A Santa with a Butt Plug:

Kitsch is often seen as the denial of shit. Kitsch excludes from view everything that is unacceptable in human existence. In Paul McCarthy’s oeuvre, there is no such dichotomy. For forty years, his scatological work – wallowing in shit, pissing on food, fucking mayonnaise jars, walking on broken glass, re-coding revered artworks as trash porn, and dropping huge piles of shit on cities – has dissected the violence of positivity. This article suggests that McCarthy’s 1970s performance work, his 1990s interactive architectures, and his 2010s automated environments articulate three distinct stages of this violence: libidinal, participatory, and automated, as enmeshed with the spectacular, experience, and information economy, and the aesthetics of the interesting, the zany, and the cute (Ngai). Pinpointing the devastating working of the late-capitalist symbolic order-disorder— an order that perpetually disorders—I argue that McCarthy’s oeuvre articulates the passage from biopolitics (Foucault) to smartpolitics (Han).


Introduction
In an early episode of the Italian comic Dylan Dog (Bonnelli, 1992) an exemplary family-parents, two children, a cat and a dog-lead the life of hospitable bedand-breakfast hosts during the day, and torture, maim, rape, kill, wallow in blood, and excrement at night. No matter how unbridled the carnage the night before, in the morning, they spring back to life. They are their usual, hospitable selves without a trace of memory of the previous night's transgressions. Magnified to a larger socio-cultural scale, the rage and the violence that manifest variously as Lushetich: A Santa with a Butt Plug 204 gross bodily harm, torture, rape and murder are forms of transgressive behaviour that defy visible and invisible oppression, personal and social injury, which, like the above episode of Dylan Dog, begs the question: is violence, physical and symbolic, a necessary temporary disorder, a cruel form of regeneration leading to a renewed stability? Or, is stability only a temporary respite from the aggression and violence that rage in human hearts, due to relentless class, racial, gender, ethnic and economic oppression? The answer is, of course: neither. The question is nonetheless relevant to the specific brand of somatic-cultural disorder that forty years of Paul McCarthy's scatological work-wallowing in shit (Shit Face Painting 1974), pissing on food and walking on broken glass (Sailor's Meat 1975), re-coding revered artworks as trash porn (Fresh Acconci 1995), and dropping huge piles of shit on cities (Complex Pile 2013)-have exemplified with accuracy, one could even say elegance.
In the world around us, physical and social things organise themselves into patterns. Patterns create structures and structures create systems that produce negative and positive feedback. Negative feedback negates disturbances and creates stability; positive feedback amplifies disturbances and creates turbulence. Both are strictly temporary, however; neither is durable or fixed. Endeavours to create a stable order of any kind-and social order is no exception in this respect-are invariably fragile. They require an entire armature of totems and taboos, commandments and laws about the demarcation of existential territories and the punishment of transgressions. In fact, the sole purpose of such exaggerated demarcations is to impose a durable, ordered schema 'on an inherently untidy experience' (Douglas, 2002: 4). Amidst the chaos of shifting impressions, marked differences between 'above and below', 'within and without', 'with and against' (ibid.) organise, sequence, and format experience. They construct a stable world by somatically and culturally inscribing taboos and obligations that reinstate the symbolic order.
The symbolic order is the sum total of all socio-linguistic structures that configure the field of inter-subjective relations. Formerly anchored in the master signifiergod, the state, national identity, the party, community, or humanity at large-it is a tapestry of mutually semantically ratifying social performances and inscriptions.

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In neoliberalism, the demise of the symbolic order (as the meta-value on which all other values depend) is entwined with the imperialism of economy, which has no content. Values constitutive of the semantically controlling (secular or religious) societies are here 'social commodities' (Arendt, 2006: 32). They have 'no significance on their own, but, like commodities, exist only in the ever-changing relativity of social linkage and commerce ' (ibid.). Rooted in the fetish idea of the market as a self-regulatory mechanism, which brings order auto-poietically out of disorder (Hayek, 1971), neoliberalism systematically desecrates (traditional and local) rules and regulations that stand in the way of expansion. As a recombinant order that perpetually disorders, neoliberalism grinds habit, deracinates stability, and proliferates ever-new 'existential refrains' (Guattari, 1995: 17). While we could say, with Žižek, that systemic violence is 'inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism', and consists of the 'automatic' creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the unemployed' (2009: 15), the last five decades have also witnessed a steady rise of invisible, medial, existentially refrained violence.
This particular somatic-cultural violence, formerly dictated by the symbolic order, is succinctly summed up in McLuhan's famous phrase 'the medium is the message' (1964: 7), which does not refer to content (watching a football match, a news item, or a children's show on TV), but to the medium's somatic and affective working.
Building on McLuhan, Guattari introduces the notion of 'existential refrains,' which refers to the emplacement, timing and patterning of relations that install themselves 'like a strange attractor' amidst the 'sensible and significational chaos', on 'the existential territory of the self' (Guattari, 1995: 17). Indebted to the theory of non-linear dynamics where a strange attractor is a perpetually changing organising principle that changes shape, direction, and velocity, yet remains clearly recognisable as a strange attractor (Hayles, 1990: 252), existential refrains mark the confluence of technical and perceptual forces that sediment as environment and behaviour. Moreover, they channel a very particular form of invisible violence, rooted in biopower.
Unlike ritual or sovereign violence-which is both explicit and explicitly related to the symbolic order-biopower refrains from overt violence: physical harm, torture Lushetich: A Santa with a Butt Plug 206 or killing. Instead, it disciplines through scientific knowledge, wellbeing, and care. As Oksala notes in reference to Foucault, '[w]ithout an understanding of the rationality of biopower it would be difficult to explain how we willingly partake in the profound and violent disciplining of our lives that characterises modern societies ' (2010: 42).
She goes on to state that 'biopolitical violence', which shapes somatic and affective habits, is 'more dangerous than sovereign violence because it is harder to detect and to regulate' (ibid.). Oksala could not be more right. In biopolitical violence, sociocultural mechanisms of subjugation, exploitation, and denigration are embedded in daily practices, media, and their pertaining existential refrains. Based on such notions as health, wellbeing, prosperity, and happiness, this 'positive' brand of violence is so powerful precisely because it is unrecognisable for what it is. McCarthy's work of the past four decades has consistently articulated the disordering effects of a socio-economic order-disorder that invisibly corrodes life while also marking a passage from the biopolitics of somatic violence to the smartpolitics of networked, avatar violence. More specifically, his 1970s performance work, 1990s interactive architectures, and 2010s automated environments bring to the fore three different phases of this violence-the libidinal, participatory and automated-as related to the spectacular, experience, and information economy.

Libidinal Violence in a Spectacular Economy
In 1974 McCarthy performed Hot Dog in a basement studio in Los Angeles for an audience of invited friends. After stripping to his underwear and shaving his body, he stuffed his penis into a hot dog bun, wrapped tape around it, smeared himself with mustard, stuffing more and more hot dogs into his mouth, drinking and squirting ketchup until he finally taped 'his bulging mouth closed so that the protruding mouth' looked like a 'snout' (Smith, 1979: 45). Describing the performance artist Barbara T. Smith writes: We [the audience] are agog with a wincing, dumb pain. […] I struggle inwardly to control the impulse to gag. He stands alone struggling with himself, trying to prevent his own retching. It is apparent that he is about to vomit.
[…] Should he vomit he might choke to death, since the vomit would have no place to go. And should any one of us vomit, we might trigger him to do likewise (45-46).
The visceral bind of the mutually stimulated retching, disgust, yet endurance is, in this case, not mere audience support. In many Indo-European languages, the word for watching refers to holding or keeping as in the English 'be-hold', or the French 're-garder'. Holding by means of the gaze is something we do on a daily basis. When we see someone crossing the room with a coffee mug filled to the brim, we fix the person and the action in order to 'hold' the coffee in place. Even when not purposefully fixing, the gaze holds. The holding function of the gaze creates perceptual architectures, as can be seen from the fact that, on the internet, the most Stemming, on the one hand, from the romantic notion of eclectic difference and novelty, and, on the other, from the informatics-saturated postmodern cognitive work, the aesthetic of the interesting is concerned with the 'relatively small surprise of information or variation from an existing norm' (Liu quoted in Ngai, 2013: 5). It marks ' a tension between the unknown and the already known' (ibid.). Ngai further notes that, in Russian, the word for 'interesting' is synonymous with 'pregnant'. One can say 'she is in an interesting state' which means that '[a]lthough she herself is one, there is another entity within her' (Epstein quoted in Ngai, 2013: 26). and Hot Dog, by contrast, combine a formal conceptual logic with excess and drivebased unstoppability, characteristic of the distinctly performative aesthetic of the zany, which, in the current age, manifests variously as hyperactivity, accelerated growth, pollution, and widespread environmental devastation. As Ngai suggests, 'highlighting the libido and the physicality of an unusually beset agent' (2012: 7), zaniness is unstoppably productive, or, in fact, over-productive. Stemming from commedia dell' arte's zanni-the perpetual odd-jobbing, intelligent yet precarious servant, single-mindedly committed to a(n often) absurd course of action-zaniness suggests both an ordered linear development (like the systematic logic of the interesting) and the possibility of derailment, injury, and catastrophe.
McCarthy's derailed seriality, his simultaneous over-production and overconsumption is closely related to biopower. All forms of power-from ritual prohibition to biopolitics-regulate what goes into the body and what comes out of it: food, drink, sweat, urine, excrement, semen, mucus, blood, menstrual blood, and, finally, children. Apart from controlling the entrances and exits to the body, the biopolitical regime, which triumphed in the Fordist-Taylorist productivistconsumerist era with a simultaneous ' optimisation' of labour and the perpetual stimulation of unbridled consumption, socialises the body in its productive and libidinal capacities. In both cases, the emphasis is on 'the somatic and the corporal' (Foucault, 2003: 137). The violent over-writing of the body's libidinal-productive capacities was at the same time the reason why many of the 1960-70s practicesthose of the Viennese Actionists, Gina Paine, Carolee Schneemann, to mention but a few-used bodily fluids as well as self-inflicted pain. Variously critiquing the societal move towards anaesthetisation, the glossing of pain and misery, and the aggressive suppression of non-linear, top-down knowledges, such as embodied female knowledge, these practices also articulated the increasingly invisible modes of biopolitical violence that were becoming steadily less visible and 'steadily more immanent to the social field' (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 23). This is why it is important to look beyond the symbolic in McCarthy's work. In Rugoff's interpretation, McCarthy's ' one-man orgies with condiments that substituted for excrement, sperm and blood' are seen as symbolic of the infantilisation imposed by consumerism; as ' enact[ing] a theatre of regression' (1996: 33; emphasis original). But regression makes us think of a temporary or, at least, salvageable derailment, in the same way that the psychoanalytic treatment of trauma does. Anything that moves backwards is thought to be able to resume its forward journey. The problem articulated in McCarthy's Hot Dog, however, as well as in many of his other works, is rupture of an unpredictable and extremely violent kind that destroys the existing existential terrains and installs new and violent, drive-based refrains. McCarthy presents a temporal embroilment of actions that occur all at once, as in a state of panic, amok, or a nervous breakdown while simultaneously 'hacking' the exteroceptiveinteroceptive realm in a way radically different from artworks that remain firmly in the realm of the aesthetics of the interesting, such as Manzoni's Merda D'Artista. By coupling over-production, over-consumption and near-destruction with the body's productive and libidinal capacities, he brings to the fore the profound violence of economics-a disciplinary practice par excellence.
Arising as a form of emancipation from the corrupted nineteenth-century religious institutions, the economic whole of the production, reproduction and distribution of wealth, retained the exact same logic, that of a single organising principle governing the ' cosmic clock's workings' thus homogenising all existing relationships (Gorz, 1989: 112). Predictive organisation, its chief tool, forces the heterogeneous principles Meat and Tubbing, the entwinement of real, visible, and symbolic, invisible violence, is mirrored in the parallel use of live performance and film. Physical violence is, of course, concrete and locatable. Symbolic violence is elusive to such a degree that 'those exposed to it' tend to ' question themselves', rather than the cultural codes that the abject, such as urine or excrement, has an unsettling effect precisely because it is neither subject nor object, yet is linked to both (Kristeva, 1982). In the theory of marginal utility, the falling rate of satisfaction and the corresponding accelerated production of new commodities binds the object to the subject, and, conversely, the subject to the object. The engineered demand-and-supply loop creates a simulacrum, a communicational system in which the consumer's conception of reality, their identity, as well as their function within that reality, is forged in the incestuous crosspollination of spectacles that form part ' of the endless, libidinally violent stream of signs' (Baudrillard, 2001: 41).

The Violence of Participation
As Foster notes in The Return of the Real, the 1990s, the dawn of the digital age and new and steadily proliferating forms of connectivity, were marked by two distinct tendencies in art: abjection and socially engaged practices. The category of abject art, in which McCarthy's work is usually placed, challenges ' cynicism with abjection' (Foster, 1996: 123). The cynicism that Foster is referring to is related to two factors: the obligatory 'happy subject', which, as Ahmed argues, has spurred the need to create the Object. Made from a wooden box, the object was ' a shapeless gaping "mouth"' attached to ' a penis and vagina and interior plumbing that led to a type of anus, which could be plugged up or left unplugged' (Ruggoff, 1996: 54). When exhibited, the visitors were asked to feed Human Object and dispose of its excretions. Unlike the abovedescribed derailed filmed performances, the simulacric enclosure of consumption and excretion is here embedded in participation. The turn to interactivity, a hallmark of the 1990s, could also be seen in Bossy Burger and Pinnochio. A grotesque improvisation on a television cooking show, and a re-enactment of a famous fairly tale respectively, Bossy Burger and Pinnochio were both shown as videos within the sets where they were shot. This double use of the set, as found object, reiterated the claustrophobic bind of the retro (existential) refrain, spatially and temporally embedded in an interactional architecture.
McCarthy often uses the phrase ' architecture of the body' to refer both to the body as architecture-a container of organs-and to his remediated performative architectures, remnants of past works, such as Trunks, or found objects, such as those used in Bossy Burger. This twofold function of architecture is perhaps most obvious in McCarthy's 1991-2 Rear View. A plaster sculpture of a headless and limbless body, placed atop a wooden table, Rear View entices the viewer to peer into the body's anus where a miniature model of a Swiss village is displayed. As Rugoff notes, 'to peep into the work one has to bend over in such a manner that one's own rear end is pointedly exhibited, transformed into a spectacle for others ' (1996: 73). A similar recursive articulation of the body as a somatic-relational architecture is at work in Bossy Burger and Pinnochio, both of which are reduced to a confined space, as are the viewers. Both works articulate the repetitive refrains of the (supposedly innovative) experience economy and its attendant therapy culture. First theorised by Pine II and Gilmore in the eponymous book, experience economy treats experience as a 'genre of economic output ' (1999: 2). A logical sequitur in the progression from the commodity, to the service, and, finally, the experience economy, it is defined as ' a series of memorable events that a company stages-as in a theatrical playto engage him [the consumer] in a personal way' (23). This is done by 'inging the thing' or ' experientializing the goods' (30). Combining participation, multisensorial interaction, and total immersion, experience economy creates entire fictitious worlds woven of entertainment and escapism in order to create a branded, optimally competitive, and thus ultimately refrain-able experience. Like Sailor's Meat and

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Tubbing, Bossy Burger and Pinnochio use tattered modes of representation, those that are already in circulation-television in the case of the former, participatory performative structures in the case of the latter.
A marked trend in the socio-economic climate of the 1990s was a shift in responsibility from institutions to individuals (Salecl, 2011: 16-17 (1992: 21). Fuelled by hyperproduction and the increasing levels of complexity, the risk society manifests as the attribution of all hazards to human decisions, which makes these decisions 'politically reflexive' (183). On the other hand, problems such as unemployment, precarity, and social isolation are increasingly interpreted through the 'highly individualized idiom of therapeutic discourse' (Furedi, 2004: 24) where 'the internal world of the individual' is 'the site where the problems of society are raised and where it is perceived they need to be solved' (ibid.). As Ehrenberg suggests, the invisible violence of frenetic activity and experience overload is inseparable from the tyranny of participation. Participatory management, participatory expression groups, even participatory entertainment ' constitute new ways of enforcing authority', 'founded on [individual] initiative', 'motivation and flexibility' (Ehrenberg, 1998: 199) that result in ' a notable increase in psychosomatic disorders and depression' (ibid.).
Disorders and depression are the obverse of the disciplinary imperative of enjoyment and fun-ification. Although Foucault repeatedly called for new uses of the body (1988), the steadily proliferating methodologies of fun-ification produce increasingly mechanical and therefore depressing forms of 'fun'. This is nowhere more evident than in McCarthy's 1992 The Garden the set for which was borrowed from the American 1959-1973 television show Bonnanza. In The Garden, the viewers enter an environment inhabited by two figures, a father and a son. At irregular intervals, the father and the son are seen-or heard-fucking trees. Their movement is smooth, mechanical, perfectly organised; having fucked one tree, they move to another. Enjoyment is here work; work is enjoyment. Both are utterly exhausting. As an aesthetic category zaniness is synonymous with the worker performing ' dedifferentiated labor' (Ngai, 2012: 9). In the increasingly precarious global conditions, the worker is the victim of 'the casualization and intensification of labor' and 'the creeping extension of the working day' (10). The imperative to increase productivity at all costs is here enmeshed with the biopolitical violence of overexertion. Unlike the spectacular economy's exhaustion of eroticism through advertising, the experience economy's zaniness turns spatial structures and objects into (fun-ified) activities. Frenetic activity is here coupled with the multiplication of existing product lines through endless variation as can be seen from such products as Nestle's coffee with the taste of tea.
The re-purposing of the product, the aim of which is to create wider appeal, expand into new markets, and increase the profits, can also be seen in McCarthy Island is essentially the waste that gradually accumulated in McCarthy's studio over a period of seven years, including recycled body parts, those of the various fairy tale creatures such as the seven dwarves, his own, and characters like George Bush, who, in the exhibition, is seen mechanically sodomising pigs like a well-functioning perpetuum mobile. Everything is in a process of steady decomposition, demolition and unstoppable-because automated-injury. The distinctly zany aesthetic of his former participatory works and body architectures is here cutely de-formed.
As an aesthetic category, cuteness is characterised by the desire to merge with the familiar and the gratifying, if un-formed or de-formed object; it speaks to the need 'to inhabit a concrete, qualitative world of use as opposed to one of abstract exchange' (Ngai, 2012: 13). The fetishism of cuteness is both a way of 'resisting the logic of commodification' and its most 'symptomatic reflection' (ibid.). As a cultivated aesthetic of powerlessness, cuteness is both pacifying and sub-textually aggressive. Cute objects evoke pre-individual bliss dissolving the subject's linguistic proficiencies into gurgling and cooing sounds. Unlike cool, which is defiant, even sacrilegious-consider the ' distressed' jeans' late-twentieth-century appropriation of the Jewish kriah, a mourning custom in which clothes are cut or torn as an expression of grief-cute is likeable, and, above all, familiar.
In Foucault's 'technologies of the self', defined as 'intentional and voluntary actions by which men [sic] seek to change themselves in their singular being […] to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria ' (1988: 19) which, for Foucault, was an emancipatory gesture of resistance against the biopolitical regime, have long been appropriated by neoliberal smartpolitics. Combining the 'technologies of the self' with the responsibilised ' dividual'-to borrow Deleuze's prescient phrase that refers to divisible and replicable, rather than indivisible or unique beings (1992: 3-7)-informational capitalism has turned the subject into an auto-exploiting entrepreneur of herself. The combination of digital acceleration and global standardisation (of communication, desires, and drives) has transformed the subject into a project. As a project, the subject is expulsed from the space-time it occupies, since to project means to launch, both in space and time. In this existential exile, '[t]he auto-exploiting subject' is ensconced in 'its own labour camp' where 'it is perpetrator and victim at the same time' (Han, 2017: 61). This is exacerbated by two other problems: the disappearance of truth as certitude-the stability of basic assumptions-and contra-temporality. Due to the increasing acceleration and disappearance of the semantics of the path, a form of becoming associated with distance, effort, and expectation, now flattened into the instantaneous availability of all things and people, contra-temporality creates a sense of failed or broken connections despite the hegemony of informational connexionism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). By repeatedly hauling back past moments, digital recorders have erased the thresholds between the familiar, the barely recognisable, the semi-forgotten, the deeply intimate, and the so distant as to be unthinkable (Han, 2014: 58). This is why, for Han, 'there is no structure to the experiential world' (ibid.), only a chaotic flickering of images. Chaos here is not creative turbulence; it is a state of confused direction-less-ness caused by the 'the infinite speed with which every nascent form vanishes […] a void that is virtual and contains all possible particles and forms' which ' appear fleetingly and disappear immediately, without consistency or reference, without consequence' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 118).
Moreover, the accelerated passage of information, with its obsessive 'innovative' value-creation destroys social knowledges and precludes their ' emancipatory potential' (Pasquinelli, 2008: 93). As a continuation of repurposing and recycling, the recombinant semiocapitalist machine subjugates through the 'exhaustion of mental capacities' and 'information deluge' (Berardi, 2016: 68). In a crisis of overproduction, both ' economic and psychopathic'-since mental landscapes are saturated with signs that create ' continuous over-excitation' (Berardi, 2011: 111)semiocapitalism is inseparable from economics, both in the sense of the increasing financial abstraction, and recession. However, economics can no longer understand 'the depth of the crisis' as underneath 'the crisis of financial exchange there is the crisis of symbolic exchange' (ibid.) manifesting as 'panic, depression, suicide, the general decline of desire and social empathy' (ibid.). The problem evident in this collapse is so radical as to surpass 'the economic conceptual framework' altogether (112), yet without a viable replacement for the myth of the self-regulated market. Etymologically, commandment, ruler, and anus, all stem from the same word: archos, which also means origin (Agamben, 2019).

Much of
Today, global capitalism makes use not only of 'political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization' but also of these institutions' 'military enforcement of political decisions' (Berardi, 2011: 113). This means that '[f]ar from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated' (ibid.).
The market is an arche-commandment that cannot be disobeyed. As any form of opposition to the invisible but palpable social, economic, and cognitive violence seems increasingly impossible, despair and the relentless straining of nervous energy push people to a radical form of 'passage a l'acte', mass murder and suicide (Berardi, 2016: 71), of which the recent years have seen many examples.
And yet-apart from such irruptions of 'inexplicable' violence, there is no violence to be seen. In smartpolitics, the politics of the 'like', based on over-positivity, the ' dividual' deteriorates into 'the genital organs of Capital' (Han, 2017: 6), or is relegated to 'waste'. Referring to the example of Acxiom (a company that trades in the personal data of about 3000 million US citizens) and divides people into such categories as 'waste' and 'shooting star' (65), Han points to the obvious fact that big data (the new, enlightened statistics) is creating a new and extremely violent social order whose violence is more invisible than ever. Promises of a cyborgian existence here stand in stark contrast to the innovative forms of violence and control. Data, and their multiple arborisations, have become new existential terrains. Yet, at the present moment in time, this region is as unfathomable as the working of the gods in traditional societies.
Despite the fact that the info-semiocapitalist oppression is uncontestable, it is mysterious, which is why it has the strength of an inverted symbolic order, one that operates as an (analogue photographic) negative that shows the contours of what is not there. In this realm, where the body is obsolete, and where the position, shape and speed of the steadily proliferating existential refrains can be neither located nor identified, McCarthy's work, a perpetual flow of recombinant variation, has a pacifying function. Dropping huge inflatable piles of shit on Hong Kong-a work that, in an environmentally aware gesture, he comically titled Complex Pile-or manufacturing cute little chocolate Santas-betrays a nostalgia for a familiar set of rules such as the sequential mapping of time; spatial, temporal and semantic surveyability; a difference between pathology and non-pathology; professionalism and cretinism. For forty years, McCarthy's serial, derailed, re-mediated, manically repetitive work has articulated not only the ambivalent aesthetic of late capitalism -simultaneously interesting and boring, productive and manic, infantilisingly cute and perversely aggressive -but also its obliterating, ceaselessly innovative, forms of violence.

Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.

Author Information
Natasha Lushetich is Professor of Contemporary Art & Theory at the University of Dundee. Her research focuses on intermedia, biopolitics, the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge, hegemony and complexity. She is the author of