metaplay, phallus-play

in my last blog, I wrote about what Susan Sontag calls the defining genre in the western development of theater, the metaplay. the metaphor of life as a dream or as theater aligns with philosophy's oldest struggle with self-consciousness. in her more famous essay, "notes on camp," I'm brought back to sontag's evaluation of the metaplay in the tenth point: "camp sees everything in quotation marks. it's not a lamp, but a 'lamp.' not a woman, but a 'woman.' to perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. it is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater."

but in psychoanalysis, to be "seen in quotation marks" is exclusively phallic. only the man -- who, threatened with castration, resolves his oedipus complex by identifying with his father and imposing on himself the law of the incest taboo -- has access to identification, or to acting. luce irigaray notices a couple examples of women acting that freud attempts to reconcile with his phallus economics. first, that of the girl and her doll.¹ if, to the girl, the doll is mimicking herself, she is following the normal feminine development of which the end is to reproduce the desired (envied) phallus through a child. but, if the girl plays with the doll to act a maternal role, she is really a little man who desires pre-oedipal unity with his mother; the only means to relate and represent to one's origins is the phallus. secondly, there is the acting of the mother who conceives a daughter.² by identifying with her own mother, who is a mother of a daughter as well, she risks repeating the bad relationship between her parents, a bad relationship caused by their conception of a girl. however, by ideally conceiving a son, there will be no identification with her mom-of-a-girl and she will fulfill that pure and originless femininity that produces the phallus in her offspring. there is a sort of double bind here. it is either that you align with the psychoanalytic feminine -- you desire the phallus -- or you've appropriated masculine means of psychological development -- you act as if you are the phallus. the same currency of value is recognized either way.

"therefore, since she really does not have the same sex organ that holds the monopoly on value, she will be particularly good at acting 'as if' she had it, at 'making believe' she has it … the cosmetics, the disguises of all kinds that women cover themselves with are intended to deceive, to promise more value than can be delivered." (114)

(spoilers for The Drama (2026)) I watched The Drama the other day and thought of irigaray. emma herself describes her past as an almost-school-shooter as playing a character, and this comes back again when her dad reminisces about her living-room performances in his wedding speech. the movie begins with charlie acting as if he had read emma's book, and it ends with the two acting as if they are meeting again for the first time (and: "weddings are performative by nature"). I imagine that the psychoanalytic interpretation would be satisfied to end it at the especially phallic guns. but interpretation "is the revenge of the intellect upon the world." what's interesting about the movie's dilemma is that emma resists anyone's understanding; charlie's attempt at a psychological explanation through the traumatic car crash isn't satisfying, the only one convinced of her unequivocal evil probably always hated her anyway, and even the director seemed not to know what to do with her. the only agreement appears to be that she is a psychopath. just as much as the psychoanalyst tames the unknowable woman by relativizing her to the phallus, the dsm-5 grasps at any deviation of the norm or social order as a simply scientific deficiency in the brain.

hysterics and psychotics

"now, the/a woman who doesn't have one sex organ, or a unified sexuality (and this has usually been interpreted to mean that she has no sex) cannot subsume it/herself under one generic or specific term. body, breasts, pubis, clitoris, labia, vulva, vagina, neck of the uterus, womb … and this nothing that already gives pleasure by setting them apart from each other: all these foil any attempt at reducing sexual multiplicity to some proper noun, to some proper meaning, to some concept." (233)

I read in Sadie Plant's zeros and ones the following passage from lyotard's libidinal economy: "'use me' is a statement of vertiginous simplicity, it is not mystical, but materialist. let me be your surface and your tissues, you may be my orifices and my palms and my membranes, we could lose ourselves, leave the power and the squalid justification of the dialectic of redemption, we will be dead. and not: let me die by your hand, as Masoch said."

which brought me to this from a thousand plateaus (or, to my blog on dead souls that brought me to this passage from atp): "Freud says that hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc … yet it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches. the psychotic can."

A schizophrenic and a woman walk into an analyst's office. they are told that the issue is beyond the surface, that there's something to excavate from the depths of unconsciousness. he refers to an "oedipus" complex, a stage that determines normative development and that had somehow escaped the two, the former by refusing to inherit the father's phallus and the latter by a long-winded detour asymmetric of the opposite sex. the analyst offers to teach them to act in oedipus' play, to trade their irregular tragedy for a regular one. (even if psychologists today claim that the complex is outdated, they still operate under the very same logic: diagnoses are relative to a norm, dissatisfactions with society are reduced to familial conflict, familial conflict is resolved by restoring the nuclear family … )

Psychological interpretation's promise of revealing a secret depth only produces a new surface: a theater. but it is a theater that believes full well in itself. sontag observes the difference between hamlet and oedipus: "Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as but are, hero and king." the obsessive neurotic, or the normal man, acts because it affirms his possession of the phallus. his identification with the father's law of reason is what protects him from castration. what is so nonsensical, unreasonable about a woman or a schizophrenic acting is that it precisely reveals their lack of the phallus; hamlet is interesting because he is superficial, because he is "only" playing roles. this is dangerous for a social order that has invested its values in symbols that offer some greater truth beneath them, whether that is the commodity affirming the consumer or the phallus affirming the obsessional neurotic. in opposition to the neurotic's tragedy is the metaplay, dispelling of his commodity fetishism and revealing not a deeper meaning but the actor that was at its surface all along.

another quote on eyes

"Woman's castration is defined as her having nothing you can see, as her having nothing. In her having nothing penile, in seeing that she has No Thing. Nothing like man. That is to say, no sex/organ that can be seen in a form capable of founding its reality, reproducing its truth. Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth. The contract, the collusion, between one sex/organ and the victory won by visual dominance therefore leaves woman with her sexual void, with an 'actual castration' carried out in actual fact." (47-48)