4 May 2010: "Free-spirited Mom Breastfeeds at a relevant alt party. Have we discovered the perf alt breasts?"

This post is about the phallus. Often Carles concludes his philosophical investigations with a series of rhetorical questions designed to challenge readers to articulate a more dialectical understanding of the issues he has attempted to raise in his analysis. Here, perhaps to keep his own dialectic sharp he supplements that practice by introducing his theme with a question as well as concluding with interrogatory provocations. The question invokes up a hegemonic dichotomy at play in the social field at large that Carles will then proceed to undermine, isolating the structuring phenomenological difference and problematizing it. The dichotomy here is between unreconstructed libidinal energy harnessed in the interest of preserving a gendered order in the regime of affective labor and reproductive labor, and the energy mustered by the organism for personal survival; in other words phylogenesis vs. ontogenesis; the erotic instinct versus the death instinct. At stake is the motive force of Darwinian sorting: does it derive from erotic attraction's role in mating rituals or does it derive from the instinctual competencies at nutritive acquisitiveness. Which is the more forceful impulse, sexual desire or hunger? As Carles phrases it: "Who seems more chill: the baby bro, or the background bro trying to ‘have a peep’ at some mom boob?"

Of course, this question is implicitly complicated by the dual status of the nodal point of the breast as both the simultaneous sign of the phallus and its absence. As Lacan writes in "The Meaning of the Phallus," "the phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark where the share of logos is wedded to the advent of desire." In other words, the breast bears with it not only nourished sustenance, but the birth of desire itself, and the birth of both metaphor and metonym if not language in general and the signification process as a somatic rather than cognitive procedure. Drawing on Lacanian theory, Carles argues that breasts "breasts… are actually 4 nourishing ur child with life + love + knowledge" -- in other words the sublimated libido that organizes the child's mental world and orients it toward an irresolvable lack, fueling the pursuit of knowledge as a substitute for impossible self-understanding.

Carles notes that "men like to ’suck on boobies’ because they are recreating the act of ‘being a lil baby.’" In this seemingly regressive infantilization, however, male sexuality is structured around an absent presence, the lost holistic unity with the mother whose memory is nonetheless evoked in the sexual arena by the breast transubstantiated into an erogenous zone for both partners to the sexual act. IN this sense, and in this sense only Carles admits that "I was holding on to ‘breasts’ as the ultimate sexual object."

But the cathexis of breasts with a particularized sexual hunger masks the way in which the breast also serves as an epigone for the castrated phallus, psychically grafted onto the female in an unconscious act of ego preservation. "Does milk from a bosom represent ‘life’?" Carles asks searchingly. The word represent of course is key. Life masquerades as mere representation when refracted through the various psychosexual symbols our species needs as well as our acculturation supplies us with. The breast as phallic mark constitutes desire, as Lacan suggests, but Carles's critique is precisely this: that if "perfect alternative breasts" are always already "lactating" -- in the process if leaking signifying meaning, as it were, then what is the alternative to the alternative? What can substitute for the substitute for the phallus if we attempt to abrogate the endless succession of inadequate metaphors? Can alternatives every be perfect or would this efface their status as alternatives and make them mere facsimilies of that which they seek to replace? Lacan teaches us that the search for an alternative is a self-limiting, self-defeating quest, a suspended desire that constitutes identity in its inability to fulfill itself. This is what makes the breast and its promise of completeness, of total regression and womb reversion, of perfect restoration of the lost unity in the Imaginary, of castration without loss or lack so ultimately threatening. Carles declares this epiphany in his inimitable "vulgar" style: "Now I realize that breasts don’t exist to have in your face while you’re making love, or as a ‘target’ to cum on when ur ‘finished with a woman.’" Femininity itself presents itself as the target, not the phallic symbols that negate it, though the fantasy of "finishing" off the feminine principle and thus defeating the Law of the Father is not upset by the deeply phallologcentric cycle of climax. The law reasserts itself as that which it has tried to prohibit. Remember, as Lacan says, "jouissance of the body is beyond the phallus" -- castration fears preserve the power of the phallus only at the price of self-denial. Carles warns: "One day, you will undress a woman, and the bulgy, hidden breasts will be the ultimate symbol of ‘becoming a man.’" A radical irruption of the mirror image and its obverse; castration turned inside out and doubled -- no wonder the urge to cradle and suck and regress!