The Phallus Was Virtual First

Abstract

The Phallus Was Virtual First Look at Bunny: Totem, Taboo, Technology, by Dominic Pettman. Winchester, UK: Zero Books. 2013 pages. $22.95 paperback, $16.99 e-book.Dominic Pettman crafts his ode to liveliness of totem in digital age by seeking evidence of its omnipresence in both obvious and unlikely places, from Tolstoy to Tamagotchi. Looking for totemic in way contemporary world (still) organizes itself-into technical objects and networks of modern mediascape (17)-may reek of untrendy Freudianism for a lot of academics and their age-old reluctance to accept unAmerican fact that, sorry, man is not master of his own home. But Pettman's account follows kind of associative logic, more in love with poiesis of argument than with tightness of argument itself, that suits those with a sensibility for labor of language as main source for theory. Where is totem hiding today? How does it camouflage itself? What does our undying investment in totemic as a survival mechanism say about our atemporal and zeitgeist-specific symptoms?Let us not forget that for Sigmund Freud, totem is inherently linked to idea of substitution. If totemic has been traditionally linked to animals, for instance, they have functioned as material replacement for a perennially virtual Father. The ritualistic killing of such animals, then, along with feelings of guilt and atonement that follow harken back to original parricide of Totem and Taboo, extraordinary event that has brought us social organization, moral restrictions, and religion.1 It is easy to how a critical account of our increasingly digital century would find it useful to engage with logic of metaphorical correspondences that govern totemic-a haunting logic where available figures are always impostors of a real whose existential precondition is to remain elsewhere. For Pettman, totem works as an empty outline waiting to be shaped into something specific through subjective cathexis (2). And as a type of fulcrum around which desires circle and gather with function of helping individual orient him or herself in relation to group-at once a dreamed-up compass and ontological tampon of sorts that contain subject in place, keeping one from overflowing and from drowning (2). There is, then, a mechanism of fantasy (of presence) and disavowal (of absence) that props up totem and that keeps going back to phallus, that original all-important trompe l'oeil holding humanity together (or rather apart). While Pettman recognizes totem-as-animal in Playboy's logo and Energizer Bunny and fantasies around excessive fertility of rabbits, he also sees it in children's relationship to Pikachu and Spider Man and reminds us of Roland Barthes's evocation of wine as a totem-drink for French as well as way capitalism itself is predicated on totemic force embodied by consumable goods. As such, there is a virtuality inherent to totem-symbolic virtual figure associated with a charged object or referent (6) and avatar for true object of veneration (7)-that virtual as we understand it today may simply literalize or make redundant.The book's title is both attempt to link together-in one single totem, as it were-the otherwise loosely related chapters and indication for totem's intimate relationship with a version of nature, or naturalization. The totemic's mechanism is one of fantasy, illusion, and scam. For Pettman, most totems are animals or are related to nature-perhaps as a way to mask theatrical blow inherent to totem as a figurehead for a something that isn't really there. The totem's claim is a lie: it is there where taboo is posited and is a precarious petrification akin to partial object, which helps us to disavow nagging absence of original object we have lost and miss. Pettman tries to keep his totemic examples animal-related, as he traces back phantasmatic mechanism of totem's coming-to-presence (59), the logic of decoy (34), in order to reveal what it is that it is actually (cock-)blocking-an attempt to see in face what lies in back, as George-Arthur Goldschmidt has said about work of psychoanalysis, and that we could easily extrapolate as work of critical theory tout court. …