Overdetermination and VICE Magazine

Project Mimique London

Overdetermination and VICE Magazine

Written as an adjunct to Project Mimique's Response to the South Shoreditch Draft Action Area Plan, April 2005. This section was added after submission to Hackney Environment Directorate.

Analysing the policing of drug subculture in Notting Hill in the late 1960s, Jock Young (1971) argues that police action against the marijuana consumer produced: a consolidation and accentuation of subcultural ('deviant') values, including an increase in the organisation and cohesion of the recreational drug-use socio-economy; and a change in the lifestyle around marihuana consumption, so that certain facets of media stereotype became actuality. The first is intrinsic to the process of escalation (or for Young, 'deviancy amplification'), as the nightlife subculture responds to criminalisation by embedding the stigmatised variant as a bonding practice. A rise in police action in response to an increase in transgression increases the necessity for the drug consumer to privatise her consumption. Thus Hackney Council profiles the busting of so-called crack houses, and provides a (consumer) hotline for grassing up squats. The definition of an area such as South Shoreditch as a nightlife location is part of this process of escalation-segregation- persecution, something which the proposed system of planning regulation and coralling of late-night uses is concretising, along with a further escalation in police activity and co-opted local business management.

Erving Goffman (1961, after Freud) terms this process an 'overdetermination' as "apparently minor satisfactions can come to be defined as great ones", when there is "the sense of a practice being employed merely because it is forbidden", and "the very pursuit of [minor practices which contravene institutional regulation] comes to be a source of satisfaction (the sense of taking the institution on) (Goffman: 274-275). Goffman refers to studies of prison inmates and psychiatric patients discussing the "scoring of coffee".

Goffman suggests that these infringements of regulation reaffirm the subject in her autonomy against the institution. However, he neglects another principle of overdetermination, that is, the multiplicity of contradictions in their uneven development, underlying the crisis management of the post-war welfare state.

Against the popularity of alcohol consumption and recreational drug use, we might note other mechanisms of the 'soft machine' or integration-repression (Aglietta) at work: the restructuring of state process -- the socialisation of governance, "a direct ideological attempt to homogenise society"; graduate and other debt (the localised manifestation of a tendency towards latent stigmatisation as predominant form of control); the consumption norm (as hegemonic, corporatist construction; note the shifting terms of relative deprivation which integrates the myth of consumer society, the world of objects and their replacement, into a process of polarisation which produces the 'faulty consumer' of the 'new poor' -- Bauman); racist stigmatisations by police (particularly in relation to car ownership), that is, the consumption norm appears to be regarded by police as white privilege; the incorporation of youth into state policy rationale (particularly around issues of drug use, work ethic and notions of 'social cohesion') combined with the stigmatisation and regulation of youth for dress code and use of space; the regulation of sexuality; the rise of immaterial and affective labour as predominant forms of labour process/command (the manufacture of consent, the production of cooperation); administered alienation replacing class solidarity (corporate trade unions and the demise of strategic dissent).

Freud used the term 'overdetermination' to describe the representation of dream-thoughts in images privileged by their condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image, or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial messages (displacement). Indeed, Jock Young describes police treatment of individuals as couched in terms of media stereotype (a condensation), something which seems to have spread to the SSDAAP and its appendices, but these constructions also describe a principle of consumption.
Subculture also has its media reflexion, and several of the key magazines aimed at nightlife consumers are based in the South Shoreditch area (The Face, Dazed & Confused, VICE, I-D). One issue of VICE (Volume 3, Number 5) The Drugs Issue, was found free in a local bar on May 18 2005, and was subsequently defaced by the artist A--- B--- with the URL 'BOMBLONDON.COM', the words 'VOLE' and 'LEND ME YOUR SHOES', and DISSENT!G8 stickers foreboding "when injustice becomes law...M74". Below, the author(s) analyse aspects of the magazine for an insight into strategies of escalation and reproduction around the issue of drug use within (international) youth subculture and the formal expression that subcultural genres have staked historically as their own.

The Gross Jar: a theoretical commentary

On page 94 of the publication the production office demonstrate their own critique of subculture, an item longing to be banned by the Geneva Convention or be raided by the RSPCA. The 'Gross Jar' once contained Polish cucumbers in brine, but now stores a rat (dead) which disembowelled itself when faced with the saline encounter, and as of Volume 3 Number 5, a used tampon provided by a staff member's girlfriend. The image printed above the article shows a pronounced sediment, and a crust of ochre growing around the rest of the jar. The tampon is described as "slowly slaking off tiny red chunks and tinting the surrounding water a pleasant crimson". This decomposition, a 'work in progress', substitutes as editorial.

As a rotting gesture, adding a critique of reproduction to the stench of toxic flesh (a Gothic curse here, sex and death; the Victorian equation of woman or the decadent male with decay, as amoral and lacking vigour), the VICE staff throw a series of metaphorical provocations (woman:breeding:bacterial, interior:skin:patina, container:morality:womb, perfection:symbol:putrefaction), "drawing attention to the area of contact between the unconscious and its manifestation as collective phantasy, that is, roughly speaking, popular culture and its representations" (Laura Mulvey, 1989, on Mary Kelly's Corpus, a very different work). There is a deeply moral antagonism here, the woman's detritus subjected to the biological hazard in the jar:
For a late teen gag the Gross Jar has remarkably sophisticated connotations. The Gross Jar is uncanny; a text du jouissance. It disturbs, it unsettles. The image might be read to imply both Platonic receptacle (the 'semiotic chora' of Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984), prey to the symbolisations, condensations and displacements of the primary process -- an experience that the drug consumer flees to, the motive for the process of consumption -- and the dissolution of identity in the processes of subjectival mourning.
When thinking of the 'chora', one is reminded here of the word "marshmallow" as one intravenous user of heroin described the experience, or of the confidence in interpersonal relations generated by cocaine.

Kristeva asserts the conception as "[n]either model nor copy, the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal and kinetic rhythm". The chora is productive of discontinuities in those forms of expression "susceptible to semiotization: voice, gestures, colours". As in Burroughs' Soft Machine (discussed in Section 6.3 of the Project Mimique report), "[c]onnections or functions are [...] established between these discrete marks [phonic (later phonemic), kinetic or chromatic units and differences] which are based on drives and articulated according to their resemblance or opposition, either by slippage or by condensation. Here we find the principles of metonymy and metaphor indissociable from the drive economy underlying them". The end of moral civilisation is reached by a return to its origins. "[T]he mother's body [...] mediates the symbolic law organising social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity and death".

A triptych emerges as interpretive analogy (after Mulvey, page 154), the spectralised presence of the decomposing rodent, and the dispersion of bacteria, haunting/consuming the woman's blood and its infusion of the sanitary product:
1. The pervasive female presence in advertising which condenses women's bodies to commodity consumption and the representation of a woman's body as commodity (objectification); images of motherhood; the warm reassurances of the semiotic chora.
2. A hidden disorder, the body or mind's vulnerability, its wounds and uncontrollable symptoms; disease, contagion, death; menstruation as a curse; drug use as opiate addiction.
3. The problem of female sexual desire. If "desire cannot be expressed without an image that can represent it" how might one redefine women's relation to their own image, ie. beyond the question of appropriation (for masculine phantasy or the repressed masculine desire for a womb). The tampon as lack, masquerading as liberation.
Terrorism or teenage humour? The Gross Jar account is juxtaposed to a review of a DVD Honey, We Blew Up Your Pussy. (Dir: Rod Fontana, kickass.com. Rating 100). The film shows women enlarging their inner lip with a pump KA-90:
Here in the Gross Jar, the objectification or mother object suffers a hegemonic repression -- a Pandora's Box of toxic effluent, a ferocious hazard -- womanhood, not with the retro charms of the 1960s housewife extolling the latest innovation, as in Honey, We Blew Up Your Pussy, but haunted by her sexuality, a transgression of taboo, brutalised and degraded in the process of writing the account. The Gross Jar is a blatant misogynist insult, yet also a reminder that morality keeps all mortals in a constricted, suffocating, position. Decomposition, a bacterial working on a bloated corpse, becomes a viral threat to masculine or authoritarian forms of control. Hardt and Negri (2000) charge that 'corruption' is a residue of capitalism, shorn of its relationship to value (page 389), and one might add, a condensation of the drug economy itself.
VICE is aimed at the young. Advertisements parade trainers, skateboards, teenage clothing, music, MTV. Its tone is often fractured, aggressive and callous -- an irritating, regressive masculinity rather than the street-smart banter of punk:
After the Gross Jar, much of the rest of the magazine is a disappointment. VICE suffers from pro-forma expositions of subcultural semiology: that is, there is little innovation in the idea of style as a form of Refusal, and only repetitions of the status and meaning of revolt. These were two of the themes Dick Hebdige (1979) drew out of the novels of Jean Genet: "The meaning of subculture is [...] always in dispute, and style is the area in which opposing definitions clash with most dramatic force" (ibid, page 3). There are no contradictions here and yet subculture lingers in the regressive commentary and a certain historicisation.

In 2005, one might dispute the revolts of fashion and scene as mutations on a theme of extortion -- a recuperation of the bricolage technique that Hebdige asserts as fundamental to subcultural strategy. However, VICE Magazine is an escalation in the terms of conflict. The magazine edition incorporates historical and subcultural representations of drug use as a cultural phenomenon and subversive rhetorical strategies made famous by its post-structuralist forbears (most notably The Face) to the point of pastiche. God is dead (yawn) and so is man (literally on pp 32, 38, 59-63, 83, 95, 97, 112); predictably enough, the medium appears to be the message. "Crime" is elevated to art by the aestheticisation strategies of profiled photographers. Christoph Voy wrestles with a disabling absence in a formalist ripost to realist genre, Thatcher Keats turns to the high fashion styling, rich colours and fabrics of Vogue (a subversion of the morality of materials), while Larry Clark's earlier series evokes the masculine solidarities of Kerouac's On the Road.

Photo series 1. Friends who died
Photography Christoph Voy, Styling E. Masson, Coordination Hector Muelas

This is a series of daylight portraits in (east?) European graveyard(s), ostensibly of young people who have lost a close friend to overdose. The images are complemented by stylist information on garment suppliers and a caption at the base of the page, a short narrative of what led up to the death.

Derrida: What opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence. The caption functions in this series as a (purported) personal statement, an account (fabricated?) of friendship, accident and suicide, a fixing of (false?) meaning, a negative rendition of the advertising testimonial, an anti-promotion of the product. Voy's series is a meditation on absence: of the grave, of warmth (and warm clothes), an absence of the deceased (deceased as died, deceased as fiction): a chill negation (toward point zero), neutralised by a flattened paradox -- image as life while devoid of life; constructed presentations devoid of censure, manipulation even emotion. The series resounds with the rhetorical negation: Why bother?

The series of images and caption sequence is a testimony of mourning (cf. a walk in a decorative cemetery) as reflective purgative. However, the caption works to erase the image as the reader is caught in the neutralising flux of prosaic information and largely predictable narrative twist. The caption raises the question: absent friend (what could be more natural in a graveyard) or absent corpse (naturalised by the anti-realist convention).
The one dimensionality of the subject's desires ("so I could start a new life") undermines the narrative of despair. Kraus (only indicated in the caption) lived and breathed bereavement, but his lover ("Boots by Chelsea/Underground Shoes London, shirt by Pepe Jeans, trousers by Dickies, shades by Von Zipper, jacket model's own") reproduces the discourse of a functionalist (mediatised) emigration, the marketing of new towns. As Bob Geldof might say: Look at him! He's not even wearing the sunglasses. Pathos is lost via the parody of alienation and emptiness, and formal repetition (sequence and genre). Textual statements work towards a distancing of the reader from the truth claims of documentary or portrait genre. The series demands a technique of disassociation/1.

Death, distance and difference: Derrida terms the lag inherent in any signifying act as différance, (to differ/to defer). An examination of metonymic displacement (that is, sequence movement, and a referring out towards other images and codes) provides this preliminary analysis:

(a) The sequence
1. Shifts in location, that is, partition-repression-exile -- cf. the Gross Jar: hospital, garage, no space, detoxification, toilet, bathroom, institution.
2. Segments of narrative (proairetic coding) are inflections of the constructions gender and loss, gender and rebellion (filmic conventions these, but also the narrative coding of 1970s girls' magazines); as well as the dominant narratives (myths) of soul and rock (music as commodity; culture as excess): adventure, solidarity, determination, suicide, love, loss, accident, extremity, escape, despair, abandonment, youth, revenge, near death, transgression, friendship, relapse, death itself.
3. Presence/absence (a heuristic): the processes of commemoration and distancing -- action, method, ritual, regret (these four mark a memory and mourning, a socio-symbolic limit, production), already past, gone (lost, replay for media only).
(b) Conventions of the image/text:
1. Use of non-models and street fashion (anti-celebrity, anti-fashion) was pioneered by The Face and I-D Magazine in the 1980s and paralleled the anti-aesthetic of pop-cultural tendencies indie, goth and punk. This was a product of the production process (free working); at once a practical resolution to the absence of fee and a conscious undermining of high fashion convention and a celebrity-focused culture. While it began almost as a statement of poverty, an elaborate play with makeup, weight loss and genre permitted the development of 'heroin chic' (for a return to the codes of high fashion, see Thatcher Keats, below).
2. The juxtaposition of fashion stockists (small print) with plausible but dull, cheap, day wear is nihilist irony (again from The Face, c. 1985/6). The professionalisation of styling (the choosing and buying of garments and objects for photographic sessions) sustains the process of image production, and is vital for the ironic inscription of artifice (a moment of doubt in an ostensibly realist convention, which it overturns).
3. Narrative treatment capitalises on a blurring of convention between the advertising and editorial image, a fashion staple, powered here by a process of iteration (repeating/assertion). Turner (1952) comments that "[t]he testimonial is one of the least happy features of advertising". Advertising itself seeks to be persuasive of difference. The narrative persuasion here, however, is of an experience that could be one's own. The 'testimonial' effect shifts to the TV voice-over of cosmetic ads and washing powder. A functionalised mourning (rectification) becomes a health/lifestyle promotion (affirmative of the consumption process only).
The series effects a play on meaning. Barbara Johnson on Derrida (1981): "To mean in other words is automatically not to be" (ibid, page ix).

The reader risks being trapped within the productivity of illusion:
or conducting a strenuous exhumation of the defining absence:
It is in this interval that the reader confronts the inherent falsity of the scenario, the banalities of mediated loss remain as trace.

Possibilities for interpretation are acutely limited, the reader confronted by the process of consumption, (opiates, post-structuralist formalism, pop cultural references), and an indifference approaching ennui. The series demonstrates pastiche to the point of annihilation. Devoid of the passion that the death of friends and loved ones arouses, these images point toward the futility of representation rather than the lives they claim to illustrate. And the series "contains as one contains an enemy, holding in place but defensively" (Stephen Heath on the film Touch of Evil, quoted by Coward and Ellis, 1977). The analogy to horror movies is not inappropriate in this play with Gothic thematic.

Photo series 2. Lifer
Photographer Thatcher Keats, Stylist Sally Penn

Heroin chic parades here as heresy, but the interview with "Jen", a postgraduate science student and user of heroin since age 13, gives the benefit of experience -- there are plenty of tips for safer injection and the minor hazards of long-term use. The Vogue aesthetic (high fashion) is convincing; studio closeups (camera as phallus) are immaculately styled -- silk camisoles, black lace knickers, vintage embroidered shirts, brocades; an air of a Parisian bordello with US banking detailing. Subcultural subversion of high fashion staple. Pop cultural references: high punk (Vivienne Westwood), New York literary avant-garde (Patti Smith, David Bowie, New York Dolls): "a self-consciously profane and terminal aesthetic" (Hebdige, page 27). Hebdige points to the mundane objects that become the stigmata of subculture, "tokens of a self-imposed exile", here, needles, spoons and cutting knives; the model's State Bank of Sullivan pouch; the expressive forms and rituals of stigmatised groups (dressing up, regularly-used veins, positions), and the way in which the tensions between dominant and subordinate groups are acted out on the surface of subculture (model's face obscured from view by a fedora; tensions literal in the arch of the legs, VICE page 76).

"Nothing better conceals the objective collusion which is the matrix of specifically artistic value than the conflicts through which it operates" (Bourdieu quoted by Burgin, 1986). Here the hegemony of technique projects above the dissident promotion of heroin use (richness of detail, colour, texture or softness; safer injection). Such imagery functions here as 'excess', a safer-sex supplement to welfare state health promotion, and both reveals and conceals a lack, unmasking an absence at the heart of patriarchal culture: the flagrant provocations of desire combined with a rhetoric of transgression (woman, a "properly marginal presence").
An auto-erotic scenario is "made real" by the brute facts of injection discussed by the model:
Safer techniques are often picked up in an adhoc fashion. VICE editorial employs a remarkably 'communitarian' approach to the magazine's otherwise amplified deviant conception.
Photo series 3/4. Photographer Larry Clark
Tulsa, Now and Then
Shots from two documentary series, one in black and white, the other colour. The extent to which monochrome aestheticises the subject matter is very striking in this juxtaposition. The earlier (b/w) photos convey a strength in masculine friendships (Kerouac's myth, pages 88 and 90 upper shot), a shared culture of intravenous drug use; the individuality of the hallucinating subject is retained (page 90, lower shot). An aura of calm and solidarity pervades the black and white images, and a suggestion lingers that these users are the children of a wealthier class.

The later photographs are of Latin Americans, a male parent and child, an adolescent, sharing a spliff, sleeping, confronting the camera unselfconsciously. The light is bad, and the photos are tinged with a blue filter. The squalor is unbearable, such meagre survival is harsh, the living room has a dirty carpet, (things littered around a chair), and one wants to snatch away the child for a better home, the sweat is tactile. The representational process acts here as 'moral entrepreneur'.

The juxtaposition of series is challenging: it suggests a far greater intensity of drug use in the Latin American images than is evident in the photos themselves; in reality the rooms are no more squalid than (at times) the author(s) co-operative house. The different stylistic treatments effect a symbolisation which closes the interpretive circuit. White boys: Beat culture, Latin American family: migrant poverty. One is acutely aware of how standards of 'photoworthiness' shift over time (a crisis in representation as the documentary genre was brought into doubt by techniques of construction and editing), and the 'trauma' that colour photography has brought to contemporary documentary work. Changing conceptions of masculinity are also operational here: on page 89, the Latin American father sits with his daughter (as a woman off camera passes a joint); on page 91, they sleep in impromptu fashion, sharing a bare mattress. The thematic here is an intergenerational solidarity in stark contrast to the free association of young men focused on intravenous drug use expressed in the monochrome shots. The 'readerly' effect jolts as hallucination. Just as a stronger drug than marijuana is implied in the Latin American scenes, a relocation of the monochrome 'masculine' images occurs (white boys transported to Latin America).

Clark is presented in the freelancers biography as a seminal practitioner ("The show is open until June 5, 2006, and it will make you realise how many people copied and are still copying this guy" VICE page 22). Such validation (word as Law) and reproval for those unversed in documentary photography's hagiography, is perhaps unnecessary given the power of the juxtaposition and the contradictory emotions that viewing these two series entails. It is interesting that as the Author has declined in importance in literary criticism (none of the feature writers are profiled on the biographical page), the author as photographer retains (or has gained) the allure of stardom. The image is no longer subordinate to the text. The presence of a major photographer in many ways reduces the power of the images to speak for themselves. As with literature, the Author becomes the punctual source of the "text" (the emotive signfier), while the productivity of visual elements and the (illusory) autonomy of the image are censored.

Repression notwithstanding, the material issue of payment comes to the fore. In the Shoreditch fashion-media economy, young photographers are expected to work routinely on an unwaged basis (Dazed and Confused, a magazine run by a celebrity photographer, refuses even to supply film donated or fund accessory staff, while The Face was founded on the assumption of a 'gift economy' where students were happy for the chance to work, for a notional creative autonomy). It is clearly time to make the White Man quake, for unwaged 'creatives' to take a stand for their own mutual benefit, to strike for a celebrity wage.
In 1985/6 The Face ran an iconic image: a shot of a Palestinian boy walking through a street on the West Bank or Gaza Strip amid the intifada. The boy was serene, perhaps happy. Along the bottom margin of the photo was a tongue-in-cheek detailing of the clothes the boy was wearing. The technique one might term 'masquerade': here fashion came disguised as politics, disguised as everyday life, mediated through underdevelopment and conflict: a strategy of rolling pretence, constantly deferring to another scenario.

The tactic seems to have entered the subcultural hall of fame. The joy of the Palestinian photo was not just the serenity of the ambling subject, it was the ambiguity of the situation, the heretical irony of politicising a fashion image and neutralising the political question as an aesthetic at the same moment; any political reading was left firmly to the reader.

Twenty years on, the rhetorical manoeuvre manifests as a perverse form of standard media practice in the construction of moral hazard or 'deviancy amplification': as JockYoung identifies, the press select events which are atypical, present them in stereotypical fashion and contrast them against a backcloth of 'normality' which is overtypical (Young, page 35). One might add with post-structuralist bravado, that from here this glissement (a sliding of the sign under its other) enters everyday life, an aesthetic terror.

Footnote
1. F.W. Turner, author of A Shocking History of Advertising, relates a suggestion by Aldous Huxley of the need to promote the art of dissociation from an early age, to counter advertising's socialisation process, via product design and packaging: "Chocolates could be wrapped in a paper adorned with realistic pictures of scorpions, and castor oil and quinine distributed from containers in the form of Sealyham terriers or Shirley Temple" (Turner: 12). This is a strategy reminiscent of the postmodern swing in the applied arts at US design school, Cranbrook, much publicised in the early 1990s.

Bibliography
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VICE Magazine (no date) Volume 3 Number 5. The Drugs Issue. Found May 18, 2005
Young, J. (1971) 'The role of the police as amplifiers of deviancy, negotiators of reality and translators of fantasy: some consequences of our present system of drug control as seen in Notting Hill' in S. Cohen, ed., Images of Deviance (Harmondsworth) Penguin.

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