Naughty Sounds

Karlo Pavlović

12th March 2025

Why dwell on the problem of senses? Simon Hajdini answers this question with one powerful sentence from his work What's That Smell?; ''our senses of sight, hearing, taste, and touch all play a role in the disavowal...[1]''. The signifier that seems to haunt 21st century, perverse disavowal, or Verleugnung, what is usually deemed as the pervert's way of dealing with castration, also affects our senses in an intriguing way. Yet, Hajdini purposely leaves out smell, arguing that it doesn't go through the same procedure of perverse disavowing[2]. Why is this so? Hajdini states that “smell figures as the marker of class difference beyond politico-ideological deodorization[2]”  - in other words, we could state that the smell itself pertains to the real of class struggle, to the fundamental antagonism that is, not something that simply intrudes the standard order of relations, but, in a way, structures their very bond; the antagonism as their inner tenet. As Alenka Zupančič[3], following Marx, would put it:

“[C]lass antagonism” is not simply conflict between different classes but the very principle of the constitution of class society, antagonism as such never simply exists between conflicting parties; it is the very structuring principle of this conflict, and of the elements involved in it.

We shall return to the ambiguous nature of smell later on. For starters, the aforementioned senses of sight, hearing, taste and touch are all caught in the workings of Verleugnung, if we were to follow Hajdini's hypothesis. The differences between the workings of Verleugnung and Verdrängung are clearly stated already by Freud, and should never be looked at as similar, as Octave Mannoni already declared in his famous essay; Verleugnung itself has nothing in common with repression[4]. The differences were, of course, further defined in Lacan's teachings, but in a humble fashion, the main differences could be stated as the following:

1. Repression, to simplify it to the utmost, works through cutting a part of reality off, leaving it in the hands of the unconscious - traumatic experience is encountered and later on repressed, buried. However, no repression works without the return of the repressed, and what is essential about the workings of repression is that it doesn't simply operate by excluding a portion of reality, but instead comes before reality as the fundamental division that shapes it – repression is thus, as a recurring function, determined by primal repression (or Ur-Verdrängung, in Freud’s terms).

   
   

2. Disavawol claims that it acknowledges the facts of reality, but it continues as if the subject doesn't know the facts – as the famous Mannoni formula goes: “I know well, but all the same...[5]”, (je sais bien mais quand même) – yet, what is in fact truly disavowed, as Mannoni brilliantly observes further, is not so much direct reality, but “the refutation, imposed by reality, of a belief[6]”. Therefore, what is being disavowed is the primordial belief itself, its magical powers. Therefore, I know very well, but I act as if I don’t know, in order to prevent things from changing, precisely “so as to be able to go on dreaming[7].”

   
   

How are we to grasp senses then, in terms of repression and disavowal? Perhaps we could approach this question with another question - what sense, if any, might be primarily affected within our current ideological landscape? For this, I want to move away from the theory of smell back to some of the other senses, by approaching a couple of interesting phenomena.

One of the most fascinating ongoing trends, continues to be the so-called concept of mukbang videos. What is it? Originating in South Korea (with mukbang meaning broadcast eating), it consists of filming yourself consuming an, usually abnormal, amount of food, often unhealthy and fat-saturated - putting it simply, binge eating on camera. And, of course, at first glance, again, this seems like a form of, predominantly visual (albeit perverse) enjoyment -  it could not be more straightforward.

But, things are, as always, not as straightforward as they might seem at first glance, for mukbang videos include a certain element that makes them even more “attractive” to consume - something called autonomous sensory meridian response, or, ASMR in short. Now, ASMR and mukbang alike, have gained popularity in recent years, which was made possible and amplified by the new digital media landscape. Of course, mukbang creators almost always add #ASMR to their content, in order to make sure that they target the proper audience.  In any case, they indeed are phenomena that require a thorough development of a theory of their own, via psychoanalysis.

Let's start with ASMR, which is defined as a tingling sensation typically felt on the scalp and throughout the head, neck, spine, and limbs, triggered by certain visual, auditory, or touch stimuli[8]. Given this description, in mukbang videos, it affects auditory and visual faculties, and it might seem that they operate holistically and harmoniously, but they, in fact, have a much more interesting, dialectical relationship. I claim that it is not sight, but rather the faculty of hearing that makes mukbang such an attractive trend, and, essentially, a form of perverted enjoyment.

A mukbang fan might approach these videos with their primary sense of satisfaction being that of sight, yet through repetitive consumption, the "extra" element, the audio, gradually takes over, alternating the polymorphous, contingent nature of the drives, making hearing primary and the visual element the surplus. It is by no means an awakening of a primordial drive through interacting with this content; on the contrary, it is an affirmation that the drives were always immanently disjunct, never properly working together in a harmonious whole, as a team. I apply the brilliant logic that Alenka Zupančič briefly presents in What is Sex? apropos gluttony, which, as we already stated, is one of the key features of mukbang, which also helps us to develop our hypothesis further:

This is what seems to be at stake, for example, in gluttony: the surplus satisfaction—surplus in relation to the organic need—produced in the course of consuming food (the pleasure of the mouth, etc. …) not only deregulates the organic function, but reverses the causality of this configuration. If the surplus is first a by-product of satisfying the organic need for food, satisfying the organic need for food now becomes a by-product of repeating the surplus satisfaction[9].

To now connect it to our hypothesis - the original surplus, in this case - the faculty of hearing, the element that was supposed to be secondary to the primacy of sight, through the very process of repetition (of repeatedly consuming mukbang videos), becomes the primary partial drive; the faculty of hearing thus becomes the key to providing the even more, explicit sexual undertones that make this form more than just strange entertainment.

But, why do I claim that the auditory senses are primary here? Why would I conclude that in this perverse dialectic, the noise is stronger and louder than the apparent primary targeted sense, vision? One only has to type ASMR into YouTube and see for him/herself why the sound is king; hundreds of videos containing people producing various sounds in crisp, high definition - from moaning, nail scratching, whispering, rubbing different materials into each other, up to unarticulated human noises that would usually cause great distress to listen to, but are, in the current ideological landscape, surely transgressing into sources of enjoyment. Therefore, YouTube, as a predominantly visual platform, gives body to the sound; the moment we type ASMR and press enter, it displays thousands of audio content results.

This is where disavowal can easily be introduced - I know very well what this content is about, yet I still access it, and my very puritanical pretence and the field where my condemnation of this content as bizarre and perverse takes place is precisely in the field of enjoyment; it allows me to keep the fantasy up and running. With a cynical statement, I create the illusion of rejecting this content, which automatically grants me access to this content, because my intention to condemn was cynical from the very beginning. What is effectively at work here is precisely what Mannoni talks about in his essay; I reject the refutation of my belief via reality, therefore I keep it alive by cynically approaching reality, by “playing by the rules’’ - I start by enunciating the factual component, pertaining to reality (I know very well...), and after I have done my deeds (by merely declaring them), I can then freely move on to the obverse of the factual component, in order to live my lie in practice (but all the same...). In Lacanian words, we are dealing with the proper difference between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation, or the “strictly linguistic definition of I as signifier, where it is nothing but the shifter* or indicative that, qua grammatical subject of the statement, designates the subject insofar as he is currently speaking…[10]”, where it is enough for me to state the stances that correspond to reality in order to continue to behave as if I do not know them.

At its most basic level, these forms can undoubtedly be classified as softcore pornography. Aleš Bunta insightfully captures this idea in his essay on perversion, where he introduces a particularly useful concept for understanding contemporary perverse phenomena: what he terms "YouTube sexuality."

I believe that YouTube sexuality has grown into a powerful force that is beginning to achieve something that had long seemed unattainable – it has managed to put pornography on the defensive on its own turf. In other words, I think pornography (in its traditional form) is losing ground to the YouTube type of deployment of sexuality. And I must add right away that the reason for this is not, as one might think, that people are growing tired of pornography, or that more and more people find its vulgarity repulsive while still finding pleasure in "softer", more playful depictions of sexuality such as those found on YouTube[11].

Bunta is absolutely right to claim that people are indeed not growing tired of pornography - it is quite the contrary; ASMR, alongside his partner, mukbang, is something that precisely demonstrates that the pornographic enjoyment, at least in the recent turn of events, can now be located in the "softer" (albeit vulgar), less nuanced deployments of pornography, and not so much in the explicit depictions of vulgar sexuality. What this switch has managed to bring out is precisely the generalised presence of fetishism, to an almost universal horizon - hence, I am elaborating on the mukbang phenomenon as a symptom of a concrete underlying structure that can and should be defined as perverse in the precise psychoanalytic sense.

These recent phenomena serve as a sharp indicator that points to a great disturbance in the field of the sexual, to something that is not only recalibrating the general coordinates of the drives and the libido as such, but also situating us into a place of no return, to a dead-end of sexuality that is now being revealed through transforming and deploying the (hardcore) pornographic elements from their distinct placement on websites, incognito browsers etc., to subtle, yet more perverted forms of sexual depictions throughout all of the internet. This does not only call attention to a triumph of a "distinctly different system of unfolding sexuality and its economic exploitation[12]", it also demonstrates how the obscure, "underground" internet corners that were once reserved for pornographic content no longer function as a home, rather as just one of the homes - pornography proper becomes nomadic, it no longer "lurks in the darkness", on the incognito tabs, it slowly converges to the surface instead, thus becoming a part of ordinary discourse, of regular everyday reality.

This universalisation, of course, not only disperses this new form of pornography to a broad audience, amongst whom are also unsupervised children etc., but it also simultaneously and effectively erases pornography as a distinct category; once reaching its universal value, oversaturating the symbolic, it loses the possibility to be properly located, in the literal sense of the term: its home is now lost because its home is at the same time right here, but also over there. It is omnipresent - it is hiding in plain sight, so to speak, remaining present in the way of absence. Topologically speaking, its structure literally becomes analogous to that of the word, "which is already a presence made of absence[13]". It takes the place of the absence of the thing - and it successfully fooled us into believing that it is the missing piece of the puzzle of sexuality. We are sticking with it, and there are no indicators that would designate a different scenario.

But, one has to continuously ask why the sudden change in interest from "old school", hardcore pornography to a more generalised, less nuanced "YouTube" variety of pornography - and why is this switch-up something that indicates a much deeper, societal change, an eruption of the real that is coming at us in full speed because of our neglecting of it? I am tempted to propose that the generalised deployment of subtle pornography, of depictions of sexuality "in gloves", points to something I am tempted to call the blue balls phenomenon - that is to say, it stands for taking the logic of the drive to its extreme; if the whole point of the drive is not to attain its object, but rather, to circle around it, the perverse subject (as the subject of the present times) has, in fact, no problems with this whatsoever. He takes this fantasy abruptly and instrumentalises it for the Other, for the sake of the drive, joyfully enslaving himself to what Bunta calls "micro-molecules of 'sex'":

Unlike watching pornography, which (for most people) is based on choice, the micro-molecules of YouTube sexuality are constantly scattered and tend to develop into little involuntary habits. And the sole purpose of these micro-molecules of "sex" is to leave us wanting more of the same kind of content, and not to create some kind of vivacious crescendo of excitement or passion[14].

These phenomena are connected by obfuscating the "big moment", and this is exactly where mukbang and other contemporary forms of ASMR can be located, in relation to the subject - they "tame the libido by keeping it constantly at the same level of desire for more of the same kind of content" (ibid). Hence, the proper name for this term would be "blue balls" - or enjoyment in one's own impossibility, in one's own suffering, or in the inability to come, which is incidentally, why many contemporary thinkers conclude not only that modern subjectivity is perverse, but that it is, even more so, admittedly masochistic. This assumption may not be far-fetched.

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Footnotes

1. Simon Hajdini, What's That Smell? A Philosophy of the Olfactory, 186.

2. Hajdini, What's That Smell?, 186.

3. Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 41.

4. Octave Mannoni, I know well, but all the same…, 85.

5. Mannoni, I know well, but all the same…, 70.

6. Mannoni, I know well, but all the same…, 69.

7. Alenka Zupančič, Disavowal, 11.

8. Karen Sottosanti, "ASMR".

9. Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 103.

10. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, 800.

11. Aleš Bunta, In times of “chastity”: An inquiry into some recent developments in the field of perversion, 241.

12. Bunta, In times of “chastity”: An inquiry into some recent developments in the field of perversion, 245.

13. Lacan, Ecrits, 276.

14. Bunta, In times of “chastity”: An inquiry into some recent developments in the field of perversion, 262.

    
    

Bibliography

1. Bunta, A. (2021). In times of “chastity”: An inquiry into some recent developments in the field of perversion. Filozofski vestnik, 42(1), 245–263. https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.42.1.11

2. Hajdini, S. (2023). What’s that smell? A philosophy of the olfactory. MIT Press.

3. Lacan, J. (2020). The object relation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book IV (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. R. Price, Trans.). Polity Press. (Original work published 1956–1957)

4. Lacan, J., Fink, B. (2006). Ecrits: The first complete edition in English, New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

5. Mannoni, O. (2003). I know well, but all the same... In M. A. Rotenberg, D. Foster, & S. Žižek (Eds.), Perversion and the social relation (pp. 68–93). Duke University Press.

6. Sottosanti, K. (2024, May 18). ASMR. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/ASMR

7. Žižek, S. (2006). The parallax view. MIT Press.

8. Zupančič, A. (2017). What is sex? MIT Press.

9. Zupančič, A. (2022, December 16). Conspiracy theory without theory: On Don’t Look Up. e-flux. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/509069/conspiracy-theory-without-theory-on-don-t-look-up/

10. Zupančič, A. (2023). Disavowal. Polity Press.

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Karlo Pavlović is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana. After

earning a BA in visual arts and an MA in media theory, his current doctoral research focuses

on the convergence of philosophical and psychoanalytic thought, with a particular emphasis on the concept of perversion and its implications for contemporary society.