Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has felt the temptation to move out from the consulting room in order to comment on wider cultural matters and to offer explanations for such phenomena that link what might be termed properly psychoanalytic notions with the domains of anthropology and ethnology. Freud's deployment of Oedipus as the template for the transition from nature to culture is rehearsed in Lacan's reconfiguration of the Symbolic as the site of culture accessed through the acknowledgement of castration. More contemporarily, Laplanche has used the idea of the ‘transference of transference’ as a means to investigate the effects of cultural objects and Zizek and others have stretched psychoanalytic concepts to account for modern pathologies of value. It might not be too fanciful to claim that psychoanalysis now has more cachet as a cultural hermeneutic than as a therapeutic practice: certainly the use of psychoanalysis as a method of investigation of modern culture is a commonplace, nothing outré.
Yet, all such uses of psychoanalysis face the same problems that Freud first encountered and warned against, even as he ignored his own advice. Caught between his claims for the limited scope of psychoanalysis as science and the inflationary tendencies of his own work, Freud is most scathing of the off-limits use of psychoanalysis in others, notably Jung, while he is constantly pulled into making psychoanalysis a master discourse and interpretative schema. So, his famous claims about Greek tragedy as always illustrating the Oedipal model, even where such an interpretation owes more to Procrustes than Sophocles1 and the deeply problematic ‘just so’ allegory of the Urvater in Totem and Taboo as the foundational myth of society. The drive of psychoanalysis towards a philosophical anthropology seems unavoidable yet is constantly
vitiated by the gap between theory and interpretative limitations. This can be posed neatly in terms of the limits to speculation which psychoanalysis as a practice finds in the therapeutic dialogue with the patient. The success of the narrative reconfiguration of the symptom made through the interpretation is in part a function of its affirmation or rejection by the patient: not all narratives are permissible and the singularity of the patient's history imposes controls on the analyst's account. Psychoanalytic interpretation must emerge from a dialogue with the patient and the dialogic relation of the speech genre that is the analytic relation exerts a form of resistance to the wilder forms of speculation. One might see the session as the laboratory where theory and material, explanans and explanandum find a reciprocally illuminating unity.
When wider cultural phenomena are taken as the object of psychoanalytic investigation however, that is, when such phenomena are read symptomatically, controls and reciprocity are lost, and the objects become amenable to an unlimited semiosis: there is no resistance to the meanings evoked by the researcher, who now acts as an untrammelled interpreter. At this point it is as though cultural interpretation itself becomes the symptom demanding its decoding from the reader who is placed in the position of the Lacanian Big Other, the addressee of the hysterical demand of the anthropologist/psychoanalyst. Rather than providing an interpretation whose truth is verified (or falsified) by its pragmatic effect within the dialogue of the session, the cultural researcher offers up something that might look more like a structured fantasy, which in turn is an object for interpretation. This interpretation is itself problematic in as much as the new object of critique can only be interpreted as a finished, closed object which does not return a live questioning of the hermeneutic hypothesis. What we strike here is the psychoanalytic equivalent of the hermeneutic spiral.
These reflections are prompted by Tim Dean's book Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, which has been something of a succès de scandale in the States, though little remarked upon in the UK.2 Dean's project is ostensibly to engage with the rise of a culturally framed practice of unprotected anal sex amongst gay men and to use psychoanalysis as a research tool to investigate this risk-laden—indeed at times risk-affirmative—practice in terms of the non-rational factors that lead to a valorisation of behaviour so manifestly antagonistic to good sense. I use the term ‘ostensibly’ to indicate that there are features
of Dean's project that seem to exceed such a neutral statement of intent. Whilst claiming that psychoanalysis offers both a range of concepts and a method of investigation, Dean also claims that the particular practice investigated psychoanalytically reveals a model for a properly ethical relation—not merely to the phenomena investigated, but also between the participants in that culture and more widely. ‘Barebacking’ under psychoanalytic scrutiny ceases to be pathological and stands beyond ‘good and evil’ if not beyond ethics, which it rather instantiates.
Such a project is worth paying attention to, especially as its claims have been endorsed at a distance by Bersani and Phillips in their book intimacies, thereby producing another moment of mediated psychoanalysis.3 What we have is a form of research into cultural production and sexual practice that mobilises psychoanalysis to arrive at a set of ethical considerations, whose conclusions are then reinforced by an authoritative discourse; the effect is to lend prestige rather than further investigate the means of theoretical production. In short, psychoanalysis is transformed more and more into a form of cultural theory the more and more mediated its relation becomes to the source of testimony. To borrow a notion from George Yudice, the American cultural critic, what we have here is an instance of the expediency of psychoanalysis mapped onto one of the expediency of culture4, that is, a case where certain terms are deployed which effect a valorisation of practices that might still need to be looked at more critically, regardless of the superficial intentions of the author.
The purpose of this article then is to offer a critical reading of Dean's work in order to elucidate its problematic relation to its object of investigation and its deployment of methodologies that derive ‘expediently’ from cultural anthropology and psychoanalysis. What such expediency reveals is a restricted re-coding of psychoanalysis that performs theoretical and methodological disavowals that parallel the disavowals of bare-backing culture, reconstituting as abstract ethics the particular responsibility of the researcher/analyst.
Dean's book in fact turns out to be a multiple text not always sure of its purported objects and not always sure of its psychoanalysis. What
might a reader initially expect from an account that claims psychoanalysis as its distinctive methodology? In the case of barebacking, it might have something to do with the meanings that participants within its extensive practice ascribe to their actions, a set of elaborations around questions of risk and damage, jouissance and danger, attended to with all the dispassion of the analyst, but cautiously framed within the decisions and patterns of the individual life. There is little of this in Dean's book: the self-accounts are found either within written reportage or as interview fragments within highly wrought representations within visual pornography. That control I alluded to above is utterly absent.
We might also expect something about the author's own position in relation to the phenomena he is investigating, something about his own investments: after all psychoanalysis is a classic hermeneutic of suspicion, especially about one's own motives. And Dean is himself implicated in the culture he is investigating: he comes out, as it were, as someone who fucks other men without a condom. This is an important self-revelation as is the claim that he is sero-negative and it might have been psychoanalytically illustrative if he had offered an account of why he chooses not to use condoms, or to offer us the insights which his analysis brought up (since he claims that he was in analysis consistently through the writing of the book) about his risk behaviour and what he thought the consequences of that behaviour might be. But he devotes no attention to his own place in the culture he wishes to describe, save once when he expresses a discomfort about being assumed to be seropositive and therefore capable of ‘gifting’ the virus. This odd qualm, which centres on a ‘misrecognition’ taken up ‘casually, without discussion of the matter’ (Dean 2009: 70) is revelatory but passed over: the sort of place an analyst might intervene. In fact the most extended self-description has nothing to do with sex, but rather with an occasion in which a homeless man helps him find a shortcut to the gym, which gives him cause to praise the city as a site where casual cross-class encounters are possible. This is delivered with such a sense of revelation that the reader might think the author singularly sheltered and also singularly mean since its only after the homeless man has been chatting for half an hour that he is thought worthy of ‘spare change’. The more salient point is that the real investments of the author as participant
observer are never explored, so that we have to read the theoretically couched meanings of the ethnography as articulating the author's own structures of meaning.
A final expectation, or rather two, might be that psychoanalysis itself have a more clearly delineated role within the explanations and contextualisations on offer and that the possibility of alternative, even competing, psychoanalytically informed accounts might be considered and reasons offered for the choice finally adhered to. Dean sees psychoanalysis as both attitude—the investigation of a culture is akin to the act of listening to ‘free association’, that unlimited discourse of the analysand—and content, that is particular models of the unconscious. But on both counts he innovates, or ‘goes astray’ to use Laplanche's ever-useful term, whilst trading on the authority of analysis. What is central to his account—barebacking as being itself properly ethical and as providing some model of other forms of interaction precisely because of its cultural form—looks for a justification from psychoanalytic thought but remains problematic.
Thus our expectations of Dean's account are denied and instead we have another sort of text, which itself might be interrogated
Any discussion of barebacking requires some initial definitions and Dean is meticulous here: mere unprotected anal sex doesn't count, since the frame of such actions is important. What Dean wants to foreground is a culture where the pursuit of the virus and sero-conversion are positively valorised: affirmed and desired. This rules out the greater number of participants in risk-positive activity, whose engagement is framed by other attitudes. Dean knows this. Indeed, he is keen to move beyond such ‘vanilla’ motivations, such as carelessness or being high, and wants both to assert that the medical context of HIV survival is a necessary condition for the de-phobisation of HIV and that it is unimportant as a motivation for risk behaviour. He also agrees that drug use is a major factor in prompting unsafe behaviour but again at the same time refuses to assign any great weight to drugs as liberating drives. He acknowledges other psychoanalytically pertinent reflections, which mark out a terrain of possible unconscious drive towards not merely
unsafe sex but sero-conversion. The latter can become the solution to the persistent anxiety of promiscuity, that is, the elimination of risk by embracing it so as no longer to worry about risk: the worry about becoming sero-positive can be eliminated by converting. Here the question of identity may also be involved: I allow myself to sero-convert because all my friends are sero-positive and I feel apart from them. He also allows for disavowal as a central mechanism in such behaviour, but only in a footnote, the disavowal of disavowal, one might say.
But these considerations are so to speak the banal side of ‘barebacking’. What interests indeed ‘fascinates’ Dean is what he calls ‘breeding culture’, the pursuit of infection as a good, and what most fascinates him is its public representations. Here the text comes alive with a detailed description of the pornography that registers and records multiple acts of unprotected anal intercourse and multiple and often inventive acts of semen transfer. What might strike the reader here are the baroqueries of such acts, their sheer excess as spectacular performance, which might raise questions about staging and exceptionality, but which function for Dean as a spur to his descriptive passion. He likes talking about ‘it’, and in a way this fits in with his stance throughout the text as provocateur and anthropologist hero, daring to look at what the constantly invoked and rejected semblable refuses to engage with. For Dean, there is a certain reinscription of masculinity involved in the heroic bottom taking on an endless series of tops; but the same narcissistic self-presentation of the radical theorist seems to pervade his own investigations.
But if the pornography of barebacking is the evidential basis for his reflections, two key moves provide the theoretical provocation that Dean pursues. Firstly, we have the idea of unlimited intimacy, which Dean is keen to identify as a participant's term, something ‘that came out of a barebacker's mouth’, a term that is related to ‘openness to vulnerability’ and which sanctions the abandonment of condoms with an array of partners whose sero-status is unknown. The second is the deployment of ideas of viral kinship, the production of ideas of community around viral exchange and consanguinity. Both terms figure a privileged value to semen which is metonymically related to HIV but they seem to point in opposite directions. The former emphasises a desire for a jouissance that is boundless and whose limit is imposed only
by the putative and deferred moment of fatal risk, which denial (not disavowal) actively intensifies, whilst the latter embraces the incorporation of semen as a material condition for being part of a community which then would permit the possibility of that infinite jouissance. But in both cases what is at work is a fantasy structuring desire and figuring semen as a particular invested object.
Fantasy is central to Dean's account but at no point does he give us any model for fantasy, nor indeed for his other central notions—fetish and otherness—which derives from a psychoanalytic framework. Perhaps more telling is his invocation of the unconscious without ever seeing its effects in what begins to look like a simple rationalist ethnography: the self-ascribed meanings of an act are the real and only meanings in play.
This is clear in his conception of culture as active transformation of meaning, the vaunted ‘creativity’ he talks about, where the negative value attaching to the virus is inverted into an enabling moment of ‘biosociality’. Death is transformed into life by the operation of a metaphorics of birth and procreation: Bersani's infamous question, ‘Is the rectum a grave?’ is answered by its displacement, ‘No, the rectum is a womb’ a site where a new subject is created. Here the arguments are anthropological, that is, what appeared to be a practice that was lethal is converted into the means to a new cultural existence, as outlined in the theories of (a Derrideanly inflected) Mauss on the gift or Van Gennep on rites of passage by processes of resignification. But the power of culture here seems omnipotent: resignification has no residue and there is no unconscious. Any and all subjects can shift their meanings by assent to new cultural configurations. But this seems unpsychoanalytic in the extreme. Desire is not structured through the meanings of culture but through the vicissitudes of individual development and its pervasive inflections: the history of the individual provides the framework for desire. Culture may offer certain outlets and legitimations, and perhaps provides the materials for desire, the cut out pieces of the world behind which the nimbus of the lost object plays but the object of desire is formed somewhere else, in another scene. Even Freud was hesitant (and incoherent) about the idea of a cultural super-ego in Civilisation and its Discontents.
This assumed plasticity of desire is supported by an account of the fetish which also breaks from psychoanalytic understandings. For
Dean, any object can be a fetish, which is trivially true at the level of abstract science: any object whatsoever might be invested with—depending on your account of desire—the mark of lack. But not any object for the particular individual: here the fetish ‘choice’ has to be precisely specific and involuntary. In some sense the sense of the individual's desire lies in what their fetish is, that is what object is necessary for satisfaction. But it is not the case that any object will serve for the same individual nor that the individual can change the necessary object: if not, then aversive psychotherapy would work without leaving its residual traces of resistance in a further symptom. Dean's fetish is more like a Pavlovian re-conditioned reflex than the fatality that the psychoanalytic traditions envisage. (And might we not add here that if such a model of fetishisation were correct, then the ‘safe sex strategy’ of eroticising condoms would function straightforwardly rather than being part of ethical practice (the wish not to harm the other) that does not simply flow from self-abandonment.)
So here anthropology trumps psychoanalysis: an external apparatus of meaning overcodes the singularities of desire. And Dean provides precisely the material to suggest how a superficial re-configuration of desire might work through the phenomena of witnessing and recording. Barebacking sex seems most often to be public sex and, at least in Dean's exegesis, sex recorded for future dissemination. But here one might suggest that there is something psychoanalytically interesting going on: just what further desires are at work or what counter-desires are socially erased in such assemblages (to use Deleuze and Guattari for a moment)? But for Dean such a question about scopic desire is irrelevant, as are any considerations about the staging that such scenarios involve. In a colossally naïve account of the filmmakers and their participants, Dean imagines a transparency of expression of the desire for sero-conversion within a complex theatricalisation of a multiplicity of contending desires—those of ‘actors’, directors, viewers and analysts.
The last chapter of the book is much less ‘controversial’ inasmuch as it gives an account of cruising and aleatory sex which is not focussed on viral exchange. In many ways this could have been written forty years
ago in the heyday of Gay Liberation: the difference is a less romantic tenor and the use of Laplanche's account of ‘otherness’ rather than the Marcusean desublimation of the sixties sexual radicals: in fact a major support of this ethnography of cruising is Samuel Delany, a figure whose writing has since the sixties been a Whitmanesque hymn to the pleasures of promiscuity. But this section is also problematic: Dean, it seems to me, misunderstands the import of Laplanche's work and is again too uncritical about a purported ethical counter-practice to ‘hegemonic’ forms.
The occasion for the reflection on otherness and the forms of seduction is the space of cruising. For Dean this allows ‘contact’, which he opposes to ‘networking’ a form of intercorporeal encounter, which ‘preserves’ or refuses to domesticate the otherness of the other. ‘Networking’ that is ‘hooking up’ with men via websites for instant sex, is rather a mode of encounter with the Same; presumably the deployment of categories and criteria of desire. Here Dean cites an extract from a paper on risk-behaviour to equate cruising on line with ‘internet-shopping’ (194) as a form of commodification. ‘Contact’ within the random environments of back-room bars, cruising grounds, etc. is clearly non-commodified but it is not at all clear how ‘otherness’ is preserved save where there is no other exchange save through bodies; even then, clearly fantasy must be at work (assuming something other than a Deleuzian contiguity of intensities as the model of sexuality). What seems to be at issue here is a conflation of the abstract otherness of Levinas, a constant beyond that must be maintained within the ambit of communication, with Laplanche's use of otherness as both the structure of the ‘fundamental anthropological situation’ and the non-coincidence of self with self consequent upon the genesis of the drives by introjection and metabolism. As I understand Laplanche, the play of otherness is at work in all encounters, even those structured in terms of ethical intentionality: this is the trace of the unconscious. The example I cited above of the encounter with the homeless man demonstrates the point: in its presentation within Dean's text, the other is reduced exactly to illustration and to staging the desires of the author. He is domesticated precisely inasmuch as he expresses only a civil (and civilised) desire (spare change after conversation): perhaps a more difficult desire of the other is just the expression of naked need in the junkie on
the street whose desire is for my money, exactly preserving my otherness. No exchange, no subordination to imaginary equality (in the Lacanian sense), just pure want. But Dean's own desire gets in the way of a real appreciation of the unpredictability (and dangers) of otherness.
Danger is oddly construed in Dean's work. His assault on the normativity of health as one of the legitimating moments of ‘barebacking’ (dubiously allied with a refusal to acknowledge HIV as the causal agent of AIDS) elides the operation of ideology-critique with a disavowal of risk assessment, so that we have the seeming absurdity of his explicitly rating the dangers of the perpetuation of encounters with the Same as greater than infection with HIV. It is the organisation of barebacking on-line that provokes his ire, not willed transmission of the virus itself. Here the centrality of Dean's notion of ‘openness to the other’ is formulated along aleatory and properly fetishistic lines. ‘Openness’ is literalised as the breaching of corporeal boundaries and semen is the fetishised—that is reified—token of that rupture. But this has nothing to do with an ethical ‘openness’, that is the maintenance of the ‘otherness’ of the other, since such a stance for Dean is premised on the refusal of exchange. The two lines of Dean's reflections seem to become mutually aporetic.
Further, modelling an ethics of ‘openness’ on the gay male aleatory encounter may be problematic: the specific conditions of this sexual drift may not be universalisable, a fact that becomes apparent when the gendered moment is made explicit. Cruising culture is homosexual not heterosexual, even as casual promiscuity among young heterosexuals is taking on new cultural frames. But the latter's imbrication in the facts of misogyny and reproduction skew the potential for ‘pure’ pleasure. That is to say, the facts of the asymmetry of power relations between men and women act as a limit to any simple transfer of the ‘democracy’ of gay cruising and its abstract universalisation. What the heterosexual encounter foregrounds is the diremptive form of sexual desire there: the desire for sexual satisfaction is split from the desire for reproduction, though the two desires are founded biologically in contiguity. Much of heterosexual sex is constituted by their willed separation: is ‘openness’ at issue here, that is, is the mechanical intervention that prevents fertilisation a refusal of ‘openness’? For some men and women
that might be so, but we would be more inclined here to look for precisely the individual meanings given to such misgivings. Dean might respond that this is not his object of investigation: it is the culture of homosexual barebacking that interests him and the forms of its articulation. He wants to talk about heterosexual pornography and the influences of gay barebacking porn therein (97ff) yet shies away from considering the consequences of his approach for heterosexual relations, or why such consequences might not follow positively. The key term here is ‘vulnerability’, which like ‘openness’ is taken to mean absolute exposure: in the case of heterosexuality such exposure clearly requires delimitation. ‘vulnerability’ here cannot be claimed as an absolute good. So, why then should absolute exposure function as un-negotiable demand in the case of gay men? It might well be the case that management and limitation provide the ground for the possibility of maximum intensity. The literalisation of ‘vulnerability’ into pure dissolution is suspect, and raises the question of rationalisation.
I have tried to point out some of the problems with Dean's ‘research’. Firstly, it makes much of its use of psychoanalysis but in fact belongs much more in the tradition of contemporary urban ethnography, and there are severe contradictions between the methodologies appropriate to each form, not least the conception of the unconscious in each: for ethnography the unconscious is the rules of order and their transformation and it can be articulated as a set of meanings; for psychoanalysis it is to do with the set of individual meanings that both express and contest the particular desires of the subject: the psychoanalytic unconscious resists its knowability. The ethnographic subject is a collective subject whose form is manifest, the psychoanalytic subject a singular subject, whose form may well be latent and hidden.
Secondly, the articulation of an ethics which precisely attempts to depathologise behaviours through ‘cultural’ legitimation depends on a relativist use of the idea of culture (albeit one that increasingly bedevils discussions of everyday life) which is improperly assimilated to the idea of the psychoanalytic session. The sort of non-judgmental attention of the latter is fleshed out with the positivist empiricism of the former: cultures just organise the world and each is only its mode of organisation
and has no other claim; in the session the psychoanalyst does not judge the analysand's symptomatic behaviour. While the latter is true, the analyst does have a view on the analysand and out of the session a transformation may well ensue. The ethnographer does not seek to influence the culture s/he investigates; the psychoanalyst acknowledges that s/he necessarily does. But further, Dean's ethics as ‘openness’ actually entails a radical non-interventionism which is contradicted by psychoanalysis itself and by an ethics of acknowledgement of the life and well-being of the other. The other is not a beyond to be preserved but a flesh and blood other towards whom I have a responsibility. This may not be to act on behalf of their ‘good’ but rather to act as if their own good were not to be infringed by my actions. In Dean's case surely not to act as though HIV were some simple sexual infection, nor to act as though transmission did not matter (his own involvement in barebacking should be a source of concern for him), nor to act as if the forms of barebacking culture were simple givens and unproblematic. I suggest that the particular fashioning of the ethnographic voice—itself risk-taking, enjoying the presumed discomfiture of the reader, the maverick lone researcher—might be a symptomatic response to the felt responsibility that Dean is attempting to disavow, just as the almost grotesque repetition of semen ingestion in the films might suggest a desire exactly not to consume which has to be overcome.
The psychoanalyst would have to acknowledge the claims of the other involved in dangerous sex but also would be at liberty to ask if these claims did not have some other content in addition. So were the analyst to take on such clients might s/he not want to wonder about the mechanisms of disavowal and denial involved; the imaginary construction of community around the biological trace of semen; the invocation of the possibility of ‘unlimited intimacy’ as a refusal of the ephemerality of pleasure (what the early Lacan might describe as the necessary limits on jouissance, as against the fantasy of the return to primal bliss); the fantasy resolution of the problem of death in the imaginary replay of birth. And s/he might also want to raise issues about an ethics that seems to rule out the loss of the self in the other and the gaining of the other in the self that seems the true purport of Laplanche's model of otherness, an ethics that in its claims to respect otherness seems happy to encourage others in self-damage.
See Jean Pierre Vernant's critique of Freud's account in ‘Oedipus without the Complex’ in Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece.
Various debates about the book can be caught on-line. Here Ken Plummer gave the book a cautious review in the Times Higher Education Supplement.
See my review of their book in Radical Philosophy 153.
George Yudice, (2003), The Expediency of Culture, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 9–39.