Chapter Two
ABSENCE . . . OR PRESENCE?
The emergence of the society of commanded enjoyment enacts a dramatic shift in paternal authority. In contrast to the society of enjoyment, the fundamental feature of the society of prohibition is a strong paternal authority who enforces this prohibition and thus acts as a barrier to enjoyment. Keeping society free of open displays of enjoyment, the symbolic father helps to keep subjects content despite their lack of access to prohibited enjoyment. Subjects realize that their duty to the father involves refusing enjoyment, and they see that the prohibition of enjoyment applies to everyone else as well. Thus, the figure of the symbolic father helps to make existence under the prohibition tolerable. Though there always remains a distance between the actual flesh-and-blood father and the symbolic father, the actual father stands in for the latter, attempting to embody symbolic authority. As Lacan puts it, symbolic authority “is incarnated in persons who will bear this authority.”1 The actual father’s failure to fully realize symbolic authority—his inevitable signs of weakness resulting from his actual existence—do not render symbolic authority any less efficacious. “What is essential,” Lacan adds, “is that the subject [. . .] has acquired the dimension of the Name of the Father.”2 In the society of prohibition, the actual father makes himself into a vehicle for symbolic authority (i.e., for the Name of the Father), and as such, he has a status within that society commensurate with this authority.
Though the society of prohibition requires and values the symbolic father, this figure has almost completely disappeared from the contemporary cultural landscape. This absence of the traditional father is a symptom of the emergence of the command to enjoy. To understand the turn from prohibition to commanded enjoyment one must recognize the change at work in the status of paternal authority. The emergent society of enjoyment coincides with a decline in the overt functioning of the father and of symbolic authority. There is no room in this society for the traditional symbolic father because his presence bars enjoyment and commands subjects to accept dissatisfaction. As a result, Paul Verhaeghe notes, “Nowadays, we are living in a period when the symbolic father as such is murdered, together with the belief in him.”3 This murder of the symbolic father has transpired, first of all, on the level of structure.
For Lacan, the symbolic father is crucial because he embodies the Master Signifier (the Name-of-the-Father). This signifier arrests the sliding of signification that occurs within the symbolic order and thereby produces stable meaning. Unlike all the other signifiers, the Master Signifier does not fluctuate, providing a ground for the system of signification. Whereas all other signifiers acquire meaning through their relationship to other signifiers—we can identify a table because it isn’t a chair, which isn’t a couch, and so on—the Master Signifier refers only to itself. It is a self-justifying signifier-without-signified. Without this signifier, meaning becomes difficult to pin down and remains in flux. As Lacan notes in Seminar III, “The relationship between the signified and the signifier always appears fluid, always ready to come undone.”4 The Master Signifier quilts this tenuous relationship between signifier and signified by providing a point at which the relationship between signified and signifier ceases to be fluid. This is the one signifier that always means the same thing, and its meaning does not rely on any other signifiers. It is the signifier that is what it is. But today it has become increasingly difficult to find evidence of a Master Signifier. We seem to lack the self-referential signifier that puts a definite end to the slippage of meaning.
The role that the Master Signifier plays in putting an end to the slippage of meaning and cutting off possibilities has made it unfashionable throughout the emerging society of enjoyment. Because it has the function of excluding certain meanings, the Master Signifier seems the enemy of tolerance and inclusivity. To side with the Master Signifier—no matter which one—is to side with exclusivity. For instance, to take up class as a Master Signifier in one’s theoretical approach, in the manner of the traditional Marxist, is to marginalize race, gender, and sexuality. However, the more we emphasize tolerance, the more we eliminate the place for this kind of privileged signifier. In this way, the structural position of the symbolic father disappears as a viable social identity for actual fathers. Actual fathers “neglect” their role as fathers not simply because they are irresponsible individuals but because the role itself has ceased to be socially viable.
Of course, it has long been the contention of conservative cultural critics that paternal authority has undergone a precipitous decline, that the father no longer holds the position that he once did in American society. These critics—among them, Dan Quayle, William Bennett, and David Blankenhorn—link the decline in paternal authority to the chaotic and permissive nature of contemporary society: all our social problems result from the absence of the father who would lay down the law and utter his prohibition. Dan Quayle exemplifies this position, as he attacks liberals for their role in the father’s decline, for having “undermined parental authority over children, weakened discipline in schools and obstructed the moral education of the young.”5 For Quayle, liberal egalitarianism has unleashed the anarchic enjoyment of children, and we need the father to restore the safeguards against this enjoyment. Quayle identifies the actual father with symbolic authority—the introduction of “moral education” (i.e., prohibition). The implications of this line of thought suggest that removing the father from the family removes the only barrier against unrestrained enjoyment, and thus there exists a direct link between the father’s absence and adolescent promiscuity and violence.
In Fatherless America, David Blankenhorn takes up the conservative case for the traditional father at greater length. He sees fatherlessness as characterizing the contemporary American landscape, and he laments what has become of the father: “The United States is becoming an increasingly fatherless society. A generation ago, an American child could reasonably expect to grow up with his or her father. Today, an American child can reasonably expect not to. Fatherlessness is approaching a rough parity with fatherhood as a defining feature of American childhood.”6 For Blankenhorn, this increasing absence of fathers from the home represents a fundamental shift in the very social organization of American society. Whereas traditionally the father was present to provide discipline in the home, now there is no source for discipline and prohibition. In short, to put it in our terms, he views this fatherlessness as a crisis because he recognizes the central role played by the father in prohibiting enjoyment. Without the father prohibiting enjoyment, nothing stops boys from turning to violence and girls from turning to sex, which is why American society has become increasingly bloody and promiscuous. As Blankenhorn puts it, “One primary result of growing fatherlessness is more boys with guns. Another is more girls with babies.”7 The absence of the father not only disrupts the structure of the family, but it also triggers all of our most serious social problems. This mantra has become a standard refrain from conservatives, but today even cultural critics on the Left have taken notice of the father’s absence and its supposed nefarious effects. In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi, a self-proclaimed feminist (and author of the feminist manifesto Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women), details the negative ramifications of the missing father.
While conservatives such as Quayle and Blankenhorn blame liberals for undermining the status of the father, Faludi contends that in the era of what she labels “ornamental culture” the father no longer has a role to play. The predominance of enjoyment and images of enjoyment leave no place for the father to pass on knowledge (about how things work) and values (about the value of loyalty and hard work). The father’s knowledge and values have no place in the contemporary world. As Faludi puts it, “In an age of celebrity, the father has no body of knowledge or authority to transmit to the son.”8 Formerly, paternal authority did not just consist of laying down a prohibition, but included communicating everything that the father had mastered. But in a society where the command to enjoy predominates, “there is no role for the father. Where there is nothing for him to master and so nothing for him to hand on, he becomes at best a glorified baby-sitter.”9 All of the knowledge that the father once embodied and passed on to the son has become useless because, according to Faludi, success doesn’t require knowledge today. The basis for success has become celebrity, not knowledge. The figure of the father once served as the master, the one who seemed to have all the answers, but now this figure has become superfluous. And the absence of a role for the father in contemporary society has produced an absence of actual fathers. Stiffed chronicles numerous cases of men living without fathers, without any examples on which to model their masculinity. Without the direction of a father figure, Faludi contends, these men lose track of their place in the social order and their connection to the world around them.
Though Faludi grasps the phenomenology of the decline of the father in contemporary American society, she does at the same time betray a nostalgia for an older masculine ideal—that of the organization man, the man who sacrifices his individual pursuits for the sake of the social good. In Stiffed, Faludi apotheosizes the men of the Long Beach Naval Shipyard (along with male icons such as Daniel Boone) for their commitment to their community. They sacrificed so that their community could prosper, and Faludi celebrates this as a model for “constructive” masculinity that has been lost today. (As she writes, the shipyard is closing down.) This attitude places Faludi surprisingly close to groups that have formed to restore this lost masculinity (such as the Promise Keepers), groups that Faludi discusses in her book with an ambivalence that belies her political distance from them. The problem with Faludi’s nostalgia is that a return to the traditional father is impossible. The symbolic father can only appear today in the form of its desperate (and ultimately failed) reassertion. Though Faludi does not go so far as to advocate a return to traditional notions of paternity, most critics of the father’s demise have taken this next step.
The absence of the traditional father, the disappearance of his social role, has spawned many attempts to reconstitute paternal authority. In fact, the fight against the permissiveness of contemporary culture is often couched in terms of fathers once again reasserting their authority and taking paternal responsibility. The huge 1997 gathering of the Promise Keepers group in Washington is only the most prominent example of this culture-wide movement. This group of men came together in order to proclaim a renewed commitment to the paternal role that they had in the past failed to fulfill properly. In his advice for fellow Promise Keepers, Tony Evans, a leader of the group, makes clear that reclaiming paternal authority is its fundamental goal:
The first thing you do is sit down with your wife and say something like this: “Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.” Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back.10
The project outlined here is one of restoring manliness. According to the logic of the Promise Keepers, the sorry state of paternal authority has produced subjects who don’t know that they must accept limitations and who refuse to compromise their own enjoyment for the sake of societal restrictions. We are experiencing so many social problems because fathers have not taught their children the word “no!”—or they haven’t been there to teach them this. If we want to avoid children spiraling out of control, we must have fathers who are more present in the lives of their children. This position represents the prevailing conservative response not only to the absence of the father, but also to the society of enjoyment as a whole.
Because they laud the bygone era of prohibition, calls for a return to paternal authority seem as if they represent a longing to escape the society of enjoyment and its “excessive permissiveness.” But as the mantra of Promise Keeper Tony Evans indicates, the case for a restored fatherhood is actually an attempt to produce enjoyment—and thus to comply with the command to enjoy. In the advice cited above, Evans tells men that they no longer have to worry about all the restraints of courtesy and political correctness when relating to their wives; they can enjoy openly. His advice—“I’m not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back”—frees men to enjoy like “real men,” to act decisively and freely. Here is perhaps the chief indication that we are in the midst of a society of enjoyment: even the attempt to restore prohibition follows the logic of the demand for enjoyment, albeit in the guise of opposing it. When we resurrect the father today, he doesn’t appear in the form of the symbolic father, the barrier to enjoyment. Instead, he appears in a form consonant with the society of enjoyment.11
The overt prohibition and the kind of father embodying it have largely disappeared, but this disappearance has not—as the Promise Keepers claim—left a void. According to Joan Copjec, “the old modern order of desire, ruled over by an Oedipal father, has begun to be replaced by a new order.”12 In this new order, a new father has emerged—a father Slavoj Žižek calls the “anal father of enjoyment.” Rather than prohibiting enjoyment, this new father commands it. The mistake of the Promise Keepers is to see an absence of the father where there has been, in fact, an increased presence. The new father is an anal father because he obsessively attends to every detail of our lives, prying into every private enclave where we might hide enjoyment. His anality consists in his controlling everything. For the anal father, the very conception of a private space (or a private enjoyment) does not hold. In contrast to the old symbolic father (who was an absent ruler and the ruler over a world of absence), the new father is overly present in our lives. The different incarnations of paternal authority bring with them a different fundamental problem. The traditional father ruled through absence, and his very distance from the subject made him seem indestructible. The anal father rules through presence, which renders him vulnerable but also inoculates him from critique. The problem today is not that we can’t find the father, but that we can’t get away from him.
The emergence of the anal father is the salient feature of the incipient society of enjoyment. He is the authority figure that corresponds to this society, just as the traditional father functions as the authority figure in the society of prohibition. However, the authority of the anal father is much more difficult to identify than that of the traditional father. The traditional father directly takes up a position of authority, whereas the anal father insinuates himself as—and believes himself to be—just another subject. He is no longer an ideal that looks down on the subject from on high (from a position of authority), but an ideal that exists side-by-side with the subject. We can see the evidence for the existence of this new father in the transformation that actual authority figures have undergone in the last forty years. In contrast to yesterday’s aloof executive who issues commands but always remains out of sight of his employees, the figure of the anal father manifests himself in the contemporary CEO with an open-door policy, always seeking input from his employees rather than simply giving orders. He is, in other words, an ideal ego rather than an ego ideal (which was the position of the traditional father). This seems like a democratizing of authority: no longer does symbolic authority remain aloof and unconnected with the activity of subjects, but it now enters this activity itself. The problem is that in the process of becoming less aloof, the anal father becomes a rival of the subject. Because he was distanced and removed, no one could compete with the traditional father, but the anal father immediately strikes us as a rival—specifically, a rival for enjoyment. As one of our rivals, the anal father lacks the conspicuousness of the traditional father.
The more that symbolic authority—in the figure of the anal father—assumes the position of just another subject among subjects, the more difficult it becomes to identify this authority. By remaining aloof and by demanding the renunciation of enjoyment, the traditional father distanced himself from those he commanded. The anal father eschews this distance. In doing so, he appears less despotic, but his friendliness inoculates him to critiques and to questions. Though the anal father represents a leveling of paternal authority, he also represents an increase in its power. In this sense, we should view this new father in radically ambivalent terms: he is more democratic and yet more powerful than the traditional father (because the authority that we can’t recognize as authority is always more powerful than the openly authoritative authority). One thus cannot say that the anal father represents “progress.” But it isn’t a question of judging the anal father or choosing between the traditional father and the anal father. It is instead a question of grasping the effects of the change in the status of authority.
OUR FRIEND, THE NEW AUTHORITY
The contrast between the two fathers makes itself felt in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989). Though the film clearly sides with the newly emergent anal father of enjoyment, it depicts his emergence through a struggle with traditional paternal authority. The fact that Weir sets the film in the 1950s and at an exclusive all-boys boarding school highlights the conflict between the two fathers and has the added effect of placing the anal father in the position of the outsider. The filmic milieu offers the traditional father home-court advantage: this is a world in which traditional symbolic authority polices all enjoyment and demands its complete renunciation; symbolic authority’s overt presence here serves to make subjects quite aware of their castration. This authority manifests itself conspicuously in the mise-en-scène of the film’s opening. The film begins with a new school year at the prestigious Wellton Academy. We see the students dressed formally and speaking to both teachers and parents in a highly respectful manner. When, at the opening assembly, the headmaster asks the students to identify the school’s “four pillars,” the students all rise and recite them in unison. From these initial shots of the film, it quickly becomes apparent that symbolic authority rules Wellton efficiently and thoroughly.
Against this backdrop, the anal father emerges in the form of Mr. Keating (Robin Williams), a new English teacher. Unlike the other teachers and administrators at Wellton—and unlike the parents of the boys he teaches—Keating does not preach obedience but encourages his students to find their own path to enjoyment, to, as he puts it, “seize the day.” Reciting Thoreau and Whitman, Keating tells them that they must avoid conformity to demands of symbolic authority and instead enjoy themselves. Keating’s first class illustrates the difference between his authority and the headmaster’s authority depicted in the opening sequence. Whereas the headmaster ordered and expected disciplined behavior from the students, Keating shows them pictures of past students from the school who are now dead, and he encourages them to enjoy themselves before they too are “food for worms.”
The struggle that ensues for the hearts of the students is clearly no struggle at all; traditional symbolic authority has no chance against Keating’s call for enjoyment. In response to Keating’s command that they pursue enjoyment, some of the students come together to form the film’s titular group, a group that meets in a cave in the woods late at night, in defiance of school rules. This defiance, however, does not at first arouse the suspicion of the school authorities: because it takes place literally underground and under cover of darkness, none of the school authorities even notice it. Historically, traditional symbolic authority has always permitted such transgressions as long as the enjoyment in them remained hidden and underground. The conflict develops only at the point when the boys in the film bring their pursuit of enjoyment out into the open. When they unabashedly pursue enjoyment publicly, the figures of authority in the film respond with the full weight of the symbolic prohibition, demanding unequivocally that the enjoyment cease. This becomes most apparent in the case of Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), the leader of the Dead Poets Society.
Encouraged by Keating’s proclamations about the importance of finding one’s own individual enjoyment, Neil discovers that acting is his particular path, the way in which he enjoys. It is precisely this enjoyment, however, that Neil’s father prohibits, laying down the commandment that Neil give up this “acting nonsense.” As Alenka Zupancic concisely puts it, “Neil’s situation can be described as follows: he has his Thing—acting—but Father forbids it.”13 Neil’s father not only forbids this enjoyment, but he also demands that Neil take up a prescribed symbolic role: he tells Neil in no uncertain terms, “you’re going to go to Harvard, and you’re going to be a doctor.” Here, Neil’s father occupies the position of symbolic authority, and the commandment of this authority is unambiguous: sacrifice your enjoyment for the sake of symbolic recognition and identity. Neil feels the crushing power of this symbolic authority over him and the dissatisfaction that its prohibition occasions. (In fact, the prohibition of enjoyment even drives Neil to kill himself.) Faced with the clear functioning of symbolic authority, Neil has no respite from the experience of his castration—being barred from enjoyment—and its attendant dissatisfaction. These are the effects of the symbolic order that he—and other subjects in times of conspicuous symbolic authority—can’t help but feel.
But Mr. Perry does not have the last word in Dead Poets Society. Even though Mr. Perry and the school authorities blame Mr. Keating for Neil’s suicide and even though they recognize the disruptive impact of Keating’s espousal of enjoyment, they are unable to extirpate his influence. At the end of the film, Wellton fires Keating for his role in the formation of the Dead Poets Society and in Neil’s death, but the film’s famous final scene makes clear that Keating has won the hearts of the students. In that scene, the school’s headmaster takes over the English class formerly taught by Keating, and he attempts to return the class to the rigid, authoritative structure that predominates at Wellton. But as he is leaving the campus, Keating interrupts the class to retrieve his personal belongings. After gathering his things together, Keating opens the door to leave, and one of the students, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), stands on his desk (a gesture Keating had earlier championed) and proclaims, “Oh Captain, my Captain” (Whitman’s address to Lincoln, which Keating encouraged the students to apply to him). Many of the other students follow Anderson in his act, and they remain standing on their desks despite the headmaster’s repeated demands that they step down. The headmaster employs all of his symbolic authority on this occasion—even threatening expulsion—and it is still no match for Keating’s appeal. In this way, the film lays out the struggle between two competing modes of authority, and it leaves no doubt about the winning side. One of the reasons the anal father has prevailed over the traditional symbolic father is this personal appeal. Unlike the imposing symbolic father, the anal father, because he licenses our enjoyment rather than prohibiting it, seems much more approachable and kind.14
Not only does the film depict the victory of the anal father over traditional symbolic authority, but it also reveals its investment in the anal father through the very way that it lays out the struggle. While the figures of traditional symbolic authority are clearly staking out an ideological position (championing the prohibition of enjoyment), Keating seems to be simply an innocent victim, guilty only of stimulating the boys to do what they wanted to do anyway. When the headmaster blames Keating for Neil’s death, we cannot but feel the injustice of this: obviously it is Mr. Perry’s prohibition of Neil’s enjoyment—not Keating’s encouragement of it—that resulted in Neil’s suicide, since the suicide occurs immediately after Mr. Perry punishes Neil for his disobedience in pursuit of his love for acting. Thus, Keating appears as an innocent victim, a scapegoat for Mr. Perry’s own guilt in the death of his son. And this is how the film reveals the depth of its attachment to the new brand of authority that Keating represents: Dead Poets Society is invested in Keating (as a representative anal father of enjoyment) to such an extent that it does not even depict his authority as authority. The film presents Keating as a benevolent teacher interested only in the welfare of his students, not as a rival authority to Mr. Perry or the headmaster. Precisely because he doesn’t appear in the guise of an alternate authority, Keating’s authority is all the more powerful—over both his students and over us as viewers of the film. It is nearly impossible to view the film without seeing Keating as the innocent victim of the cruelty of traditional symbolic authority. This situation alone indicates the degree of the film’s ideological commitment to Keating and what he represents.
As Dead Poets Society demonstrates, the anal father himself always seems less than authoritative. Unlike traditional symbolic authority, the anal father appears in the guise of one of us; he’s on our side, not on the side of authority. But as one of us, he exerts his authority in ways that traditional symbolic authority could never imagine. We aren’t suspicious of an authority who doesn’t appear to be an authority. Hence, Mr. Perry and the headmaster can only look on in envy at the authority Keating wields. When they stand on their desks in the film’s final scene, the students express their willingness to bow down to the new authority and eschew the old, thereby clearly demonstrating the power of the new.
ENJOYING ONE’S COIN
The anal father is a thoroughly modern phenomenon, emerging with the leveling of traditional authority, but it is especially with the development of global capitalism that the sway of this new father has increased. Global capitalism functions by submitting all cultural life to the process of commodification, and this process can only be sustained if everyone is engaged in the endless pursuit of enjoyment, a pursuit that the anal father authorizes. Under the reign of the anal father, I am constantly confronted with the Other’s enjoyment in its most unbearable dimension. Wherever I turn, I cannot escape the Other’s enjoyment. Whereas the dead Oedipal father’s name presides over a society devoid of enjoyment, the anal father presides over a society crawling with it. The omnipresent advertisements calling us to enjoy ourselves attest to the anal father’s reign, and this reign represents a dramatic shift in the deployment of the father’s authority. Whereas the old father ruled as a present absence, the new father’s presence is suffocating; we can never get away from sensing his enjoyment, even when he is physically absent. And his enjoyment doesn’t bar us from enjoying. The presence of this enjoyment instead calls us to enjoy ourselves, and we never feel as if we are doing so adequately enough. Our duty today lies not so much in going to work and working hard as in, for instance, going on a cruise and really having fun. This enjoyment also makes its presence felt in the form of a more powerful superego. The superego keeps the anal father’s standard of enjoyment constantly at the fore of our thoughts, constantly present. It is precisely this dimension of the anal father—the overwhelming, suffocating presence of his enjoyment—that becomes clear in David Mamet’s play American Buffalo.
In American Buffalo, Don, a junk dealer, has unknowingly sold a valuable coin to a collector. The play consists of Don’s effort—aided by, alternately, his “friends” Bob and Teach—to steal the coin back, now that he has realized its true value. The play’s opening exchange between Bob and Don establishes Fletcher—whom they play cards with and who never physically appears in the play—as the anal father of enjoyment. When Don begins to teach Bob, his young charge, the ins and outs of life, he immediately cites Fletcher as exemplary, as what “a standup guy” should be. Fletcher is exemplary precisely because of his ability to enjoy; he allows no one to steal his enjoyment, to get the better of him. In fact, he is such an expert at enjoying, he can render even the most disadvantageous situation enjoyable. Don tells Bob, “You take him and you put him down in some strange town with just a nickel in his pocket, and by nightfall he’ll have that town by the balls. This is not talk, Bob, this is action.”15 The key to the father’s enjoyment is his ability to bridge the gap between talk and action, a gap that constantly plagues ordinary subjects. The word is the absence of the thing, and ordinary subjects must satisfy themselves as best they can with this absence, with this sacrifice of the enjoyment of the thing. The father, because he doesn’t have this gap between his words and his actions, gets to enjoy the thing. This is why Don tells Bob, “Just one thing, Bob. Action counts. Action talks and bullshit walks” (4). For Don, action is the father’s enjoyment, and bullshit is the castrated experience of the ordinary subject.
We see Fletcher’s action—his enjoyment—most clearly in his card playing. Fletcher wins at cards because he knows how to enjoy, as Don and Bob’s conversation about the previous night’s card game indicates:
BOB: You win?
DON: I did all right.
BOB: Yeah?
DON: Yeah. I did okay. Not like Fletch . . .
BOB: No, huh?
DON: I mean, Fletcher, he plays cards.
BOB: He’s real sharp.
DON: You’re goddamn right he is. (6, Mamet’s emphasis)
Neither Don nor Bob can say exactly what Fletcher has, but he has it—a certain je ne sais quoi that allows him to hoard enjoyment for himself. In this sense, it is important that Fletcher’s talent lies in cards and having a town “by the balls.” No one can say precisely what this sort of talent is, save that it is something which allows him to get the best out of every situation. In a word, he knows. This knowledge is what makes Fletcher an exemplary instance of the contemporary anal father. As Žižek puts it in Enjoy Your Symptom! this kind of father has “a very special kind of knowledge, a knowledge of enjoyment, i.e., the knowledge which is by definition excluded from the Law in its universal-neutral guise: it pertains to the very structure of Law that it is ‘blind’ to this knowledge.”16 In the contrast to the Law and to the Name of the Father, the anal father has this knowledge. What this father knows is the underside of the social order, the hidden, criminal world that is full of enjoyment. 17 He has a talent for cards (because he cheats, of course), for shady business deals, and for all kinds of criminal activity—for anything that involves the secret of enjoyment.
The tie between the anal father and the criminal underworld becomes readily apparent in the films of David Lynch, in which the anal father appears as almost a standard character. He is Baron Harkonnen in Dune, Bob in Twin Peaks, Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway, and, most famously, Frank Booth in Blue Velvet. All four characters are associated with the underworld or the world of crime, and each of them—rather than a traditional public figure—is the central authority figure in their respective films. The power of traditional symbolic authority today, as Lynch demonstrates in each case, pales in comparison with the power of these figures. In Blue Velvet, the police in Lumberton are either unable to thwart the machinations of Frank Booth, or they are part of his organization. In Lost Highway, Mr. Eddy makes the only show of authority in the film, when he runs a tailgater off the road and lectures him on the rules of driving etiquette.18 The police remain, for the duration of the film, in the position of impotent observers, never once taking authoritative action. This dynamic, present throughout Lynch’s oeuvre, indicates that a fundamental shift has occurred in the nature of authority. Whereas authority previously had to make at least the pretense of preventing corruption and eschewing criminality, now it is openly corrupt and criminal. It is openly on the side of enjoyment, not prohibition.
This becomes most evident on an aesthetic level in the character of Baron Harkonnen from Lynch’s film version of Dune. The Baron’s body itself suggests his excessive enjoyment: he is obese, but even more importantly, oozing sores cover his body. Though they would seem to clearly detract from the Baron’s attractiveness and appeal, these sores in no way serve as a source of shame for the Baron. In fact, he has his servants constantly complimenting him on his diseases. We hear one say, “Your diseases—love to me.” The Baron prides himself on these open sores precisely because they are indications of his enjoyment. They indicate points at which the inside of the Baron’s body has bubbled over onto its surface. What usually remains hidden within—our private enjoyment—is, in the case of Baron Harkonnen, completely visible on his bodily surface. In addition to the presence of his oozing sores, the Baron also displays his enjoyment through flight. He is the only character in the film who levitates, flying around his castle while everyone else remains confined to the ground. These readily visible indications of enjoyment in the character of the Baron, a figure of authority, have the effect of making him a far more horrifying figure than the traditional father. Seeing the corruption and enjoyment of the anal father makes it clear that he has an intimate knowledge of what the traditional father could only prohibit.
STRENGTH THROUGH WEAKNESS
Because we constantly see the enjoyment of the anal father, he lacks, in contrast to the symbolic father, the illusion of omnipotence. The authority of the symbolic father depends on collective belief in his power. This is what makes the subversion of this father a relatively straightforward matter. It consists in simply showing that the father doesn’t really have the strength that he pretends to have. With the anal father, however, things become much more difficult. As a present father (rather than an absent one), the anal father always shows off his impotence. Though we constantly see his failures and impotence, the anal father loses none of his authority over us in the process. Fletcher, the anal father in American Buffalo, ends up getting mugged and having his jaw broken. This indication of his fallibility, however, does nothing to lessen his authority over the other characters. After learning of Fletcher’s hospitalization, the other characters, in fact, feel their own failure to enjoy even more emphatically. Immediately after hearing the news, Teach proclaims, “I mean, we’re fucked up here. We have not blown the shot, but we’re fucked up” (97). They, not Fletcher, have “fucked up.” Instead of relieving his pressure on them to enjoy, Fletcher’s weakness increases it. Even in his weakness, Fletcher—at least in the minds of the other characters—continues to enjoy, thus marking an even greater contrast with the others than before they saw his weakness.
This kind of enjoyment in impotence makes subversion in the late capitalist world of the anal father doubly difficult. It isn’t enough to simply reveal the failure of mastery in contemporary society, because every such effort serves only to increase the power of that mastery. Perhaps the exemplary instance of the way in which exposing the anal father’s impotence increased his mastery occurred in the case of Ronald Reagan. Even when the press put his impotence or corruption clearly on display (in exposing, for instance, his naps during cabinet meetings or his lying about the Iran Contra scandal), his popularity—i.e., his mastery—never abated and, in fact, grew.19 This is how we can be sure of Reagan’s status as an anal father; like Reagan, the anal father is a “teflon” master, one to whom no critique can ever manage to stick.20 The anal father’s weakness has the paradoxical effect of increasing his resistance to critique.
This resistance to critique is the predominant feature of power in global capitalism. With the old paternal authority, a critique that unmasked the functioning of its power had the effect of disabling that functioning. Or, as the Enlightenment mantra would have it, knowledge had a certain power over power. Just as we can see the development of a resistance to critique in the figure of Reagan, something similar occurs in film and television. The threat that knowledge posed to power led film and television, until recent years, to hide their means of production, to conceal the apparatus that produced the end-product that we see on the movie or television screen. The necessity of this concealment led Brecht to conceive the act of laying bare the productive apparatus as a radical, counterhegemonic activity. Ideological art, according to Brecht, was ideological because it presented the illusion of a completed product and hid the productive mechanism (the process) that created this product, in the same way that capitalism hid the labor that produced the commodity—the labor of the proletariat—within the commodity form itself. In order to be radical, then, art had to show the backstage, to provide the spectators with a knowledge of its power of illusion—thereby alienating the spectators from their positions within the functioning of power. This explains the radicality of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, for instance, in which we see the camera shooting the scene during the film’s climax. According to the theory of Brechtian alienation effects, the knowledge that the scene has been produced dislodges our investment in it and breaks the hold that the power of the film has over us.
Today, however, it is no longer just radical works of art such as Bergman’s films and Brecht’s plays that lay bare that apparatus of production. This exposure of the apparatus of production is an everyday occurrence, happening in the most mainstream films and television shows.21 These revelations of the working of power do not provoke an alienation effect. They have no ability to dislodge the functioning of power, but instead work to sustain it. Even television news programs—engines for the dissemination of ideology—freely expose the backrooms where they assimilate and “produce” news. Watching the television news, we are able to see workers behind the news anchor, busily manipulating the information that the anchor will present to us. We can see, in other words, the ideological machine that decides what information we should receive and what we shouldn’t—and yet this in no way undermines the authority of the presentation. This insight into the functioning of power, like the insights into Reagan’s foibles, has the effect of cementing power’s hold over us rather than relaxing it. It does this by cutting off all lines of critique prior to their articulation: if we try to claim that producers of television news have prepackaged the news for us, they have already admitted this in the very form of the program’s presentation, and so our critique has no sting. In this sense, the contemporary television news program is just another version of the anal father, made stronger by its ability to make its weaknesses—potential lines of critique—into additional signs of strength.
This resistance of the anal father to critique becomes especially apparent in the case of Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society. While the film’s final scene shows the students successfully transgressing the demands of the headmaster (the representative of the symbolic father), no such transgression occurs with Keating. Earlier in the film, Keating commands three students to walk around the school courtyard, and when they begin to walk uniformly with the other students clapping in unison, Keating stops them and upbraids them (kindly of course) for their conformity. He urges each student to discover his own individual way of walking—i.e., to find his own private enjoyment. When Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) refuses to walk at Keating’s command, this moment of disobedience does not in any way subvert Keating’s authority. On the contrary, Keating points out that Dalton proves his point: his subversive display fits right into Keating’s “lesson plan.” In the face of the anal father’s demand for each student to find his private enjoyment, there is no clear path to subversion. In refusing to play along, one plays along all the more. Unlike the symbolic father, the anal father invites our subversion and thereby quells its subversive sting.22
The problem arises because subverting the anal father plays directly into his hands. The effort to undermine him inevitably forces the subject into the position that the anal father commands the subject to occupy. This becomes evident in Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000). The film depicts the story of a retired gangster, Gal (Ray Winstone), and a figure of underworld authority, Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), who works to lure Gal out of retirement in order to work on a heist. Logan functions precisely like the anal father within the film: he visits Gal at his Spanish villa and begins to demand incessantly that Gal accept the job, refusing to accept Gal’s repeated refusal. Logan insists that Gal immerse himself again in the underworld—the world of enjoyment. In addition, Logan’s efforts at coercing Gal involve the gratuitous display of his own enjoyment and the humiliation of Gal. He boasts to Gal and his friend Aitch (Cavan Kendall) that he has had sex with Aitch’s wife, and he mocks Gal for being married to a former porn star whom so many other men have enjoyed. Logan parades himself as the master of enjoyment at the same time that he calls Gal to the world of enjoyment. Unable to fend off this anal father in any other way, Gal’s wife finally shoots him, an act that seemingly frees Gal from Logan’s demands. However, in order to hide Logan’s death from the underworld boss who sent him to retrieve Gal, Gal must return to England and perform the job. Hence, at the moment he escapes Logan’s dominance, Gal finds himself compelled to do the exact thing that Logan was demanding. Even in death, the anal father continues to exert his authority and to place nearly impassable barriers in the way of subversion. To subvert an anal father such as Logan is to fit nicely into his plans.
In the face of this figure who is so impervious to critique or attack, the situation seems hopeless. The nostalgic efforts of Susan Faludi and Charles Blankenhorn to return to the traditional symbolic father offer one potential path. This is a path that must be thoroughly rejected. As Paul Verhaeghe points out, the attempt to return to the old traditional father always results in producing more new anal fathers. He says, “these days the symbolic authority function itself has disappeared. Consequently, any solution based on this line of thought inevitably results in the establishment of crude, unnegotiated power figures. In other words, primal fathers.”23 But we can go even further. Not only is such a return ultimately impossible, it also fails to recognize that one of the fundamental insights of psychoanalysis: the symbolic father has always been dead, even before the anal father took his place. This is what Lacan means when he says that “he has never been the father except in the mythology of the son.”24 We sustain the position of the symbolic father because we do not want to abandon the image of an ultimate enjoyment—the kind of enjoyment that can only exist on the other side of the symbolic father’s prohibition. The prohibition allows us to believe in a total (and totally satisfying) enjoyment even if it constitutes this enjoyment as inherently unreachable. In this sense, prohibition protects us from impossibility. To abandon the symbolic father, then, is to abandon this image of an ultimate enjoyment and to accept that enjoyment can only be elusive and fractured, never complete or securely defined. This is the opportunity that the demise of the traditional father offers us. When we attempt to reassert the authority of the traditional father, we evince our failure to take up this opportunity. But we also fail to be equal to it when we attempt to heed the command of the anal father and commit ourselves to the project of enjoyment. In each case, we succumb to the lure of a total enjoyment.
Today, the most common response to the changing status of the father is the pursuit of enjoyment, following the path that the anal father lays down for us. But as we have seen, this path does not lead to authentic enjoyment. Through the characters that appear onstage in American Buffalo, we see the way in which the anal father—and the society of enjoyment—renders enjoyment impossible to come by. Don, Teach, and Bob all experience the imperative to enjoy, but their attempts to heed this imperative fall short because their enjoyment pales in comparison with that of Fletcher. This over-present anal father constantly reminds the subject in the society of enjoyment that she/he has failed to really enjoy—to enjoy in a way that the ideal ego (i.e., the anal father himself) does. This is why Don, Teach, and Bob are such pathetic figures in the play. Their inadequate enjoyment relative to that of Fletcher remains perpetually on display, thus illustrating the hopelessness of obeying the command to enjoy.
Nonetheless, the path that the command to enjoy lays down for us remains enticing. What makes this path so attractive is that it seems to allow us to bypass the demands of castration, to access the enjoyment that the old father had hitherto prohibited. But the enjoyment that the anal father allows us always remains imaginary: we are permitted to lose ourselves in a world of images. Whereas the symbolic father’s prohibition of enjoyment had the effect of reminding us of our position within the symbolic order (as subjects of castration), the anal father’s command to enjoy forestalls this kind of recognition. It prompts us to view ourselves and the other on the imaginary plane—to miss our situatedness within the symbolic order. Thus, the world of the anal father is at once a world of the image.