We can see the ways in which Freud was getting the superego to do too much work for him: it is a censor, a judge, a dominating and frustrating father, and it also carries a blueprint of the kind of person the child should be, and therefore should want to be. It forbids, but it also promotes certain ideals and values. And this reveals the difficulty of what Freud was trying to come to terms with; the difficulty of going on with the cultural conversation about how we describe so-called inner authority, or individual morality. But in each of these multiple functions the ego seems paltry, merely the slave, the doll, the ventriloquist’s dummy, the object of the superego’s prescriptions: the superego’s thing. And the id, the biological drives that drive the individual, are also supposed to be, as far as possible, the victims, the objects of the superego’s censorship and judgement. The sheer scale of the forbidden in this system is obscene. And yet, in this vision of things, all this punitive forbidding becomes, paradoxically, one of our primary unforbidden pleasures. We are, by definition, forbidden to find all this forbidding forbidden. Indeed, we find ways of getting pleasure from our restrictedness.
How, in Freud’s view, has our virulent, predatory self-criticism become one of our greatest pleasures? How has it come about that we so much enjoy this picture of ourselves as objects, and as objects of judgement and censorship? What is this appetite for confinement, for diminishment, for unrelenting, unforgiving self-criticism? Freud’s answer is beguilingly simple: we fear loss of love. Fear of loss of love means forbidding certain forms of love (incestuous love, or interracial love, or same-sex love, or so-called perverse sexuality, and so on). We need, in the first instance, the protection and cooperation of our parents in order to survive; so a deal is made (or, in a different language, there is a social contract). The child says to the parents, ‘I will be what you need me to be, as far as is possible, in exchange for your love and protection.’ Not unlike Thomas Hobbes’s story about sovereignty – in which the sovereign literally makes life liveable – the protection required for survival is paramount: everything must be sacrificed for this, except one’s life. Safety is preferred to desire; desire is sacrificed for security. But this supposed safety, at least in Freud’s version, comes at considerable cost; at the cost, in effect, of being turned into, by being treated as, an object. It depends upon our being made to feel that we are the kind of creatures that need an excessive amount of critical and condemnatory scrutiny. We must be packed with forbidden desires, if so much censorship and judgement is required. We are being encouraged to believe, by all this censorship and judgement, that forbidden, transgressive pleasures are what we really crave. That really, essentially, deep down, we are criminals; we need to be protected primarily from ourselves, from our wayward desires.
What this regime doesn’t allow us to think, clearly, is that we are also packed with, and inspired by, unforbidden desires; or that our moral ideals could be anything other than forbidding (we cannot easily imagine ‘the moral ideal being presented as attractive rather than imperative’, as the nineteenth-century philosopher Henry Sidgwick put it in his The Methods of Ethics). Just as the overprotected child believes that the world must be very dangerous and he must be very weak if he requires so much protection (and the parents must be very strong if they are able to protect him from all this), similarly we have been terrorized by all this censorship and judgement into believing that we are essentially radically antisocial and, indeed, dangerous to ourselves and others. We must be the only animal that lives as though this grandiose absurdity were true.
IV
The books we read in adolescence often have an extraordinary effect on our lives. They are, among other things, an attempt at regime change. In Freud’s language we could say that we free ourselves of our parents’ ideals for us by beginning to use the available culture to make up our own ego-ideals, to evolve a sense of our own affinities beyond the family, to speak a language that is more our own. In the self-fashioning of adolescence, reading, for those people who like it – and for many people music and films are much more important – begins to really take, having a subtle and often indiscernible effect throughout a person’s life. We should, therefore, note, by way of conclusion, Freud’s adolescent passion for Don Quixote, a story about a ‘madman’, as he is frequently referred to in the book, whose life is eventually entirely formed by his reading, in his case by the reading of chivalric romances. Don Quixote is a man who all too literally inhabits, living in and through, the fictions about knights errant that he has consumed. He is a fictional character who makes himself out of fictional characters.
As a young man Freud was an avid reader, and was very good at, and interested in, languages. And he learned Spanish, as he wrote to a correspondent in 1923, for a particular reason: ‘When I was a young student the desire to read the immortal Don Quixote in the original of Cervantes led me to learn, untaught, the lovely Castilian tongue.’ This ‘youthful enthusiasm’ was born of a passionate relationship with a school friend called Silberstein. He was, Ernest Jones writes in his biography of Freud,
Freud’s bosom friend in schooldays and they spent together every hour they were not in school. They learned Spanish together and developed their own mythology and private words, mostly derived from Cervantes … They constituted a learned society to which they gave the name of Academia Cartellane, and in connection with it wrote an immense quantity of belles-lettres composed in a humorous vein.
An intimacy between two boys that is based on a story about an intimacy between two men (in the service of a woman), an intimacy that inspires writing and humour and complicity. Don Quixote could be linked in many ways with Freud’s life and the development of psychoanalysis (think of the deluded fantasist and the practical realist, the acquisition of social prestige and the psychopathology of everyday life, the power of language and fiction in the formation of the self, psychoanalytic groups as cults that believe they are not cults – all pertinent to Freud and his work). Learning Spanish and reading Don Quixote together with a friend were part of Freud’s unofficial education, which ran alongside his official, institutional education (Freud, like Don Quixote himself, was always interested in the unofficial life). But there is one motif that I especially want to single out in this text, so important for Freud and, not incidentally, written more or less contemporaneously with Hamlet, for the purposes of thinking further about unforbidden pleasure, and the often futile unforbidden pleasure of self-criticism. And it is, appropriately enough, about Don Quixote’s infamous horse, Rocinante.
In a well-known passage in the New Introductory Lectures (1933), where Freud described the relationship between the ego and the id – between the person’s conscious sense of themselves and their more unconscious desires – he used an all too familiar, all too traditional, analogy (as if to say: psychoanalysis is just a modern version of a very old story, which of course it also is). ‘The horse,’ Freud wrote,
supplies the locomotive energy, while the rider has the privilege of deciding on the goal, and of guiding the powerful animal’s movement. But only too often there arises between the ego and the id the not precisely ideal situation of the rider being obliged to guide the horse along the path by which it itself wants to go.
I take this ‘not precisely ideal situation’ to be an allusion, whatever else it may be in our overinterpreting it, to Don Quixote; and to what, in several senses, he was led by. If we read it in this way, the ego is the deluded fantastical knight who, of course, like all realists, is utterly convinced of (and by) his own plausibility to himself. And Rocinante, in this rather more Beckettian version, is what we call, perhaps appropriately, an old nag. The analogy is at once a parody of, and an exposé of, the cliché of the horse as elemental force. And where does Rocinante go, as Don Quixote is led by his horse? He goes home. But because he is a horse, not a person, home does not mean incest (nor, in all probability, does it mean where his parents are; it just means where he lives). Home, of course, has always meant more than incestuous desire; unti
l, that is, it was underinterpreted by psychoanalysis. In this pre-Freudian and post-Freudian model of the so-called mind – one, perhaps, that Freud repressed in his urge to provide and make compatible a more scientifically bracing and traditionally religious model – the id is the nag Rocinante, the ego is the mad Don Quixote, and the superego is the sometimes amusing, often good-humoured, frequently down to earth and gullible Sancho Panza. ‘Sancho,’ the critic A. J. Close writes in Cervantes: Don Quixote, ‘is proverbially rustic; panza means ‘belly’; and the character of the man is basically that of the clown of sixteenth-century [Spanish] comedy: lazy, greedy, cheeky, loquacious, cowardly, ignorant, and above all, nitwitted.’ What does the Freudian superego look like if you take away its endemic cruelty, its unrelenting sadism? It looks like Sancho Panza. And like Sancho Panza, the absurd and obscene superego is a character we must not take too seriously.
‘Sancho proves to have too much mother wit to be considered a perfect fool,’ Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Lectures on Don Quixote, ‘although he may be the perfect bore.’ We certainly need to think of our superego as a perfect bore, and as all too gullible in its apparent plausibility. We need, in other words, to realize that we may be looking at ourselves a little more from Sancho Panza’s point of view, whether or not we are rather more like Don Quixote than we would wish. We might, that is to say, get as much real enjoyment from life, if not more, from our unforbidden pleasures. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness makes us. Our pleasure in each other’s company need not be quite so forbidding.
Unforbidden Pleasures
The word experimental is apt, providing it is understood not as descriptive of an act to be later judged in terms of success and failure, but simply as an act the outcome of which is unknown.
John Cage, Silence
I
We may live in the aftermath of the myth of the Fall, and the even longer aftermath of the myth of Oedipus, but the first traffic lights were invented in the United States after the First World War. The traditional mutual accommodation travellers had been making to each other on their bikes and cars and carts was replaced by a set of lights. ‘Its purpose,’ the anthropologist James C. Scott writes, ‘was to prevent accidents by imposing an engineered scheme of coordination.’ Partly through pressure of numbers and the proliferation of vehicles, and partly through the new scientific and bureaucratic fantasies of efficiency and productivity, familiar forms of cooperation gave way to a new, technologically implemented, set of rules. People’s practical judgement was delegated to a red light. They had known when to stop, but now they were being told when to stop.
Then in 2003, in Drachten in the Netherlands, Hans Monderman, a ‘counterintuitive traffic engineer’, proposed the removal of traffic lights in the interests of what he called ‘shared space’. Once put to the test the results were extraordinary, leading to a series of what were called ‘red light removal schemes’ across Europe and America. ‘He began,’ Scott continues,
with the observation that, when an electrical failure incapacitated traffic lights, the result was improved flow rather than congestion. As an experiment, he replaced the busiest traffic-light intersection in Drachten, handling 22,000 cars a day, with a traffic circle, an extended cycle path, and a pedestrian area. In the two years following the removal of the traffic light, the number of accidents plummeted to only two, compared with thirty-six crashes in the four years prior. Traffic moves more briskly through the intersection when all drivers know they must be alert and use their common sense, while backups and the road rage associated with them have virtually disappeared. Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters. He also believed that an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe.
It is, of course, in many ways a suggestive experiment; and it is not incidental that Scott uses it in a book entitled Two Cheers for Anarchism, anarchism being one of many traditions of antinomian thought, at least in the West. People questioning the rules – wondering both what a rule is, and what it is to follow a rule; wondering what morality really is, and why moral obligations matter – is the news that stays news. We are always tempted to ask, as Sterne does in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: ‘is a man to follow rules – or rules to follow him?’ Indeed, we are encouraged (that is, educated) to ask in whose interests the rules are made, and for what purpose; whether we are being punished or coerced in the name of being protected. And whether the rules apply to some people but not to others. It has become second nature now for many people to think that rules – even in their most extreme versions, or particularly in their most extreme versions, as taboos – may always be no more and no less than human artefacts. Gravity may be more fundamental than justice, but our morality doesn’t need to have the gravity of gravity. We are inevitably exercised about where we draw the line, the kind of lines we draw, and to whom we delegate the drawing of lines. In certain circumstances killing people is not forbidden, but killing certain people is; torture is not forbidden, but torturing certain people, and sometimes how we torture them, is; sex is not forbidden, but certain kinds of sexual activity with certain people is; and so on. Virtually no one sanctions and supports incest or paedophilia. But in every other case, when it comes to the forbidden – what we mustn’t do as opposed to what we shouldn’t do – there are always exceptions, mitigating circumstances; good reasons found and given for redescribing forbidden acts as newly acceptable, or for having to do forbidden things (from banning sexism and racism, say, to suspending civil liberties, to killing ‘civilian’ children). Apart from the incest taboo, and its displacement in paedophilia, all the rules seem to be made to be breakable. This is the familiar legacy of the Enlightenment; this is what a certain kind of modern person believes. Everything forbidden can be redescribed as ultimately desirable. Everything sacred can be rendered secular.
But attending to the rules can mean inattention elsewhere. Rules are supposed to both attract and organize our attention, and to be taken for granted. As playing any game makes clear, the rules have to be wholly absorbing, and automatically abided by; a second nature to deal with the first. Rules – and particularly absolute rules, the guardians of the forbidden – are not supposed to be forgettable. Indeed, when it comes to the forbidden we are not supposed to let our minds wander; we are supposed to be utterly gripped, and in the grip of the law. The forbidden is by definition defined, is always already defined, so one cannot be ignorant of it, or casual about it; whether one is conscious or unconscious of the definition, it is in principle knowable (knowing what is forbidden may be one of the main things that knowing is for). Acculturation, adaptation, means living as if one knows what is forbidden. Psychoanalysis – the theory and therapy that organizes itself around forbidden desire – adds that we can be both conscious and unconscious of what is forbidden; and that being able to redescribe forbidden pleasures as unforbidden pleasures is the only way to find out what it is possible to say about them, and what we might want to argue about. And psychoanalysis, as the only secular therapy that puts the otherwise sacred idea of the forbidden at the heart of its theory and practice, has also added an emblematic profession to the culture: one that makes us go on thinking about the forbidden in a secular language; and, by the same token, exposes, as we shall see, not merely what forbidden desire inhibits, but what the whole idea of the forbidden forbids us from considering. The thing, the real thing, that the forbidden has stopped us thinking about is the unforbidden; unforbidden pleasures have suffered at the hands of the more privileged forbidden pleasures. And by being placed in the shade, or rather, by our placing them in the shade, we have forbidden ourselves more pleasure, and more about pleasure, than we may realize.
II
When what is forbidden becomes blurred, or vague, or ambiguous – or is even contested – something is being done to the forbidden. It is being red
escribed. The forbidden, by definition, should not be subject to redescription. And yet we know that this is what keeps happening to forbidden pleasures: they keep being reconsidered. We are more and less ambivalent about the forbidden than we want to be. ‘A Fundamentall Law in every Common-wealth,’ Hobbes wrote in 1651 in Leviathan (a book Freud quoted in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams), ‘is that, which being taken away, the Common-wealth faileth, and is utterly dissolved; as a building whose Foundation is destroyed … a Fundamentall Law is that, by which Subjects are bound …’ It was clear to Hobbes that the only foundations that we have are our fundamental laws; that we are the kind of creatures that, without these so-called fundamental laws, will be in a war of all against all; in endless uncivil civil wars. And this presumably is the logic of the forbidden, of the fundamental laws: it is deemed to be that without which we cannot live, or cannot live the lives we most want (or have been persuaded to want). And that we are bewitched by the picture, by the analogy, of having foundations; of there being something upon which everything depends. The two things – the fundamental laws and the foundations – going together. Leviathan is a book about what we might be wanting, what we might be thinking and feeling – about, that is, what we might be doing – if we were not paying full attention to these fundamental laws.
In Monderman’s traffic experiment – which is not about revising a fundamental law, but is nevertheless suggestive – there are fewer accidents because people are more attentive to what they are doing, more alert, as if the rules make people less sentient; as if something is handed over to the rules, and implicitly to the rule-makers, making people behave automatically, or as sleepwalkers, or as people less inventively competent than they in fact are (‘an excess of signage led drivers to take their eyes off the road, and actually contributed to making junctions less safe’). There is more flow than congestion – ‘traffic moves more briskly’ – but this cuts both ways; it is both more ‘efficient’, and it increases mobility. Once movement is no longer forbidden by a red light, the unforbidden pleasures of cooperation and its attendant talents reveal themselves. And it is perhaps worth remembering Deleuze and Guattari’s use of a similar analogy in their anti-psychoanalytic book Anti-Oedipus: ‘The prime function incumbent upon the socius [society] has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record them, to see to it that no flow exists that is not properly dammed up, channeled, regulated.’ The forbidden is pictured here as a controlled flow. Whatever it is that flows threatens to get anywhere and everywhere. Hobbes’s fundamental laws are to keep an imagined chaos at bay. It is worth bearing in mind, in other words, that the way we imagine desire – the pictures we have, the analogies we use, the figures we find – is often dictated by a forbidding voice. The forbidden defines desire in the same way, it is worth repeating, that the overprotected child believes that there must be something really terrifying out there if he needs so much protection from it.
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 9