Disenchantment, Drive and Drive

13In/Form–Haemo Aesthetics and Politics12

Alex. F Brown

Disenchantment,Drive and

Drive

Nicholas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive contains a short but indelible sequence in which the relations of desire and death-drive, Eros and Thanatos, appear in perfect simultaneity and indissociability. The name-less hero (henceforth “Driver”) and the woman he loves (Irene) stand in a hallway. An elevator opens, a man stands inside. The protagonists get in and the elevator closes and begins to descend. A gun is glimpsed in the coat pocket of the stranger, revealing his purpose here as an assas-sin sent to kill them. The hero turns and — gingerly, for the first and only time — kisses Irene. Time is stretched to dilate the brevity of the moment. In what is very nearly a single movement or perhaps a hybrid gesture, the hero pivots from the kiss to grab the back of the hit-man’s head and smash it brutally against the elevator wall multiple times. The man goes down and Driver keeps up the assault with ruthless stomping blows to the head until the man is clearly dead, and then beyond any possible rationality continues to demolish, flatten and splatter him across the rear corner of the elevator floor. Irene backs toward the door, and then through it as the elevator arrives at the bottom level. Driver looks up from the carnage he’s left and locks gazes with Irene as the door slides shut between them forever. Tenderness and violence, crystalline clarity of desire and the blind automatism of destructive rage — this constellation has perhaps never been given as concise an articulation.

What I wish to do here is examine the basic terms of this libidinal economy with a special focus on disenchantment and death-drive in the work of Bernard Stiegler. What I particularly wish to work against is the notion that Eros and Thanatos are opposed tendencies, which results in a very Manichaean portrait whereby psychical life is reduced to a kind of eternal struggle between proverbial angels and demons, or creative and destructive instincts. Eros and Thanatos are best understood, on my account, as a unitary principle with two poles. Death-drive, in contrast, has no manifestation whereby it can be read legibly as an instinctual ten-dency. It needs to be retained, however, as the necessary condition which supports the “life instincts.” I will make my argument with an analysis of Stigler’s theorization of political economy followed by several passes through the film Drive, which I read as an exposition of the psycho-analytic concept of death-drive. My reading ultimately depends on the interpretation that the central figure of Driver is not a character in the film. On the contrary, he is its fundamental fantasy. In short, Driver does not exist. He is what has to be there in order to grant consistency to the other elements (characters, beliefs) so that a simple situation can be elevated to a story. In other words, the Driver ex-sists in relation to the film as the figure of its narrative drive. Driver is the element which weaves together a disenchanted social mileu characterized by the blanched and

Disenchantment, Drive and DriveA l e x . FB r o w n

In/Haemo/Form Aesthetics and Politics14 15 Disenchantment, Drive and DriveAlex F. Brown

detextured desiring schema of the marketization and consumerization of everyday existence.

What kind of desire is consumerist desire? We think of desire as something that requires an object which remains beyond our ability to totally realize; I can only desire an object so long as I do not actually have it, and fully obtaining the object would spell the end of desire. A consumer object, however, is made to be destroyed — whether by using it all up as with food objects or wearing it out or, now in the age of techno-logical acceleration of all things, by simply becoming obsolete with the release of the newer version. Consumption and consumer culture, if not destructive of desire, at the very least interrupt it perpetually by increas-ing the pace of the search for new desired objects and oversaturating the field of object choice.

What happens to desire for inherently durable objects (a human relationship, a social position, a complicated skill, etc.) when such things are faced with the competition of a marketplace which promises and truly delivers a constant supply of intrinsically disposable substitute objects? We can see three possible outcomes. Firstly, the durable objects are simply abandoned in favor of their consumable counterparts; I give up trying to cook for myself and begin eating frozen TV dinners. Secondly, the consumer mentality expands and overflows the field so that object relations in general take on the characteristics of consumption regard-less of the object itself; rather than care for my companion animal for the span of its life I get caught up in the trending designer dog breeds and when I tire of my Maltipoo I abandon and replace it. Finally, the avail-able objects, in order to remain potential objects-of-desire, adapt and transform themselves into products for marketing and consumption; I seek relationships on dating websites and become frustrated when I find that the results are never “as advertised.” Each of these scenarios has in common a deficiency in composing what Stiegler terms “consistence.” What they fail to do is weave any enduring bond between the singular objects that could be and the psychic individual they could subjectivize. Instead, they fall into a dynamic of industrialized fungibility, particular things which never singularize and therefore obsolesce at a calculable rate. The result, to the extent that I remain a consumer in my object-rela-tions, is a general and pervasive disaffection.

Stiegler connects the theme of consumerist liquidation of desire to the narrative of disenchantment in the development of capitalist industrial societies. Disenchantment follows from the processes of com-modification whereby capitalism, in order to combat the tendential fall in the rate of profit, submits all things to a rationalization (which is also a rei-fication and an instrumentalization) which allows for their measurement

and calculation with regard to a general equivalent. This process perhaps begins with (but in any case is exemplified by) the measurement of time which allows for the alienation of labor from work by abstracting discrete countable, exchangeable units from what was previously a continuum. Stiegler analyzes this process as one of “grammatization,” the concretiza-tion which renders things calculable such that they can be subject to the industrial mode of production. Now, the problematic which emerges for desire is that calculability expunges mystery. I can only invest things with desire — that is, to engage with rather than simply possess my objects — to the extent that something remains incalculable in them. Our epoch, the

“information age” in which capitalist commodification broaches previ-ously immaterial domains, becomes “the hyper-industrial age [which] can be characterized as an extension of calculation beyond the sphere of production along with a correlative extension of industrial domains…. Thus a new form of capitalism develops… where it is not the entrepre-neur-producer who makes the law, but rather marketing in its control of the temporalities of consciousnesses and bodies through the mechaniza-tion of daily life” (Symbolic Misery 47-48). Thus we arrive at an impasse or crisis of desire in the precise sense that none of the products and services offered us by the cultural-industries are capable of being consti-tuted as objects of desire, properly speaking.

What makes an object an object? The answer is certainly nothing objective. In Stiegler’s lexicon, an object is something singular, excep-tional, infinite, absolute or universal — something becomes an object when it quite literally “means the world to me.” This should be taken in a precise sense. It is not so much these rare and foundational objects (a lover, a child) that make a world as it is a consistency formed by libidi-nal cathexes to everyday knowledge practices. Disenchantment is a corrosive loss of this savoir-vivre and savoir-faire which consist in the fabric of a world. The result tends towards the dissolution of consistent life-worlds to a state of worldless subsistence. This is a very real threat, as Stiegler has abundantly illustrated. Not only because certain people, feeling a lack of existence, go on spree killings or vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, but because disaffected individuals “have no feeling for what is happening, and for this reason they no longer feel part of society. They inhabit a zone… which is no longer a world because aesthetically it has disengaged” (Symbolic Misery 3). In libidinal terms, the lack of persistent attachments literally decomposes the world. The ties which knit the abundance of things into a coherent milieu are undone, never formed in the first place, or become so erratic that we can honestly say it is the world which has gone crazy. The proper mode of being in a non-world can only be a severe detachment.

In/Haemo/Form Aesthetics and Politics16 17 Alex F. Brown

Disenchantment, Drive and Drive

Stiegler’s ongoing critique of political economy returns to and revives these categories of psychical and libidinal principles which underlie the transformations of industrial capitalism. In the hyperindustrial era, the commodification process which reifies and concretizes objects in order to dissolve them into general equivalence extends to regions of existence far beyond the production-line and into such intimate quarters as our life of the mind. Attention, affect, taste and cognitive abilities in general are all submitted to hyperindustrial exploitation, serving as both the raw material and marketplace for the production and consumption of new services and “temporal objects.” In this schema, which he also commonly refers to as “drive-based capitalism,” the psychoanalytic conceptual vocabulary takes on a heightened importance in relation to the terms of both the materialist critique of political economy of the industrial age as well as prior renditions of libidinal economy. Capitalism migrates into territories of the psyche and the material base relations of produc-tion become, themselves, psychical relations. Leisure time activities such as video-gaming become directly productive of value as they are played (for example in the “virtual economies” of MMORPGs which lead to real-world-trading of in-game property), as do social relations in electronic forms such as Facebook. This state of affairs marks a great turning point in the global development of capitalist economics as well as a terrible challenge for critique, presuming as it does the loss of even an “ideologi-cal” outside of capitalism from which to ground a critique of capitalism.

Stiegler begins with a basic model which comprises both libidinal and political aspects of economy. The following passage can be taken as representative:

It is an anti-libidinal economy: only that which is singular is desir-able, and in this regard exceptional. I only desire what seems exceptional to me. There is no desire for banality, but a compul-sion for repetition that tends to banality: the psyche is constituted by Eros and Thanatos, two tendencies that ceaselessly compose with each other. The cultural industry and marketing strive for the development of the desire for consumption, but in reality they strengthen the death drive to provoke and exploit the compulsive phenomenon of repetition. In this way they thwart the life drive (“Suffocated Desire”).

A renewed attention must be paid to the conceptualization of the psychi-cal categories in the aim of strengthening and clarifying Stiegler’s critique, particularly with regard to aligning it with contemporary psychoanalytic frameworks emphasizing the radical nature of the death-drive. Most significantly, Lacanian formulations of the death-drive as original cause of the subject bear a striking resemblance to Stiegler’s theorization of

the originary default which serves as his anthropogenic myth. Whereas psychoanalytic accounts emphasize the constitutive decenterment of the subject and tend to downplay the specificities of technical appara-tuses, Stiegler’s libidinal-economic account focuses rigorously on the dynamics of technicity in the development of civilization while tending to de-emphasize the notion of the subject and subject formation. Stiegler appropriates Gilbert Simondon’s framework of psychic and collective (to which he adds a third, mediating, term — technical) individuation. In this analysis, “individual” must be taken in a very different sense than the personal individual of modern liberal thought. In Stiegler’s reformulation of Simondon, a psychic individual co-emerges with a collective through a process of transduction which simultaneously individuates a technical milieu. The essential point is that none of the three terms can be opposed to the others; they are all indispensable aspects of one and the same process.

According to the dominant but overly reductive reading I am attempting to work against, desire decoupled from an object regresses to the mindless destructive compulsions of the death-drive. Sublimated libidinal energy in the form of an object-cathexis which binds it in an attachment is let loose by the loss of object and, thus set free in a move-ment of desublimation, explodes into a blind Thanatropic rampage. The elevator scenario which opens this essay can be seen as the very para-digm of the dynamic by which the liberation of the drives is presupposed to result in the suicidal tendency towards dissolution; “drive unbound,” precisely. But what if we look at it in another way, where Driver does not have any desire at all, because he is already situated a notch lower? He then becomes an agent of pure insistence beyond life and death, and the kissing/killing sequence simply a manifestation of the indestructibility of libidinal pulsion with regard to the precarity of the object-relations it circulates. When we look at Driver as someone or something which does not exist, the story of the film is complicated, but different elements rise to the surface which explain the excessive brutality of the film’s violence and the strangely peripheral human relationships which populate it, as well as the submerged wishes of its oneiric aesthetic. What I want to do is read Driver as a figure of death-drive itself.

Take 1: DriverWe never know his name, but we know he is extraordinary. “Put this kid behind the wheel and there’s nothing he can’t do.” We are given a demonstration of this in the opening sequence, a ten-minute pre-credit heist scene culminating in a spectacular “slow-speed” chase with him as the getaway driver. Police are dispatched to the scene of the robbery, a



consumer electronics warehouse. Driver doesn’t involve himself in the crime, his business is driving. He does so with principle and an unbreak-able composure. He drives, and he gets away — his two principle traits. Principle characteristics of the death-drive are already visible here. Whereas desire requires an object to sustain it, drive is a self-propelling pure circulation. In other words, drive has no ultimate aim other than itself. Like Driver, who maintains a distance from the particularities of the criminal actions he enables, drive traces a contour through which desires pass without entangling the circuit of the drive itself. Driver has no aim in these crimes except to live to drive another day.

Furthermore, we never get to know who he is. The opening scene emphasizes his anonymity, and the film never really breaches it. A dingy motel room where he plots the getaway drive, a disposable cell phone that he’ll never use again, a Chevy Impala (“the most popular car in the state of California… nobody will be looking at you”) which blends inconspicuously into traffic; all these serve to obscure and disindividu-ate him. Strategically nameless in this instance, given that he’s commit-ting a felony, but he goes unnamed throughout his own story. Perhaps it’s more than a great way to evade a police dragnet that he finishes his escape route by parking at the Staples Center and melting into a crowd of Clippers fans. His method matches his character. Inverting his one distinctive piece of paraphernalia, an embroidered scorpion jacket, his appearance is as indistinguishable as his title. He simply merges with the masses and goes. Drive, we could say, is a preindividual milieu which serves as the energetic driver of individuation.

Driver, we learn, drives all kinds of ways. The getaway thing is just an occasional lucrative sideline. He also drives stunts for the movies. Shannon, his boss at the garage, is hoping to enter him into the stock-car racing circuit. In point of fact, it is Shannon who manages his stunt-driving and getaway-driving careers as well. Driver, himself, never reveals much of any sort of inner motivation. He appears as more of a blank slate for the inscription of others’ desires. As he repeats several times in vari-ous contexts, “I drive.” The statement has an unmistakable aura of finality. This is what he does. This is all he does. He drives — not as an occupation or a means to some other end but as an end in itself, an identity and a mode of being.

The dramatic tension of the story emerges when Driver meets Irene, an apparently single mother who lives in his apartment building. Appropriately, they are brought together when Irene’s own car breaks down and Shannon offers Driver’s “services” to drive her home. Again, it is a transferential relationship with Shannon that gets things moving; Shannon expresses that Irene is desire-worthy and Driver consequently

desires to help her. Thus we have the articulation of the Lacanian formu-lation of “desire of the other”: desire for an object originates not in some particular property of the object nor in a fundamental lack in the subject, but rather through a process which subjectivates the subject-object relation through an intermediary. If Driver desires anything in the course of the film, it is the “desire of desire.” Only by becoming involved in pre-existing networks of libidinal ties does Driver ever seem to get motivated. But his motivations never seem to settle into a clear pattern. It would seem that he desires Irene, but this proposition is seriously challenged by the films introduction of another male lead.

This most problematic aspect of Driver’s relationship with Irene is signaled by the discovery that she isn’t really a single mother. She is still together with Benicio’s father, Standard, who is in prison for an unspeci-fied crime. Moreover, Standard is being released from prison and will be returning home to live with them. This is the moment where a typical scenario introduces a competitive rivalry, a conflict between men for the desired woman. A conflict of this type would typically be enough to drive a story: the obstacle to the fulfillment of a desire (winning the affections of the woman) sustains that desire and subsequently floats the whole dramatic action. In contrast to this expectation, Driver seems all too eager to facilitate Irene’s renunion with Standard. The film antici-pates and defuses our expectation of masculine aggression through an exchange between the two men in the hallway outside of Standard’s wel-come-home party. Standard confronts Driver in what we would expect to escalate into just such a conflict, but Driver shows no inclination to take it up. Standard is marking his territory, and Driver simply gives it to him. Standard: “I hear you’ve been coming around a lot — helping out. Is that right?” Driver: “Mhmm… That’s right.” There isn’t even a hint of envy or resentment in him. In fact, there is every indication that he is glad that he has helped and that he intends to keep on helping. What this should signal is more than that Driver is just a great guy; he is the enabling sup-port that serves as the very condition of the Standard/Irene couple.

Take 2: Standard/Irene/BenicioWhat becomes of the film if we view it from a different, less intuitive, direction and place Standard and Irene and their son Benicio at the center? The film gives several indications that this is in fact the emotional kernel of the story. Significantly, these three are the only ones in the film who pronounce the phrase “I love you,” which would suggest that the libidinal framework of film’s characters is all tied up in this family unit. In fact, some idiosyncrasies of the film are fully explained if we take only these characters to be literal people, and all the rest as a hallucinatory



projection. What I want to suggest is that this extremely heteroclite reading is in fact the libidinal truth of the film, exhausting the film noir dramatic supplement in which it clothes itself.

Irene is in a predicament because she loves Standard and her son and knows that Standard loves her and Benicio also. Standard got wrapped up in shady dealings because making a living is a hard thing to do and he made some wrong decisions, as normal human beings are notoriously prone to do. He gets sent to prison and she is left to work to support the family with menial labor and wait for Standard’s release. We don’t know the exact nature of her employment, but we can deduce that it isn’t a great source of inspiration in her life from the work uniform she wears which would indicate a minimum-wage type of scenario. She has some friends but is too busy and too exhausted and too committed to her son and absent husband to lead much of a social life. In short, Irene is stressed, undervalued and lonely.

Standard is eventually released and comes home to live with them. He makes promises and intends to live by them, but reality comes knock-ing. He is less employable than before (the same situation as anybody with a criminal record) and furthermore, still has ties to the underworld element. It isn’t long before his own debts and personal acquaintance-ships result in him recidivating and getting tied up again in no-good business. He isn’t what we would think of as a bad person, but his options are limited by what he knows and what other people expect him to do. Some of these people want him to rob a pawn shop, which he does. He gets shot. He dies.

Benicio loves his mom and dad. He is a sweet kid, and benefits a lot from having a devoted mother. He doesn’t really understand why his dad is incarcerated, so he just misses him and wants him to come home. What’s really scary is the guys who know where they live, who come looking for Standard to beat him up and threaten him. Benicio has a bullet as a token from one of these goons, a promise of more scariness to come if his dad doesn’t do something. But his dad will do something, that much he knows. He just doesn’t know much about what that some-thing is. The only understanding of it all is that it must be bad, because police are at the house again talking to his mom and this time dad isn’t coming home.

This, then, is the whole story. A family which manages to subsist in the frenetic economy of Los Angeles. But subsistence is not enough. Something else, a supplement, is required for there to be a storyness to this story. Something decidedly extra has to come and give it some consistency, to tie it all together. Driver, Shannon tells Irene, “just showed up about six or seven years ago,” which is about when Benicio was born.

He hasn’t always lived in the same building as Irene, but moved in rather recently. It would seem he appears on the scene just as Standard’s prison sentence draws to an end and their family life resumes once more. Why?

A very strange scene occurs between all four characters in the dining room of Irene’s apartment. A kind of lovers’ dialogue, but with Benicio as the audience and Driver as something like a guarantor. Standard asks Benicio “Did I ever tell you how I met your mom?” and proceeds to narrate the tale. It’s a typically mundane story, the kind of anecdote that only has value to the extent that you’re emotionally tied up in the consequences. In short, it is a totally believable human moment. What is it doing in such a prominent place in this hyper-stylized cinematic spectacle of romance, action, violence and crime? Who is being human-ized? The crucial bit of dialogue is this exchange, which marks the begin-ning of Standard and Irene, and hence the beginning of Benicio. Standard:

“I am Standard Gabriel.” Irene: “Where’s the deluxe version?”The only possible resolution to these questions is that Driver him-

self is the “deluxe version” of Standard. Driver is interposed in this scene as the necessary “transitional object” which allows for the stabilization of libidinal ties in this family. He is “doubling for the star” in the same sense as in his role as stunt-double for the movies. He bears the heavy bur-dens of barreling ineluctably onward so that the desiring configurations can emerge as concrete and enduring. The whole story of the criminal schemes he finds himself involved in is a hallucinatory projection under the sway of narrative inertia, an imaginary past and future into which an otherwise disaffected present can justify itself. The Irene-Standard-Benicio triad is already necessarily a quartet.

In/Form–Haemo Aesthetics and Politics22 23 Disenchantment, Drive and DriveAlex F. Brown

Works CitedDrive. Dir. Nicholas Winding Refn. Sony, 2011. DVD.

Stiegler, Bernard. Symbolic Misery. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. Print.

— “Suffocated Desire, or How the Cultural Industry Destroys the Individual: Contribution to a Theory of Mass Consumption”. Trans. Johann Roussouw. Parrhesia 13 (2011): 52-61. Web.

Alex F. Brown is a graduate of the Liberal Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and maintains an interest in a range of modern arts and cinemas from opera through science- fiction. He recently published several essays in Directory of World Cinema: Scotland, including the world’s only positive review of Bonnie Prince Charlie. His current research is all about cars. He does some of his best writing with a Montblanc Carrera, but he would rather drive the Porsche.

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Disenchantment, Drive and Drive