If Monderman’s experiment and Scott’s parable are about ‘red light removal schemes’, they are also about the more or less impeded, regulated, formulated flow of something or other; the question being, what kind of flow does the red light think it is organizing? What is the catastrophe the red light assumes it is wanting to avert? Something, after all, has to be done to desiring, to pleasure, to make it forbidden; it has to be described in a certain way (forbiddingly, intimidatingly). The forbidders have their reasons. When we do forbidden things we often have to give an account of ourselves to ourselves and to others; when we do unforbidden things nothing, apparently, needs to be said.
But what Monderman’s experiment revealed, whether or not it is representative, was that there were fewer accidents, virtually no backups or road rage, more fluency and flow, less congestion. And, most interestingly for my purposes, more cooperation with other people and more attentiveness to them, the two things going together (‘Monderman likened it to skaters in a crowded ice rink who manage successfully to tailor their movements to those of the other skaters’). It is a picture, however idealized, of sociability as akin to an unwilled choreography; and the idea of tailoring here is genial. As with the skaters there is an attempt at, a shared project of, minimizing frustration and antagonism, and realistically (it actually happens at the skating rink, not just in someone’s mind). And all this, not incidentally, can be linked to the conclusions of early infant observation and the kinds of attunement, for example, witnessed between mothers and their babies when things go well enough (and it can also be linked with the Boston Change Process Study Group’s salutary point that what matters is not that things go wrong between the mother and baby – how could they not? – but how they are repaired). One of the things the drivers had been forbidden by the red light was a way of working things out with the other drivers. By returning the drivers to an earlier way of doing things, something new was discovered (as Kristin Ross writes in Communal Luxury, ‘Being attentive to the energies of the outmoded was one way to think oneself into the future’). These drivers and skaters and tailors and anti-Oedipuses and mothers and babies are having to make it up as they go along; not, of course, from scratch, but in the actuality of their immediate circumstance together. However rule-bound their behaviour – and however pastoral a view that may be being promoted by this example – each of these figures is having to acknowledge that, whatever else they are doing, they are experimenting. And the forbidden is clearly where the experimenting is supposed to stop.
III
‘The attribution of value to mere conforming behaviour, in abstraction from both motive and consequences, belongs not to morality but to taboo,’ the Professor of Jurisprudence H. L. A. Hart wrote in Law, Liberty, and Morality, making it clear that to be law-abiding can be to be unaware that one is following a rule. Conformity can be understood only in its particular context. Just as magicians are the people who really know that there is no such thing as magic, conformists can be the people who are not following the rules but living by the magic of rules. Morality can be argued about and consented to, whereas taboos can only be binding, or even spellbinding. Morality, then, is about experimenting with morality; about engaging with it as an ongoing conversation rather than as a rule book: morality as a way of working out, of describing, what we really enjoy doing together.
When it comes to the forbidden we have to distinguish between the authoritarians and the experimentalists, between the essentialists and the pragmatists. The pragmatists, the experimentalists, say, ‘I (or someone else) have tried this – have done this forbidden thing – and it had, by our standards, catastrophic consequences. We mustn’t let anyone we care about do it again.’ The authoritarians, the essentialists, say, ‘This is evil, it certainly mustn’t be tried, and preferably shouldn’t be thought about or discussed. It is what our worst punishments are designed to abolish.’ The French psychoanalyst Bela Grunberger was an experimentalist when he wrote that the reason the father should prohibit his son from sleeping with his mother was that, if the son did sleep with his mother he would be unable to satisfy himself or her, and so would be humiliated. In this version of the Oedipus complex the father is not a castrator, but the guardian of the child’s future potency. God was being an essentialist in the Old Testament when he told the Jews that ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’; that they shouldn’t worship idols, ‘For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and the fourth generation’ (Exodus, 20:3–5). Either way, the forbidden is the foreclosure of certain ways of thinking about the future. The forbidden refers to a future that mustn’t happen. Once we know what is forbidden it clears the way for the unforbidden – all those other things that the authorities encourage us to enjoy, or want to fob us off with.
The rules free us to experiment, but an absolute rule – a rule deemed to be beyond conversation, beyond negotiation, as the forbidden is – pre-empts the possibility of improvisation. It is defining. Yet we can never quite know what the forbidden is forbidding us, as Adam and Eve, our first parents, discovered. Once we break the fundamental laws we are in uncharted territory. To forbid something, that is to say, is an omniscient act; it attempts to establish a known future, a future in which certain acts will not be performed, and from which certain thoughts and feelings will be excluded. And that fact has daunting moral implications. Those who lay down and enforce the fundamental laws claim to know what they are, and to know what the consequences are of breaking them. In this sense fundamental laws are prophetic; their makers claim to know the future. And yet, we are all too aware – and psychoanalysis has alerted us to this in a new way – of people’s capacity to render the unforbidden forbidden: either to render it, hopefully, inaccessible, and/or to make the unforbidden more exciting. Psychoanalysis has shown us the defensive potential in upping the rhetorical stakes: we can all too easily say to ourselves, ‘This is not dangerous, or exciting, or intriguing, this is FORBIDDEN!’ (when the Kleinian psychoanalyst Money-Kyrle wrote, as mentioned earlier, that the aim of analysis was to prove the irrelevance of the inhibition, he was alluding to this). In psychoanalysis the analyst works out how it has been worked out by the patient that these are the pleasures he is able and willing to seek, but not those; she works out where the patient wants to draw the line, and why.
When the traffic lights were removed – and this is one of at least two familiar kinds of modern story – the assumed catastrophe did not occur. In fact, as luck, or something else, would have it, things were even better than before. There were fewer accidents, the flow improved, there was less rage, more common sense. Monderman’s traffic experiment, as it turned out, was an example of what John Dewey calls, in Art as Experience, ‘adaptations through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation)’. The other familiar modern story is that the red lights are removed and futures are created that are beyond our worst imaginings; this is what tragedies and all political tyrannies are there to tell us about. But after Monderman’s experiment, Scott writes, ‘Small towns in the Netherlands put up one sign boasting that they were “Free of Traffic Signs”, and a conference discussing the new philosophy proclaimed “Unsafe is safe”. ’
We know something of what it is like to drop the idea that there is such a thing as forbidden knowledge; and we do, but mostly don’t really, know what it would be like to ban the incest taboo (imagine a society in which children in families, backed up by their parents, were encouraged to murder their mothers and marry their fathers, or murder their fathers and marry their mothers). And we know what it is like for certain forbidden desires to become unforbidden; indeed, some of our most terrible histories, of racism and sexism, are about the forbidding of desires that clearly need not have been forbidden – supposedly forbidden desires – histories that in retrospect seem to some of us to be the fundamental histories of our times; both wildly unintelligible in their cruelty, and all too intelligible. Also the best bits of
psychoanalysis have been able to tell us something useful about the anxieties that prompt the forbidding of desires, and about why, therefore, we should not always be overly confident as forbidders of desire (if psychoanalysis had had nothing new to say about restricted acts, or about new ways of completing actions, it would have been of limited value). Once, for example, homophobia is more intelligible – once, that is to say, there are better, more persuasive, stories about it – it becomes contestable.
Nobody now believes that we could, or would even want to, abolish all forbidden desires, any more than anyone could imagine a culture without the category of the unacceptable – the forbidden being the unacceptable at its most intractable (‘To unlock the innermost secret of morality and culture is to know, simply: what to avoid,’ Philip Rieff wrote in his book Charisma). And some of us may believe – and psychoanalysis clearly has a stake in this – that forbidden desires, like everything else, can be redescribed in a way that makes them less forbidden, or certainly less unthinkable. People traditionally come to psychoanalysis because of the monstrousness of their desire, or what they take to be the monstrousness of their desire; and the analyst redescribes where she can. But, obviously, there can be no psychoanalysis – just as, presumably, there can be no culture – without the idea of forbidden desire (even if the history of the making and breaking of rules would suggest – and psychoanalysis has a good story about this – not that rules are made to be broken, but that rules are made to be tested, or can only be made by being tested). No rule is safe, but rules are there supposedly to make us feel safe.
In psychoanalysis we should remember, at least in its developmental stories, that the forbidden is not apparently what we begin with, or where we begin. Babies do not commit forbidden acts, nor do they have, from their own point of view, as it were, forbidden desires. They acquire them – they learn them – through acculturation because their parents, by the time they become parents, have been thoroughly initiated into the forbidden. Little does the very young child know what will be said about what he wants. So what some psychoanalysts refer to as the pre-Oedipal may be, among many other things, a wish to imagine, to picture, a time in the individual’s life of intense pleasures and sufferings, that is not lived under the aegis of the forbidden; a time of the intensest feelings before good and evil. The child is born, unavoidably, into a world already governed by the notion of the forbidden; it is the medium in which he grows; and so what is supposedly pre-Oedipal for the baby is in a sense not pre-Oedipal at all, because his parents are thoroughly versed in the whole notion of forbidden desire, and they hold and handle their child accordingly. In this story there is no life before the forbidden, only a life lived before its full realization.
Growing up means growing up into what we call knowledge, or appropriate acknowledgement, of the forbidden. The forbidden is what adults need to tell children about, explicitly and implicitly, consciously and unwittingly. And the forbidden is essentially a story about the consequences of certain kinds of desiring; a catastrophic story, a punitive story, a by definition intimidating story about what can happen if certain desires begin to flow. And we have to wonder what it is like – what the effects are – of children and adolescents growing up in an adult world that is obsessed by forbidden desires and pleasures, often at the cost of the unforbidden ones. And why, by the same token, it might be assumed that promoting unforbidden pleasures could seem to be merely a forlorn consolation for the middle-aged. Forbidden pleasures may have literally stolen the show, and the more intriguing and unpredictable continuity of our lives may lie in our largely unarticulated experiences of unforbidden pleasures, in all their extraordinary variety. The aim of development may be to become as dependent as possible, not as transgressive as possible.
The forbidden and the tragic are made for each other. If tragedy shows us that forbidden desire is really forbidden, comedy (and psychoanalysis) can show us what happens when the unforbidden is forbidden. And what happens when we let the forbidden narrow our minds. The idea of pleasures that are not somehow painful – that are not cures or compensations or alibis for pain – has become literally inconceivable, so wedded are we to our perpetual dismay.
IV
Forbidden desire has been a big problem in the history of the ways we think about ourselves. And I want to explore this in terms of the problem forbidden desire has been for psychoanalysis where it reflects the kinds of problem it has been in the wider culture (and indeed in the culture of fin de siècle Vienna, where psychoanalysis began). There is, of course, always a question of what we take desires to be, and of what we can do with and about them; of which ones we are supposed to prefer and why (and why we are supposed to prefer certain desires to others always prompts the question ‘Who says?’). A question, in short, of what we have been told, one way and another, about what desiring is, and how we should do it (and this means what we have been told, one way and another by, say, parents, teachers, biologists and novelists, or whoever else we find to be worth listening to, or have had to listen to). But there is a particular sense in which I think that forbidden desire has been a big problem for psychoanalysis; apart, that is, from all the other ways in which it is the big problem for psychoanalysis (and not only for psychoanalysis). And it is linked to Monderman’s experiment with the traffic as a kind of moral parable.
In his essay ‘Gay Betrayals’ (From Is the Rectum a Grave?), Leo Bersani suggests that gay men, out of what he calls their ‘exemplary confusion’, should be, or actually are, offering an ‘implicit and involuntary message’ to heterosexuals that ‘we aren’t sure of how we want to be social, and that we therefore invite straights to redefine with us the notions of community and sociality’. The forbidden is that which sets absolute limits to redefining notions of community and sociality; and in ways that the unforbidden may not. Is it absurd to imagine a new kind of outlaw, an outlaw in search of unforbidden pleasures? Psychoanalysts, like Bersani’s gay men and women, could be the people that take for granted that nobody is sure how she or he wants to be social. The forbidden – the idea of the forbidden, the scenario of forbidden desire – has traditionally been the official way we set limits to how we can want to be social; sociability depending on what we really enjoy doing together, on the pleasures we can take in each other’s company.
One might well have thought beforehand that Monderman – akin to Bersani’s description of gay men and women being uncertain as to how they want to be social – was taking a considerable risk with his ‘red light removal schemes’, despite what he ultimately discovered. Forbidding things can stop people both finding new ways and recovering old ways of collaborating. Forbidding things can pre-empt the enjoyment of unforbidden things. What forbidding things is an obstacle to is not always clear. Clearly the sociability created by the red lights is different from the sociability created without them. So what I want to consider is: what have been the consequences of the forbidden dominating the ways we think about pleasure and sexuality (in psychoanalysis)? If we take forbidden pleasure as the essence of pleasure, as the real pleasure, what happens to the unforbidden pleasures? Do they really exist – are they derivatives, substitutes, sublimations? – and if they do what kinds of pleasures are they? Are they all poor relatives of the real thing? Are they merely for the timid, the inhibited, the cowardly, the dull? Is unforbidden pleasure merely hedonism for infants and the elderly? By privileging transgression we may have created a spurious belief of all too knowing pleasure-seekers, who supposedly have all the best lines and all the best lives, however tragic. Perhaps psychoanalysis, in its original overvaluing of forbidden desire, has been complicit with what D. H. Lawrence in his Introduction to Pansies called ‘the modern mind … falling into this form of degraded taboo-insanity’; that is, the insanity generated, in Lawrence’s view, by the whole notion of taboo. It may be worth wondering again what unforbidden pleasures, of which there are so many, amount to in the story, and in the experience of, a life.
Clearly, if we believe for
example that real pleasure, profound pleasure, passionate pleasure, is forbidden, or derives from the forbidden, then courage is what we need, and risk is what we will celebrate (and idealize). We will need to be as brave as possible in not betraying our desire; indeed, to promote unforbidden pleasures is to imagine a world in which we don’t have to take courage (or cowardice) very seriously. There certainly seems to be an old-fashioned story about heroism lurking somewhere in our commitment to the forbidden in which the bold, the risk-taking, the transgressive are, by definition, having a better time (this, of course, might make psychoanalysis, then, a kind of military training, helping people become more the heroes and heroines of their own desires). If one of my greatest pleasures in life is my morning coffee, am I, in some sense, a rather pathetic person, too starkly, as people used to say, bourgeois? If being as kind as is possible gives me the life I want, am I some kind of weakling, merely part of what Nietzsche called a ‘slave religion’? If I prefer friendship, or political activism, to sexual relationships or sexual encounters, am I just inhibited? Are the seekers of unforbidden pleasures – who are also, of course, the seekers of forbidden pleasures; they can’t help but be that also – too bland (that is, terrified) for real consideration, other than the consideration of analysing them out of it? Are they great sublimators and displacers but poor realists? We don’t have to choose in psychoanalysis between the forbidden and the unforbidden, but we sort of do; we can and will have forbidden and unforbidden pleasures but we always already know where the real action is. In short, what, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is the unforbidden? Where do unforbidden pleasures stand in psychoanalytic stories about a good life? Are unforbidden pleasures sad substitutes for the forbidden ones? What has the monism of forbidden pleasure – the siren-song, the abiding claim on the Freudian subject of the forbidden – stopped us from thinking about pleasure?
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 10