Lecture Two: “A Social and Psychic Revolution of Almost Inconceivable Magnitude”: Countercultural Bohemia as Prefiguration

 

Bentham famously proclaimed that mankind is at the mercy of two sovereign masters: pleasure and pain. Human beings will pursue pleasure and avoid pain. It seems obvious! But Freud discovers that this apparent truism just doesn’t hold up, actually. Much of the time, we will pursue things which seem, on the face of it, painful. There is, in a way, a second-order level of enjoyment, which is the enjoyment of things which, on the first-order level, seem to be painful. And yet, part of the problem that Freud had with his patients was this attachment to a second-order level of enjoyment. Because if it’s simply a matter of people being in pain, and that pain was straightforwardly undesirable, then you could fairly easily wean them off the pain, but if there’s some second kind of satisfaction to be derived from things which were superficially painful, then it’s much more problematic, and other attachments are formed. This is what stood in his way and one of the key things that he finds.  

 

So, then there is this problem of “repetition compulsion”, which is central to Beyond the Pleasure Principle of 1921. It’s commonly known that Beyond the Pleasure Principle, like Civilisation and its Discontents, was substantially informed by the experience of World War One. Because one of the things that Freud was puzzled by was shellshock, from the First World War. Shellshock, which is a phenomenon whereby people would repeat the trauma of a shell going off near them. So, if a book fell from a shelf, they would immediately be thrown back into the situation of a shell having exploded close to them.

 

We kind of take this for granted now. Freud asked the naive question:Why? Why do people do this? Because if an organism was simply motivated by staving off panic and moving towards pleasure, then what compels it to repeat these extremely unpleasurable things? Part of the answer for Freud is some kind of mastery over the trauma. The repetition enables the organism to claim the trauma for itself, in a way. And he discusses this with the so-called “fort–da” game… He plays this game [with his grandson], to do with the absence of his mother, who is spending more and more time apart from him, he plays this game which involved, I think, some sort of small object that you throw away and it’s here, it’s gone, it’s there, it’s gone, it’s here, it’s gone… And so, instead of simply avoiding the pain of the absence of his mother, he turned it into a game of which he could have some sort of mastery, and which tells him some sort of narrative in the process. 

 

This compulsion to repeat, then, becomes crucial. But beneath that there is then this more metaphysical problem that emerges for Freud from the very basic drives of human beings. And this is where he starts to posit the so-called “death drive”, which is highly complicated… We’ll broach it though.

 

Partly, it’s complicated because Freud himself is not fully sure what he thinks it is. You can see it in almost diametrically opposed ways, in some respects. The first way to see it, then, would be simply as a destructive or aggressive drive, which is simultaneously also the drive towards self destruction. And Freud starts to posit this as an independent drive from erotic drives, the drives for pleasure. But, hold on a minute … You see, what he also starts to think is, well, is this really opposed to the pleasure principle or another form of the pleasure principle? Because what the death drive ultimately seems to be aiming towards, at least in one of its versions, is acquiescence, peace, ultimate calm — the release from desire itself. This is the so-called “nirvana principle”… We can see it as if the organism is like an elastic band that is being pulled. It’s in a state of tension. And there is this innate impulse towards the release of that tension, just in the tension itself. If I keep pulling the elastic band, something doesn’t pull it back — it pulls itself.

 

This is one way that Freud starts to think of the death drive. The death drive has to be pivoted in its aim, and this is how Marcuse essentially discusses it — the erotic drives are there to impede the goal of the death drive towards acquiescence. The organism finds its own way to death — that’s the line that he takes. 

 

There’s another way of thinking about the death drive. A lot of Lacanians take this view of the death drive. People like Žižek. The deathdrive doesn’t aim at death; it doesn’t aim towards a final state of acquiescence. It aims at, rather… I don’t want to say an indifference to death.

 

One of Žižek’s examples is The Red Shoes. (. . . )

It’s where a ballerina puts on a pair of enchanted dancing shoes and they basically dance her to death. She’s initially in a state of ecstasy but, eventually, she can’t keep dancing at that sort of frenzied pitch, and so she dies.

 

The point is not that she was taken over by something which aimed at killing her. It’s that she happened to die because the drive made her indifferent to death; indifferent to organic death. This is a drive that was stronger than the desire to avoid death.

 

So, there are these two almost diametrically opposed senses of the death drive here, but what they have in common is this antipathy towards the idea of a utilitarian-style disposition of our desires. So, there’s all this to contend with. And this leads Freud, then, into his most pessimistic theses, which are expressed most powerfully in Civilisation and its Discontents, which haunts this chapter of Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation.

 

Mark Fisher, in "Post Capitalist Desire. The Final Lectures, edited by Matt Colquhoun