This post is about the sinthome. In the collective imaginary of the West, the antipodes have long served to hold several contradictory fantasies in tension -- both penal colony and blank slate, a place for a fresh start and a place of incarceration at the same time. Can we ever be said to escape from ourselves and our own destructive proclivities? Is every attempt at escape actually a prison sentence that has been passed upon us by the society whose norms we have failed to mediate? Carles mulls over these questions in considering archetypal Australian, rock-and-roll performer Michael Hutchence, and the efforts of Anglo-American society to exorcise his ghost, in this case by encouraging a woman who poses as a self-conscious innocent with a "cutesy indie girl voice aesthetic" to reinscribe the signature work of Hutchence and deny its subterranean masochism, its desperate commitment to cyclical self-abuse in a literally strangulated attempt at self-mastery. As Deleuze comments in his famous essay on masochism, "pain only acquires significance in relation to the forms of repetition which condition its use." Carles invites us to consider which kind of repetition, and which kind of pain is operant, in the "completely butchered" cover of one of Hutchence's songs.
The levels of obligation and ritual involved in the scenario Carles homes in on are multiple, beginning, of course, with the sexual rituals that led to Hutchence's untimely demise. That ritual of suffocation is paralleled in Carles's analysis with the ritual/compulsion/obligation of performing other artists' work within the popular-music industry. As Carles notes, the performer who works under the pseudonym St. Vincent (and as Deleuze notes, such pseudonyms are legion in the rituals of sadism and masochism) seems as though "she was ‘forced to sing’" Hutchence's song, "Need You Tonight," itself a multilayered depiction of erotic torment, about, as Carles notes, a "tortured man who just wants to get off in the dirtiest way possible." He adds that St. Vincent "would have a difficult time with this song unless she got ‘extremely dark’ in a personal/sexual type of way."
So it is that we see the sexualized, masochistic component of the classic anxiety-of-influence scenario, as artists are compelled pay homage to their predecessors at the same time as they attempt to escape from their shadow and shape their own distinctive artistic genius. In a sense, Carles cleverly implies, every attempt at a cover of another artist's work is a metaphoric trip to Australia. And simultaneously, at another level of consciousness, cover versions are psychosexual dramas, the adoption of false identities, the blurring of pain and pleasure in the dissolution of self: "I wonder if you should even be allowed to cover this song if you haven’t been choked during an orgasm," Carles shrewdly points out. The sublime moment of jouissance is at once the moment of the self's most severe constriction, a return to the primordial, to the abject, to the pre-self, to the consciousness that precedes consciousness, the collective genius that conditioned the ground upon which our very sense of self-awareness could be shaped. "Have you ever lost consciousness right after an orgasm?" Carles asks. Must we surrender the self for pleasure? Is recessive imitation an orgasmic expression of self-abnegation?
The final twist, implied by Carles's interrogatory methods in general, is that the very act of asking these questions is another iteration of the cycle of repetition, another suspension, another recursive return...
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