missing out: in praise of the unlived life
History is not merely what happened; it is what happened in the context of what might have happened. – Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘History and Imagination’
Prologue
We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives – even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available – because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children – it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice – that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. (xi)
There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason – and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason – they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. (xii)
But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are. (xii)
We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. (xiii)
What is absent and felt to be essential is not, of course, a modern or a secular preoccupation; wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn’t there (and it is, indeed, the challenges to our wanting by other people, the clash of our desires with the desires of others, that make us who we are). (xvi)
Freud, in other words, like Camus after him – implicitly, but without quite saying so – believed that the only question, if not the only philosophical question, was whether or not to commit suicide. (xvi) #alanwatts
There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unlived life. (Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner’s unlived lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening. (xvii)
In our unlived lives we are always more satisfied, far less frustrated versions of ourselves. In our wishes – which Freud put at the centre of our lives – we bridge the gap between what we are and what we want to be as if by magic; and, by the same token, we sow the seeds of our unlived lives. (xix)
Describing how our wanting works, and works against us – how all our wanting has a history – Freud shoes us that frustration is at once both the source of our pleasure and the inspiration for our unlived lives. (xix)
Missing out on one experience we have another one. And then the comparisons are made. We choose by exclusion. The right choice is the one that makes us lose interest in the alternatives; but we can never know beforehand which the right choice will be. We never know if one frustration will lead to another. (xix)
The more we frustrate ourselves in wanting something, the more we value our desire for it. But Freud is also saying that it is only in states of frustration that we can begin to imagine – to elaborate, to envision – our desire. Though Freud is telling us something here about the pleasures of asceticism, this is not a counsel of renunciation; he is recommending frustration as the essential preparation for desire, as the precondition for its flourishing, and for the possibility of there being some satisfaction. (xx)
Waiting too long poisons desire, but waiting too little pre-empts it; the imagining is in the waiting. (xx)
Wanting takes time; partly because it takes some time to get over the resistances to wanting, and partly because we are often unconscious of what it is that we do want. (xx)
On Frustration
Tragedies are stores about people not getting what they want, but not all stories about people not getting what they want seem tragic. (1)
Lives are tragic not merely when people can’t have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them; when what they want entails an unbearable loss. (2)
If we were creatures less convinced and convincing about our so-called needs we would suffer in quite different ways. Tragedies begin with a person in an emerging state of frustration, beginning to feel the need of something; and at the beginning, for the protagonists, they are not yet tragedies. (4)
A tyrant is someone who believes that what he demands is available and can be given (to be entitled is, by definition, not to question the reality of what it is one is entitled to). (8)
(frustration is optimistic in the sense that it believes that what is wanted is available, so we might talk about frustration as a form of faith). When you feel frustrated you are the authority on what you want. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be a tyrant and you wouldn’t be in a rage. (8)
And put in a way, of course, the frustrator sounds more morally interesting, in a more complex predicament, than the one who is frustrated…
And yet there is something symmetrical about Lear and Cordelia; they both, at the beginning of the play, know exactly what they want. And I don’t think we solve this problem by saying, in one way or another, that what Cordelia wants is better than what Lear wants. It certainly isn’t worse, but it is no less intractable. (9)
‘The cause of tragedy,’ Stanley Cavell writes in his great essay on King Lear, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, ‘is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change’ (Disowning Knowledge). We would rather destroy everything than let other people change us, so strong is out memory of how changed we were at the very beginning of our lives by certain other people; people who could change our misery into bliss, as if by magic, and which we were unable to do for ourselves (all we could do was signal our distress and hope someone got the point)… Cavell intimates that we are always looking for an alternative to changing, to being, as he puts it, exposed to change… Everything depends on what we would rather do than change. (10)
Knowing what one wants is a way of not exposing oneself to change (or of taking change too much into one’s own hands, subjecting it to one’s will); and, by the same token, taking up Cavell’s point, is prone to make us murderous. So it is tempting to say that we can be at our most self-deceiving in states of frustration; as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). (12)
Frustration is always, whatever else it is, a temptation scene; something we are tempted to get rid of, something we crave false solutions to, something that lures us into the more radical self-deceptions. So there are two propositions I want to consider: first, that the frustrator is always, whatever else she is doing, wanting to change the person she is frustrating (she may drive the person crazy, or away, or be getting someone to face the facts, but a change is being sought; the malign and the benign frustrations are transformative). And second, following on from this, it is extremely difficult to feel one’s frustration, to locate, however approximately, what (or who) it might be that one is frustrated by (or about). (13)
Without frustration there can be no satisfaction. Frustration that is unrecognized, unrepresented, cannot be met or even acknowledged; addiction is always an addiction to frustration (addiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met). (14)
The fact that there are frustrations seems to imply, of course, that there are satisfactions, real or otherwise. The fact of frustration has, that is to say, something reassuring about it. It suggests a future. (14)
There is, though, one ineluctable fact, one experience that is integral to our development, something that is structural to human relations right from their very beginning; and that is, that if someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. (15)
You know someone matters to you if they can frustrate you. (15)
The demand for love is always a doubt about love; and all doubt begins as a doubt about love. (17)
All love stories are frustration stories. (17)
To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had… you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing – nothing comes out of nothing – but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them forever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. But one thing is very noticeable in this basic story; that however much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.
You might say, before you met the man or woman of your drams – or indeed any of the passions of your life – you felt a kind of free-floating diffuse frustration; and what you did by finding the miraculous object was locate the source of your frustration. Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by. In this sense we are always trying to find, what, in Lacan’s terminology, we lack. The sources we seek are the sources of our frustration. It would be logical, but only logical, to think – instrumentally, pragmatically, sensibly – that the point of finding out what is missing is to recover it; that at least the first stage of making up for a deprivation is to discover just what we are deprived of. That we need to know, or to sense, what we have lost in order to refind it. The finding of an object, Freud says in a famous pronouncement about the erotic life, is always a refinding of an object. And yet Freud also questions – in a way that was taken up by later psychoanalysts – the reality of these lost and found objects. He intimates – and states outright – that we may never have had this object in the first place, and that we can’t recover it. That the object, the person we are looking for and can never refind because it never existed, was the wished-for one. We never, in other words, recover from our first false solution to feeling frustrated – the inventing of an ideal object of desire with whom we will never feel the frustration we fear. The ideal person in our minds becomes a refuge from realer exchanges with realer people. (19)
(Lacan, in the hyperbolic version of this, said love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist). (20)
Perhaps what these psychoanalytic stories suggest, at its most minimal, is that there are (at least) four kinds of frustration: the frustration of being deprived of something that has never existed; the frustration of being deprived of something that one has never had (whether or not it exists); the frustration of being deprived of something one has had; and, finally, the frustration of being deprived of something one once had, but can’t have again. Clearly these forms of frustration flourish in the same hedgerow, and can’t always be told apart. But classified, put as starkly, as schematically as this, one thing quickly becomes self-evident: that these are different experiences with different consequences. They bring with them different possibilities, they inspire different futures, they call up different defenses, they generate different kinds of unease. (21)
And this is a story Freud wants to tell; about how the individual’s fate is bound up with what he can make out of frustration. In Freud’s ‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Psychic Functioning’ (1911) he reiterates and elaborates on how ‘the state of equilibrium in the psyche was originally disrupted by the urgent demands of inner needs’. It is a picture in which the psyche is taken to be in a state of equilibrium, a state of relative balance, until it is disturbed by desire. (21)
Once satisfaction by means of fantasy breaks down, then, Freud says, the individual has ‘to form an idea of the real circumstances in the outside world and to endeavor actually to change them’. (23)
Thought is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible. Thinking modifies frustration, rather than evading it, by being a means by which we can go from feeling frustrated to figuring out what to do about it, and doing it; what Freud called ‘trial action in thought’ – and what we might call imagination – leading to real action in reality. (25)
And the choice, we should also notice, is, in Bion’s language, between evading frustration and modifying it. If thinking is the way to modify it, then attacking one’s capacity to think would be an evasion; failures of imagination would be the unwillingness to bear with frustration. (25)
In this sense it is not desire that is the problem but the frustration it discloses. You can’t have a desire without an inspiring sense of lack. What we do to our frustration to make it bearable – evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on – takes the sting out of its tail. (29)
People become real to us by frustrating us; if they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy. (29)
If this was quantifiable we would say that the good life proposed by psychoanalysis is one in which there is just the right amount of frustration. It is, however, rather like Lear’s kingdom, not quantifiable. But it seems as though it is all the wrong kinds of frustration that make our lives what they are; that so much depends on what each of us makes of the too much and the too little we get. As Lear says, ‘The art of our necessities is strange’. There are tragic solutions to frustration. (30)
One of the ways we frustrate ourselves is through our self-deceiving satisfactions. (31)
And yet Freud, followed, among others, by Bion, is asking us to imagine something that is seemingly wildly improbable: that there can be only unrealistic wanting, but that unrealistic wanting can be satisfied only by realistic satisfactions; everything else being frustration in disguise, rage and vengefulness, what Cavell calls the murdering of the world. We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it. (33)
On Not Getting It
But mostly, not getting it, whatever it is, means being left out; left out of the group that does get it, and exempt from the pleasure that getting it gives. (34)
There is what Green calls a ‘permanent dialectic between misrecognition and recognition in psychic work’; we oscillate between wanting to get it and not wanting to. We can’t always afford to be recognized and to recognize ourselves and our needs because of the suffering entailed. To recognize our desire for what is – as both dependent on others, and forbidden and therefore transgressive – reveals us as too unacceptable to ourselves, too conflicted, too endangered; it puts us, quite literally, at odds with ourselves. It shows us too starkly just how disturbed we can be by our needs. (35)
Only the dialectic, the see-saw, between recognition and misrecognition makes things bearable; were we to straightforwardly recognize the essential aspects of ourselves, it is suggested, we would not be able to bear the anxiety. Were we to see our desires all the time as they really are, we would be incapacitated. We are, in actuality, something we don’t have the wherewithal to recognize. This is the (psychoanalytic) sense in which we don’t get it because we don’t want to. The only phobia is the phobia of self-knowledge. In the too-settled and coherent picture of human nature that is psychoanalysis, we are always too daunted by who we are. (36)
And this might mean, in this context, not always assuming that there is an it to get; living as if missing the point – having the courage of one’s naivety – could also be a point. (38)
As though to get some things, to be able to give a fluent account of them, is to misrecognize their nature; to pre-empt the experience by willing the meaning, or by supposedly articulating the meaning. (44)
This chapter is about what we are left with when we don’t get it. It is, after all, not an uncommon experience, but not one routinely sought. It is not illogical to think that if you don’t get it – at least, say, when one is being educated – you should try to get it, rather than do something else. Not getting it all too easily, in certain situations, programmes you, instructs you to do what you can to get it. (48)
Both experiences you will notice are fantasies of understanding, what we might call the promise of knowing things in common; though it would be difficult to describe what kind of experience this knowing was, or indeed whether it was a kind of knowledge. (53)
Not getting it, at its worst, is a malign helplessness; what we need in these situations is not so much a room of one’s own, but a gang of one’s own. The dream of like-mindedness is a dream about a group of people, or a couple, in which the possibility of not getting it – indeed the whole issue of not getting it – has disappeared. (54)
So we might consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get; and our picture of this can be, in adult life, when we are lost in thought, absorbed in something without needing to know why we are absorbed, or indeed what we are absorbed in; or when we dream. (54)
There is, in other words, a freedom – a freedom from the tyranny of perfection – in not understanding and in not being understood (understanding is not always the best thing we can do with need). All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs. (56)
As though the will to understand – our second nature, as it were – was sometimes a distraction from, or an evasion of, something more valuable or even more pleasurable. It might be like suddenly realizing that we had been given the wrong map, the wrong set of instructions; that, say, instead of our owing each other something it dawned on us that we could do something else together. And putting it like this, of course, reminds us that the wish not to get it might be akin, at least in some versions, to what Lacan calls our ‘passion for ignorance’ and what Freud described, rather less grandly, as our wish not to know about the things that we suffer from (as though not knowing about them diminishes our suffering, which is a tribute in itself to our investment in knowing). Not getting it could just be determined avoidance; being taught how not to get jokes could just be a surreal dystopian vision. It could be a kind of longing, in which satisfaction is felt to be the spoiler of desire, or food the saboteur of hunger. But what I want to promote here is the alternative or complementary consideration; that getting it, as a project or a supposed achievement, can itself sometimes be an avoidance; and avoidance, say, of our solitariness or our singularity or our unhostile interest and uninterest in other people. From this point of view we are, in Wittgenstein’s bewitching term, ‘bewitched’ by getting it; and that means bewitched by a picture of ourselves as conspirators or accomplices or know-alls. In this picture, once we are lucky enough to have developed into people for whom getting it and not getting it are the issue, we might then want to learn not getting it, or unlearn the supposed need to be the kind of people who always get it; who get the joke whether or not they find it funny; who get the poem whether or not they think it is a good one; who get the point so they are in a position to evaluate it. (57)
Not getting it might be described here as a determined, tenacious ignorance that is in the service of something better, something better than complicity; not an innocence or a faux naivety but a belief, for example, that in some situations not getting it is more revealing and getting it is more obscuring; that we can be fobbled off by satisfactions of getting it and oddly enlivened by the perplexity of not getting it. (58)
Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.
There is, in other words, a difference between somebody saying something that makes one feel understood and somebody saying something striking. There is, or there can be, a difference between reading something intelligible and reading something that has a powerful effect; between words as procurers of experiences and words as consolidators of knowledge. (59)
What would it be to be a person whom no one could easily describe, or whom no one could come up with a description of that seemed pertinent or useful or illuminating? When we meet one of these people – and we are more likely to meet them in fiction in the novels, say, of Dostoyevsky than in the novels of Jane Austen – it exposes the tacit knowledge, the tacit assumption, that we tend to live by; that there are many people whom we think we do more or less get, or whom we get enough not to have to worry about it. It is of course a question of some consequence, what we do with, what we want from, people we don’t get. In universities this is called the history of madness, or anthropology (and used to be called theology). We have psychiatric diagnoses to ensure that there are no people we don’t get. (60)
When Ashbery was asked in an interview why his poetry was so difficult, he replied that when you talk to other people they eventually lose interest, but that when you talk to yourself, people want to listen in. No one, other perhaps than Ashbery, talks to themselves in the way he writes poetry; but what Ashbery is suggesting in his whimsically shrewd way is that the wish to communicate estranges people from each other. If you talk to people, he suggests, they lose interest; if you ignore them – or, rather, if you ignore them by talking to yourself – they are engaged. As though curiosity might sometimes be preferred to communication or comprehension. The wish to understand or be understood – to, as we say, communicate or be accessible – might give a false picture, might be a hiding place, might be a retreat or a refuge. (61)
Understanding first – by definition, within reason – then the freedom to also not understand, or need to. Psychoanalysis is, in fact, the treatment that weans people from their compulsion to understand and be understood; it is an ‘after-education’ in not getting it. Through understanding to the limits of understanding – this is Freud’s new version of an old project. Freud’s work is best read as a long elegy for the intelligibility of our lives. We make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense. (63)
What Žižek calls ‘the attitude of overinterpretation’ is a self-cure for the fear of what I am calling ‘not getting it’. Overinterpretation is getting it with a vengeance. It betrays an anxiety, so to speak, of not being close enough to, not being of the same mind as, the one supposed to know. As though well-being, or even survival, was a function of closeness, and closeness was a function of knowledge (closeness means wanting to be close to those who know, especially to those who seem to know us). Knowledge, Freud tells us, is of absence; it is the way we measure distance. (67)
Paranoia is the attitude of overinterpretation in the service of survival. (70)
By ownership, in this context, I mean the fantasy of the impossibility of abandonment, of an infallible and unfailing dependence. In this predicament it is not the object but the keeping of the object that is paramount, as though knowing someone was a way of having them in safekeeping. When knowledge of oneself and other people is complicit with such fantasies, it is a form of world-magic. As though it were possible to know oneself and others in a way that would guarantee that one would never be let down. So one paradoxical proposition we might consider is that it is only knowledge of oneself and others that makes betrayal possible. (71)
Whereas the human condition as formulated by Cavell – which is, more or less, the human condition formulated by the psychoanalysis that follows on from Freud – is insoluble. There is nothing we could know about ourselves or another that can solve the problem that other people actually exist, and we are utterly dependent on them as actually existing, separate other people whom we need. (73)
We mustn’t let knowing do the work of acknowledging; otherwise we can end up disbelieving – that is, being unable to prove – the existence of other people and then of ourselves. Knowing other people, in psychoanalytic language, can be a defense, the defense, against acknowledging their actual existence, and what we need their existence for.
What is worth adding to this is that we have to start, developmentally, by knowing ourselves and others – by having, by being allowed, the illusion of such knowledge – in order to make acknowledgement possible. Getting it, at the beginning, is the only way we have of being free to not get it. The illusion of knowing another person creates the possibility, the freedom, of not knowing them; to be free, by not knowing them, to do something else with them. (74)
Psychoanalysis, as a treatment, is an opportunity to recover the freedom not to know or be known, and so to find out what people might do together instead. (75)
When it comes to sexuality, we don’t get it. But this doesn’t mean that we just haven’t yet come up with the right way of knowing, the kind of knowing suited to our sexual natures. It means that when it comes to sex we are not going to get it. We may have inklings about it, but we are not going to, as it were, get to the bottom of it. We can know the facts of life, but nothing else. We may, as we say, have sex, but we won’t get it. (77)
When it comes to love, knowing doesn’t work; when it comes to love, what is revealed is that one desires, but one has no idea what it is that one desires. Or it may be, as Proust wants to persuade us, that this wish to know is more pernicious, less clueless; that what one wants to know about the other, unconsciously, is what will cure us of our desire for them. Not knowing someone, not getting it, then becomes integral to the project of sustaining desire. (78)
States of conviction are attempts to regulate excitement. (78)
What both the so-called patient and the so-called analyst are so often struck by in the process of psychoanalysis is how so much of what seems to be true makes absolutely no predictable difference. Or, more exactly, that the difference that knowing can make is itself unknowable; that what you can discover about your own desire, about the history of your desiring, tells you nothing certain about your future proclivities. (80)
On Getting Away with It
Which is why, as we shall see, getting away with things is among our most confounding experiences. If, as Freud remarks, the child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence – the moment when he proves to himself that his parents cannot read his mind, and so are not omniscient deities – then it is also the first moment in which he recognizes his abandonment. The privacy of possibility has opened up for him. If you get away with something – though, as we shall also see, it rather depends on what it is – you have done well and you have done badly. You are released but you are also unprotected. You have, at least provisionally, freed yourself from something, but then you have to deal with your new-found freedom. The ambiguity of the phrase is partly to do with the off picture of freedom it contains. An exhilaration masks a fear. (87)
And since it is the whole idea of punishment that makes so many of our narratives hang together – the popular end that gives us a beginning and a middle, which are not always easy to find – getting away with something also means rewriting the story. If you do get away with something, you have revised your expectations, narrative expectations included. (88)
If it is the possibility, the anticipation, of getting away with something that is among our greatest excitements, then the unlikelihood of such things happening is the complementary reassurance. ‘Daydream’ – the wishful fantasies of everyday life – is our word for getting away with it; reality tends to be the place invoked for where this may not be possible. (89)
But, clearly, getting away with something, doing it with impunity, leads us to the idea of being found out; because we have only ever got away with something until we are found out. And yet, of course, we have always already been found out by ourselves. (92)
Our acts can be undiscovered by others only if we have first noticed them ourselves. But our acts do not necessarily go unpunished if they are noticed only by ourselves. (92)
One of the things I want to consider – indeed, one of the things that is integral to the subject – is a simple fact: that getting away with things, whatever else it is, is always a pleasure, however brief. We like to do it ourselves, and we like to hear of other people who do it. (101)
I want to suggest that getting away with it can be publicly discussed in all its complexity. In politics, as in business, it has to be at least publicly condemned, however gleefully enjoyed it is in private. When we admire people for breaking a law that we have consented to, we put ourselves in a difficult position. It is this position that the arts are particularly well suited to explore. (102)
If we ‘no longer think of ourselves as having responsibilities towards non-human entities such as truth or reality’, we are fairly and squarely in the world of getting away with it. (105)
Getting away with it is like an apparently private language within and made possible by a public language; like a dialect. It is as though the law has let me break the law, as long as I (we) keep it secret; the law is complicit with my breaking it by not being omnipotent. (106)
Getting away with it – as a talent, as a skill – is something you would keep to yourself, or only tell people who were on your side; indeed, the telling of it would create a group. But what if getting away with it was a new moral principle or project? What if it announced a new morality? In this new morality – which sounds like a moral game, or a parody of the idea of morality – moral excellence would reside in being able to successfully exempt yourself from rules you have consented to. You would always be getting out of it – the law you promote and claim to abide by. The Good Person would be replaced by the Impressive Person; and what would impress would be the breaking of rules without punishment; the bearable lightness of being. Where once there were the principled, now there would be the opportunists; the clever would displace the pious.
These new moralists would not be amoral, because they would depend on the law for their new morality. They would be self-confessed double agents. They would be able to practice their duplicity only by advertising it. Being caught would be the crime. They would need to keep the world as it is, not to go on rebelling against it, but to go on cheating it. They would be pro law and order. And they would have only one real enemy: a law that was infallible, or, to put it another way, an authority that was omniscient. They would be the lovers of loopholes, of apparent greatness, of things one can find a way round. From one point of view, one might say, it would be a morality for the disillusioned; or, rather, for those who want to believe in higher authorities, and don’t want to believe in them, at the same time. (108)
On Getting Out of It
To unlock the innermost secret of morality and culture is to know simply: what to avoid. – Phillip Rieff, Charisma
Phillip Larkin:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself. (111)
The project, so to speak, is to stop the relentless transmission of misery. What is believed in, or at least what is being proffered and proposed, is simply the getting out, the breaking of the cycle. (113)
It is as though when we get out of something we know too much: we act as if we know far more than we could – about what would happen if we stayed. That in order to free ourselves from certain things we have to fake an omniscience about the future; and acknowledging this need not be a (masochistic) counsel to endure oppression, but another way of thinking out alternatives. Sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have. And sometimes we need to be able to do this in order to free ourselves. (114)
When someone wants a get-out clause in a contract, or indeed in a relationship, they are allowing for the possibility that something better might turn up; they know that there might be something better, which they need to include in their calculations. Needing to formalize this possibility acknowledges, at its most minimal, that I may not have got what I most want, even if I don’t know what that is. And there is, of course, an optimism in assuming that better things may be coming down the line. If get-out clauses lack commitment, they also underwrite an openness about the future. My get-out clause, contracted publicly or reassuringly affirmed in the apparent privacy of my own mind, is my uncertainty about my own desire. (116)
This is my supposition: we live as if we know more about the experiences we haven’t had than about the experiences we have had. (118)
What the child divines in the book is what he may be capable of; childhood is the developing of an appetite for future possibility. We know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have. Though it is, as we shall see, a strange kind of knowing; and it goes back a long way. When Freud wanted to persuade us that perception was distorted by wish, he wanted to persuade us that we tend to see merely what we want in what is there, and that knowing (and not-knowing) is all to do with wanting rather than with truth. We see a future of satisfaction in a present of deprivation. When we look forward, as we can’t help but do, something in the present moment is always being overridden. (119)
One wants to get out of something only when one presumes that one knows what is going to happen if one doesn’t. Wanting to get out, in other words, then, whatever else it is – and it may be essential for survival – is all too easily a form of omniscience. We want to get out before we know what it is we are getting out of. At its most extreme, this is what we call a phobia. (123)
Why do we seem to know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the ones that we do have? Because only this makes the getting-out possible, and because it is deprivation that makes us imagine. (128)
The certainty of knowing what one is escaping from is one of the misrecognitions required to construct an acceptable image of oneself. Getting out involves, whatever else it involves, not going on looking at what you don’t want to see. (130)
Not, what can you get from this book? But, what can it get you out of? If reading can be, in the best sense, escapist, then it might help one discover what it is one wants to get away from. (130)
Harold Bloom: “If you don’t believe in your reading then don’t bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don’t care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not.” (131)
And the reason the strong reader is not seeking agreement or consensus for his reading is because no one can tell you that you don’t need what you claim to need, they can tell you only that you shouldn’t; just as no one can tell you that the joke that amuses you isn’t funny, they can tell you only that you shouldn’t be amused by it. (132)
Love starts from hate. The precursor of love is knowing what we don’t want, what we want to get out of. (133)
Our need for others is a kind of defeat or capitulation: the submission that turns into our most difficult admission. Freudian Man, as he was once called, can get into things – or at least get into the things that he most desires – only by trying to get out of them. The way in is through the out door; avoiding things is a way of attending to them, of keeping them in mind. (133)
Freud invites us to wonder what relationships would be like if we dropped the idea that they had anything to do with indebtedness or obligation. (134)
There is no subject to which the literary arts are more devoted; literature is escapist, whatever else it is, in its incessant descriptions of people trying to release themselves from something or other. (134)
Those who cannot pretend to know everything about the past are doomed to repeat it. We can get out only by presuming an omniscience about what we are getting out of; which is always, whatever else it is, an omniscience about the satisfactions we seek. And it is the written, spoken and sung arts – the verbal arts – that are the arts of omniscience. Only in words is anyone ever omniscient. And omniscience, as we shall see, is the enemy, the saboteur, of satisfaction. (136)
On Satisfaction
Lear, Othello, Macbeth are stark instances of what Wittgenstein famously referred to as being ‘bewitched’ by a picture. They knew so certainly what they wanted partly because it is impossible to have a wish without having a picture of its satisfaction; desire always comes with this picture attached; though it is often a tacit picture, as it were, an unconscious one. A picture rendered unconscious by the exigencies of reality. Satisfaction has always happened in our minds before we are satisfied; satisfaction comes first, that is to say, as a form of truth (states of conviction are the closest we come, as adults, to this initial fantasy of satisfaction). It is as though in fantasy wanting always brings with it a guarantee; not always that there will be satisfaction, but of what satisfaction will be like when it comes… Our doubts tend to be about whether we can get the satisfactions that we seek, not about the nature of these satisfactions. (138)
The language of satisfaction is notably impoverished, riddled with clichés and exclamations, ‘that was amazing’ and so on. But one of the strange things about satisfaction is that its anticipation precedes its realization; that it happens twice – not quite the first time as a farce and the second time as a tragedy – but first wishfully (in fantasy) and then in reality, if one is lucky. Satisfaction is looked forward to before it happens – we have the experience in our minds before we have the experience – and this looking forward makes all the difference to what can happen. When we wait too long for someone we are looking forward to seeing, we see them differently; often we see them, at least in the first instance, as not worth looking forward to. (139)
So, at least unconsciously, there is nothing about which we are more certain than the nature of our satisfactions; or, to put it another way, Freud describes how much work we do to ensure that our satisfaction is no surprise. And this leaves us with a paradox, which has to take the form of a question: when you already now what satisfaction is, how can you possibly find out what it is like?
A picture of satisfaction, we might say then, at least to begin with, is a flight from wanting; a refuge from the rigors and risks of desire; a refuge, in fact, from real satisfaction. In fantasy, in the wishing scene, we leapfrog over the obstacles, or rather we don’t succumb to them… We fast-forward through the frustrating bits. In Bion’s language we ‘evade’ frustration rather than ‘modifying’ it. Our fantasies of satisfaction – our preeconceptions about satisfaction – are where we hide from the possibility of real satisfaction. (140)
Fantasy is the medium in which we jump to conclusions. And the conclusions we jump to are about satisfaction, and are themselves satisfying. (140)
It is the link between satisfaction and redress – the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy – that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire – make it literally unreal – with picture of its satisfaction… Our fantasies of satisfaction are clues to our fears about desiring. Wishful fantasies are the original sins of omission. (143)
So we have to start imagining desiring not without an object of desire, but without imagining too certainly the satisfactions that might accrue, not being too quick to satisfy ourselves in fantasy; and, when we do, being able to ironize such satisfactions (not take them too literally, or too solemnly). And doing this, of course, affects our imagining of the object of desire and what we can claim to know about it… Tragedies are dramas in which satisfactions are too exactly imagined by their heroes, and then too ruthlessly believed in and pursued (so one cure for tragedy would seem to be the pursuit of falsification)… and they are dramas about the consequences of too exactly imagining such things (which means imagining them without irony); of making a satisfaction into a thing. (144)
It is worth wondering what happens to our erotic life, or to our sociability with each other and ourselves, when certainty becomes our picture of satisfaction. And what happens to our satisfaction, to our possibilities for satisfaction, when it does. It has indeed become difficult not to imagine satisfaction as having something to do with certainty; and I would add to this that the quest for certainty in certain areas of our lives is a quest for revenge. Not merely a taking revenge on the uncertainties of life, but revenge for the uncertainty built into wanting. (146)
And adjustments can be made to narrow the gap or to avoid it, which are all variations on the continual theme of mitigating desire. So-called tragic heroes are by definition people who don’t set off wanting something with a view to something else more satisfying turning up along the way. They are not casual or cool or freewheeling or easily distractible or waiting for something to turn up. They are, as we say, determined; overdetermined. They are intent. (146)
And if this object of desire was a person, our picture of satisfaction would be of some kind of certainty in our relation to them, say, a certainty of their presence, of their availability, of their reliability, of their telling us the truth, of their fidelity; of their being, in short, knowable. The providers, we might say, of certain satisfactions. (150)
Tragedies occur when people get their sense of entitlement wrong. (158)
There are, we might say, certain disillusionments that tragic heroes (and heroines) can’t acknowledge; indeed, the plays are stories about the consequences of unacknowledged or uncompleted disillusionments… Disillusionment may be tragic, may, rather, have its tragic side, but the true havoc of tragedy, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is of disillusionment avoided… When the ordinary catastrophic disillusionments are repressed, they return with a vengeance. When Paradise is lost, people can’t just move on. (160)
What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of our dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We can’t afford to live as though certain things are true about ourselves. Our satisfactions have to be realigned. (161)
Annette Baier: “Love between unequals in power is good of its kind when it prepares the less powerful one for love between equals. It fails when what it produces is either a toleration of prolonged unequal dependency, or a fear of any dependency, rather than a readiness for reciprocal and equal dependency.” (162)
Whatever else he has done Freud has exposed our avoidance of love as an avoidance of satisfaction. We need, as he suggested, to have better – more interesting, more enlivening, more satisfying – conversations about our frustrations. (168)
Appendix: On Acting Madness
Thinking of oneself as sane can be infinitely reassuring, but it can also be radically misleading; and, indeed, distracting. Part of the terror about so-called madness is that it represents one of our unlived lives, something that might have happened to us, something we might have done; something that may have been the only solution to the direst of circumstances. Or even a temptation we had to avoid. When we think of the lives we may have led, there are lives we are relieved to have missed out on, and many more lives perhaps – many more version of ourselves – that we are not quite so sure about. (170)
Great claims are made for the self when it begins to sense its own entropy. At a loss, tremendous gains are proposed. So-called mad people, who are not all the same – just as tragic heroes are not all the same – experience themselves as on the verge of disappearing; they are the always-about-to-be invisible. The person acting madness has to impersonate someone who is quite literally trying to keep up appearances. There is, needless to say, something very theatrical about this. Or, to put it slightly differently, it is a predicament that calls up a certain theatricality.
The fear of losing one’s place in other people’s minds – the fear of the invisibility of one’s need – can summon up the most vivid, the most dramatic performances in oneself. (173)
But the idea of someone acting madness might make us want to think something like: as the sane are to the mad, so the actor is to his part. The actor acting madness – in some ways like the mad person himself – has to learn to appear to be mad. But to be mad in a way that holds people’s attention; that is, mad in a way that most mad people can never be, but need to be. The mad are people who have never found, or never made, or never had, a sufficiently attentive audience. And this in itself might make us wonder what an audience is for. And remind us that the first audience is family. And how they responded to our first performances is integral to who we are; and to what we feel about performing. And, indeed, to what we feel about madness. (174)
But mad people, as all these plays dramatize, make people jump to conclusions about them (anxiety makes people jump to conclusions); madness tempts people to be more knowing than they are. It certainly makes people work because they have something about someone that has to be dealt with (the mad are trying to make themselves impossible to ignore and impossible not to want to ignore). (175)
But real madness breaks the social bond, and acting madness must not: the mad person’s sociability is by definition precarious; the acting of madness, as I say, has to be engaging. Acting madness means holding and keeping people’s attention; being mad means always being about to lose it, or living as if it has always already been lost. Or that it can never be recovered. Acting madness is about getting people to be attentive in a different kind of way. Madness transforms the nature of our attention, the quality of our attention, when it doesn’t actually destroy our willingness to attend. (178)
In psychoanalysis – one among many of these transformed forms of attention at once demanded and created by those people disturbed by modern life – the analyst listens to the ‘mad’ person, or to the madness in the person, sees very little of his life, and speaks; the specified aim, the project of the so-called treatment, is the transformation of suffering through redescription. In the theatre the madness is impersonated, the drama is enacted, and the audience, at least the modern polite audience, listens. The play, of course, is scripted; the psychoanalyst shows the patient how he uses his script to defend himself against his madness. The psychoanalysis, at least by intention, is therapeutic if not actually curative; the theatrical performance does not circumscribe its aims. In one of these social forms the listener is paid, and in the other he pays. What the theatre world and the profession of psychoanalysis both believe is that the mad are worth listening to; indeed, may be among the people who are most worth listening to. Or, to put it slightly differently, the mad parts of ourselves may be the parts (in both senses) worth taking in. But it may be very important that there is somewhere in a culture where people must pay to listen to the mad, rather than the other way round. Somewhere where it is shown that madness – or, rather, madness unmet – is, among many other things, radical self-destructiveness, and that, at the end, there may be someone else that one can return to being. Where it can be borne in mind that madness can be at once a fate and a role; that if, say, it is learned, it might be unlearned. That if it is dumb, repetitive, or terrifying, it can be eloquent, startling and moving. And that radical self-destructiveness can be a form of radical self-knowledge. (179)
What the psychoanalyst shares with, or learns from, the contemporary theatre audience is the tacit belief that, when it comes to madness, you speak only after you have heard as much as you can. (182)
We, or at least some of us, have been persuaded to believe that there are not, alas, two kinds of people, the sane and the mad, but that there is, as we say, a continuum that we are all on; that we are all an uneasy mixture of the two, if there are two such states; or even that we make this reassuring distinction because we know somewhere how blurred the boundaries are; that a lot of so-called sanity is crazy, and that there is a lot of sanity in so-called madness. And indeed that there is some kind of complicity between the nominally sane and the nominally mad. And just as sanity and madness may be secret sharers, there may be no more to a person, as Macbeth famously wonders, than the parts they play. That is to say, all those people who no longer believe in an essential self – or, indeed, in an essential anything – people who don’t need the God-terms, who no longer find words like ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ any use, are drawn to more performative accounts of the self; they think of the ‘self’ as a word to cover the repertoire of performances desired by them and demanded of them in a particular culture, at a particular time. This is what Irving Goffman called ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’ and Stephen Greenblatt calls ‘self-fashioning’; a presentation is made, there is a fashioning, the language of artefacts replaces the language of nature. For these people there are not true and false selves but preferred selves; when I say that something is ‘not really me,’ I’m not saying this is against the grain, as though there is a grain that I am; I’m saying that for a variety of reasons I don’t want to be or do whatever it is. I can’t be anything I want, but there is more to me than I know. In this view sanity and madness are two of our culturally inherited roles or parts or options; we may not choose them in a way an actor might choose a role, but we may choose them in the way an animal tries to find an environment that works for it, or the way in which someone who bets on horses tries to pick a winner. And there is nothing else we can do but perform ourselves. There is no alternative to acting, no binary opposite for us to prefer. All the world’s a stage and there are no other worlds. We are always and only acting, and the question asked in Twelfth Night – ‘Are all the people mad?’ – has been answered in the affirmative. Madness is part of our potential; whether we are born mad (as some psychoanalysts believe) or driven mad or are genetically predisposed to madness, as many people now seem to believe, madness is part of our make-up, so to speak; but no one is exempt from the possibility of madness, and everyone recognizes something of themselves in the mad, if they can bear to. (183)
Sometimes we are inclined to think one thing, and sometimes the other; our moods, as Emerson remarked, don’t believe in each other. (184)
These people, some of us, some of the time, know that whatever else we are, we are also mad; and that we can at least sometimes experience ourselves not as so-called multiple personalities, but as people with several often incompatible versions of ourselves; as people who have some choice as to how they act, and who can easily think of themselves as wanting to improve their performances. What begins as pathology can soon become the norm; the shock of the new and the pathologizing of the new can be inextricable. (185)
So-called mental health, that is to say, is normative; and the norms are created by consensus (and the consensus can be created, as it is now, by both science and the market, by both telling us the truth about reality, and that mental illness is real in the same way that physical illness is). If Lear or the Macbeths or Poprishchin were living with us now, there would be professionals who would know what was wrong with them, treat them accordingly, and we wouldn’t have needed all this drama, all this talk. Less said soonest mended. To be drugged is not always to have been heard; when it comes to madness the theatre has always been the best antidote to the drug-culture. The theatre has always been the real antipsychiatry movement. (186)
The mad person… has difficulty finding anyone who can stand them; this is their quest. But the person acting the mad character has to be utterly alluring; what we might be unable to stand we must also find irresistibly compelling. (188)
Symptoms are always a form of self-cure; you first hear about your problem from your proposed solutions to it. The alcoholic is suffering from whatever conflict alcohol was initially a solution to, and then the solution becomes the problem. The real question is not, how can someone stop drinking, but rather what was the alcohol a self-cure for in the first place? So in thinking about these plays, and particularly about the acting of madness, we need to think of madness as a form of self-cure; a self-cure so drastic that the original problem or illness or predicament – it is difficult to know what the right word is – is utterly lost track of. The problem is cast into oblivion by the solution. (194)
We see each of the protagonists pushing their plans forward; and each of the heroes, it is worth noting, claims, at least at the outset, to know exactly what he wants. Tragic heroes are consistent in their wanting; and make us wonder, by the same token, about what kinds of consistent wanting we call mad, or how insistent wanting has to be before we call it mad. (195)
…it is amazing what you can sometimes hear when you listen. (198)
Acting madness means speaking your lines as though they make sense and as though they don’t; as though they have a sense, but no one has quite yet got it. In each of these plays it is the progressive not-getting of the mad character’s words that drives him mad, that destroys him. (199)