This post is about the Verneinung. Is it too obvious to state that the child of Sri Lankan performing artist MIA may struggle with developing an autonomous ego formation, and that the very idea of subjectivity may remain objectively ungraspable for this particular bundle of aggressive desires? Remember that MIA also functions as a "producer" in many different sense of the word: As Deleuze and Guattari have declared, "Producing, a product: a producing/product identity. It is this identity that constitutes a third term in the linear series: an enormous undifferentiated object. Everything stops dead for a moment, everything freezes in place -- and then the whole process will begin all over again." This seems an apt description of both this pregnant cultural moment vis-a-vis MIA, on the cusp of a level of success that will permanently deprive her of anonymity and the integrity of her desires qua desires, and of her infant, the undifferentiated object/abject par excellance. One can easily imagine this child thinking along the same track as Deleuze and Guattari when they continue: "From a certain point of view it would be much better if nothing worked, if nothing functioned. Never being born, escaping the wheel of continual birth and rebirth, no mouth to suck with, no anus to shit through." That is to say, the constitution of MIA's child as a subject means also depriving it of its freedom from the socially produced mechanics of contrived desire.
When MIA dresses her baby in clothes designed to mimic her own most-famous wardrobe item, is she merely making a metaphor of the mirror stage famously promulgated by Lacan or actually trying to forestall the inevitable (and inevitably flawed) ego separation between child and mother? Is she trying to prevent her child from an unstable and unsuitable relation with language itself, the medium of her own achievements? Carles notes, "Lil bro seems lost, like he is unsure of what is happening, not confident in his lil personal brand." He is having trouble negotiating subjectivity even on the terms established by late capitalist self-branding imperatives. Carles is empathetic, rendering his sympathy at once as a command to the reader: "Feel bad for the kid. Seems like he is being branded to become an ‘independent spirit’, but u can’t be independent if your parents make free-spirited decisions for you, particularly when it comes to zany fashion decisions." The point here is that a child born into a certain level of notoriety will struggle with finding appropriate imagos to permit him to differentiate the real from the unreal, the self from the other from the Other. To wit: If the child recognizes his famous mother in the mirror when the crisis of identity comes, one can only imagine the myriad deformations incumbent upon such a misrecognition, the méconnaissance; the I/eye will remain in a state of atavistic immaturity, a purer consciousness perhaps, but a kind of incompetency for social being as currently constituted. He may not succeed in achieving the alienation that allows for social being and may stay suspended in a womb-like state of semi-selfhood, reliant ultimately on the mother as a filter for all experience. As Lacan notes, "We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums [or the impenetrable wall of psychic security afforded by ubiquity in the gossip pages?] but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury." Anyone who has listened to MIA's recordings will know the applicability of that last clause to our subject.
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