Fringe thoughts on Judith Butler’s Lesbian Phallus

I’m going unpack some of my responses to Chapter 2, “Bodies that Matter”, from Judith Butler’s essay: “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary”, and hopefully find a more clear way of expressing my thoughts about how an idea turns into an idealization; idealization being a type of symbolic representation that further separates and further fails to approximate the real body. And by further I mean causing more separation and illusion between experience and representation; like the way the ‘imaginary concept or idea of a body part, being activated into existence by “pain” and symbolically naming it, would separate representation (the concept) from experience (ie. feeling that has not been contextualized or rather represented ). By this logic, ‘idealization’ would continue to further the gap between the real and the imaginary/symbolic perhaps leading to an illusion of knowledge, “knowing” or consciousness. This illusion might be similar to believing that language equates to consciousness.

I can see how setting up the reader with Freudian examples of body conceptualization leads to the idealization of the Phallus, which detaches itself from the fleshy organ and is allowed to grow larger than life. Yet it is only merely a veiled approximation of desire’s appetite or the possession or emulation of power. I see this as extremely relevant to where I think Butler is leading us, away from the “investiture” in Freud’s Phallus and towards the disillusionment with the Phallus “the representative of power”. (And by that token, leading me to see Freud’s theories as merely a brilliantly deep representation of himself as human, rather than the forefather of psychoanalysis applied to all.)

The ideal is by definition inorganic: an inorganic, unattainable perfect representation, yet indissoluble from the messy flesh it is housed in. What I was trying to say in the first discussion, might be better explained in this sentence here: A real body part is to the imagined body part AS the imagined body part is to the idealized body part.

The concept of a body part that tries to fully detach from any origin in the body then becomes an idealized concept like the Phallus, which is disembodied and projected on just about anything, or as Butler says, is “transferable property” (33).

When the real body part gets mixed up with the imagined body part or even when the idealized interferes in the imaginary, a battlefield of double-entendres ensues (ie. When you say “pussy means power” are you saying that I must be intellectually able to compartmentalize previous meanings of it, ie. a vagina, an insult, with a meaning you give it that is abstract?). And once again the idealized body part, ie. the “perfect pussy power”, “the phallic power”, etc., can unravel as one tries to approximate it in language. In some ways the idealized version of anything, that denies its association with “materiality”, is just as vague as its counterpoint: the body without consciousness of itself.

Isn’t to argue that a body part does not exist until one can form a concept of it, is just another version of “if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”….

<<<<<I must say, I do not think existence should get mixed up with consciousness. >>>>>>>

— — — — — -Back to Butler:

“In the essay on narcissism, hypochondria lavishes libido on a body part, but in a significant sense, that body part does not exist for consciousness prior to that investiture; indeed, that body part is delineated and becomes knowable for Freud only on the condition of that investiture.” (29)

If Freud had said that one cannot know a body part until one experiences sensation in it, or that the sensation forces some thought process about what could be going on there, that would seem more palatable.

“Pain seems to play a part in the process, and the way in which we gain new knowledge of our organs during painful illnesses is perhaps a model of the way by which in general we arrive at the idea of our own body (25–6)……In a move that prefigures Lacan’s argument in “The Mirror Stage,” Freud connects the formation of one’s ego with the externalized idea one forms of one’s own body. Hence, Freud’s claim, “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity but is itself the projection of a surface” (26). What is meant by the imaginary construction of body parts? Is this an idealist thesis or one which asserts the indissolubility of the psychic and physical body? Curiously, Freud associates the process of erotogenicity with the consciousness of bodily pain: “Let us now, taking any part of the body, describe its activity of sending sexually exciting stimuli to the mind as its‘erotogenicity’ ” (Freud 1914, 84) (page 29–30, Lesbian Phallus).

But as it is phrased above, it would be like saying that the child does not exist until he sees himself in the mirror and separates his experience of the self/world into his representation of the self (despite his caretakers having a representation of him). Existence of this kind would seem to live in the mental realm arguably never giving due credit to the physical experience prior to representation.

The fact that it is hypochondria (excessive worry & conviction that something is wrong) that activates the libido and consciousness of that body part, reminds me of a little boy who wonders if something is wrong with his penis, becomes obsessed with something being insufficient about his penis and then this attention establishes an erotogenic origin. Or perhaps the first erection for the little boy is a sensation of pain and appears to be indicating that something is wrong. Was hypochondria just one example of “negative narcissism” bringing about body conceptualization? What other triggers “lavish the libido on a body part” and thus make it “knowable”?

I’m not familiar with Freud’s ‘A child being beaten” but the reference was folded into the discussion. Would this logic of “pain” activating a concept of body imply that the child’s body does not exist until it has been beaten? Or that someone else being obsessed with something being wrong with the child will cause physical and psychogenic pain which lets the libido animate or “lavish” the body? This is a disturbing thought, especially when coupled with the way idealization of pain or pain tolerance can be used as a defense mechanism:

Personal example: I was spanked as a child. It seemed fairly normal at the time and in no way equates to being beaten ( it was way before spanking your children became legally questionable). But what is interesting is that I remember only being scared of my father’s spankings. With my mother, I remember exclaiming spitefully, “It doesn’t hurt, hahaha!” and like, daring her to spank me. Perhaps in those moments of feeling desensitized, I began to idealize my relationship for a tolerance of pain, separating the act of being spanked from its meaning, (that I did something dangerous or wrong), and turned it into a mechanism about how to control my reaction to pain. By focusing on the sensation of body parts that were not being punished, I found a way out of the pain, physically — psychologically.

To give Freud his due credit, it seems very plausible that pain adds more dimension to one’s knowledge of a specific body part and its relationship to the rest of the body. Perhaps transferring pain (or pleasure) to one area of the body as to not feel it in another is a common way to deactivate or perhaps redirect libidinal interest from the area where pain originates? This seems entirely associated with the superficial description of Freud’s anal stage, which is described as controlling reactions or retaining impulses vs. controlling with impulses or releasing reactions. The latter (releasing impulses) being phallic.

— — — -

“At first, it seems logically incompatible to assert that these genitals are at once a cumulative example and a prototype or original site which occasions a process of secondary exemplifications. In the first case, they are the effect and sum of a set of substitutions, and in the second, they are an origin for which substitutions exist. But perhaps this logical problem only symptomizes a wish to understand these genitals as an originating idealization, that is, as the symbolically encoded phallus.” (pg 31)

Is Butler saying that the circular logic of where the erotogenization originates is itself a desire to idealize the genitals as the origin of erotica to ascribe them is itself an ‘encoded phallus’ or phallic process?

“One might also argue that to continue to use the term “phallus” for this symbolic or idealizing function is to prefigure and valorize which body part will be the site of erotogenization; this is an argument that deserves a serious response. To insist, on the contrary, on the transferability of the phallus, the phallus as transferable or plastic property, is to destabilize the distinction between being and having the phallus, and to suggest that logic of non-contradiction does not necessarily hold between those two positions.” (33)

I totally agree with this (above). And this phrasing, although different than my use of words, supports my notion that continuing to use Phallus to describe mechanisms that are outside of a genital site, are always subliminally linked to the penis and its promotion. To deny that it has much to do with the body part it refers to is to castrate the signification from its signifier. To slice off or partition the meaning from the word. Which feels obtuse. I mean, at least accept it as a metaphor!