It is the aesthetic moment in visual art that Milner wants to use as a model for human relations; the at-oneness in which the distinction between the self and the other, the forbidden and the unforbidden, briefly disappears (and she also makes us wonder, in this context, what abstract art has to be to make it a forbidden pleasure). Milner went on to suggest, in the Winnicottian way, that the patient in analysis, like the child in the family, needs what she calls ‘the factor of a capacity in the environment’:
It is the capacity of the environment to foster this growth, by providing conditions in which a recurrent partial return to the feeling of being one is possible; and I suggest that the environment does this by the recurrent providing of a framed space and time and a pliable medium, so that, on occasions, it will not be necessary for self-preservation’s sake to distinguish clearly between inner and outer, self and not-self.
This ‘feeling of being one’, this ‘giving up of the discriminating ego’, need not be forbidden, but it could be. It might be described as transgressive, but it need not be; just as such states could be described as omnipotent or as denial of envy or dependence, or aggression, or indeed of separateness. Clearly cultures – and schools of psychoanalysis – can be distinguished by how much these states of togetherness are encouraged or tolerated (and indeed describe), and in what ways these states are understood. But in these states – which Milner was careful to describe as fleeting, momentary, ‘partial’ returns to the feeling of being one – a rule is not being broken; rather, an experience is being risked: the experience of what happens when vigilant self-holding is relinquished so that one becomes of a piece with the world. One makes the world one’s own by forgetting oneself. Sameness is not merely recuperative for Milner, it is the way we recover the future; it makes it possible to, in her words, ‘find new objects’. The acknowledgement of sameness makes the idea of transgression disappear. Finding new objects, in other words, in this story, does not involve a so-called resolution of the Oedipus complex. It involves broaching the unforbidden pleasures, not the forbidden ones. The forbidden keeps us different from ourselves; the unforbidden keeps us the same as ourselves. We may need at least both.
One of the unforbidden pleasures of childhood for Blake and Wordsworth was the child’s capacity to be absorbed. It is the loss of that capacity which Milner believed modern people suffer from (and come to analysis for). Of course she knew about people’s real trouble with forbidden desire, but this was her more singular contribution to psychoanalysis. In 1934, in A Life of One’s Own, she wrote of her need for ‘a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes, for finding and setting up a standard of values that is truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass-produced ideal’. What Hobbes called a ‘Fundamentall Law’ – that which is absolutely forbidden – is perhaps the exemplary or ultimate ‘borrowed mass-produced ideal’ (‘the innermost secret of morality and culture is to know, simply: what to avoid’). All essences and foundations are the equivalent of mass-produced ideals; invitations to conformity. The forbidden informs us of what our true likes and dislikes must be. Could it follow from this that the unforbidden does not? Or that, as Milner intimated, we have done it all the wrong way round; we have used the forbidden pleasures to tell us what the unforbidden pleasures are, rather than allowing the unforbidden pleasures to be a way of discovering one’s true likes and dislikes. Milner’s quest, one could say, was for what Seamus Heaney in Crediting Poetry called ‘a less binary and altogether less binding vocabulary’.
This book is about whether the unforbidden pleasures have something more to tell us, or at least something else to tell us, about pleasure than the forbidden ones. Were this to be true, a lot of things that we have taken very seriously would seem less serious. The tyranny of the forbidden is not that it forbids, but that it tells us what we want – to do the forbidden thing. The unforbidden gives no orders.
VII
‘Philosophers,’ Joyce Appleby writes in The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, ‘use the word “reify” to indicate when a concept is being talked about as a real thing rather than as a way of talking about something.’ The forbidden, we might say, has been reified when it is really a way of talking about something, about many things. But the forbidden has to be presented, above all, as the ultimately real thing, a way of talking about what Hobbes referred to as the fundamental laws; the rules governing what it is forbidden for us to do are the rules upon which all the other rules depend. And we have to appear to know what we are talking about when we talk about the forbidden – we are talking about what we absolutely must not do, and therefore what we must not be. We are supposed to be those people who would not dream of doing forbidden things. So talking about the forbidden is talking about who we really are; or rather, who we wish we were, because somewhere in ourselves we know that things are forbidden not only because people are tempted to do them, but because we live in a world in which people do these things, in which people do have apparently forbidden pleasures (it should be noted that in the history of capitalism the forbidden has been a remarkably flexible concept). To talk about the forbidden is to talk, then, about risk and transgression, about certain kinds of excitement and fear and shame. It leads us towards our so-called darker selves. And it also leads us towards our more militant and authoritarian selves.
But if to talk about the forbidden is essentially to define ourselves, is a way of saying who we would prefer ourselves to be, what is talking about the unforbidden a way of talking about? What kind of people do we sound like when we talk about our unforbidden pleasures? Perhaps not that impressive, or impressive in ways that haven’t yet occurred to us. Promoting unforbidden pleasures means finding new kinds of heroes and heroines (or dispensing with them altogether). It certainly privileges the more ordinary at the cost of whatever we take to be the alternatives to the ordinary. So these questions are a way of wondering what pleasures, if any, can really sustain us. Of wondering whether life without significant aspiration is viable for us.
Forbidden desire, in its mostly religious forms, has clearly been very sustaining – as an organizing of desire, as a maintaining of essential meaning and value, as a way of feeling that our lives are worth living because something is really at stake in living our lives as well as possible (that is, as obediently as possible). Though each of these religious forms assumes that the pleasure we can take in each other is insufficient; that something transcendent or supernatural is required to really keep us going. Considering the unforbidden pleasures (alongside the forbidden ones) and whether they can make life sufficiently convincing – pleasurable enough to be going on with, even preferable to their forbidden counterparts – means wanting a new sense of what, if anything, we want to keep us going; of what, if anything, we find our real enjoyment in; and whether that is enough.
Life Itself
It will amount to something
I was told, and I was told to hold fast to decency,
to be spotlit and confident. I was told
next year’s words await another voice.
Joanna Klink, ‘Elemental’
I
However painful one’s life turns out to be – however painful one believes that life really is – it is also possible that we have been forbidden from enjoying our lives, or from enjoying them as much as we might. Indeed, our sense of injustice – including all of our personal and our more obviously political grievances – is based on this simple idea: that we are being refused possible pleasures. This is what the so-called difference between the generations always entails. It is, after all, a common enough accusation of the young that adults are unnecessarily restrictive; that they are always setting limits to the available pleasure (Freud’s story about the Oedipus complex is an emblem of this). So it is often of interest – even though it is something, we might say, that is happening all the time – when someone’s older self addresses their younger self, in a way that the younger self can never converse with itself. That is, from the point
of view of the desires and ideals of the younger self, more or less satisfied, more or less realized. The older self always knows more than (if not about) the younger self only in the sense that the older self knows more about the consequences of the younger self’s desiring. Our older selves go on living the what-happened-next of our wanting.
In ‘An Attempt at Self-Criticism’, a new introduction to the second (1886) edition of The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music of 1872, Nietzsche attempts to explain why – in retrospect, as a middle-aged man – he had written this extraordinary book, at the extraordinarily young age of twenty-eight. At the age of forty-two, reviewing his first book, Nietzsche is quite clear about the question he was trying to answer as a younger man. ‘The finest, most beautiful, most envied race of men ever known, the people who made life seem most seductive, the Greeks,’ he wrote, ‘– what, they of all people needed tragedy? Or even: art?’ What could tragedy possibly have to do with the finest, the most beautiful, the most envied race of men ever known? What could possibly trouble such ideal people, whose very perfection, one would have thought, made their lives virtually flawless? The best people must be those who are – by definition, by a certain kind of logic – exempt from the worst things in life. Why would people so impressed, so intoxicated, by life make tragedy their chosen genre; why, indeed, if life itself was abundantly sufficient, would they need art at all?
Perhaps all art, all culture, Nietzsche suggested, is a kind of protection racket, fobbing us off to keep the horror at bay. The Greeks may have needed art, say, to celebrate this ‘over-brimming’ wonderful life. But why, we could then ask, would it need to be celebrated at all, rather than just simply lived? What does celebration add, and why would anything need to be added to such consummate lives? But, above all, why did it even occur to these enviable Greeks that there was such a thing as tragedy? Nietzsche’s question, addressed to his younger self, is, in other words: what is it that even the achieved perfectibility of man – as represented by the ancient Greeks – can’t free us from, or protect us against? Even if we meet, even if we satisfy, our cultural ideals – that is, become the people we most want to be – what will we be left with? This is exactly the kind of question an older person is more likely to ask than a younger one. And why this should be so – why aging as disillusionment has become such an ingrained cliché – is also worth wondering about. Following on from Nietzsche’s question we could ask how it has come about that we have been educated to have expectations about life that are so likely to leave us feeling defeated. We must have been wanting the wrong things from life – we must have inherited the wrong cultural ideals – if our experience is one of cumulative disappointment.
Regretting much about his youthful book, Nietzsche particularly deplored having been seduced, as a younger man, by the language and the values of the men he admired and had emulated. ‘I now regret very much,’ he wrote, ‘that I did not yet have the courage (or immodesty?) at that time to permit myself a language of my very own for such personal views and acts of daring, labouring instead to express strange and new evaluations’; meaning here in the language of older philosophers, particularly of Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer. One thing, Nietzsche intimated, that might lead one to despair and defeatedness is not speaking in one’s own voice; letting admired others speak on one’s own behalf; having pleasures that are not our own foisted on us. These admiring loyalties that Nietzsche increasingly believed – partly inspired by his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson – prevented one doing the one thing most necessary, the most life-justifying thing: becoming who one is. It is as though what had dawned on Nietzsche was the difference between asking yourself, ‘Who do I admire?’ and asking yourself, ‘Who do I want to admire?’ But what Nietzsche went on to quote as an example, from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818), went to the heart of Nietzsche’s dilemma; of the young man who wrote the book, and of the middle-aged man who then reintroduced it to himself and his readers: ‘What gives to everything tragic, whatever the form in which it appears, the characteristic tendency to the sublime,’ Schopenhauer wrote, ‘is the dawning of the knowledge that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction, and are therefore not worth our attachment. In this the tragic spirit consists; it leads to resignation.’ Once we realize what life is really like – ‘the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction’ – we are doomed, at best, to resignation, something Nietzsche claimed was utterly ‘alien’ to him. Parodying Kant’s famous motto in What is Enlightenment? (1784) – ‘Dare to know!’ – Nietzsche recruited Schopenhauer here to say, in a wholesale rejection of progressive, enlightened, liberal values: ‘Dare to know that the world and life can afford us no true satisfaction.’ And therefore whatever our values are, they can afford us no true satisfaction. Dare to know that only one thing is worth knowing, which is that it would have been better never to have had to enter into the knowing game. But Schopenhauer, he now felt, had seduced him into a false pessimism. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche claimed, had ‘obscured and ruined’ his ‘Dionysiac intimations’. There are then two kinds of despair for the middle-aged Nietzsche: the despair of being lured into using other people’s words for one’s own new evaluations; and the despair of being seduced into faux despair. Despair, the Dionysian Nietzsche believes, is always a temptation, especially for those who are frightened of life. They effectively take refuge in imitation, and the joys of defeatedness. ‘What, after all, could be more consoling,’ Diana Fuss writes in Dying Modern, ‘than the knowledge that there can be no consolation?’
And yet this quotation from Schopenhauer that the older Nietzsche was so disdainful of – but can’t resist quoting and so recirculating – echoes, or reinforces, one of the most dramatic moments in The Birth of Tragedy. Wanting to explain what he calls the ‘fantastic super-abundance of life’ of the Olympian gods, which reflected ‘the over-brimming, indeed triumphant existence’ of the ancient Greeks, Nietzsche suggested that the modern spectator stands ‘in some perplexity’ before all this enviable vitality, ‘asking himself what magic potion these people can have drunk which makes them see … the ideal image of their own existence’. The implication here is that the Greeks have idealized themselves, and indeed life itself; and if they have done this, there must be a reason why idealization was required. And it is this that Nietzsche described the modern spectator as having already ‘turned away from’. ‘ “Do not go away,” ’ Nietzsche exhorted the reader, the modern spectator:
‘but listen first to what popular Greek wisdom has to say about this inexplicably serene existence you see spread out before you here.’ An ancient legend recounts how King Midas hunted long in the forest for the wise Silenus, companion of Dionysus, but failed to catch him. When Silenus has finally fallen into his hands, the King asks what is the best and most excellent thing for human beings. Stiff and unmoving, the daemon remains silent until, forced by the King to speak, he finally breaks out in shrill laughter and says: ‘Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.’
It is somehow appropriate that, in a book called The Birth of Tragedy, real birth is discouraged. In one fell swoop all of our cultural ideals are invalidated; as, indeed, is the whole idea of cultural ideals. It is reactive to what Nietzsche called ‘the terrible wisdom of Silenus’ that the Greeks created their super-abundant, over-brimming vision of life: ‘The Greeks knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence; in order to live at all they had to place in front of these things the resplendent, dream-born figures of the Olympians.’ They needed their idealized cosmology. Yet ‘all the shimmering light of the Olympian gods paled before the wisdom of Silenus’. This wisdom of Silenus, which overlaps with Schopenhauer’s wisdom, this ‘true knowledge, this insight into the terrib
le truth, which outweighs every motive for action’, Nietzsche continued, creates ‘revulsion’. And for this primal revulsion, this fundamental revelation, there are two self-cures, in his view: the ecstasies of Dionysus or the ‘resignation’ of Hamlet. Elemental exuberance or fatal lethargy. ‘Very powerful forces are required to defeat the forces of desire [and] lead them to resignation,’ Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus. It is this powerful, overriding force of Silenus’s wisdom that Nietzsche feels himself seduced and disarmed by. This was why the serene Greeks were obsessed by tragedy. Because the truth about life is that it would have been better not to have been born. And we have been born, and been given this belated knowledge. A knowledge that makes a mockery of our desire; that reveals all our purposes as hiding places and refuges. At least life has taught us this: that life is unbearable.
Not the Platonic or Socratic redemption by knowledge and virtue, nor the Aristotelian flourishing of excellence and potential, nor the saving laws and graces of the Judeo-Christian religions, were plausible or viable forms of optimism, in Nietzsche’s view. Indeed, there were none. ‘The very fact,’ Raymond Geuss writes in a commentary on The Birth of Tragedy,
that the Athenians organized so much of their political, social, and religious life around a ritualized representation of catastrophic destruction (i.e. tragedy) shows that they must in some sense have been metaphysical pessimists. How else, Nietzsche argues, could one explain the keen, addictive pleasure the Athenians and, following them, many others through the ages have taken in watching a basically admirable, heroic individual destroy himself in the pursuit of truth and knowledge, as Oedipus does?
Unforbidden Pleasures Page 12