Perversion the Social Relation

Contamination's Germinations 197What's so interesting about Accident and White Noise is that theirarticulation of contamination and drives juxtaposes the possibility ofthe agency of objects or particles with the predicament of the action oflanguage and narrative. These views both explicate and complicate ourunderstandings of ourselves as desiring subjects. Subjects, in this paradigm,are simply one site in which confrontation takes place, but a particularlyimportant and dense site, since we are the nexus of languageand object relations. In or as this nexus, however, subjects function asboth incomplete and excessive; subjects are radically discerned from determinedmeaning—that is, disconnected from being fixed by fate—andbecause of that finite being, unlimited in their desire. But subjects arealso subject to narrative, inescapably relating to one another in the socialthrough narrative. Thus it is necessary to examine not simply theincoherence of individuals but the dynamics of groups and systems. AsCopjec succinctly puts it, "One thing comes to be substituted for anotherin an endless chain only because the subject is cut off from theessential thing that would complete it." 13 Jack Gladney's Teutonophiliaplays out this sequence of substitutions via the death drive, but at thesStaie time reworks—and thereby transforms—the death drive's narrativerepetitions from being recurrent impulses toward stasis into a dispersalof pieces of language: sentence fragments, advertising slogans,lists of brand names, announcements of narration.It might help to examine this moment of transformation through adifferent lens, one we also find at the intersection of narrative and thedrive: cause. Contamination itself is certainly a phenomenon that invokescausality, if only in its colloquial conception; when a contaminationoccurs, the first things we want to know are its cause and effects. Forinstance, the Chernobyl contamination hinged on failures of the systemto maintain its integrity in the face of electrical power fluctuations. Likenarrative, like the drive itself, contamination seems, thus, bound up inregressive, retroactive orientation and a forward, progressive impulse.But contamination is often mysterious, indefinite, and something of afailure—as Lacan notes, "There is cause only in something that doesn'twork." 14 Within this tension, contamination forces us to recognize thenonindividualist paradigm of the drive, and the possibility of nonindividualistagency. What links contamination to narrative and language,then, is its perverse connection to causality, understood through a non-