4. Implementación de herramientas Lean
5.2. Reducción de sobrecosto de mano de obra
Before I move on to showing that the Black Swan haunting Nina’s body – in other words, becoming-swan itself – functions according to the same structure as the wolf dream, it is illuminating to discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s
reservations regarding Freud’s analysis of the Wolf Man and how it relates to becoming-animal. The first chapter of A Thousand Plateaus is dated and titled in reference to The Wolf Man (‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’51), clearly with connection to the issue highlighted above of the ‘correct’ number of wolves in the dream. One may start by a cross-linguistic comparison – appropriate, given
51 Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘1914: One or Several Wolves?’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia (London and New York: Continuum, 1987), pp. 26-38.
the transcultural character of the analysis itself – of Pankejeff’s Freudian name. Originally, in German, he is called der Wolfsmann, meaning literally ‘the
Wolfman’, or even ‘the Man of the Wolf’. Both the English and German
versions, therefore, create the appearance of a single, lone wolf instead of the six or seven of the dream.52
For Deleuze and Guattari, what is most striking (and condemnable) in The Wolf Man is Freud’s indifference towards the multiplicity of the wolves: regardless of whether one or several wolves actually appeared in the dream, ‘it was already decided from the very beginning that animals could serve only to represent coitus between parents, or, conversely, be represented by coitus between parents.’53 Thus, they are able to summarise Freud’s ability to find the same primal scene symbolised by any number of wolves: seven wolves of the fairy-tale, where only six are eaten, the parents had sex at five o’clock, three times, two parents, one terrifying, castrating father.54 This reverts back to the multiplicity inherent in Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming-animal as opposed to the unity of Freudian concepts such as the penis, the father, the vagina.
Regarding the neurotic ability of seeing in a sock a symbol for the vagina, Freud
52 The plural of Wolf in German is Wölfe, rendering the several-wolves, accurate version of the nickname der Wölfemann (Wolves Man), or der Mann der Wölfe (the Man of the Wolves). Interestingly, Romance languages (such as the French in which Deleuze and Guattari are writing) refer to him by means of several wolves: l’homme aux loups in French, o homem dos lobos in Portuguese, el hombre de los lobos in Spanish, and l’uomo dei lupi in Italian. (The French expression, however, is homophonous to its singular counterpart, l’homme au loup.) Unlike its Germanic siblings, Dutch follows the Romance languages with the plural de Wolvenman (instead of de Wolfman). Finally, in Russian the expression also has only one wolf: человек-волк (chelovek-volk), and not волки (volki), despite the fact that another Slavic language, Polish, rejects agglutination in favour of the plural genitive construction of człowiek od wilków (and not wilka). The same would also be possible in Russian as человек волков (chelovek volkov).
53 Deleuze and Guattari, ‘One or Several’, p. 28. 54 Ibid.
asserts that psychosis would prevent this identification since the sock is, in fact, an entire surface of cavities instead of only one – the assumption being that, from the moment one notices the multiplicity of holes, one cannot think of a vagina, since it is apparently defined by its singularity. Deleuze and Guattari: ‘comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that’s what Freud says.’55
For them, similar to my argument regarding the dream wolves’ indifference to castration, becoming-animal implies a multiplicity which is precisely averse to the kind of singular entities found in psychoanalysis.
Who is ignorant of the fact that wolves travel in packs? Only Freud. Every child knows it. Not Freud. […] Freud obviously knows nothing about the fascination exerted by wolves and the meaning of their silent call, [their libidinal meaning], the call to become-wolf.56
For them, ‘every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. […] We do not become animal without a fascination for the pack, for multiplicity.’57 They therefore stress the inherent multiplicity in becoming-animal. One becomes- animal in direct relationship to the pack. Often, they argue, becoming-animal occurs through one ‘exceptional’ individual of the pack – the favourite, the Unique, the anomalous, with whom an alliance is made that makes becoming
55 Ibid., p. 27.
56 Ibid., p. 28, 31. In this light, it is interesting to note that Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake seems to borrow two striking images from the Wolf-Man’s dream, the setting of the wolf dream, and the dream itself: during the ballet overture, the Prince as a child has a nightmare in bed, while through the window behind his bed, one of the swans can be seen flapping his wings. And, during the ballet climax, a sick Prince lies again in bed, when the swans come to perch on the headboard one by one, resembling both Hitchcock’s The Birds and Pankejeff’s dream. 57 Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Becoming-Animal’, p. 240.
possible.58 This individual belongs to the pack but to its margins, the periphery, where it ‘is neither an individual nor a genus; [it] is the borderline’.59
In Black Swan, as in Swan Lake, multiplicity is present in the corps de ballet or swan flock. The fact that classical or romantic ballet choreographies are usually organised around the duality soloist vs. corps is possibly the entire reason of Nina’s crisis.60 That there is an entire troupe of dancers trained to dance alike and dressed to look alike both highlights the importance of the soloist and threatens the soloist with replacement. In the libretto of Swan Lake, the Prince pursues the flock, but ultimately finds the Swan Queen, Odette. As I argued, in his flight from the Oedipal constraints of royal succession, he seeks to lose himself in the multiplicity of the pack, but the fairy-tale plot reinserts marriage into the proceedings by the means of Odette, the shape-shifter, who ultimately serves to merge Oedipal and non-Oedipal projects so as to allay the audience’s fear of marriage. In Black Swan, thus, it could be said that the dancers compete to determine who gets to be the one exceptional individual who makes the alliance of becoming-animal with the Prince, an alliance which, nevertheless, only confirms the marriage obligation it apparently diverged from.
Nina revels in being chosen to be the Swan Queen, and berates her mother for implying she is not up to the job: ‘I’m the Swan Queen! It’s you who never left the corps!’ However, she does not wholly ascribe to this special
58 Ibid., p. 243-9. 59 Ibid., p. 245.
60 One might even speak about a corps of wolves in the wolf story: since the castrated wolf must form a pyramid to reach the tree, he as good as commands a troupe of dancing wolves.
individuality, since throughout the film she is startled to see the whole of the corps dancers actually have her face. Nina wants the role of Odette not to be above the other dancers, but in some level to ‘lose herself’ in the flock multiplicity of becoming-animal – in an entirely different fashion of losing oneself from the one encouraged by Thomas.
It is in what one may call Nina’s becoming-animal drive (interpreted psychoanalytically as simply her inner Black Swan) that we can trace the
similarities between Black Swan and The Wolf Man. I mentioned that, for Freud, the image of the primal scene gave rise to the dream by means of the
vocabulary of the wolf story. However, we saw that the wolf story could be a product of the dream itself, so that the line of influence from primal scene to dream actually functions both ways (Fig. 13).
That means that not only can the primal scene have influenced the wolf story and the wolf dream, but that the dream may have retroactively
(nachträglich) influenced the primal scene by means of the vocabulary of the Wolf Dream W O L F S T O R Y Primal Scene
wolf story. This is a similar schema to the one presented by Whitney Davis (Fig. 14).
Fig. 14 Davis’s diagram for the structure of Nachträglichkeit in the Wolfman’s childhood.61
In his diagram, events in the past influence and shape coming events, but the latter also shape and determine the past retroactively. My own diagram, despite being simpler, includes the additional influence of the wolf dream on the child’s sexual history, which I conflate with the ‘authoring’ of the wolf story.
If in The Wolf Man the signifying power of the wolves was collapsed into two possible meanings (castrated and non-castrated), the same is true
regarding Black Swan. Initially, the duality in question might obviously appear to be between the White and the Black Swans, but I believe this is a misleading path. For one, one could say that this is the distinction at stake in Swan Lake, and that Black Swan is a different text. Black Swan, as a text, is much more invested, as I hope to have shown, in the contrast between transcendanse and dancity, where the former represents the disdain for and instrumentalisation of
61 Whitney Davis, Drawing the Dream of the Wolves: Homosexuality, Interpretation, and Freud’s “Wolf Man” (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 35.
embodiment in the pursuit of something ‘greater’, and the latter the image of animality as an undifferentiated, dense materiality, where one is lost and undistinguished ‘as water in water’.62 As I hope it is now clear, these are the two most common answers to the problem of animal embodiment –
transcendanse would be the standard Cartesian stance, whereas dancity would be the name for the materialistic approach to animal being in the strand of Animal Studies I am criticising. As I have argued, both are the two sides of the same linguistic conceptuality and are secondary products of arche-animality. As it is, I have already shown how becoming-swan does in fact function to represent both signifying procedures.
However, we can return to a psychoanalytic interpretation – and confirm that Black/White is derivative of transcendanse/dancity –, by focusing on the textual strata of the film. As in The Wolf Man, becoming-swan is supposed to be interpreted as a translation of Nina’s psychosexual development as influenced by the Swan Lake libretto. Whereas the primal scene apparently inaugurates Pankejeff to the world of sexual difference as based on castration, Nina’s psychosexual development similarly frames reality in terms of a duality. Girl/woman, reflection/reality, Imaginary/Symbolic are all related to the primordial psychoanalytic distinction between presence and absence of the phallus, castrated female and non-castrated male. Nina’s mother’s phallic-ness and cherishing of her daughter as a vicarious phallus work together to prevent Nina from entering the ‘correct’ understanding that only males are phallic, that
62 Georges Bataille, ‘Animality’, in Theory of Religion, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), pp. 17-26 (p. 19).
females are castrated, that the seduction of mirror images in the Imaginary is unimportant, and that only subjection to the signifier in the Symbolic
constitutes subjectivity. These last two points reveal the complicity between the psychoanalytic material and the arche-animal themes of transcendanse (the overcoming of reflections, and their resulting invisibility, by means of entry into the Symbolic) and dancity (Imaginary capture in specularity).
In the film, the issue of castration as a hinge for Oedipus’ textual coherence is presented in Nina’s scratch on the back, a compulsively self- inflicted wound. This scratch is ambiguous, since it could, on the one hand, be read as the castration wound that normative femininity should learn to accept, meaning that Nina resists her mother’s infantilising influence by castrating herself, in order to finally actualise womanhood (i.e. the Black Swan). Ana España, in her ‘El Doble y el Espejo en Cisne Negro’, suggests as much when she argues that Nina’s scratching works as a form of relief from maternal influence, as well as an ‘onanistic substitute’.63 The crucial moment of auto-affection – as is the case of masturbation – has been productive ground for philosophical discussions, as can be attested by Derrida’s reading of Husserlian auto- affection in the form of ‘the voice that keeps silent’. Nina’s relationship to herself in masturbation, however, cannot help but go through the moment of specularity/otherness (the distinction here being irrelevant): this is revealed not only in the fact that the scratch is only visible to herself in a mirror’s
63 Ana España, ‘El Doble y el Espejo en Cisne Negro’, Fotocinema: Revista Científica de Cine y Fotografía, 4 (2012), 120-139 (p. 130), my translation.