for any other groups. (About 19% compared to about 22%). [28]

Seltzer rightly points to the difficulty of making a certain subject-type conform to a type that is being constituted by its non-divisibility from ‘everything else’ in culture, but he is also suggesting that the problems in creating serial killer subjectivity be rectified through empirical and ‘truthful’ statistical numbers. By doing this Seltzer enforces a very traditional concept of subjectivity, that acts in many cases create/affirm subjectivity (even if it is only 22%) and therefore produces a non-profile of the serial killer, albeit a fairly rigid one. By non-profile I mean, he is stating that a serial killer cannot be placed into a conventional subjectivity mould, yet it is because 81% of serial killers do not fit into such a mould that they should not be ‘typed’. Is Seltzer succeeding in creating his own anti-subjectivity mould for serial killers, suggesting that at least 81% are the same, fixing his model into a real, quantifiable representation of the negativity of death? One of the largest problems of psychoanalysis performed on anything less than a one-to-one basis is that it affirms various slots of pathology each psyche may be fitted into. In this respect both psychoanalysis and the serial killer that embraces a ‘real’ death drive over a psychical one, deny the potentials of death as a transformative concept, even before the most important question of ethics is addressed. Both affirm a type that conforms to behavioral rules even if they are the rules of non-conformity. The second problem is the pathologization of a fluidity of interior/exterior toward an explanation of serial killers, which closes off the potentials of fluidity as well as those of a re-figuring of death by assuming a body extricated from or before ‘culture’, overlaid with the outside world. [29] By using the serial killer (or the psychotic) as the pathological subject of non-differentiation between inside/outside a presumption of a priori matter of the flesh, knowable before and as a level zero of being is assured. Alternatively the serial killers inside/outside dilemma in Seltzer could be seen as ignoring the body altogether and focussing instead on psychic pathology, where representation, desire and subjectivity are all located explicitly in a Cartesian mind field, a process of mapping the mind. While the killer only ever ‘kills’ a body, the death of the subject the killer does not know or consider is what causes outrage at murder. No subject knows their own body enough to prevent its derangement causing death, except perhaps surgeons on a superficial level (what the surgeon wants for a body is not necessarily what the surgeon will be able to achieve). Flesh in the analysis of serial killers is completely repressed despite its use as an artifact of crime. All a serial killer does is destroy the flesh. This is enough to constitute ethically unacceptable behavior. Culture, however, only focuses upon the dead subject, which both fails to address what the killer has done and hence fails to comprehend death on its basic pure-corporeal level. Culture is affected by the corporeal but represses it, in order to focus on the subject, who might offer a potential site of study or knowledge. The most immediately repressed point is that there is no subjectivity or even potential for subjectivity extricable from living flesh.

The subject ‘serial killer’ and its relatively new pathologization fit well with psychoanalytic psychosis theory. Where the two fields merge produces a good example of the regressive version of the uses of death. Regression is backward facing change that necessarily traverses familiar realms, while progression is non-linear future facing process that aims towards differentiation, flux and the rupture of integrated subjectivity. Both progressive and aggressive uses of death utilize violence but where the progressive violently transforms the singular self, the aggressive effects (the) Other(s). It is destructive in the most negative sense of the word. The aggressive drive is present in most psychoanalytic analyses and is most explicitly theorized by Melanie Klein.  Jacqueline Rose appropriated the theories of Klein within a wider context, from psychoanalysis to sociology and particularly war, Seltzer has taken both Klein and Rose as a theoretical basis of his serial killer theories. This seems to be an easy evolution for this form of regression – murder of individuals and murder en masse. Implicit in Klein’s work is the infantilism of the aggressive impulses. And indeed, instead of an oedipal child that desires the (usually opposite sexed) parent while feeling aggressive towards the Other, Klein posits the proximity of the child to its closest parent as “something which devours”. [30] Aggression in Klein is the level zero of impulse and desire and in the infant is dangerous because the infant knows no differentiation between phantasy and act. This theory of Klein’s is evinced in exactly the same manner that Seltzer explicates the serial killer’s lack of differentiation between the world and the self, which leads on from a lack of differentiation between phantasy and ‘real’ action. Anxiety, which leads to aggression, is implicit in the lack of differentiation in an infant. Rose states, “Thus the child’s anxiety becomes the foundation for the first experience of ‘as if’: ‘We surmise that the child feels as if’; ‘He behaves as if”, to my mind, is the same thing as saying ‘He has phantasies…’.” [31]   Both the child and the serial killer are unable to experience phantasy as distinct from action, or, both experience phantasy so effectively they behave and feel in a manner suggesting the phantasy impinges upon their actions and reactions, an effect not necessarily appropriate for ‘real world’ behavior. This may to suggest that I am over-differentiating the inside and outside, that I am pointing to an essential division between act and thought. I figure this relationship, rather, as one which regulates the subject, both corporeally and experientially, as able to experience drive, phantasy and pleasure introspectively, without the need to experience a capital act or separate product from such phantasy: locating the phantasy of others in and of the self. The ethically experiencing corporeal subject thus regulates action, which comes after this primary experience of others in the self.

Phantasies and visceral strata of the self are considered as others - the self is constituted through many connections on many levels of foreignness and familiarity, and considered as such. That is, a subject who has already identified its own self’s others will, in a social situation, exist as a continuum of how they already exist, rather than consider others based only on what is outside the self. Considering others of the self forms a fluid mode of consideration of others, both their specificities and their potentials, but not limited by such specificities. Consciousness of an other is here based not on the interior/exterior model of thought but on the ability to consider every moment as a certain haeccity, be it only within one self in front of an image or in a social situation where the others within the self are part of the consideration of all others. [32] By demanding the subject be figured as corporeally embodied the inside/outside division can not survive. Flesh is the stratum, which traverses and potentially annihilates inside/outside, phantasy/action and psychical/Real because flesh is the subject (inside) and sensations of ex-istence (outside) indivisibly and simultaneously.

The regressive serial killer and the infant are unable to experience the self differently because the self does not exist as such. Even if we take this non-differentiated body which could have its own potentials for subversion, we cannot take a body that demands action and effect in the ‘real’ world as subversive because of the real capital desire-act-effect equation which this mode of figuring phantasy demands. No matter where the body is located in this equation, it is still an equation with a recognizable aim towards a ‘product’. In the case of the infant the product is mastery over the world, which involves a separation of the self from the world in order to rectify what Rose calls Klein’s “fundamental negativity which [Klein’s] papers put at the base of subjectivity”. [33] For Seltzer’s killers it is the activity of murder, actual forced death as opposed to death as concept or representation that demands the corpse exist as capital waste (hence outrage at the act as one of reckless wastefulness).

Both the infant and the serial killer represent a relationship to death as re-enforcing a capital transformation with a definite aim/end. In returning these theories for a moment to traditional psychoanalysis, it is the very notion of the Real, which here could be seen as the production of capital (symbols, language), over phantasy or representation (which desires affect more than product) that destroys both life and the death drive. Earlier, I discussed the non-polar relationship between life/desire and the death drive. Serge Leclaire, in his case study of a woman unable to desire because of the early death of her parents, discusses the material power of phantasy as vital in asserting the formation of desire. His patient ‘Thérèse’ experienced the death of her mother and father at the Kleinian moment in her infancy when she wished for their death. Hence her aggressive drive was actually satiated, and thus all the elements implicit in the non-satisfaction of phantasy, namely continuation of desire, were absent. She actually experienced a satisfaction and closure to Lacan’s eternal dissatisfaction of drive constitutive of desire. Leclaire sums up the importance of the death drive as dissatisfaction thus,

It is the death drive that in and through the figure of the tyrant to be killed, and the primary narcissistic representative to be destroyed, defines the place of the unconscious representatives as both one’s native land of exile and lost paradise to be regained. It is the death drive that ensures, in a word, the presence/absence of the Other, without which there can be no speaking and desiring ‘I’. [34]

Paradise is that which can never be regained so as to ensure the continuance of the death drive and hence the life force which is inspired by frustrated desire. I have pointed out earlier the limits which psychoanalysis has in its insistence on a formulated subject that desires the Other, yet in this instance it is useful in explicating the necessity of having an other. For my theories it is the other(s) within ourselves that tends us towards potentially different consciousness. Why the other(s)? Because an/the other(s) assures the maintenance of an ethics by assuring a non-satisfaction of actual death drive phantasy, which is the dissatisfied death drive. This ethics addresses the sanctity of the existence of others, assuring the Other is considered in relation to the drives of the self so that the self, in attaining satisfaction, does not destroy others. By first locating others within the self, the self need no longer recognize a concrete barrier between the ‘I’ and ‘everything else’. Situations of desire and drive can occur within the self becoming as they can occur in contact with others, so that satisfaction does not mean death for the object of desire and the desiring subject, but change for the self and potentially for other selves. The problem of the death drive driven outwards and satisfied is the aggressive violence of the serial killer towards the undifferentiated self that has no other. The murderous death drive of psychoanalysis must remain a drive and not a reality in order to affirm the life/desire or libidinal drives. While desire for death (of self or other) is a drive it is affirmative; when it is satisfied it changes to nihilism and the death drive is simply reduced to death.

Something is killed when phantasy is satisfied; in the case of Thérèse it was the life drive of desire, in that of the serial killer it is others. The death drive which assures the presence/absence of the Other always assures an other while the serial killer assures the annihilation of anything other by conflating the self with everything around him. I am not suggesting here that the maintenance of a rigid barrier of self is the answer, exactly the opposite. What I aim towards is the deconstruction of the self as object in eternally frustrated situations with other objects. The self should not be killed off, neither should it be maintained. Becoming is a refiguring of the division between self and experience, rather than an annihilation of any concept of self, such as the serial killer exhibits. By exhibiting a disregard for boundaries of inside and outside, the serial killer engages with and reaffirms the importance of this binary. In Seltzer’s argument, the inability to conceptualize self outside of environment becomes pathological, while I wish to do away with such dichotomous concepts all together. Going beyond the Cartesian split, the primary inside/outside binary, means going beyond those forms of pathology, which maintain its importance. The binary of inside and outside is an evolved form, a macrocosmic version, of Cartesianism. The pathology of the serial killer as undifferentiated is a further articulation of Cartesian-driven pathologies like addiction, where the ‘body’ has an addiction the ‘mind’ cannot control. The serial killer is an aspect of the environment that cannot be controlled from the ‘inside’. In this chapter the relationship of the subject to death must go beyond the division of both mind/body and inside/outside because the aim of the book is to theorize a new consciousness based on an exploration of horror, viscerality and other un-theorized consciousness implicit in and not divided from daily experience (which includes phantasy and does not define experience as capital act). These are not privileged sites but starting points and the body of new consciousness is not an end but an ongoing process. A process by definition must progress, yet like the phantasy of psychoanalysis it never attains. Unlike psychoanalysis, however, it never has an object or level of attainment in mind. Death in its representation unnerves the subject and hence it is from here that it shall be used as a means to begin the processual transforming (but never transformed) self.

<<TRANSMATHOME|NEXT>>