Freud and Our Discontent

I want to start with an incident that I observed some time ago when I was working in NYC. I walked out of school planning to get back and pick up my son from day-care. I had been teaching, and it was early afternoon on October 31st; Halloween. On the way to the subway, walking along 96th Street, I stopped to see why some of my colleagues were watching the street and talking. There, in the middle of the road was a bearded naked man, with long bedraggled black hair, dancing. Police had surrounded him, and in the distance I could hear the sound of more cop cars coming to aid the officers on the scene (isn’t there any other crime going on in Manhattan that needs attention more urgently?). The naked man fell to the ground, prostrate, face down, arms outstreched at 90° to his body. The police, about eight in number (and still growing), were standing around the man contemplating what they were going to do. I left, knowing that they would soon lift the man into “protective custody.” What about this scene is unusual? I had to leave. The police were doing their job. The man was “clearly” insane. Yet, as my colleagues laughingly pointed out, giving me food for thought: “He was having fun.” If I were to give it very little thought, I could assauge myself that at least he was going to receive “help.” Yet, I know that this is not likely to be very pleasant in itself. As one unhappy person found out: “All the bad things happened. I got sprayed with mace, thrown into a jail cell, interviewed by a psychiatrist and committed, taken to the hospital in a straitjacket and put on a locked ward.” Merriam, K. A., The Experience of Schizophrenia, in Magaro, P., (ed.) The Construction of Madness: Emerging Conceptions and Interventions into the Psychotic Process, Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1976. And that is just the start...

Elizabeth writes that:

""[Freud's theories] bought to fore a powerful critique of the constraints imposed by the moral and social codes of Western civilization" (Coffin, 856). I don't fully understand what the authors are saying here. That the constraints of society forced people to go mad? To sublimate and repress urges that, for true satisfaction, should not be sublimated or repressed?"

She goes on to say that the ego's hold is too strong, especially with the super-ego's help. We need less constraints. Freud was ambivalent about all of this. Society needed to restrain individual desire, yet the Id will get out, since that is where all the energy is. Its the ego's job to to control it, something it does through repression say. One can look up Freud, S., Repression, in General Psychological Theory Papers on Metapsychology, or Freud, S., New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, . It is not always successful. The most extreme form of this is psychosis, when the ego is completely inundated by the Id.

Always in this, the desire for something is a desire for something we LACK. So desire is constructed as a negative and something to be feared. And our inability to mediate this desire is the cause of all our problems. I want to take Elizabeth's point a little further and tie it to one of the themes of our class--the role of capitalism as the dominant economic and social paradigm of our age.

In doing this, I want to consider the work done by Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F., Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, Tr. Hurley, R., et al. This is not reading for the faint of heart.

DG assert that desire is rather a positive force, much like Nietzsche’s will to power. They argue that we desire something, not because we lack it, but because we understand it to be good for us. Thus:

“If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality … The real is the end product, ... Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack an object … Desire and its object are one and the same thing … ” [AO, 26]

Desire is absolutely critical; and was--before the introduction of the “capitalist axiomatic”-- capable of positive force. We don't desire something that we no longer have (like long lost Mum) or get excited about according to advertising we imbibed (I must have that new shampoo! My hair, I couldn't possibly show myself outside, I'd be so ashamed of the greasy strands...). Rather what we do (if left to our own devices) is connect ourselves to other things. That is what we are in our essence--Connecting-Disconnecting Beings. The act of connection and relation is the act of desire in action. One way to think of it is to see ourselves as machines or collections of machines--connecting and disconnecting at any given moment. DG call these machines "desiring machines." We connect in one act of desire, disconnect in another act of desire.

Even if we grant what DG say about desire being positive it is still the case that in today’s society there are many instances where desire appears to fulfill a need or lack. To explain this we have to understand DG’s hypothesis concerning the nature of society and capitalism, and it is here that I want to get to Elizabeth's concerns. They argue that:

“Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production…the deliberate creation of lack as a function of the market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having ones needs satisfied.” [AO, 28]

Thus, the capitalist system actually sets up the conditions for desire as lack to occur. One of the major ways in which this occurs is through the Oedipal family structure, which acts to restrict desire in capitalist societies. Capitalism tends to reduce all social relations to commodity relations mediated by dollar values. One works for a wage and buys goods for a price rather than get or swap goods from/with a friend. Desire is subsequently displaced from its traditional signs and meanings that limit human relations (such as kinship and class relationship, folkways, and religious beliefs). Yet, capitalism reinstitutes or re-places (re-meaning) desire, in conditions of the market place. For example one can commercialize religions and other beliefs into money making ventures. Punk used to be anti-establisment, noe its just another genre in the music catalogue. Further, we are taught to want the latest thing--the new fad, the new model, the latest in technological wizardry--without which we are curiously incomplete. Advertising reinforces this message--we can be better, stronger, smarter, if only we had or used this product...

Capitalism works on the basis of axioms such as “supply = demand”, and “workers are paid the value of their marginal product (that is, what they are worth),” and “capital must be allowed to move to take advantage of profit opportunities anywhere in the world, so that in the long run there is no profit to be found.” Thus, on the one hand capitalism fixes production in the form of goods (to be consumed by consumers) and in the form of the people who make them (producers--entrepreneurs and workers) by giving us uniformity of production and consumption; and in the way that desire for those goods actually unfolds in capitalist society. On the other hand even as it spreads it’s uniformity to every corner of the earth, capitalism stresses the rights of the individual to be free- to choose those things that are considered desirable, even if they are not part of the capitalist axiomatic [AO, 179, 223+]. Thus, you can have any shampoo you want, as long as you choose from the 300 varieties that we offer. And if you don't like that, then use this herbal, environmentally friendly alternative (which is made by the same corporation family...). There is an increasing pressure to conform and be free at the same time. This increasingly becomes a contradictory message that becomes increasingly more difficult to satisfy: “society is schizophrenic.” [AO, 361] Thus, “[e]verything in the system is insane:.” [AO, 374-375] Capitalist society will force you to be free--free to choose what you want, as long as what you want is what the capitalist system can provide.

Individuals might like to escape this pressure. What this means is that if one wants to express one’s desire to escape the confines of societies over-determination of their person, and find a way to express their desire positively requires, DG argue, that the individual must find a creative means of escape- a line of flight, which others have metaphorized as a voyage, or journey [AO, 131, 151, 224, 230, 245, 255]. Creativity here means that the opportunities open to the individual to connect with the world increase. This is something that capitalism as we have seen wants to control in the form of managing one’s desire as lack--"Be creative, but in ways that pay the bills or make profit!" The individual who is on this line of flight always runs the risk of falling into the grip of the forceful intervention if it appears that they are not “playing the game” of being a good consumer\ producer. The situation that the adventurous individual faces who wants to experience their desire as pure positivity will clash with the system.

Or, to put it another way--capitalism is designed to specifically put you in this double bind. You can be an individual and have your needs met, just as long as you conform to the expectations of the system by using its mass-produced products. And if your desires are those that don't fit the norms because the model of :desire as lack" doesn't thrill you--Be Careful!--you must repress or sublimate them. And if you fail? We have nice padded cells for you...