The Phallus Was Virtual First

Dominic Pettman crafts his ode to the liveliness of the totem in the digital age by seeking evidence of its omnipresence in both obvious and unlikely places, from Tolstoy to Tamagotchi. Looking for the totemic in the way the contemporary world (still) organizes itself—”into the technical objects and social networks of the modern mediascape” (17)—may reek of untrendy Freudianism for a lot of academics and their age-old reluctance to accept the un-American fact that, sorry, man is not the master of his own home. But Pettman’s account follows the kind of associative logic, more in love with the poiesis of an argument than with the tightness of the argument itself, that suits those with a sensibility for the labor of language as the main source for theory. Where is the totem hiding today? How does it camouflage itself? What does our undying investment in the totemic as a survival mechanism say about our atemporal and zeitgeist-specific symptoms?

Let us not forget that for Sigmund Freud, the totem is inherently linked to the idea of substitution. If the totemic has been traditionally linked to animals, for instance, they have functioned as material replacement for a perennially virtual Father. The ritualistic killing of such animals, then, along with the feelings of guilt and atonement that follow harken back to the original parricide of Totem and Taboo, the extraordinary event that has brought us “social organization, moral restrictions, and religion.”¹ It is easy to see how a critical account of our increasingly digital century would find it useful to engage with the logic of metaphorical correspondences that govern the totemic—a haunting logic where available figures are always impostors of a real whose existential precondition is to remain elsewhere. For Pettman, the totem works as “an empty outline waiting to be shaped into something specific through subjective cathexis” (2). And as a type of fulcrum around which desires “circle and gather” with the function of helping the individual orient him or herself in relation to the group—at once a dreamed-up compass and an ontological tampon of sorts that contain the subject in place, keeping one from overflowing and from drowning (2). There is, then, a mechanism of fantasy (of presence) and disavowal (of absence) that props up the totem and that keeps going back to the phallus, that original all-important trompe l’oeil holding humanity together (or rather apart). While Pettman recognizes the totem-as-animal in Playboy’s logo and the Energizer Bunny and fantasies around the excessive fertility of rabbits, he also sees it in children’s relationship to Pikachu and Spider Man and reminds us of Roland Barthes’s evocation of wine as a “totem-drink” for the French as well as the way capitalism itself is predicated on the totemic force embodied by consumable goods. As such, there is a virtuality inherent to the totem—”symbolic virtual figure associated with a charged object or referent” (6) and an “avatar for the true object of veneration” (7)—that the virtual as we understand it today may simply literalize or make redundant.

The book’s title is both an attempt to link together—in one single totem, as it were—the otherwise loosely related chapters and an indication for the totem’s intimate relationship with a version of nature, or naturalization. The totemic’s mechanism is one of fantasy, illusion, and scam. For Pettman, most totems are animals or are related to nature—perhaps as a way to mask the theatrical blow inherent to the totem as a figurehead for a something that isn’t really there. The totem’s claim is a lie: it is there where the taboo is posited and is a precarious petrification akin to the partial object, which helps us to disavow the nagging absence of the original object we have lost and miss. Pettman tries to keep his totemic examples animal-related, as he traces back the phantasmatic mechanism of the...