Kate Moss, A Stair Case Study: The Angel And The Analyst
Kate Moss was recently photographed by the British director Mike Figgis for the Agent Provocateur lingerie catalog, whereafter he trilled in some nerve-jangling mania to a friend that she is "truly a supermodel, the best of the best."
It's as if looking at Moss--and this from a man who looks for a living--was some utterly far out human adventure, like the wild ride had by those internaunts in the Raquel Welch movie who shrink to such Lilliputian size that they whoosh through the bloodstream in their equally miniscule hemomobile. Figgis' gushy, thrilled tone is usually reserved for the genuinely wonderful end of human experience: the civilian space traveller returned to earth, or the teenage virgin parlay vooing the fineness of his first poontang.
If Kate Moss was really great at something in particular she'd hardly inspire madmen to run through the streets shouting her name. What makes Kate Moss spectacularly thrilling to contemplate is implied in the name super model, with the outline this word implies serving as the container into which Lacanian jouissance pours like the endless chocolicious waterfall at Wonka's wonderful factory. What makes Kate Moss wonderful is that she is good at nothing.
As in the tsim tsum, the Hebrew moment of genesis (where since God is everywhere, he pardoxcally first withdrew in order to make room for his creation the universe) Kate Moss, the unmoved mover, sparks desire and leaves a vast blank expanse for the limitless excitement that blooms and mushrooms. A cloud within a cloud within a cloud never interrrupted by borders or particulars, like an ability to speak Latin, or a mate who lasts past checkout time at Claridges.
And what echo do we hear down those hushed, plushly carpeted hallways as the maid enters to strip the sheets--still warm from the latest of a limitless, irreducible line of rock drummers or pop music strummers or garage band junkie bummers--but the voice of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machine:
"Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand." Desire, this voice continues, contra Freud, "is not a theater, but a factory." Perhaps the one where all those Calvin Klein jeans were sewn. And like the voice in the head of Saul Bellow's Henderson, we see past the satisfaction of the gossipy tidbit about last night, past the girl, past the product and say merely "I want, I want."
Female beauty, like cocaine, is a controlled substance. (I write this now from a suite in the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood, a city built by men from the East who turned female beauty into a global fantasy Empire. And then of course there's our town's other fantasy empire, and I don't mean Disneyland or Lockheed Martin, I mean Flynt Enterprises, in their big, proud building over on Wilshire.) The thing about Moss, as I have said here earlier, is that there is no Louis B. Mayer or Larry Flynt to stop and start the flow. She operates out there all on her own without a curfew or a credit card limit or a license from Phallocentric Central.
Kate Moss is the desiring-machine embodied, which is to say not embodied at all, but deterritorialized, borrowing again from our friends Deleuze and Guattari. Like cocaine, Kate Moss just makes you want more Kate Moss. The chimpanzee-cage outrage when she was caught by a tabloid doing the drug was merely the public's powerful unconscious sensation that the pairing was utterly redundant. Kate Moss is cocaine, and her use of it is merely a crime of style: garnishing cocaine with a dusting of cocaine.
In this light, Kate Moss' "promiscuity"--the rock star upon rock star with a rock star for tea--seems like a neurotic attempt to try and sample some small amount of the pleasure that she provides so freely and endlessly for others. "I make shoes for everyone, even you, but I still go barefoot," sang Bob Dylan, who suffered from a similar plight.
So it is with pleasure (if you'll excuse the pun) that I read today that Kate Moss has begun psychoanalyis in an attempt to understand her particular predicament.
The blank space that Moss creates for Deleuzian desiring-machines might be outdone in its enormous wonder and power perhaps only by the vast, nearly insterstellar space created by the silence of the analyst. Space enough, at least, to help the analysand find room for her human personality to emerge uninterrupted, where she can take a good look at it and begin to make sense of things. A space, perhaps, where even the shoemaker might find a pair that fits just right.
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