A vulgar-Freudian corollary to the "youth and vitality" theory had it that Reagan was a charismatic leader who presented the nation with an image of self-assurance, wholeness, and health: the perfect ego ideal.[8] It is difficult to see, on close inspection, what there was to identify with.
Sometimes Reagan seemed to beg for psychoanalysis. "I was the hungriest person in the house," he writes in Where Is the Rest of Me?, "but I only got chubby when I exercised in the crib; any time I wasn't gnawing on the bars, I was worrying my thumb in my mouth--habits which have symbolically persisted throughout my life." Identify with that, and you get a nation of thumb-suckers. Hardly a worthy adversary for the "Evil Empire."
But then there was always the anal option. On the foreign policy front, Reagan's libidinal economy was on a permanent war footing that could be described as anal-aggressive. His body, like that of the First Emperor, sucked attention and energies inward toward the government and its architectural seat, then redirected them outward at the enemy. When Reagan disappeared into an increasingly retentive White House, he was disappearing into the black hole of his own anus. Never was he closer to that ultimate immaterial state of godlike transcendence than in his role as Prime Sphincter.[9]
His phallus was fuzzy. Reagan could play the role of a father figure. But when he did, he was more like everybody's uncle than a mighty patriarch. And as we saw at his home birth, he had a propensity to embody the motherland. As a matter of fact, he did not customarily have a penis. During his prostate saga, the New York Times published an anatomical chart of the presidential body [18 December 1986]. Despite the proximity of that gland to his alleged genital apparatus, the executive organ fails to appear. Reagan does get both an anus and a rectum, suggesting a tendency of the phallic to disappear into the anal. Reagan agenitality, however, just as often veered toward the vestal virgin roles of the Statue of Liberty genre. In anti-genital mode, he did not even tolerate the sexual activity of others ["Ardent Dogs Killed as Risk to Reagan," San Francisco Examiner, 19 October 1987].
If the citizenry indulged in phallic phantasies in relation to Reagan's body, it was not likely to take the form of them imagining him having what they wanted. Rather, they became what he lacked. Whenever his anthem played, they would pop up proudly erect and pledge allegiance to his magic fabric. If dangerous marauders (like Grenada) loomed on the horizon, they would shoot off their missiles in eager defense of Miss Liberty. Reagan's followers, like Hitler's, stood in for his phallus, which was detached from his body and multiplied, as scattered as his TV image.
Reagan's vital body parts were distributed across the social field, as were the First Emperor's. But his were in different, always changing, constellations. His body was infinitely decomposable and recomposable. It could not only bridge the gap between the individual and the collective; it could travel across age and gender boundaries with postmodern ease. A postcard marketed at the beginning of the first term shows Ronnie and Nancy wearing each other's heads, and looking eerily comfortable in them.
Reagan could be the virile father of the nation, as when he bombed Libya; but he could just as easily be its favorite daughter (despite having killed Khadafy's). His political effectiveness did not depend on sustaining any particular symbolic configuration. Any one would do--as long as attention remained focused on his body. That was the bottom line. It didn't matter what symbolic connections were made to his body--only that some connection to it be made. CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl recalled receiving a phone call from the White House press secretary thanking her for doing a highly negative story about Reagan. It didn't matter what the content was, he said; broadcasting images of Reagan, any images, could only help him.[10] The White House press corps itself seems to argue against any theory of Reagan's political success being based on citizen identification with positive qualities associated with his visual image.
If we give in to Reagan's invitation to psychoanalyze we miss the novelty of how his body effectively functioned on the political level. As substance of unity, his collectivized body guaranteed a structural homology between the three fundamental terms of individual body, family, country. In a system of homologies where each term mirrors every other, no term is central and no event can be deemed originating. A system of equivalences is set up vertically between the part and the whole and horizontally between parts or wholes on the same level. This authorizes an infinite circuit of symbolic relays that can be travelled any number of times in any direction: this is the famous structuralist principle of reversibility. What it means is that every possible symbolic permutation is an a priori of the system. A symbolic interpretation can at most activate a term that is already present. It cannot critique. It can only fill pre-designated gaps. Speculation on whether Ronnie and Nancy still "did it" and jokes about Reagan's virility and its sublimation in displays of military prowess were commonplace during his presidency. In spite of the fact that they invariably accompanied criticism of his policies, they expressed complicity with Reagan rather than resistance: they accepted the basic equation between his body and the body politic that was to be the hallmark of his rule and safeguard of his administration's popularity across many a scandal, foreign policy defeat, and the economic hardships of his first term. A traditional psychoanalytic interpretation, whether it saw Reagan as a father figure or as pregenital and repressed, would get us little farther than dirty jokes. It would triumphantly unearth a series of risqué associations, ignoring the fact that they were already on everybody's lips. In the age of Reagan, Oedipus came out. What was once repressed was now on the surface.
It was precisely as a surface that Reagan's body functioned. There was no depth to it for an unconscious to hide in. The 'teflon president': all shimmering surface. As we have seen, a substance of unity functions by combining in a homogeneous medium heterogeneous terms drawn from a multiplicity of levels. It does that by extracting or abstracting certain qualities and not others, and projecting them onto a single surface. In Reagan's case, the qualities were predominantly visual, and the ultimate surface was the TV screen. That particular surface is almost omnipotent in its combinatory powers. Logical and symbolic associations pertaining to what psychoanalysis calls the secondary processes get equal billing with what normally would be considered primary processes. The primary processes become visible. Reagan's public pronouncements consistently displayed distortions characteristic of the dream-work. Nicaragua, for example, was displaced to a threatening position just south of the Texas border. Film and TV residue from past viewings were condensed into present perceptions, such as when Reagan called his dog Lucky 'Lassie,' or when he told a story about a heroic fighter pilot drawn from a movie he had seen as though it were a true story. In Reagan's America, the psychoanalytic distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, and the ideological distinction between the fake and the real, ceased to be pertinent. Everybody knew that Reagan couldn't or wouldn't tell the difference between them. But it didn't matter. He simply did not operate on that level. Fantasy, logical contradiction, and fraud were authorized. That did not make Reagan psychotic or even cynical. He operated on a level at which those terms have no meaning. On that level, he was perfectly functional. His presidency worked. Reagan almost single-handedly turned the ideological direction of the country around. He was able to produce ideological or Oedipal effects by non-ideological and non-Oedipal means. Supra-ideological and supra-psychoanalytic might be better terms, because he did not forego the ideological or the psychoanalytic. He subsumed them in a larger mechanism.
The plasticity and manifestness of Reagan's body unbalances not only a traditional Freudian approach, but more recent paradigms as well. It is difficult to see him, following the suggestion of a Baudrillardian critic, as a hyperreal male who "could always satisfy our iconic interests." He can only be perceived as a "satisfying" simulation of masculinity (a "hologram" of the American male) if vast stretches of his image production are ignored.[11] A Lacanian analysis might find him the embodiment of the phallus, constituting subjectivities by distributing plenitude and lack, all the while remaining tragically absent to itself. This interpretation would privilege his amputational aptitudes, placing them under the sign of castration. But the cut of the scalpel can as easily be seen a positive power of plasticity as the playing out of a primordial lack. Given Reagan's organs' ability to regenerate and mutate, amputation could actually be considered an enablement: a precondition for migration and reconnection on a surface of variation.
It is perhaps less useful to say that Reagan was neither a father figure, a phallus, nor a simulation, than to recognize that he was all of these things. He was not fundamentally an actor in a family romance projected on a nation, nor the constitutive agent of an intersubjective structure of lack-in-being, nor a hyperreal optical effect. He was a surface on which all of these processes had equal play, like different channels to which a viewer's brain could turn as at a press of the remote control. His screen-body was the interface in a many-dimensioned interactive medium.
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