The disintegration we are talking about is of a different order to a, let us say, ‘ordinary’ breakdown. This is made clear in the chorus, where we have the desire to not fall to pieces, but alongside this we also have, ‘I just want to cry in front of you’. The falling to pieces is not physical, or is not manifested as physical, which is to say that it is to prevent, rather than as a sign of, a ‘falling to pieces’ that we have a physical ‘falling to pieces’. To put this another way: it is not a disintegration of self which is caused by the presence of an other, but a disintegration of self which can only be staved off by an other, but which, at the same time, is sustained in the other. A point that is explicitly referred to in the change from the first verse, in which he is the cause of the problem, to the second verse, where he becomes the solution (‘When I come undone/ You bring me back again’)
The relationship between the self and the other is, as we have already referred to, initially formed by the mirror stage, and is further cemented by ‘the moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end [which] inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy …, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations' (Lacan). The importance of the mirror stage in this linkage is elaborated upon in Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis:
It is this captation by the imago of the human form … which, between the ages of six months and two and a half years, dominates the entire dialectic of the child’s behaviour in the presence of his similars
Which is to say that the mirror stage is the basis for interaction with the other: ‘The child who strikes another says that he has been struck; the child who sees another fall cries'. This is not the result of Einfühlung, empathy, but the result of the formation of the ego as other in the mirror stage, ‘the deflection of the specular I into the social I’.
What I would like to suggest is that the coming together of Avril Lavigne and “Avril Lavigne” creates a short circuit which results in a disintegration. The knowledge that one has become “Avril Lavigne”, puts into question the very possibility of being Avril Lavigne; it is so easy to construct a new version of the self that the old self shatters at the knowledge of its own construction. The illusion of wholeness is shown to be precisely that. Leaving Avril to appeal to the very Other that is destroying her for her salvation - for there is no other.1
‘The world is symmetrical to the subject - the world of what I last time called thought is the equivalent, the mirror image of thought’ (Lacan). The Other doesn’t exist. As we pointed out earlier, ‘the creation of the subject, this (illusory) mastery of the ego, also creates the universe qua organized totality’, I.e. creates the Other. This Other, this discourse - the unified world - is also under threat of disintegration. Lacan suggests that even the Revolutionary craves a centre, and this as such must limit the revolutionary: ‘A certain number of biases are your daily fare and limit the import of your insurrections to the shortest term, to the term, quite precisely, that gives you no discomfort - they certainly don’t change your world view, for that remains perfectly spherical’. We can see that alongside the disintegration of the self, the self as centre, we have another operation, that of the disintegration of the Other as centering. What I am suggesting here is that Avril Lavigne, in her attempt to create a new aesthetic space is more ‘radical’ than other, more explicitly political performers, ‘those who are so utterly compliant with the expected behaviour that they can even simulate the signs of resistance spontaneously precisely because they no longer feel such resistance in themselves’ (Adorno). What the use of the mirror stage demonstrates is that the two levels of disintegration are inseparable - they mirror each other. In another mirroring we can say that, as Lacan argues in The Mirror Stage - that the subject is caught between a wholeness that never existed and a wholeness which shall never exist - so Avril Lavigne is caught between an “Avril” who shall never exist and an Avril that never existed. In yet another mirroring, we find in the song ‘Sk8er Boi’ the inversion of ‘Fall To Pieces’, which is to say that ‘Sk8er Boi’ approaches the disintegration from the point of view of “Avril”. Here the disintegration is shown in the fragmentation of Avril between the three characters of the song, rather than in the actual lyrics which, as might be expected from the “Avril” side, are ‘whole’, they offer no sign of fragmentation (We could also imagine a song, not yet written (and given the third album perhaps never to be written), from the Avril side, a song which would also display no fragmentation, but which would display Adorno’s simulated ‘signs of resistance’ rather than the pleasure in celebrity of ‘Sk8er Boi’).
What we should see here is that “Avril” is actually responsible for the creation of Avril - meaning is retroactively created: ‘it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events’ (Žižek 1992:69). (Interesting in this regard is the appearance of ‘Sk8er Boi’ before the appearance of ‘Fall to Pieces’, and both before our hypothetical Avril song) Without “Avril” Avril remains meaningless, and with this we are in the realm of what Alain Badiou terms the ‘event’. The event is the emergence of truth. For Badiou truth is not knowledge, truth is always new and opposed to knowledge as repetition - what already is. ‘A truth thus appears, in its newness, because an evental supplement interrupts repetition’. For our purposes the important thing is that the event creates a subject of the event - ‘…a subject is what fixes an undecidable event, because he or she takes the chance of deciding upon it’. In our example it can be seen that the subject (Avril) comes about because of the decision to create “Avril”; if Avril had accepted that position as her own she would never have been at all. It should be noted that this reading seemingly works against what Badiou has to say about the subject in art:
It’s imperative for us to say that the subject in artistic creation is not the artist as such. … The subjective existence of art are the works of art. … The artist is the sacrificial part of art. It’s also, finally, what disappears in art. And the ethic of art is to accept the disappearance (2004b:109).
While this is a topic which must be dealt with in more detail elsewhere, here I shall just argue that the situation for Avril Lavigne is more complicated than this. For instance, it is arguable that the very desire of Avril is for a disappearance of “Avril”, which is to say, that as Avril is looking for space within the arena of consumer-capitalism, rather than attempting to attack this from outside - from some (mythical) position of Art, the whole idea of the disappearance (or otherwise) of the artist as subject is that which must be worked out within the space, i.e. in the open.
What Avril‘s songs represent is what Badiou terms ‘fidelity to an event’: ‘This decision [of the subject] opens up the infinite procedure of verification of the true … Such a procedure is an exercise of fidelity’. This is what we see in the insistence of all of Avril’s songs on honesty and integrity - an honesty which is impossible - and with this we have Love. ‘What makes up for (supplée au) the sexual relationship [qua nonexistent] is, quite precisely, love’ (Lacan 1999:45). In Avril Lavigne’s songs the idea of honesty bridges the orders of the personal [love], the aesthetic, and the political. Love and Art both aim for (impossible) honesty.
There’s no such thing as a sexual relationship because one’s jouissance of the Other taken as a body is always inadequate - perverse, on the one hand, insofar as the Other is reduced to object a, and crazy and enigmatic, on the other, I would say. Isn’t it on the basis of the confrontation with this impasse, with this impossibility by which a real is defined, that love is put to the test? Regarding one’s partner, love can only actualize what … I called courage - courage with regard to this fatal destiny. (144)
Is it not this ‘fatal destiny’ which Avril confronts in the aesthetic, the personal and the political?2 Consequently her belief in honesty is not some illusory shoring up of the ego, some ideological defence, but a faithfulness to her desire. Her act of vacillation between art and advert, Avril and “Avril” is an act of love: ‘love is the work of love - the hard and arduous work of repeated “uncoupling” in which, again and again, we have to disengage ourselves from the inertia that constrains us to identify with the particular order we were born into’ (Žižek).
Faithfulness to her desire? The Best Damn Thing? We shall see, in part three.
1 Note in this connection the song ‘How Does it Feel’ with its chorus of ‘How does it feel to be/ Different from me/ Are we the same’.
2 Here we must again recognise the influence of Alain Badiou and his four truth procedures (art, science, politics and love) with the caveat that Badiou suggests that ‘artistic truth is different from scientific truth, from political truth, from other sorts of truth’.
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