Subjects
Keeping in mind the initial definition of process as production, recording, and consumption, a third synthesis is invariably at work, a synthesis of consumption that belongs to the “subject,” a “subject” that is produced by a recording and that defines itself in terms of the recording it consumes.
How could a recording produce a subject? To begin with, here are two examples from the history and medicalization of sexuality. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault has outlined for us the recording of homosexuality from the 1850’s onwards and how it has come to produce not only the psychiatric category of the homosexual as presumably pathetic and pathological but also the possibilities for its modern day offshoot: the gay subject. As well, Sandy Stone has given us an image of the recording of the transsexual identity from the 1950’s onwards, a recording in which the shoddily researched notion of gender disphoria (being born in “the wrong body”) has seeped from the clinic and into the discourses of psychology, politics, and popular culture (“The Empire Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto”).
Ultimately, and for us here, the most poignant recording of all is Oedipus itself. As our social delirium and fetish, Oedipus records incest and patricide as primary. Supposedly, the taboo on incest is designed to curb an already existing wish, and guilt to redress and repair the effects of that wish. Freud was quite persistent on both scores and that is precisely why he could never accept the position of the budding Melanie Klein. As far as he was concerned, she had argued that one does not feel guilty because one has murdered one’s father but rather that one phantasizes the murder of one’s father because one already feels guilty. This made no sense to him!
