Civilisation and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), Chapter two, part one
Part 2.2.1: craving and yearning, purpose, porpoise, palliative measures, (un)pleasure – is that all there is?
The second chapter of C&ID is arguably the most important for any social theory derived from Freud: or, at least, everybody since (who I’m especially interested in right now esp.) has been trying to parley with the set of answers he gives here.
For me, it is a formidable set of responses, building as it does on Hobbesian assumptions about human nature, especially those which are the sources of our quarrels: competition, diffidence, glory. Freud also deals with the legacy of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, in the form of utilitarian and Spencerian understandings of the basis of pervasive human behaviour, which talk back to broadly Kantian and Rousseauian political anthropologies. Later in C&ID, and elsewhere, Freud fleshes out some of these Spencerian motifs with recourse to some very dodgy 19C ethnological reporting from the Australian central desert (more on that soon). There’s a bunch of discourse daddies here we have to get past and go beyond: one can either avoid them, or reckon with them. For this reason, alongside the previous chapter, and unfortunately for you, dear reader, I keep realising how much space it merits – or I just keep typing, then realise I’ve done another thousand or three words. Given that this is a blog and that the injunction to myself is to just write and keep writing, so be it.
~
On the basis of what Freud puts forward in this chapter, he reaches two fundamental conclusions:
1) repression is necessary if we’re to live together (in civilisation) somehow; repression is the basis of civilisation
2) guilt and the guilty conscience borne of this socially-necessary repression might be the most important and ineradicable legacy of ‘all of this’ in the kultur; ordinary unhappiness is the price (of the necessary repressive renunciations which upholding civilisation requires)
Repression is the basis of civilisation, ordinary unhappiness is the price.
In other words, civilisation is and must be repressive, as we cannot live spontaneously with one another and live well (in a civilised way): thus there must be a repressive apparatus, of some kind. But to what degree? This is precisely Marcuse’s question in Eros and Civilisation.
So already, we can see the implications for social theory ‘downwind’ of and replying this this, from Marcuse, Reich and Fromm to David Graeber via Levi-Strauss, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari (with popular authors like Rutger Bregman, James Suzman, Francis Fukuyama, Yuval Hurari etc). Marcuse’s provocation is still the most interesting while we’re still directly on Freud and C&ID, given that he is a Marxist who believes in the possibility of human emancipation through socialism, yet that he is also a philosopher who accepts Freud’s repressive hypothesis. Granted, Marcuse says, there must be some repression. Even in a socialist society (which for Marcuse also meant modern, industrial, hi-tech), you would have law, bureaucracy, and something like cops. However, Marcuse then asks: why is surplus repression necessary now (in 1955, but does it not still hold?), given we live in affluent postwar Western societies in which, technically speaking, exploitation and alienation is not necessary, as it was in the Victorian England, Caribbean and India of Marx’ time? Moreover, why are we still so aggressive and destructive, why is there such excessive destructiveness everywhere? Capitalism delivers the goods; peace and prosperity is technically possible; why is there still so much aggression and destruction. These are huge and brilliant questions that, to me, every generation of social theory since has capitulated on. For Marcuse, only the ‘dynamite’ of drive theory and the death drive gave some insight into this; for Fromm, the revolutionary character showed us a way through. Another post for another day soon.
What does it mean to be civilised, actually? What happens once we’re comfy in der Kultur?
For us as desiring subjects who have become guilty as we’ve been initiated into the kultur, becoming civilised means we all have to renounce our spontaneous pursuit of absolute pleasure, the eternal pump.
We all have to renounce our spontaneous pursuit of absolute pleasure
We all have to renounce our spontaneous pursuit of absolute pleasure
‘we must become the pitiless censors of ourselves’
although unconsciously ‘we’ do not give up the chase,
for ‘we’ are driven to it (and beyond pleasure, to destruction [of this more later]).
You can’t just fuck who you want, touch who you want, grab what you want, but you want, you yearn, you crave.
We all have to renounce our spontaneous pursuit of absolute pleasure, but you want, you yearn, you crave.
KRAMER (moves over and sits next to George): Do you ever yearn?
GEORGE: Yearn? Do I yearn?
KRAMER: I yearn.
GEORGE: You yearn.
KRAMER: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I... I sit... and yearn. Have you yearned?
GEORGE: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave all the time, constant craving... but I haven't yearned.
KRAMER (in disgust): Look at you.
GEORGE: Aw, Kramer, don't start...
KRAMER (moving back to the other side of the booth): You're wasting your life.
GEORGE: I am not! What you call wasting, I call living! I'm living my life!
KRAMER: O.K., like what? No, tell me! Do you have a job?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: You got money?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have a woman?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have any prospects?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: You got anything on the horizon?
GEORGE: Uh...no.
KRAMER: Do you have any action at all?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have any conceivable reason for even getting up in the morning?
GEORGE: I like to get the Daily News!
This is another of Freud’s insights into our motivational set, six decades before Seinfeld and KD Lang: our constant craving and our yearning. Our stubborn wunsch (wish), emerging as it does from the unconscious, ‘knows no no’; the id insists itself, bubbling up, leaving the already overburdened ego to mediate between this primary pleasure-seeker in us (the innus would have been a better ID than id) and its eternally driven nagging prompts (wanty wanty wanty; do it do it do it). But for the reasons sketched in the post on ego, filtered through all the formative traces that remain, by a subject who does not have ego control over fundamental aspects of their desiring existence and experience. If you’ve ever felt very stubbornly horny in the absence of outlet or satisfaction (especially by feeling conspicuous arousal over someone you know or feel you shouldn’t have been aroused by), or dealt with a toddler (hopefully one you weren’t aroused by) at the supermarket who wanted something you wouldn’t let them have, you’ve had two ordinary experiences of this insistent aspect of human existence. Freud has given us a less kinder surprise, I guess you’d say.
In adult mental life, the superego also interjects and says ‘no!’, imposing dad’s Law… or crushing us with duty and with guilt, preventing us from either seeking out what we crave, making us feel guilty for wanting it, punishing us for the rest of our lives for those moments when we transgressed and did act on our yearn (and liked it very much, oh the shame… ), or getting us to punish someone or something else in lieu. George Castanza is one of TV’s great instances of a repressed, neurotic subject incapable of living out his desire successfully, and constantly thrown back into neurotic ruminating and repetitive romantics farces and failures – to tragicomic effect. Kramer, by way of contrast, seems to live in impossible alignment between id and ego, with no superego ever barring him from seeking his yearning, or bagging that carpark: he often does not see the Law, certainly he does not heed it. Actually, it’s interesting then to consider the extent to which Larry David’s own character in Curb Your Enthusiasm is basically George, but with a far more powerfully intrusive super ego, shifting most of the comedy to the writhing cringe where Larry either says something he ‘shouldn’t have’, or goes and tells the person who stole his parking spot why they’re wrong and ‘shouldn’t have done that’. I’m sure someone has already written a cultural studies thesis on this…
As the grand societal consequence of this repression and renunciation that is civilisation: we get law and order, houses and highways and art and literature. Inverting Hobbes by crossing out the no and the nor, we get “no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society” (Leviathan, chapter 13, italics mine). But, Freud adds, forever refiguring Hobbes or disfiguring the Hobbesian as an unhappy subject for giving up their natural liberty: tragically, as we all have to renounce our spontaneous pursuit of absolute pleasure although unconsciously ‘we’ do not give up the chase, so we will also always be neurotic, the car horn not honking out that we are hornier than we can know, strung out as we forever are sensing that something about this reality we’re trapped in isn’t and can never be quite right. Kramer can still see how he yearns in the midst of this, express his yearning to George, and move on California to act on it; for George, he craves, but he does not even know how he yearns, or how.
And you may ask yourself, "How do I work this?"
And you may ask yourself, "Where is that large automobile?"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house!"
And you may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful wife!"
…
You may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?"
You may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?"
And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?"
And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?"
~
So then, given repression and guilt, how does Freud work this; how does he get there?
He starts by touching one last time (aside from Moses and Monotheism, he wasn’t totally done with the topic) on how religion allows us to face this, by way of a purpose: paradise lost, cast out of Eden by our knowledge, we are left in a community of Eve-blaming sufferer-penitents who look to the punishing-protecting Father who will save us, provided we follow His rules in His book, worship Him, and have faith that there will be eternal Paradise in the afterlife. With ‘all of the above’, we can ‘spare ourselves the detour’ of destabilising existential reflection on our yearning, and just fall into the purpose that religion gives, although it is a narcissistic regression based on illusions. There’s always a price; the Kinder’s surprise is often pretty shit.
But what could it even mean to talk of a purpose in all this? Freud echoes Dostoyveksy in going so far as to say that the notion of a ‘purpose’ stands or falls based on a religious system, moot as the question is when we consider the ‘purpose’ of a porpoise or a porcupine, or that ‘knowing life’s purpose’, even if we could know its true purpose, would solve the problems of living: as Neil Young sang, ‘though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away’. Thus even giving oneself a purpose, even knowing the true purpose, wouldn’t fix all the suffering and frustration we, like everyone, routinely experience, all day, every day, almost without cessation. Again, it’s interesting to me how, at this moment, Freud’s account parallels Buddhism’s description of the whirlpool that is samsara. Poor George (and the George we recognise in all of us [which, a lot of guys I know, it turns out, deeply do recognise as/in themselves. In contrast, many of us have known a Kramer, but few of us identify with him]). George struggles, he craves, and the bumbles and suffers, trapped in his suffering, unable to escape it for California, or even just avow his yearning the way Kramer can, with almost total disinhibtion.
So even religion’s ‘answer’ to the purpose question does not enable us to confront life directly on our own (given that one must believe in a group and submit to its story book, directives, and renunciations). And with the monotheisms, not even with the promise of pleasure in this world: only in a believer community, and with the compensatory promise of something we get ‘in exchange’ for belief after we die (lol). First you have to live and suffer among believers – who, if they’re Salafists or Seventh Day Adventists, won’t even let themselves dance – then you have to die avowing faith in the promise, then you supposedly get the promise: although, so far, we haven’t heard back from anyone who’s achieved fulfilment. Alec MacGillis was so right to finger ‘fulfilment’ as also a deeper promise Amazon is offering us. One-click fulfilment is what we crave; then some shit thing we don’t want anymore turns up, or we stick it up ourselves and it doesn’t buzz correctly for us, sowe put it in our garage or cupboard for a few years, then throw it away.
Also: submitting to the authority of this community-held, community-enforced story does give purpose and meaning, but as many Enlightenments have reminded us, also at the cost of giving up our own cognitive freedom, and our ability to think for ourselves, think life through and then face facts on our own, how ever harsh, with our own values, without recourse to an imposed ‘belief set’ – which is a set complete – standing in lieu of our own reason. (This is where, for good reason, Fromm enters in Man For Himself. ) We all limp, and we can walk with a stick, or let the doorknockers sell us their stick, but walking with a stick means not standing steadily one one’s own two feet, conceding that one needs a stick, then letting someone supply you with one that they can also use to beat you, or encourage you to ostracise your family if they tell you that you don’t need a stick.
For everyone else, stood up by God and standing alone in the wind, facing life directly every day – without a stick or a light sabre and the force – is intolerable, and we’re left wondering what the purpose of this whole malarkey could possibly be, yet without an authoritative answer or the definitive porpoise of the Cosmic Answer Dolphin (if it seems I’m being flip, is that any sillier than the Easter Bunny).
How can we endure this? Freud is unequivocal. “If we are to endure it, we cannot do without palliative measures” (13).
Freud lists three types of palliative measures, and what they offer:
powerful distractions, like gardening (which allows us to make light of it)
substitute satisfactions, like art (which diminishes it)
intoxicants, like booze (which anaesthetises us to it)
What makes sense of these three categories, based on actual human behaviour? Simply: we want to be happy, we strive for happiness. But what does happiness mean? For Freud, its ‘means’ are the avoidance of unpleasure, and the pursuit of pleasure; its ‘ends’ are the absence of pain and the presence of strong pleasure. You can see how Freud goes for Erotic release as the apex of peak experiences, the Everest in our neverending struggle to get (no) satisfaction from the id that won’t take no for an answer. He is not interested in seeing the snow leopard up there, he is coming day and night.
I won’t critique this fully in this post, but I can never read past how Freud subs in happiness and pleasure without opening critical curiosity to it. As that true of your life and what motivates you most deeply, dear reader? Is life really about the pursuit of happiness, and is the latter really about pain-avoiding pleasure seeking? I know people like this, and there were moments when I was two, or sixteen, when life was (ideally) like that. But now? And is that all life is about? If we stay with Freud, we’re also out drinking with Peggy Lee, riffing on Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’:
And when I was 12 years old
My daddy took me to the circus,
The greatest show on earth
There were clowns and elephants, dancing bears
And a beautiful lady in pink tights flew high above our heads
As I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don't know what
When it was all over I said to myself
"Is that all there is to the circus?"
Is that all there is?
Is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is
Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’s experience of the Nazi camps revealed something analogous, but importantly different: there was the Hobbesian struggle for survival, yes; but beyond this, for Levi, there were people – some, not all – who managed somehow to keep seeing people as ends in themselves, and hold onto the intrinsic preciousness of life itself. Holding onto humanity in that way was never guaranteed, and some people lost it (or arrived at the camps without it and were more likely to survive for this reason, though with the selection this was never guaranteed), but some people ‘somehow’ were capable of maintaining it, as well as surviving. That’s an extraordinary insight brought back to us from one of the worst imaginable human experiences. For Frankl, beyond the struggle for survival, there was always the question of meaning, our search for it, even in those most extreme conditions. For Fromm, building indirectly on an encounter with this same abyss, as well as building on Freud (and Marx and Maslow and Buber and Spinoza), he contended that, beyond bread alone, we need (in my extrapolated wording of Fromm)to:
relate;
create and produce;
root ‘down’ and have solidarity 'with' groups and locales;
identify and have identities;
a unity of order and orientation practised as devotion.
If any of what Levi, Frankl, and Fromm contend is true, then gardening, singing, and getting high are not just palliative measures, though to be sure, they’ve all been used as productive diversions, booby prizes, and ways of drowning our sorrows. Yet they can and very often also do have an entirely different set of meanings (cultural, ethical, and personal), none of which are necessarily about pleasure seeking and pain avoidance: and here, I think, we can glimpse that life is its own purpose yet also transcends it in the many ways it points beyond itself. At the very least, I always wonder why Freud is content to give the final word to ordinary base behaviour, our ‘default settings’, as if everyone is only ever just George. And I notice that, although this model captures my motivations for my two-decade foray into binge drinking pretty well (Pedro’s ol’ motivars?), like Freud’s notion that nonsexual love is ‘aim inhibited’, it gives a funny account of gardening and music, and LSD (or being in a forest listening to techno on LSD). I take deep pleasure from music, but music isn’t about pleasure, not is it just a substitute satisfaction, a palliative measure in the face of my continued-though-meaningless suffering in our shared state of unbearable existential purposelessness. Freud is insisting on a powerful and pervasive set of coping mechanisms that all of us have used one or more of at one time or another, but by insisting on them, he’s missing something about reality that lacks nothing, something about life that has meaning, something about what we do that isn’t just about distracting, diverting or drunking ourselves out of recognising the unbearable purposelessness of this starship enterprise. For me, this has to be put beside what he misses about the oceanic feeling (and thus about religion and spirituality), which is also what psychoanalysis misunderstands about existence, at the very moment it claims to have its trumping depth-psychological explanation. However, with all this in mind, as many of the great thinkers of this and the last century keep noticing, he was also onto something, and the proceeding steps flesh out how we tend to cope, and why, in truly insightful ways that few people have been as sharp and concise in nailing. That’s for next time.