It was fun rooting against that little bulldozer in the memes about the Ever Given last week, but did our mundane delight in the symbolism of the lodged ship (perhaps an all-too-eagerly awaited mundane; finally an apolitical, distant, comedic, blunder) miss a mark? Was there a Real source of fascination behind the images?
Let’s consider the strange and terrible physical enjoyment of the situation, a kind of disgusted fascination that goes by shivery names like submechanophobia. Gigatons of water, metal, dirt. The whole blockage in Suez became a bodily metaphor — with all the backlogged barges and sense of urgency of an intestinal blockage. We can only imagine the seismic relief Egypt felt when this movement came to pass. And as any living-or-former anal retentive knows, the impasse, obstruction, impaction itself is the source of pleasure here — as a withholding of certain functions, a sacrifice of sorts. A loss which is enjoyed both as loss and is constitutive of the lossless world prior to it, retroactively.
Sounds great! I’ll take some!
And couldn’t this bodily satisfaction be political ? Even distinct from the ‘body’ that’s popular to talk about today — controlled or criminalized, the site of race and representation, agency, or the body politic. Perhaps something much more absurd. The weird bodily moments that we’re confronted with because politicians or political actors are corporeal beings — subjects of drive. The way Bernie Sanders holds his lower lip like it doesn’t quite match with the upper one, the way he smacks his tongue when he parses a phrase like “now, there is debate amongst the people of this country…” How about Trump’s chronic congestion, when he inhales through his teeth and talks with puckered lips? His strange gestures and shape — a gross, squinty, moist language spoken with his whole body, a language that makes impersonating him so easy and so hard. The only reason an impersonation makes sense.
We may inadvertently adopt such gestures in unconscious identification with these figures (aren’t we always a little disgusted when realizing that voices, tics, and gesticulations which feel so spontaneous are not quite our own). And if we relate — identify in some queer sense — to such figures through these publicly-traded satisfactions, then this should suggest some purpose behind them, although it’s not clear what. Could we take a logical leap, and ask how the rhetorical or discursive impasses that seem to define our beloved politicians might be bound-up with these clicks, smacks, and slurred words? That is, could the characteristic ways they stumble over words, get caught-up in reassuring thoughts, or say nothing in particular be linked to the kind of anal-retentive satisfactions of the body outlined above? Sometimes it seems like a wheezy breath might ‘stand-in’ for words Trump can’t quite come around to saying — even if in other domains he’s capable of utterances a conventional politician would never dare make. The mental and the physical bleed into each other in these moments — personal ideological impasse starts to manifest a strange physical presence.
It’s no surprise that these gurgles, rasps, glares, winces, snorts, and slurps are on their most public display in our populist leaders. To openly embrace such vulgar wellsprings of enjoyment is already something like an act of defiance (against public decency, politeness, consensus politics). To enjoy one’s very personal quirks — to give them a public offering — goes hand-in-hand with the discontent these leaders levy against more polished politicians, politicians who try not to give hint to their own bodily pleasure-seeking. More formally, to bring discontent to such a head — to articulate what were only-ever vague grievances overlooked by consensus politicians (a practice that Bernie and Trump seemed to refine constantly), might also coincide with lifting the personal bar on behaviors that seem so spontaneous (perhaps not natural though, since we’re often invaded by these acts) yet have no place in the realm of mannered, efficient, status quo politicking. We were deprived these little sources of entertainment with Obama’s grace. Even the bumbling Bushes gaffed bashfully, which suggests they were still apologetic to an Other for their slips. An air of smooth-sailing was perhaps practiced but never mastered by these figures.
Moments and gestures like the ones above are the ‘minimal synthesis of language and enjoyment, units of signs permeated with enjoyment.’ We might understand these cathected bodily acts of signification as ‘anchoring points’ of language in its entirety; the instatement of language in an individual by a channeling of the drives. ‘Channeling’ here has a lot to do with prohibition, and the classical Freudian narrative of the ‘adoption of language’ through some (paternal) prohibition doesn’t seem far from the mark here, although the relationship — between prohibition, language and drive — is bound to be complicated. George W. Bush, in the comical moments of trying to open a locked door, or mispronouncing a word, was bashfully apologetic to an Other, an abstraction that might be called a formally paternal figure (in all likelihood Barbara). The tics that Trump and Sanders seem to embrace more readily might be remnants of a chaotic and infantile form of bodily satisfaction, as such they constitute a protest by child-Trump or child-Sanders against the forced-choice to inhabit language after being torn from mother. At the same time these material acts of signification are the most fundamental linkage in language — they ensure the connection of affect to signifier. Our tics, scraps of some mythical pre-Oedipal satisfaction, are ultimately what makes language tick — as something charged, terrifyingly poetic, and which contains something unknown that compels us to keep on speaking. We might even wonder if emotions themselves are remnants of some infantile sexuality caught up within signifying chains and never fully freed up. As adults, we feel angry because of one thing or another, never granted the pre-Oedipal gift of just being angry. We can get butterflies in our stomach at something so abstract as winning a contract. Strange…
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