Adaptation Period.
“Did You Get My Calls, Ma?”

Margaux Schwarz

The Dialogic Birth of the “No”

The very first interaction our son dared to have with another human his size, involved, quite literally, eating a little girl’s foot. This took place during – what they call at the crèche – the “adaptation period,” a soft euphemism for “you’re allowed to stay and hang around for an hour while pretending to look casual and unobsessed, so your child doesn’t register, on a cellular level, that you’re about to disappear and leave him with these strangers and their semi-sanitized bins of drool-slime-covered plastic toys.” We were invited, permitted really – to remain nearby so that he (in fact “we”) might “adjust”, though what actually happened was that we sat cross-legged and performed various silly pantomimes of simili-calm presence while internally spiraling into a kind of anxiety crisis: Is this normal? Is he normal? Has this rubber golden fish been sterilized? Is this baby sick? She’s coughing a lot, isn’t she? He has so much hair, how old is he? Is that other baby already crawling? Is this nurse nice now but does she yell at children when no parents are around? Is she going to hurt my baby? Should I actually stop working and keep him at home till he speaks so that he can tell us if something’s wrong? Maybe that’s better, yes, we’ll do that, alternately. Would it be crazy to do so? Can we both work part time and earn enough money? Oh God.

So there we were, with pins and needles in our legs, on a purple foam mat – in every sense uncomfortable – watching our baby grab the nearest foot like a hungry animal. The foot belonged to a serene baby girl in leggings, who looked at him with a kind of patient, bovine indifference, as if to say: This happens more often than you’d think.

Apparently, and this before one year, it’s quasi impossible to set up limits with a child, whose premature brain would only circumvent the gesture without integrating its meaning, or grasp a symbolic “no.” This episode testifies to the first stage of libidinal development, i.e the psychosexual development described by Freud: the oral stage. This stage is defined (and experienced!) by the infant’s exploration of the world primarily through the mouth, alongside grasping with the hands and babbling: their first attempts at communicating with the world. It is the period during which the infant mouths their own hands, feet, toys, the edge of a table, the carpet, your finger or sleeve or any human or non-human parts, indiscriminately. Before the child enters the symbolic,¹ before the psychoanalytic “No” can take root, boundaries are obviously not yet understood as moral or social but are felt bodily, as shifts in affect, that is to say: as a significant change in the parent’s “presence”. The baby is not able to be obedient or learn a rule yet but is instead a “sensor” of rhythms, repetitions and patterns like the pause in your voice, your tone or the redirection of its hand.

In the scene described above, we see the beginning of what Lacan might call the pre-symbolic theatre of the drive.² The drive is the psychic force that pushes a child to interrupt you fifty times when you’re talking to someone that is not them, or to melt down about whatever they want but don’t manage to or are forbidden to have, do, eat, see, or bite (sometimes all at once). It isn’t something you can control, but something you sort of try to maneuver with language and limits, so they can eventually want things in a way that’s bearable (for them, for others and for you). Parenting then becomes less about “meeting needs” and more about installing the necessary structures which will teach them that the world won’t give them everything and that this, paradoxically, is what will allow them to want at all. This little girl’s foot in our son’s mouth will thus be remembered as his first parental “no”, the first boundary in a social context.

The symbolic “no”, which is traditionally associated with the paternal function in psychoanalysis, is not exclusive to fathers or men. It can be enacted by any caregiver, and that role is today often held by the mother or by another figure. But in our contemporary, hyper-individualized society and its rising number of single parents that have to carry the full weight of every position (of both care and law), things get more complex. In such cases, the issue becomes dramaturgic: the absence of a counterpoint. And it is important, again, to note that it is not because the missing position would have to be held by or is needed as a man, but because symbolic differentiation, dialogic by its very nature, often requires more than one voice. A child doesn’t learn meaning through monologue but through, so to say, various positions on the stage. It is actually quite striking how we can relate this process of shifting from raw pulsion to shared meaning to spectatorship. A limit becomes a rule only when someone else witnesses it, so when, in a way, a spectator confirms that what happened, happened. To activate this differentiation, you thus need this third position: not just “me” and “you”, but something that stands outside this duo (a person or a group, an object or a social rule) so that limits that are “out there” appear as shared rather than personal. We leave when the clock says seven, I don’t set the time myself, the clock sets the time (it’s a fact!) or The door is closed, I have to knock or ring before I enter. Over time, that external third becomes an inner third: the early seed of self-regulation that makes you a subject. (We will come back later to the impact of this counterposition lacking in digital media, or its lack of walls and thus of boundaries?)

And this very self-regulation is the issue Anna Kornbluh identifies in Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. In this brilliant essay, she reads Lacan’s Symbolic as “the register of language, institutions, norms, laws, practices, and order”,³ and psychoanalysis, in this sense, as “a science of mediation”: a study of how language and norms participate in both the construction of desire and relationality. The infant’s first imposed “No” is thus more an entrance into mediation than prohibition per se: it is meant to introduce delay into relation, something like a slow de-inscription of the fantasy of immediate reciprocity. But what happens when circulation replaces mediation?

Picture Alice, Lewis Caroll’s Alice, this little girl, not quite a subject yet (as she has not fully processed the machinery of the Symbolic Order), falling, literally and psychically, into a space where language is familiar but fails to make sense, where rules exist but seem anarchic, where physical laws are absurd as bodies grow and shrink and animals speak and on top of that, if adults are present they don’t seem remotely interested in explaining any of these phenomena. We could say in a way that Caroll is here staging a condensed version of what we called earlier the “Theatre of the Drive”: a fantastical but deeply anxious mise-en-scène of what it feels like to be flooded with your pulsions in a world where no one tells you what to do and everyone lets you alone so that you suddenly feel way too big for your own skin and have to sort out by yourself what you want or need and if these are the same things or not. The parents in this story are indeed dramatically absent, which is of course not a detail but a key element around which the whole psychic architecture of the enclosed world of Wonderland spins: the absence of what Lacan calls the Name-of-the-Father (le nom et le non du père), i.e., the adult in the room who can translate chaos into meaning. Instead, all the characters Alice meets are strange figures who don’t seem able to regulate their emotions, and while she is a polite young girl who knows how to behave socially, the same cannot always be said of those she encounters. Most could be described as socially awkward or mad (as the Cheshire Cat notes, everyone in Wonderland, Alice included, is mad, why would they be there otherwise?); some are rude, others suspiciously nice, and others outright violent. The Queen of Heart issues death sentences as if ordering tea; others speak so enigmatically that they are barely understandable; The Rabbit lives in a constant state of emergency, forever invoking rules yet too busy to explain them to poor Alice etc. Caroll doesn’t bring us to a fantasy world here but to the very territory of the unmediated drive: a Wonderland of compulsive repetition, where the child loops through scenes that look like a play but feel more like a series of undiagnosed breakdowns made all the more terrifying by the absence of a protective adult. And while we won’t go in too much detail on Michael Jackson’s Neverland, a name that now carries a deeply tragic irony, it’s worth a brief detour. Peter Pan’s Neverland is where children never grow up, a world free of parents and thus of limits and responsibility. In this sense Jackson’s choice of that name can’t be but deliberate as it embodied the fantasy of a utopia freed from the constraints of adulthood. What began as a kind of private Disneyland or more exactly an adultless theme park, eventually revealed itself as barbaric: a dreamspace built on denial, collapsing into a threatening and dangerous trap under the very absence it idealized.

Less tragic, more weightless, but circling some of the same structural absences, Lena Dunham’s latest series, Too Much, feels like a contemporary echo of Alice’s adventure, set in a fantasized London. The director of the raw, indie portrayal of 2010’s New York youth in Girls now introduces a character wrapped in a more sugary form of rawness, still “real”, but perhaps a bit too top-coated by Netflix’s over-budgeted varnish. Then again, maybe its more stereotypical form suits the subject, or not, but we will return to that later. Back to the analogy with Alice: No fantastical creatures here, but Jessica (Megan Stalter), the main character who might just be an adult Alice: one who seems to be still a little girl, as she never quite received the necessary set of limits, and so can’t or won’t accept reality for what it is. Jessica is a young producer in advertising who’s in the middle of a breakdown following a breakup. She’s sent by her boss and brother-in-law (one of the many blurred limits between spheres) to London to “regain her energy” as the main company is merging with a London-based firm. Earlier in the first episode, London already hovers in the background: a premonition of her move and the setting for the fantasy she’s built around it:

JESSICA My only consolation? Love stories set in pastoral England. The romance. The honor.

As sociologist Eva Illouz writes in her book Why Love Hurts:

Courtship in the Austenian world is structured by myriad invisible rules. Non-sociologists tend to think of rules as limiting. But for sociologists, rules are also enabling, the medium through which actors relate to each other, build expectations about each other, and trudge well-known paths with each other. Rituals — a set of rules known to actors in order to engage in or disengage from relationships — are similar to a well-drawn pathway in a jungle of possibilities. They create expectations about what can and should happen next. To put it differently, rituals are a powerful symbolic tool to ward off anxieties created by uncertainty. Thus, in the nineteenth century among the propertied classes, there were, if not scrupulously observed rules, at least codes and rituals of conduct that organized encounters and that needed to be respected in order for men and women to be proved worthy of each other. In this romantic order, actors derive a sense of propriety from the rules of conduct they observe.⁴

In Too Much, Jessica clearly fantasizes about London, or British culture more broadly, for its perceived restraint and composure, which might offer her a cure for the emotionally saturated state (and world, country) she comes from. It’s a cultural contrast to her overstimulated reality. What she’s really dreaming of, as she endlessly watches Victorian-era rom-coms (coincidentally a big part of Netflix’s catalog), is not just romance, but, as Eva Illouz explains, an enabling, limiting structure – the idea that somewhere out there, rituals and codes still exist to shield desire and love – or just life really – from chaos. She needs/fantasizes clear British instructions: “LOOK LEFT”, “LOOK RIGHT”, “NO BALL GAMES”, “SLOW”, “KEEP CLEAR”, “STAND ON THE RIGHT, WALK ON THE LEFT” – overall, a directed body. In the cab on the way to the airport, window open, just before she leaves, her mother feeds her with an intense message while her grandmother waits in the background:

LOIS You know, I think it took me a long time before I realized I wasn’t fully mothered.

JESSICA Mm.

LOIS A part of it was postwar attitudes towards maternal obligation. But some of it is just her bad personality.⁵ So I want you to know that no matter how old you get — and you will — I will mother you. I will mother you harder than you can take.

JESSICA Ok. Ouch. Sounds violent, Mom.

As a matter of fact, no structural figure seems to be present (we will later learn the father is dead and thus idealized), leaving only an over-loving-whelming matrilineal caring tangle: the mother, the sister, and the young nephew, all living under the grandmother’s (Dottie played by Rhea Perlman) roof, nested in a bourgeois suburban house filled with too much love and anxiety. A maternal surplus.⁶ A nest that does not contain so much that it submerges. Here, we recognize the figure of the Jewish mother, both Jessica’s and Zev’s (her ex-boyfriend), the over-present one, who compensates for the missing Law with disarming/problematic devotion.

2. The Milky Way or the Lack-intolerant Regime

Maternal figures here give everything, tell everything, know everything, comment on everything. They are emotionally too involved, boundary-blurring, sometimes controlling – all the while playing the role that has been scripted and mythologized by artists like Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Jill Soloway or Sarah Silverman. The grandmother narrates her first night of sex, with creepy details, to Jessica over FaceTime, while she is simply seeking advice about a urinal infection. But Jessica barely reacts, she seems numbed, used to this familial logorrhea. Indeed, everyone and everything spills out, overflows: boundaries, frames, jeans. And the only one who seems unsettled by this intergenerational, never-ending pyjama party – where lavishing bodies in robes or joggings chat, share intimate stories and drift without hierarchy or filter – is Dash, Nora’s (Jessica’s sister, Lena Dunham) 13-year-old son (Oliver Nirenberg), at the age of Bar-Mitzvah, the threshold of child and manhood. He’s literally a dash, a break in rhythm, tired of this sticky continuum.

DASH (Nora’s Son) I am 13, I am not expected to have any plans on a Friday night. But you’re all kind of a tragic lineup, don’t you think?

While the mother figure is “tragically” too much, the father is dead, literally and symbolically. He opened a vacancy for a job that no one has replaced and his absence doesn’t only belong to Jessica’s biography, but to the wider cultural context of late modernity where the symbolic father, the one who says “no”, has supposedly weakened. Yet again, this question around the “missing/absent father” risks mistaking gender for function, as what is truly absent isn’t male authority per se (as we said earlier) but shared symbolic “dramaturgy”, a direction of rules, rituals and overall narrative coherence. And that’s precisely what the masculinists and bro-spheres are today reacting against. They want the father back, not as a person, but as a testosteroney fantasy of disciplinary structure (here through weight training, body building and a few Jordan Peterson tips). As Angela Nagle notes in Kill All Normies, the online right and manosphere culture (which we could call Manoland) often uses the absent father as an alibi for their misogynist barks: blaming women or progressive politics for occupying the space left by failed or abusive masculine authority. Like in Fight Club (1999), which Nagle mentions, their rebellion isn’t really against the system, but more against its feminized effects, a clear disgust of the language of the domestic and care.

This has become precisely also the rhetorical tone and style of the MGTOW⁷ movement and the anti-feminist manosphere in general, in which the absent father is often the basis for further blaming women. In Fight Club, the cuck theme is also there. The narrator, Jack, tells us ‘like so many others I had become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct’ as he sits on the toilet looking at an IKEA catalog. Durden later asks him, ‘Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?’ Like the online right, it incorporates masculinist and anti-feminist politics, as well as rebel angst and a rejection of the domesticating, feminine influence of women.⁸

Manospheres do not just grieve the collapse of the father, they instrumentalize it to reject and attack what’s seen as replacing him: receptivity, hospitality and vulnerability. So rather than defying authority or repression, this kind of adolescent rebellion targets care itself, seeing it not as a support, but as a threat to virility. Care is obviously not refused when it’s directed towards them, i.e when women do absorb their anger, their anxiety and their pain; it is only rejected when it’s asked from them, when they’re asked to hold. Care is obviously not refused when it’s directed towards them, i.e when women do absorb their anger, their anxiety and their pain; it is only rejected when it’s asked from them, when they’re asked to hold. Jessica, with her girlish clothes and disarming softness, is the perfect embodiment of the kind of woman these men react against: the demanding “over-feeling” woman, coded as hysterical, excessive or just unbearable.

And yet, in parallel, the common cultural script still demands that the mother be everything and never fail as captured masterfully by Laura Dern’s monologue in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story (2019) – where she plays Nora, the lawyer representing Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), who is in the midst of a divorce. The mother must be like Mary, perfect, sacrificial and completely selfless, a standard that, still today, no one expects of men:

NICOLE You know, he can be an asshole and I can get really pissed off and I’ll call him on being an asshole.⁹

NORA I’m gonna stop you there. When you do this for real, don’t ever say that. People don’t accept mothers who drink too much wine and yell at their child and call him an asshole. I get it. I do it too. We can accept an imperfect dad. Let’s face it, the idea of a good father was only invented like 30 years ago. Before that, fathers were expected to be silent and absent and unreliable and selfish. And we can all say we want them to be different. But on some basic level, we accept them. We love them for their fallibilities, but people absolutely don’t accept those same failings in mothers. We don’t accept it structurally and we don’t accept it spiritually. Because the basis of our Judeo-Christian whatever is Mary, mother of Jesus. And she’s perfect. She’s a virgin who gives birth, unwaveringly supports her child and holds his dead body when he’s gone. And the dad isn’t there. He didn’t even do the fucking. God is in heaven. God is the father and God didn’t show up. So you have to be perfect and Charlie¹⁰ can be a fuckup and it doesn’t matter. You will always be held to a different, higher standard. And it’s fucked up, but that is the way it is.

Laura Dern’s character stresses here the inequity of the Mother/Father dynamic. The Father’s Non (No)/Nom (Name)/Know (Savoir) is not only accepted but desired; it is codified, instituted, and taken as a founding principle of law whereas the Mother’s Non/Nom/Know is basically unwanted and even unaccepted. While her Non (No), i.e, her refusal, her limit, is almost forbidden and often pathologized, as failure or guilt, we could add that the mother’s Nom (her last name) is (still) rarely transmitted in Western societies, resulting in her symbolic inscription basically being muted. On the other hand, the Father’s Nom (Name)/Know (Savoir)/Non (No) functions at the same time as lineage, as prohibition and overall as a passage into the symbolic. Yet, in traditional Jewish law (so in the case of Jessica’s family), Jewishness is transmitted by the mother, where the too much (“YES”) as a cliché, is at once desired, valued, and depreciated. Thus the mother is cast as either too much or not enough – of care, attention, speech, frame, or food – an ambivalence that, if we rewind to day one, from the baby’s point of view (and here we borrow Melanie Klein’s controversial proposal) has less to do with what the mother actually does than with whether the breast is, in that specific moment, felt to function properly or not, as an efficient device, i.e. as “good” or “bad”. Read a posteriori, this good/bad breast appears less as a description of how babies “think” than of how adults (and society) continue to hold contradictory feelings toward mothers. Even if, more than seventy years ago, Donald Winnicott introduced the idea of the Good Enough Mother precisely to challenge the fantasy of perfect and flawless maternal care, the female parent is, as Laura Dern’s character underlines, “held to a different, higher standard”. She has to function as an “on demand” service – as the nurse instructs you to, right at the “Welcome feed” in the hospital room – until, as comedian Ali Wong puts it, you become your child’s literal self-service cafeteria.

ALI WONG A lot of young women have anxiety about giving birth but let me tell you something. Giving birth ain’t nothing compared to breastfeeding. Breastfeeding is brutal. It is chronic - physical - torture. I thought it was supposed to be this beautiful bonding ceremony where I would feel like I was sitting on a lily pad in a meadow and bunnies would gather at my feet while the fat Hawaiian man version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow would play. Now, it’s not like that at all. Breastfeeding is this savage ritual that just reminds you that your body is a cafeteria now. When my baby girl would get hungry she’d yank my nipple back and forth like that bear fucking up Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. I saw that movie and my nipples were like, “I feel you”.

“Feeding on demand” is indeed not an innocent terminology, it’s a useful practical advice – sure – but it can just as well be read as highly ideological as it synthetizes the maternal body as an inexhaustible reservoir, a resource that must respond if not immediately, at least with minimum delay and no refusal.

DOUBLE CALL … … … … … … … … …DOUBLE CALL … … … … … … … … …If we follow Avital Ronell’s reflections in The Telephone Book, the figure of the mother can be understood as the one who is always “on call”, i.e “on service”. The demand placed on her is not unlike the insistent ring of the telephone: it interrupts, obliges, and insists on being answered. But while Ronell stresses that the call entails a responsibility, the exposure of one’s response-ability, the maternal call is ideologically framed as a form of one-directional demand in an endless ability to respond. No fall-ability admitted, the mother MUST answer. In this sense, breastfeeding “on demand” literalizes the Ronellian call: it makes of the maternal body a perpetually open line, rendering silence or delay unthinkable. If the paternal call is the one of the refusal, the maternal call is imagined as an infinite presence.

However, as Maggie Nelson reminds us in The Argonauts, the lived reality tells another story and for example, pumping milk can testify to the opposite: maternal finitude. The mother’s body is not endlessly available, but sometimes absent or unable to answer right away or at all – due to body limit, work and exhaustion or simply choice or mood. Such flexible, human, unpredictable parameters do not fit the principle of supply meeting demand; and Nelson underscores very well this paradox at the heart of caregiving when she writes:

While pumping milk may be about nourishment, it isn’t really about communion. A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can’t be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude.¹¹

Pumping marks the impossibility of total communion, and so does formula. Like the contraceptive pill, formula opened a whole new era for women’s freedom as they were suddenly discharged or at least temporarily relieved from maternal labor. What had once been the privilege of the elites, who could hire wet nurses (and we will not extend on how problematic this was), was now democratized; mothers could circulate freely without their babies attached to their breast. All the while acknowledging the infamous scandal of its predatory marketing in the 1970s and 1980s,¹² formula remained aligned with feminist demands for autonomy. At once emancipatory and disembodied, formula seems to function in relation to breastmilk much as fiduciary money functions in relation to gold standard. In both cases, there is a rupture from the “référent”, the “natural” benchmark (gold / breastmilk), which is replaced by a system of substitution. A certain detachment from reality.

It is precisely this detachment that is criticized today, as breastfeeding clearly dominates public discourse. Bringing together the most opposed ideological camps, from conservative “tradwife” movements, who see it as a return to a kind of natural maternal destiny, to ecological and left/progressive movements, who reframe it, quite similarly but with other terms, as an anti-industrial, sustainable practice, privileging embodied rhythms. Both sides seem to want to reassert the reality of the nipple as umbilical cord, a so-called return of the landline?

The dream of an always available and frictionless line?

In psychoanalytic terms, our relation to milk is indeed a sort of “landline” to subject formation: it offers the first, universal experience of connection, reconnection and disconnection, and thus of frustration. As Alfie Bown argued in his online course Responding to Lack,¹³ this can be thought of as a “Milk Stage”, which coincides with Freud’s Oral Stage we mentioned earlier and would precede Lacan’s Mirror Stage. Whereas the Mirror Stage defines the infant’s identification with its own image (its self, alone, separated from the mother’s body who makes now two bodies instead of one), which inaugurates the “I”, the “Milk Stage” marks an earlier scene in which feeding creates brief rhythmic unions and separations (being fed, waiting, being fed, weaning, being fed, sleeping, being fed, shouting, etc.). In those delays and withdrawals, the infant first meets the feeling or even the bodily inscription of lack, so that desire and subjectivity begin to take shape through the oscillation between closeness and separation, shattering the continuity between mother/carer and child, between the needs and the wants. This dynamic of frustration unfolds as well when a baby eats solid food for the first time as it instinctively repeats the sucking motion of drinking from the nipple or bottle’s teat; they are also very impatient with the rhythm of the spoon reaching their mouth with much more delay – their little body tenses, their eyes fix on us, not understanding and already missing – with a flicker of panic – the rhythm of milk frictionlessly flowing.

ALFIE BOWN So the way we relate to milk… It hinges on this process of differentiation, of changing into different people, because we all begin by wanting and taking the milk, but by the time we’re finished with the milk, we’re all totally different subjects. So milk has this kind of like, strange hinge function. It’s interesting, it’s strange to explain actually. I guess one could say that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, there’s the famous concept of the “Mirror Stage”. We could say that there’s a “Milk Stage” which comes before this, which is like the first moment where our differences interrupt our universality. So we’re all born babies sucking the milk, but we very quickly, during this process of milk eating, become different people.

Then Alfie Bown showed us several representations of milk imagery in contemporary culture – a meme, a YouTube clip and a recorded livestream – to map the three psychoanalytic structures. He started with an excerpt of a livestream of Shia Leboeuf’s anti-Trump 24/7 art installation “He Will Not Divide Us”, disrupted by young men from the US-based White supremacist movement. The self-identified alt-right agitators chugged themselves in milk as an anti-vegan/lactose-free provocation. Alfie Bown read this video as perverse disavowal: acting as if a return to maternal plenitude was possible to summon prohibition and reinstall the paternal/institutional “No”. “I know well but all the same” is apparently the typical perverse mantra, here meaning, I am aware that I am frustrated, that Milk is not an endless supply but I will act as if it is and make it drip all over me to be told off.

A poem appeared on an extreme right-wing news site, insisting:
“roses are red, barack (sic) is half black, if you can’t drink milk, you have to go back.”¹⁴

He then played a video of a vegan milk pouring protest in a quite fancy supermarket (probably at Marks and Spencer or Harrods), where activists calmly emptied the cartons’ white substance on the floor while cameras recorded and security hesitated to react. This very example is not meant to formulate a judgement on the legitimacy of the activists’ action, rather, it aims at locating how the lack is projected outward and foreclosed. Here, the “hole” in reality is not situated in the subject itself but in the world, in the industry or “the system” that should be purged, expelled, illustrating how psychosis locates the lack outside the subject and not within. I’m fine but the world should be corrected. Finally, he ended with the “forced milk” meme, depicting a woman gripping another by the hair to pour milk into an unwilling mouth, its captions saying: “Me,” “Bus driver,” “Thanks”, condensing neurosis: an offer that never matches demand, the politeness of saying “Thanks” masking that the offer doesn’t align with the need, so that the gratitude then flips into worry about one’s own desire: Is this what I was supposed to want? The giver is an imposing “Other” and the receiver is the neurotic subject who ruminates afterward, because they didn’t dare to say that what they’ve been given was not what they wanted/needed: repressing their desire. Taken together, these examples made his point; three economies of lack: perversion disavows, psychosis forecloses, neurosis represses – all of them seen through the lens of milk as our primary relationship to lack.

And, funny enough, the very materials through which Bown (who co-edited a whole volume on Memes¹⁵ as objects of cultural and political analysis) builds his analysis are everything but neutral. A livestream excerpt, a protest video, a meme: each belongs to a culture of endless circulation and replay where milk appears not only as a psychoanalytic object, but as an instant-image-object moving through the same “lack-(dose)-intolerant” regime: that of Kornbluh’s “immediacy”.

These digital-psychoanalytic scenes thus shift toward a historical and economic one: if milk first stages the infant’s encounter with delay, dependency and frustration, then the ultra-speed of “too-late capitalism” can only but (of course) short-circuit this lacanian-lack-learning. The interval between demand and response becomes indigestible and testifies to a world where “binge is the way and the life”.¹⁶ Milk, once the first lesson in interruption, is absorbed into the dream of “the constant stream of an oceanic jet of immersive flow”,¹⁷ which must replace the (finite) maternal body by the fantasy of an endless demand/fulfillment loop. Otherwise it would mean accepting interruption.

MUSICAL BREAK

[Intro] Mi amore, mi amore Espresso macchiato, macchiato, macchiato Por favore, por favore Espresso macchiato corneo   [Chorus]   Mi amore, mi amore Espresso macchiato, macchiato, macchiato Por favore, por favore Espresso macchiato, espresso macchiato   [Post-Chorus]   (Aha, aha, aha)   [Verse 1]   Ciao, bella, I’m Tommaso Addicted to tobacco Mi like mi coffè very importante No time to talk, scusi My days are very busy And I just own this little ristorante   [Pre-Chorus]   Life may give you lemons when dancing with the demons No stresso, no stresso, no need to be depresso¹⁸

So Jessica, latte macchiato in hand (the adult formula bottle – soothing and caffeined performance at once), might best be described as what happens when postmodern subjectivity, early 2000s feminist theory, and 10,000 hours of therapy podcasts collide in one person. She spends most of Too Much navigating a London that isn’t quite real and trying to orient herself around people who all fail, in different ways, to play their roles. And when we say “postmodern subjectivity,” we mean that specific mental architecture where the self is not a coherent thing but a constant refracted performance: a hyper-aware internal feedback loop of mediated thoughts and feelings “Do I really feel this, or am I performing these feelings because I’ve seen this scene before?”. A type of empowerment that means knowing your archetype and then deconstructing it publicly, ideally while tweeting about patriarchy in lowercase. Jessica is fluent in all of this : she can name the systems and cite the therapists, identify the attachment theories and yet none of it protects her from wanting people that don’t want her back, or worse. Felix (White Lotus season 2’s Will Sharpe), the gentle musician with his purple eyeshades and painted nails (those painted nails, often black, which French comedian Amandine Lourdel defines as gender appropriation!), offers a glimpse of intimacy but no ground; Nora, the sister, provides care but is so lost herself after her divorce that she can’t really sustain it as she’s back to being a little girl at Mummie’s (Rita Wilson) house; Zev (Michael Zegen, who played the ex-husband of the Marvelous Mrs Maisel), the ex, is more of a ghost; and finally, her new British boss, colleagues and clients are not better as they seem to be all in the same existential crisis.

When Felix meets Jessica, he is honest about the fact that he is already not in a relationship but involved in one. He uses a term that suggests he sort of drifted into the situation rather than chose it. When he goes to tell his soon-to-be ex, Linnea (Adwoa Aboah), that he’s met someone new (Jessica), she surprises him by answering the door in a latex outfit. Here again, he will be sucked and stuck into a situation he didn’t really choose: she leads him inside, ties him to the bed, blindfolds him, and straddles him in an intense, ambiguous mix of domination and confrontation. The situation is uncomfortable for everyone – Felix, Linnea, and us, the viewers – until Felix finally breaks the tension by admitting he’s been distant and may have met someone else. With this news, the fragile wall of fiction Linnea was struggling to build collapses and she sadly unbinds him (on his request). Felix is almost impossible to catch even though he’s gentle, tender, and, overall, “a nice guy”. Linnea tries to decipher him, and comes to the conclusion that if he’s ungraspable, then he must be in need of a container. And so, she offers him one: a frame of performed discipline, in order to keep him close. She’s trying to give this relationship a shape, any shape really, as soon as it doesn’t dissolve. This brings to mind Deleuze’s reflection in Coldness and Cruelty that sadism and masochism are not symmetrical opposites, but instead entirely distinct structures of desire, governed by incompatible “contracts”. Sadism imposes the law from above (a vertical, declarative authority) while masochism is contractual and pedagogical: the masochist needs to train their master before they can (or are allowed) to dominate them.

It is unrealistic because a genuine sadist could never tolerate a masochistic victim (one of the monks’ victims in Justine explains: “They wish to be certain their crimes cost tears; they would send away any girl who was to come here voluntarily.”) Neither would the masochist tolerate a truly sadistic torturer. He does of course require a special “nature” in the woman torturer, but he needs to mold this nature, to educate and persuade it in accordance with his secret project, which could never be fulfilled with a sadistic woman.¹⁹

Linnea follows her instinct of creating a container. It’s a good idea, but it doesn’t fit. She creates a scene, but her partner won’t play. Felix neither submits nor resists and glides through the performance like water through fingers. Without tension, nothing holds, so out of deception she lies beside him, thumb in mouth – a childish gesture of comfort after the hard labor of trying to generate a form out of nothing. She doesn’t understand what Felix needs. What he needs isn’t structure, or love and sex scripted like a plot. He needs disturbance or someone too alive, too much to contain (Jessica?!). And this is what makes the scene structurally incompatible: deep down, he doesn’t want to be held; he wants to hold something real, not a role.

And around them all is London, an aestheticized, Netflixified version of the city, not unlike how Emily in Paris gave us a Paris without metro-sweat-or-dog-shit Paris. But here, in Too Much, the fantasy (London as Wonderland) feels almost logical: even the gloomier parts of the city where Jessica lives are also made sexy, recasting more working-class, less posh neighbourhoods as a syrupy, romantic version of a video by The Streets. Jessica moves through the city with this deep hope that someone will bring the structure she’s longing for by saying “Here’s what it means”, which of course no one does. There’s lots of care there, even performative concern, but no real satisfaction. And that’s precisely why, in this Liquid Society (to borrow Zygmunt Bauman’s term), she starts to crave extreme feelings, speaks loud, wears outfits to differentiate herself. She needs these intensities to test the limits that haven’t been set, to feel real in a space where everything is fluid and feels reversible and ungraspable. The boundaries aren’t clear, so she pushes at them, not to break them, but to find out if they exist at all. She needs to test limits, but in this strange register of cringe/tentative asking for consent, like here:

JESSICA I almost kissed your hand.

WENDY [with a smile] Don’t

JESSICA But no, I won’t kiss your hand.

Just as in the Mouth-meets-foot episode, the “cringe” character of this situation comes from something bodily real – the mouth eating the foot, the almost-kiss – exceeding the limits needed to stay attuned to the situation’s social frame. She looks at Wendy (a model/influencer who’s now the ex of her ex) just as our son stared at us with this look saying: I am gonna do it, is it allowed? And if not, I will see it in your eyes and you will take this foot out of my mouth, so I’ll do it anyway. But of course, Jessica is not a child – though both her sense of fashion and her tone suggest otherwise. She speaks the way an infant sucks: rhythmically, repetitively, anxiously. And her clothes have the same regressive energy, a bit like what might happen if your parents let you dress however you wanted at age four or five, all Barbie outfits and costume-like ensembles: the mermaid, the businesswoman, the babygirl. Each look says “Look at me”, and because the femininity it performs is so childish, so exaggerated, it also shouts: “Take care of me. I am not an adult”. It’s not just attention-seeking, it’s a vulnerability SOS disguised in glitter that simultaneously presents her as a bold, assertive woman – someone who dares to be seen.

The spectator, meanwhile, is indeed positioned the way a nervous child might position a parent: please don’t get upset, don’t misread me, stay close. Jessica speaks to others (and by extension to us) with a constant anticipation of their (our) reactions whether through apologies, softness or awkwardness; her tone requires to be emotionally engaged and available. In a sense, the series asks the spectators to embody the role of a carer. We are asked to witness, tolerate, understand and why not find a solution for her! Her tone establishes a kind of contract in which the viewer is co-responsible for holding Jessica together.

And if her tone and style become tools for signaling needs – bordering on what we might define as a kawaii/cute aesthetic –, they operate as a form of ‘powerless domination’, in which vulnerability functions as both weapon and shield. It’s a technique that ultimately proves effective, since, as we will see in the series finale, her needs are (ostensibly) fulfilled.

DISCLAIMER: SPOILER ALERT

The 10th and final episode, feels a bit off, like a deus ex machina unraveling far too quickly to be believable. But perhaps that’s the point: a happy ending, offered not as resolution but as a provocation playing with the typical (and unreal) romcom finale (in nostalgic super 8). Indeed, the wedding of Jessica and Felix seems less like a life plan than an introduction to a new fetish – one which is not sexual but institutional –, the symbolic structure Jessica has been longing for from the start: something solid, something ritualized – “believed to have special power to protect”.²⁰

But of course, it feels too much, too fast, more impulsive than reasonable, not realistic at all. And yet, friends, colleagues, and family go along without a doubt or any piece of advice. No one offers even an inch of framing; everyone simply dives in with the bride and the groom, led by their pulsional choice. A convenient silence that says: we’re off the hook for these two, they’re now responsible for each other. It’s out of our hands now. Thank God.

Dunham is well known as an icon of “confessional culture”, and this series is not an exception. She, too, apparently married a British musician rather quickly. And if it’s well known that she dives into her personal story to write her series/movies, we can also say that, unfortunately here, reality does not necessarily translate into good fiction. What is interesting, however, is that even though the story clearly draws on Dunham’s own life, she has decided to play a peripheric role, the position of the older sister (a sharp contrast with Girls, where she placed herself at the very center of the narrative). Psychoanalytically, this shift acts as displacement, allowing her to witness rather than reenact (herself) her own past.

“Ex ducere”, our trilingual Latin-Greek-French mum always used to say – that raising a child, l’éduquer in French, comes from ex ducere: conduire au dehors, to lead them outside. However, if Jessica is going out, outside, au dehors, it is only to get stuck in a city that she embraced as a transitional object: a comforting fantasy that keeps desire in motion without confronting her real issues.

3. Too Much and Never Enough

On Stop Everything, their podcast on Australian radio ABC Listen, journalists Beverley Wang and Hannah Reich analyze Too Much exactly in this light:

Hannah Reich : I think that’s one of the issues I have with Too Much vs Girls is it’s been sort of like Netflix-ified, it’s so slick.

Beverley Wang : 100% I also found myself wondering, what if this was an HBO show, how different would this be? Because I think the Netflix style of sitcoms is so exposition-heavy, they really like to make sure that they’re hitting you on the head with what’s going on. I think because they think you’re double screening, but ironically I almost felt like this show drove me to double screen because there was so much exposition I needed a distraction.

Hannah Reich : I mean, that’s a really good point, I was thinking purely on an aesthetic level. Girls had a kind of a varnished raw aesthetic to it, to dialogue, to the plot and stuff, and this is almost, it’s too shiny, everything’s too shiny, but it doesn’t quite work²¹

The ABC critique (“Netflix-ified”, “exposition-heavy”, “too shiny”) helps to unpack the spectatorial effect that we questioned earlier: Does the Netflixified form of Too Much fits its content? Indeed, the form of Too Much mirrors its theme when we consider both the main character’s difficulty in managing her own frustration and her need for emotional buffering. The problem, however, is that the platform is solving these spectatorial issues (that of attention and sensitivity) primarily through over-explanation and aesthetic overload. In this sense, the production circumvents the problem rather than confronting or staging it – thereby losing the opportunity to articulate the medium as the message. Compared with Girls’ rawness, Too Much converts and manages every possible friction into a form of dubious care, so that conflict can be binged rather than endured. That’s why it feels “real” yet lacking substance.

Ambiguity is thus managed as over-exposition does the job of interpretation for us, spectators. It offers the pleasures of comprehension and awareness, even sometimes the sting of cringe, but lukewarmed so that it does not feel too uncomfortable. It feels a bit like what Slavoj Žižek said about decaf or beer without alcohol, the bad without the bad, the sex without the sex, “a series of products deprived of their malignant property” offering the thrill without its consequences.²²

The same logic unfolds here in relation to script and production, but in the opposite way: whereas Žižek’s “light” version of a product functions by subtracting the harmful substance, here it operates by adding – indeed, by adding too much – colors, light, music, etc., in order to cover up the “unwanted” reality. This too much, this excess is a strategy well known in camp culture, where, as Susan Sontag argues in Notes on ‘Camp’, artificiality paradoxically generates authenticity through exaggeration. Jessica’s character, through Megan Slater’s interpretation, Lena Duham’s direction and choice of costumes often employs these strategies effectively: her gestures, outfits and way of speaking exemplify what Sontag would call a kind of “naïve” or “pure” camp, where excess becomes the tongue of truth-telling: a surplus of artifice that paradoxically reveals vulnerability. However, the Netflix production and script not only overshadow these successful attempts but also, more often than not, fail to capture this metamorphosis of artificiality into authenticity – this typical camp strategy – that we could define as the aesthetics of “More is More”.²³ Their use of excess here is closer to what Sontag calls “deliberate” camp, a self-conscious deployment of codes and style that falls instead into superficiality. And indeed, this too much is actually never enough, precisely never too much but always censored, top-coated, too short to have the unsettling sensation of excess. In the entertainment industry, the question of limits and boundaries is now outsourced simultaneously to scripts doctors, sensitivity readers and intimacy coordinators – a team of “cleaners” whose job is to anticipate our reactions and to neutralize any potential offense. The problem is that, in the end, they lubricate sensation so thoroughly that it becomes hard to feel anything at all.

This is where we return to our opening scene, to the first “No”, the first limit marking the interruption of the flow of satisfaction and lastly, then, “auto-play” as the perfect ending of this anti-dramaturgy which abolishes the pause before it can even become a question. “All by [your]self”²⁴ you “don’t wanna be” and you won’t need to be as you won’t need to choose. The platform promises a form of continuity as care: no gap, no abandonment. The stream knows you better than anyone as you’re constantly feeding it. As Kornbluh puts it: Our “‘viewing experience’ [is then] highly customized to our profile”²⁵ until we end up “swim[ming] in a shitstream of our own excretive analytics, TV as safe space.”²⁶ Mouth open “Wish[ing] you were here”,²⁷ and sure, the platform replies, here you go: “I will always love you”.²⁸

Notes