Ping Pong 41: Something is Happening Somewhere
The real problem with Freud is that we (and perhaps he) take him far too seriously. He can be understood by acolytes as the great prophet of the mind. The man who defined its deep inner shameful secrets. Freud’s achievement becomes that he is the man who ‘proved’ that all the joy of humanity, and all the complexity of living can be reduced to a few boring, tawdry and frankly banal complexes. Such an approach, attempts to universalize Freud (Oedipus becomes everywhere, and in all novels all of the time), and so misses the real point, the real originality in his basic approach. This originality lies in the fact that Freud realized something about modernity, very early on. Namely, that the increased complexity of the world challenged humanity in two directions. On the one hand it made the idea of a simple self, at ease with itself and what it is, very difficult to sustain and maintain. On the other hand, once the world is very complex, then there is no real guarantee that one’s passions will be adequate to express all the new situations that one finds oneself within. One is likely therefore always to feel at odds with the world. Both these concerns will be examined in depth within this Rant.
The most basic manner in which modernity challenges the ‘ego’ lies in the sheer increasing number of options and possibilities that is such a feature of modern living: A world where nothing can be allowed to be simple or easy or straightforward. A world where one must constantly choose and re-choose whatever one does. The ego, therefore stands upon the cusp of a whole variety of different possible worlds. Worlds between which it will to have choose in order to know that it is at all, but is constantly open to the possibility that it has made the wrong choice. From this last point four further ones immediately follow.
Firstly, what one chooses becomes rather integrated and complex. If one is choosing not only the big things, but also the little, then those choices are very likely to be caught up within each other. To choose to wear one series of modified chemicals as perfume, becomes a part of a wider system of choice. That is, it reflects the deep vortex of choices to be made: one choose it as one chooses a part of a package, a lifestyle option in which one’s ego can sensibly deploy itself. What is chosen is therefore not simply one thing and then another thing and then another; But rather a way of being, a way to screw what one is and what one does into one thing (and one thing alone).
At this point it becomes clear that modern advertising and Freudian thought run together so very well. Advertising takes the ‘package of a life’ problem, and turns it into the ‘dream of a life’ problem. To wear a scent becomes then to be, in a sense already a part of the dream world, the series of options (or at least it might be, if reinforced with the correct series of images). To exploit such a fact is of course to exploit the implication of Freud’s argument. If the ego is defined in the choices that it has made, then it is defined (at least initially) in fantasy. So that the Ego, that is, our feeling of being a self, is defined less in what we do, and more in what we feel ourselves to be, in making the choice of acting. An ego comes caught up in the fantasy of what it will be, and how it will act.
Thence it is this fantasy that advertising plays, connives with and warps. It plays with it by inserting its own product into the ‘dream’, in doing so of course it aims to reflect the fantasy back upon the dream, and extends it, making it appear the more real, by representing it. Our dreams, our mucky little hopes, and private ‘what ifs’ are reflected in the advertising image (or at least so the advert hopes). We become important (and matter to the product) because it reflects our little dream-thought processes. But of course in gaining such a position, the advert will immediately seek to extend its domain. The little dreams in which our ego is what it is, can be extended so that other worries (bad breadth, sweat, hair) might be created, and products sold. - So that the level of little ‘what ifs’ (which reflect greater ‘what ifs’) becomes instantly flexible. A product can be sold to furnish any delusion, and every life-dream.
Secondly, this last point, defines and explains why ‘celebrity’ matters. The celebrity (in all its shades), are the living icons (I mean the word literally) of the adverts. They reflect one series of lifestyle options; One set of choices which people can choose to be like, taken to its totemic extreme. But also they reflect the possibility that any one series might be extended or modified in some way. That is one of the ‘perks’ of being a celebrity, i.e. that one does not need to choose a life quite like the rest of us. One might be a model, but market a smell, ‘write’ a book, make a TV programme…A Celebrity therefore, is an individual to whom a fair number of the resources of capitalism are dedicated, resources that ensure that these individuals (and only these) are excused being forced into one (and only one) life: they live the dream of being able to choose many differing lives…
Thirdly, Freud realized that in a world where one must choose one life out of the bewildering complexities of lives (and that one life was all that one had in the absence of a soul or a God), the importance of being a child. This importance is of course in itself a social construction. In a world where people simply did what their parents did, there was barely any ‘childhood’ as such. There were adults, and infants: these old enough to work, and those who too were too young. The idea that there ought to be a special state in between these two (call it childhood and later call it adolescence), a state were one’s job was to learn about all the different things one might be, is therefore very much a creation of modernity.
Freud realized then that this state was peculiarly delightful for two reasons. On the one hand to be a child is to be excused from having to make a choice; on the other, one is excused because one has at least the possibility of making very many choices. To be a child is therefore to have many worlds in front of one (and to be allowed the space to choose the path one wanted). Childhood becomes then a very ‘special’ time and its uniqueness is likely to overhang and pattern lives. We will look back to our childhood choices and wonder what else we might have been; alternatively we will remember the joy of having the world in front of us (and someone else to make the decisions for us), and want it again (in some way). Freud therefore realised that there was a paradox in childhood. Here was a very desirable state, which we were only allowed to be in, for a short space of time, and then which could only live for us in memory. And the temptation to use these memories to re-conjure up our own childhood is a temptation we all face, a temptation which Doctor Freud wants to warn us of. It ought to be mentioned even in passing, that modernity modified this problem by creating the category of adolescence, a category older than a child, and younger than an adult, but one which we all appear to have been able to extend effortlessly into the rest of life (much to the advertiser’s joy, as it allows them to sell us many different lifestyle options).
Fourthly, to choose is necessary to restrict one’s other options and so likely to be problematic in itself. That is, ‘historically’ social structure and biological necessity has forced humanity into a certain series of options. One had to be what one’s parents were in order to be able to live at all. What forced people to choose certain lives was the iron hand of necessity. Once this necessity is lifted, there is a real problem about what replicates the tyrannical hand of necessity. The ability to force a life in one direction (and only one) will need to be something we carry around within us, something innate to us. Freud called this force the super ego. He moreover realized that this force, which locks us into a single simple individuality, will be the special concern of the state. It is after all in the state’s interest that we all behave ourselves, and all behave predictably. It will therefore be the role of the state to present us with ‘father figures’ (teachers, lawyers, priests, ‘experts’, czars and gurus), to instil a sense of order and the ability to choose upon us all.
Freud therefore understood that modernity would in a sense, involve a partial competition between two very mismatched powers. On the one hand there was the fractured ego, and the endless possibility (supported by advertising and beyond it, wider capitalism) to be someone else or something else. On the other, there was the state which desperately needed people to settle down into fixed careers (so that the task of ruling people becomes easy or even possible). There is no need for these theories to always be in competition. On the contrary, the ‘science’ of economics lies in defining ways in which the two domains can cooperate with one another (the free market places the emphasis on choice, Keynesianism on the power of the state). Be that as it may, there is no reason why they need to cooperate with one another. Governing a modern state becomes problematic and torn between the instinct for authoritarianism (with all that that involves) and for freedom (with all that that implodes).
This last point leads one back to the second major theme identified at the start of this Rant. It is an effect of modernity that humans are very likely to feel at odds with the world. This is because once the world becomes progressively more complex and intricate, it becomes harder and harder to define and manage feelings that are appropriate for that world. One feels one way, it feels good, and yet suddenly things change, then the feeling is challenged or channelled in a new direction, and what felt good, suddenly opens out onto madness. In a world were one cannot predict what might be possible in the near term (that is, where technology or chance might lead us, good or bad) one cannot easily define and maintain simple emotions. This problem can be understood on two different levels.
On a deep level one might see humans progressively at odds in the world they create. One can no longer have any real knowledge of what is going on elsewhere, or what other humans are developing, and how that development will then impact upon one’s life. Faced with this sheer lack of control, humanity reverts to those quite distinct (but complementary) theses. On the one hand one might assume that there is somewhere (anywhere but here) a great conspiracy afoot. A reason why things go wrong or do not behave as we forecast they should. The course of our lives, and our very feeling of powerlessness becomes a doctrine that ‘somewhere someone (or thing)’ is doing something wrong. This doctrine can then be further developed to include everything which we feel we do not fully understand (but are forced to rely upon). We therefore learn to distrust every industry be it the food industry (and its genetic modification) or the nuclear industry (with its radiation) whom we suspect to be a part of this ‘conspiracy’, and we do so universally, and in spite of the evidence (some such attacks might be justified scientifically, but others are certainly not). We therefore end up appearing to resent our own powerlessness, and blame it on others (and assume that they must be part of a conspiracy). Freud of course was up to his eyeballs in this idea (what else in the unconscious?). But by creating the personal account of an internal conspiracy for our own mystery, he clearly (if unintentionally) showed how we all, removed from our power, look for others to blame…
On a more personal level it is clear that modernity, in challenging feelings with constant change, forces us into endlessly new situations. Situations which have a tendency to bring us up sharp against our own ‘nature’. We become aware of our feelings as never before, as we are worried about where they will lead us, and how they will react to the world we find ourselves progressively within. It is at this point so very easy to see why Freud matters to explain this conflict. He presents us with a model that uses templates from apparently the past (certain family structures, and myths), to present us with a sequence of maps, which will allow one to situate one’s lost passions within the world, and even offer one the hope that these passions might be changed and developed. Freud offers us the dream therefore that we might be rendered powerful again, and that the soup of passions in which we find ourselves and own nature, might resolve meaningfully (or at all). A powerful promise, that possibly a belief in Freud, might in part affect.
In all the obvious drawbacks (and simply tomfoolery) of Freud, it is very easy to lose sight to his greatness. This greatness, which was partially unintentional, lies surely in understanding that modernity deeply complicates what we ask the mind, and so our feelings of selfhood, and our passions, to do and to feel. More than that, given the sheer complexity of our world there is no real guarantee that we will be able to feel appropriate feelings at all times and in all places. Freud is influential therefore because he not only realized this last fact, but also he devised an elaborate schemata for finding lost feelings, and bringing them back into the fold of a mind pitched into a complicated world. One might reject this second element of his work, but one cannot lose sight of the problem. ‘To feel’ in the modern world has become, on a personal level, tricky. But this only begs a second question. If holding down an individuality in modernity is difficult, what about the wider society? How is that challenged by modernity? A question which the next Rant will consider.
