Making and Unmaking in the Oedipal Family Drama
In the ordinary Oedipal psychodrama of family life, the son kills the father. However, within the logic of late industrial capitalism, with its anachronistic imperative to “make something,” to “build something here,” this is how the son makes something of himself. By killing the father’s late industrialist company (the “old man’s dream,” as the Fils renard of Wall Street might have been tempted to phrase it), the son lays waste to the father. The aggressive teleology of capitalism, the determination to always be innovative, a capitalism that is relentless in its pursuit of the new, the drive that sustains capitalism, functions analogically here. The son makes of the father’s economic pursuit, what should constitute the immanence of the father’s legacy, not only an anachronism but renders the father himself, and how he is in the world as a capitalist, obsolete.
That is how your kill your father. Dead.
The father is thus subjected to two (consecutive) deaths. The first is the putting to death of his mode of production and, because of the brutal decisiveness of that death, making immanent to the father his (economic) obsolescence. The second, physical (actual laying to rest), death is rendered inconsequential. If, as it is said, cowards die many deaths before their death, then we can say that late industrial capitalists are not so fortunate. They are permitted only one death, and it is a death that condemns them to an economic afterlife that serves no purpose other than to remind them of their (economic) irrelevance. Their mode of production has been made irrelevant by the new modes of capital acquisition.
In Biblical terms, the late industrial capitalist reaps both more and less than he sowed. He is rewarded for his economic production (the price of the buyout that, as we know from Edward’s negotiations with Morse Industries, is not insubstantial; in other words, the industrial capitalist profits), but that always amounts to less than the inestimable value of having “built something.” And we know from both James and David Morse, the elder of whom must be understood here as standing analogically in relation to the late Mr. Lewis, that there is no price that can be put on the value of having “built something.”
It is this desperation, this immersion in, identification with, and attachment to a mode of capitalist production that has become an irritant (and, in some ways an impediment to) postindustrial capital, that we hear in James Morse’s plaintive cry: “We make things.” “We build Navy destroyers.” (It must be said, with these the US Navy potentially wreaks destruction on other peoples in the world. Are we then, facetiously, to be glad that vulture capitalism puts paid, at least in this instance, to one mode of death? That one part of the military-industrial complex is suspended, if only for that moment of its transition from late industrial capitalism to postindustrial capitalism?) Vulture capitalism unmakes what it is industrial capitalism used to pride itself on making.
The son has unmade the father. Edward plays, to a tee, the deadly (economic) game of exceeding the father. As know all too well, the logic of legacy is widespread among the ruling classes. This is a logic governed by the imperative of infinite surpassing/excess. The offspring will always succeed in exceeding the parents; the offspring’s generation, which will acquire the skills requisite to its era, will increase the family fortune. By these standards of success, if by no other, Edward emerges victorious. He triumphs not only in terms of generating new modes of wealth, but he succeeds in showing the economic obsolescence of his father’s generation.
This is how the son makes something of himself. This is how the (unmaking of the) father proves to be the making of the son.