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Abstract:
This article examines Harmony Korine’s 2012 film, Spring Breakers. Arguing that
Korine’s film explores the bankruptcy of ethics in advanced capitalism, the article
considers two predominate and contrasting theories of contemporary subjectivity:
Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytically-inspired conception of the subject as radical
lack and Deleuze’s affirmation of the subject through attention to affect and the
virtual. In reference to Kant’s radical reformulation of the moral law as an empty
and tautological form with the concept of the categorical imperative, this article
shows that Korine’s allegory of the spring break adventure correlates the subject’s
eagerness to surmount any and all obstacles toward enjoyment to late stage
capitalism’s increasing encroachment on the absolute limit of deterritorialization.
In so doing, the film suggests that neither Deleuze nor Žižek, affirmation nor
lack, offer an effective ethical principle for the subject in the face of the real of
global capital.
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1. “ [O]ne can only regret that the Anglo-Saxon reception of Deleuze (and also the
political impact of Deleuze) is predominantly that of a ‘ guattarized ’ Deleuze […] what
inherent impasse caused Deleuze to turn toward Guattari? Anti-Oedipus [is] arguably
Deleuze’s worst book ” (Žižek, 2003, pp. 20–21).
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Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as the most redeemable,
particularly The Logic of Sense in which Deleuze sets out to explain the
emergence of sense from being (Deleuze, 1990 and 1995). In Žižek’s
view, the question that Deleuze attempts to answer in The Logic of Sense
in regard to the material genesis of sense can only really be conceived
adequately within the “problematic of dialectic materialism […] only
(dialectical) materialism can effectively think the ‘immaterial ’ void, the
gap of negativity in which mental events emerge. Idealism, by contrast,
substantializes this void” (2003, p. 87). As Žižek well knows, however,
it is precisely this characterization of the gap as negativity that Deleuze
would reject (Smith, 2012a, p. 61). Accordingly, one has to question the
verity of Žižek’s claim that the purpose of Organs without Bodies is merely
a “Hegelian buggery of Deleuze ” when it seems it could more readily be
defined as a passive-aggressive attempt to dismiss the legitimacy of
Deleuze’s philosophical thought tout court (Žižek, 2003, p. 48).2
While both Deleuze and Žižek could be said to agree that the subject is
a reified and misleadingly reductive ontological concept, in his work with
Guattari, Deleuze argues for a productive conception of desiring
production at the molecular level of the subject while Žižek, on the
other hand, argues that the subject is an empty void akin to the Hegelian
“night of the world”:
We must be careful not to miss the way Hegel’s break with the
Enlightenment tradition can be discerned in the reversal of the very
metaphor of the subject: the subject is no longer the light of Reason opposed
to the non-transparent, impenetrable Stuff (of Nature, Tradition …); his
very core, the gesture that opens up the space for the light of Logos, is
absolute negativity, ‘ the night of the world, ’ […]. (Žižek, 2003, pp. 35–37)
2. Here Žižek makes reference to Deleuze’s own description of engaging with the thought
of great philosophers as an act of “ buggery, ” intended to produce monstrous offspring.
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By failing from the beginning to see what the precise nature of this
desiring-production is, and how, under what conditions, and in response
to what pressures, the Oedipal triangulation plays a role in the recording
of the process, we find ourselves trapped in the net of a diffuse, generalized
oedipalism that radically distorts the life of the child and his later
development, the neurotic and the psychotic problems of the adult, and
sexuality as a whole. (Deleuze et al, 2009, p. 49)
According to Deleuze, the immanent ethical task for the subject in the face
of this “entails ‘an amplification, an intensification, an elevation of power,
an increase in dimension, a gain in distinction” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 172).
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found in the fantasy of the collective utopian orgy but rather in the driven
and competitive pursuit of capital gain.
It was not long after Antonioni’s much-maligned debut of Zabriskie
Point in fact, that Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus, the first
volume of their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project. Whereas the 1960s
free-love hippie movement was seen to have died out with the Hells
Angels and the Altamont Free concert in December of 1969 (presumably
part of the reason why Antonioni’s ill-timed release of Zabriskie Point in
1970 was such an abject failure), its utopian dimension continued to live
on, at least theoretically speaking, in the concept of desiring production
advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. In Anti-Oedipus,
Deleuze and Guattari insist, and against the Lacanian theory of subjective
lack, that at bottom, on the molecular level, the subject is made up of a
vast reservoir of desiring production. Furthermore, this molecular level
affects what happens on the molar level of representation, that is, the level
of the subject properly speaking and also the social field.3
In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (2009) argue that whatever
happens on the social field is directly invested with desire, and that
capitalism will conversely deterritorialize and reterritorialize this desiring
production towards its own advancement and at all costs, in order to avoid
reaching the absolute limit beyond capitalism itself, that is, the limit of
absolute deterritorialization:
What we are really trying to say is that capitalism, through its process of
production, produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy or
charge, against which it brings all its vast powers of repression to bear, but
which nonetheless continues to act as capitalism’s limit. For capitalism
constantly counteracts, constantly inhibits this inherent tendency while at
the same time allowing it free reign; it continually seeks to avoid reaching
its limit while simultaneously tending toward that limit. (p. 34)
3. “ [D]esire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring production is one and the
same thing as social production ” (Deleuze et al, 2009, p. 30).
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its name. What the confrontation between Kant and Sade reveals is that,
given its empty form, the logic of Kant’s categorical imperative is such that
it is just as likely that evil is its ultimate principle as good. Good and
evil thus become indistinguishable in the empty form of the law itself. In
fact, Žižek (2009a) following Lacan, has argued that Kant’s conception
of diabolical evil – a pure evil defined apart from any pathological
motivation – is the ultimate repressed content of the Kantian law. The
moral law itself thereby merely functions as a Vorstellungsrepräsentanz
(repressive representation) of diabolical evil as its repressed content:
What is so unbearable about the notion of diabolical Evil is that it makes the
ethical Good and Evil indistinguishable, the problem with diabolical Evil is
that it meets all criteria of the transcendental definition of a morally good
act. […] diabolical Evil is the non-phenomenalizable Real. […] the only
true phenomenalization of diabolical Evil is the Good itself, the call of the
moral law. (p. 296)
It is at this point that we see when within the film’s narrative chronology
the phone calls are actually made, at the end of the spring break vacation.
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Although the audio from the phone calls had played once earlier as voice-
over tracks, accompanied with imagery of a fairly typical if debauched
Florida spring break vacation, by the end of the film we see that in fact the
girls place these calls only after the events of the spring break vacation
have violently amplified. Brit and Candy call home to their mothers just
on the cusp of murdering Alien’s rival drug dealer, Big Arch (Gucci Mane),
along with other members of his crew in the film’s final shoot out: the
climax of their spring break vacation.
Similarly, earlier in the film, Faith makes a phone call to her
grandmother in which she describes her spring break trip in similarly
effusive terms. Faith is set up early on in the film as a fairly naı̈ve good girl
who attends church youth group but who is also yearning for earthly
fulfilment. She knows something is lacking in her day-to-day life but does
not know exactly where to find the answer. It is some combination then
of her spirituality and her naiveté that makes her description of spring
break in St. Petersburg somewhat uncanny. Accompanying scenes of
binge drinking, hard drug use, and orgiastic grinding cross cut with
scenes of the girls more innocently swimming and scootering, the audio
track features Faith describing the trip to her grandmother as, “the most
spiritual place she’s ever been” as “magical, beautiful, perfect.” And as
she says to her friends in the pool shortly thereafter, “It’s like paradise
here.” Faith wants to “click it, freeze it and say it’ll stay this way forever;
… I’m serious ya’ll, it’s different here. I know we did a really bad thing
but I’m glad we did; … I feel better here.” The “really bad” thing Faith
is referring to here is the armed robbery of the chicken shack that Brit,
Candy and Cotty performed in order to procure the money to be able to
afford their spring break vacation – to make their dream a reality.
All the while hanging heavily over the revelry of the spring break
vacation is the sense that the girls already had a taste of the ultimate high,
higher than that of spring break itself, in holding up the chicken shack.
Later in the film, of course, once the girls hook up with Alien who bails
them out of jail after they were arrested when one of the spring break hotel
parties was broken up, it becomes clear that the high that Brit, Candy and
Cotty crave is in fact a criminal high that will surpass the earlier petty
robbery at the chicken shack that precipitated the spring break vacation.
Interestingly, once the girls hook up with Alien, Faith soon decides
to return home. Although it is she who perhaps most intensely craves a
limit experience (we could call it a religious experience), ultimately she
fears the level of deterritorialization that Alien represents and that his life
of crime would open up for her.
Suffice it to say that as it is defined by Spring Breakers, and not
unlike Žižek’s (2009a) conception of the Kantian law as the
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gunned down by one of Big Arch’s crew, yet Candy and Brit continue
unconcerned onto the property intent on killing Big Arch as planned.
After they successfully do, and in the film’s final shot, we see Candy
and Brit again crossing the St. Petersburg bridge under its signature
yellow scaffolding, each in a kind of affectless state seemingly typical
of exhausted girls leaving a debauched spring break vacation but which
is nonetheless jarring given that they are leaving a murder scene. Here, in
the film’s final scene, Candy and Brit leave St. Pete’s to presumably return
to their college town to be the good girls they had earlier told their
mothers on the phone they would be. The only souvenir they have with
them to suggest that this spring break was not wholly ordinary is Big
Arch’s Lamborghini sports car that they drive off in.
Considering the plot of Spring Breakers and in light of Deleuze’s
Spinozan-informed principles of an immanent ethics – amplification,
intensification, elevation of power, increase in dimension, gain in
distinction – it should be clear that in spite of the evil nature of many of
the acts we see performed by the four girls in Spring Breakers, they fulfil
the conditions of Deleuze’s immanent ethics. In other words, in disregard
for any other conception of the moral law, they increase their desiring
production and their power, going to the limit of what they can do.
Deleuze’s ethics thus seem to lack a degree of reciprocity between subjects
such as that supposedly guaranteed by Kant’s categorical imperative.
Indeed, as Daniel Smith (2012b) argues, Deleuze even allowed that the
means of evaluating an immanent form of ethics is problematic. Deleuze’s
solution to this seeming impasse was to be found in the faculty of
judgment:
A mode of existence can be evaluated apart from transcendental or universal
values by the purely immanent criteria of its power or capacity (puissance):
that is, by the manner in which it actively deploys its power by going to the
limit of what it can do (or, on the contrary, by the manner in which it is
reduced to powerlessness. (Smith, 2012b, pp. 147–148)
Here Smith seems to imply that the actions of our spring breakers could be
deemed unethical, given the fact that in order to go to their limit, they
commit horrific crimes. Elsewhere, however, Deleuzian ethics seem to
lack any dimension of evaluation such as when he states, for example,
that: “there are never any criteria other than the tenor of existence, the
intensification of life” (Deleuze et al, 1996, p.74). The moral ambivalence
of Deleuze’s immanent ethics is arguably the direct result of the
tautological conception of the Kantian law. In other words, in the
wake of Kant’s formulation of the law, morality and ethics become
irreversibly severed.
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As both Deleuze and Lacan suggest in their analyses of Kant with Sade,
however, Kant’s conception of the law may be arguably less ambivalent than
it is inherently unbalanced: granting the sadistic law an unlimited “right to
jouissance, ” in Lacan’s words, in exchange for the infinite guilt of its
subjects (2007, p. 649). It is in their interpretation of Sade’s response
to Kant, however, that Lacan and Deleuze differ. Whereas Lacan sees
Sade’s conception of sadism as ultimately reproducing the unbalanced
logic of the Kantian categorical imperative only in terms of evil rather than
good, Deleuze argues instead that Sade privileges amorality as a form of
protest against the law. As Deleuze (1991) argues, “true sovereignty” can
only be “found in anarchic institutions of perpetual motion and permanent
revolution […]. The law can only be transcended by virtue of a principle
that subverts it and denies its power” (p. 75). It is interesting to consider
then how Žižek’s own investment in revolution or anarchy as the only form
of legitimate political protest aligns with Deleuze’s thought here. The
protagonists of Spring Breakers could be interpreted to fulfil the conditions
of anarchy exactly as Deleuze describes them but yet the question remains:
what is the content of the law against which they protest?
If Kant and Sade have both shown that the law is ultimately only an empty
form, if as Lacan would later argue there is no other of the other, then what
exactly do our spring breakers rail against? In light of the empty form of
the Kantian law, Žižek argues that Lacan saw an opportunity to advance
a theory of the law as pure desire defined outside of pathological
considerations (1998). In response to this, we might argue that while
in the Kantian formation the moral law represses diabolical evil, for
contemporary neoliberal subjects, and as Deleuze and Guattari would seem
to agree, capitalism itself now functions as the Vorstellungsrepräsentanz of
pure desire. As Žižek (2003) states, “capital is the ‘concrete universal’ of
our historical epoch. What this means is that, while it remains a particular
formation, it overdetermines all alternative formations, as well as all
noneconomic strata of social life” (p. 185). Indeed, given that Žižek’s
description of capital eerily echoes Kant’s description of the law, should
the anarchic crime sprees depicted in Spring Breakers (and from an
Anti-Oedipal perspective) then be considered legitimate, even ethical
attempts to free the real of desire from its repression under capitalism? It is
here that we perhaps should put Žižek’s own Lacanian-Hegelian ethics of
radical negativity equally to the test. Does the Hegelian-inspired principle
of radical negativity bring us to any alternative place from which to act
other than the anarchic one depicted in Spring Breakers?
As a good Lacanian, Žižek reminds his readers often that both
the subject and the Big Other – that is the law – are at bottom lacking.
What type of ethics then is available to this destituted subject? Ultimately,
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5. Lacan developed the concept of the sinthome most fully in seminar XXIII. Žižek
provides a wonderful elucidation of the concept of the sinthome in the second chapter
of The Sublime Object of Ideology (2009b, pp. 57–92).
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