“Meaning is the polite word for pleasure”
—or, how the beast in the nursery learns to read
In our first lesson, concerning how “the world must be made to mean,” we encountered the rather rude proposal that none of us is born altogether human, that each of us comes into this world as an inadequate little animal that—not who, mind you, but, more precisely, that—must be turned into a small human child. We also encountered the unflattering suggestion that our entire species universally and transhistorically experiences a “specific prematurity at birth” (Lacan 1966b/2006: 78). This prematurity is called upon to account for our woefully insufficient animality, for what Lacan calls the “organic inadequacy of [our] natural reality” at the experiential get-go, “a certain dehiscence at the very heart of [our] organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of malaise and motor uncoordination of [our] neonatal months” (1966b/2006: 77, 78).
But what accounts for our prematurity, for our allegedly over-early launch out into this world that must be made to mean? How does it happen that we as a species don’t take as much time in uterine space as we apparently “should” and so seem “biologically determined” to endure a period of abject immobility and helpless dependency considerably longer than that of any other animal neonate? A conjectural explanation for our endemic “organic inadequacy” at birth is that premature birthing developed as a strategy of evolutionary adaptation—when our primate ancestors first assumed an upright gait, this postural shift precipitated a skeletal pelvic contraction in proto-human females such that heads of fully formed fetuses were suddenly too big to be born. But whatever its speculative prehistorical cause, the ongoing effect of our prematurity—and thus, our dehiscent historicity—is that, unlike other animals, born simply as small versions of what they already organically are, we are not born human but have to be made that way. In other words, while any non-human animal that survives its neo-nativity will spontaneously grow to become an adult of its species, the infant of our species, congenitally inadequate to its own animality, requires careful assistance, orthopedic correction, extensive training, and prolonged cultivation if it is ever actually going to become a human being, a viable participant in extra-uterine human reality. If the neonate, for some reason, never receives its “basic training,” if nobody ever “does any work” on it or with it, if nobody ever orders or induces it to mean, then this organism may somehow survive in the purely physiological or “animalistic” sense, but, bluntly stated, it won’t become “one of us.” It won’t, simply by virtue of growing larger, just naturally and spontaneously develop the characteristics that distinguish us—or, that we cultivate in order to distinguish ourselves—from non-human animals.
In a way, this problem, the primordial discord of our species, is registered in the quirks of our vocabularies. Consider, for example, how fairly commonplace such English words as “humanization” and “dehumanization” can seem, while nonce words like “caninization” or “deporcinization” seem fairly absurd. And the reason for the absurdity is clear enough. You might be able to teach a puppy some nice tricks, but you don’t exactly have to “caninize” your mutt in order for it to become a dog. And because the individual oinker is completely identical to its own porcine life, the only way to completely “deporcinate” a pig would be to kill it.
Humans, however, do have to be humanized, or socialized—worked on and put into words—in order to become certifiably human. And while, unlike non-human animals, we have proven ourselves particularly adept at genocide and self-slaughter, it is of course quite possible to “dehumanize” people and peoples without actually having to go so far as to kill anybody— indeed, we’ve been performing this nasty trick on ourselves and each other for pretty much all of our history. It is sometimes said, though rarely anymore, that people should study “the humanities” so as to become “more fully human.” But as far as I know it has never been suggested that a horse should study “the equininities” to become more fully equine, or that an ass needs to throw itself into “the asininities” to become more completely asinine.
But let’s sum up the idea that I’ve been braying about here, an idea that may come as a kick in the pants to any self-respecting common-sense adult, but which, I would venture, most very young children intuitively understand—the idea that we “adulterated” human beings are actually only ever relatively humanized beings, never anything other than anthropomorphized animals in a world that must be made to mean. Now, when I suggest that children basically get this, that they actually understand humans to be socialized or anthropomorphized animals, what I mean is that children at a certain age can probably sense what’s really going on with them, what’s really happening to them, even if they couldn’t articulate the ordeal in such sophisticated language—children, that is, may unconsciously register the fact that their “animality,” such as it is, is being transformed by and into “sociality,” that their already quite limited “animal joy” is being further sacrificed to the socio-symbolic, that their “animal being” is being exchanged for intelligible meaning.
Of course, this exchange isn’t really the worst existential bargain in the world, for the child no doubt painfully perceives the extent of its own helpless dependency, the sheer inadequacy of its otherwise enjoyable animality. Ambivalently, then—grudgingly and gladly— the child, in order to become “a child,” a “who” instead of a “what,” accepts induction into “the human club” as a sort of consolation prize for not having been a particularly successful beast. But this child, I speculate, unconsciously (and, again, ambivalently) may very well register the cost of following the symbolic order. At some level, at some other frequency, so to speak, the child knows that something is being lost as well as gained in its mandatory morphing from a “what” to a “who,” from an “it” to an “I,” from “bad” little animal to “good” little boy or girl.
Evidence for this awareness on the child’s part might be found in the enduring popularity among schoolchildren of a certain species of animation. I refer to the pleasure that children take in watching animated cartoons that feature nothing but anthropomorphized animals—dogs, cats, mice, birds, bears that/who are capable of walking upright, can engage in relatively polite (if rather inane) conversation, and so on. Very young spectators probably wouldn’t long enjoy watching a realistic cartoon canine that could only bark, growl, bite, eat from a bowl, crap on the sidewalk, and so on; they would be bored, dismayed, or possibly even frightened by animated adults who behaved just like their parents (and thus, their own futures). But children do psychically invest in and gain representational pleasure from animatedly anthropomorphized animals. They find meaning in these figures simply because, as small animals that/who are in the process of being anthropomorphized themselves, they identify with these “funny” forms. These “silly” characters correspond profoundly to their own transitional state—no longer specifically animal, not yet certifiably human. Such cartoons compensate children for their acquiescence to the symbolic; they make good the little human animal’s huge animal loss.
But let’s be clear about the “nature” of this loss. It of course involves a loss of nature, a loss of animal enjoyment, a disappearance of real pleasure. But it also involves a gain in and of meaning. But what, or how much, does this loss-as-gain actually amount to? How does this cost/benefit analysis open the question of meaning’s initiation as a subtraction of enjoyment, a sacrifice of pleasure, a renunciation of the real? Note that in the preceding I write that children “gain representational pleasure” from cartoons. Since cartoons are nothing but representations (i.e., they’re “not real”), the pleasure gained from them is clearly representational. But the phrase is tricky, implying a distinction between merely representational pleasure and some immediate non-representational enjoyment of “the real thing.”
And here’s where language rears its head, so to speak, for what is language if not a “mediating” system of representations in which words are called upon to re-present real things, to symbolize or signify the various matters of the real? But then again, what if language itself in its entirety were nothing but a massive and total substitution of itself for every really enjoyable thing, for any immediate enjoyment of the real? What if representational “meaning” turned out to be our very young child’s reward for having abjected or “cast out” real enjoyment? What if “meaning” were really only another word for “pleasure”—a single word for all the words that substitute themselves for pleasure, and thereby effectively block our ever really having any ever again?
Solemn adults who respect all meaning and suspect all pleasure—who both insist that life be Meaningful (with a great big honking capital M) and despise the thought of anyone’s being alive just for the heck of it—would likely be displeased by these questions (or rather, they would find them “meaningless”). But children, again, arguably understand the questions quite well—and perhaps even get a kick out of them. Indeed, in his book The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites, the child psychologist Adam Phillips goes so far as to suggest that “for the child, meaning [itself] is the polite word, the sophisticated word, for pleasure” (1999: 11). What does Phillips mean by this impolite suggestion?
For Phillips, I think, the word “pleasure” must pertain to what Freud calls the pleasure principle, a primary type of psychical functioning that Freud contrasts with the reality principle. As we’ll see in the following elaboration of these two principles, their negotiation is the crux of what I’ve called above the very young child’s “existential bargain”—the initial anthropogenetic exchange of “bad” young animal being for “good” old human meaning. In other words, the negotiation between the pleasure and reality principles is the very condition of possibility for that little animal’s being brought “into the fold” of human historicity, for its becoming a subject of human reality.
Now, you may be surprised to learn that by “pleasure,” Freud does not mean “stimulation” of any sort (sexual, emotional, neurological, etc.), but rather just the opposite—by “pleasure,” Freud means the reduction of excess stimulation, the subtraction of unpleasurable tension. By “pleasure principle,” then, Freud designates a process of mental functioning that demands and depends upon unpleasure’s immediate reduction. The basic goal of the pleasure principle is to retreat from unpleasurable tension and return to a psychic equilibrium or quiescence, an ideally tensionless homeostasis. Whenever it loses homeostasis, whenever it experiences unpleasurable tension in any form—hunger, diaper-rash, fear of the dark or of strangers or of being all alone—the helpless infant wants to get its “pleasure” back, wants the tension to go away, wants its homeostasis restored, immediately. But in reality there will always be some discrepancy between the infant’s immediate demand and two interrelated and mediating factors (factors which mediate in that they “come between” infantile demand and its fulfillment). One significant factor is the time it actually takes for homeostasis to be satisfactorily restored (if ever it is); the other significant factor is the form in which the satisfaction actually materializes (if ever it does, and the object eventually obtained may very well differ in form from the object irritably anticipated or psychically reached after). Reality, then, constitutively involves the “factoring in” of significantly temporal delay and significantly formal alteration (so much so that, as we’ll see, temporal delay and formal alteration become the twin bases of significance itself). The discrepancy between immediate, formally self-identical gratification and satisfaction temporally delayed and/or formally altered is pretty much the difference between pleasure and reality. And every “little animal” must deal with this difference in order to factor itself into human reality, to become a small human child, a good or polite little girl or boy.
Now, the infantile psyche—ragingly impolite (and arguably ungendered) at this juncture—is completely under the “inhuman” dominance of the pleasure principle. Whatever it wants, whenever it wants it, its infantile majesty wants exactly what it wants and it wants that now. It knows no reason to endure waiting for pleasure’s homeostatic restoration; it knows no reason to accept any substitute gratification whatsoever. Too bad for this completely unreasonable infant that it’s also utterly powerless, helpless, and dependent, a miniscule tyrant incapable of actually doing anything to remedy its “wanting” situation. Under the pleasure principle’s dominance, then, the infant having a bad time attempts to reduce anguished temporality in the most immediate way possible—by mentally summoning (i.e., fantasizing, hallucinating reaching after) the missing object (e.g., the mother’s breast). But since this instant fantasy image fails to satisfy, provides merely representational pleasure, but never the real thing, the infant who wants someday to be more and other than an infant must eventually give itself over to the mediations of the reality principle. The infant, that is, must actively substitute a real demand for the merely imagined delight, must actually cry out for the missing object, which in reality may only eventually appear, may show up in a disappointingly diminished form (pacifier instead of breast), or may never materialize again in any form whatsoever—the toughest tit of all, so to speak.
The psychoanalytic gist here is that reality necessarily impels the infant’s acquiescence to waiting and substitution, to temporality and exchange. To the infant’s fantasmatic demand for the real thing, right here, right now, reality or “the adult world” comes back with a prohibitive or retarding counter-offer. Reality “responds,” so to speak, with a rather tragicomical “promise of happiness,” with a “not that, not here, not now, not yet; something else, somewhere else, some other time, maybe—we’ll just have to wait and see.” Given adult-world’s promisingly negative response, the infant, completely dependent upon adult-world, has little choice but to renounce the fantasy of immediate enjoyment and accept the adulterated, delayed, partial, altered, substitutive gratifications that reality offers—or rather, that human reality essentially is.1
Outside of accepting reality’s counter-offer—a frustratingly vague “promise of happiness” in place of the real thing—the infant’s only other “option” would be to remain a kicking and screaming infant for all time. The word “infant,” of course, means “without speech,” so, psychically speaking, remaining an infant (even while physically outgrowing the nursery) would mean “going without” speech. But without speech one isn’t likely to go very far with the grown-ups. For the reality principle, whose interests the adults represent, offers its promising gifts mainly in the form of speech, or even as the very structure of language itself. For language, like the reality principle—or perhaps as the reality principle—always involves temporal delay, formal alteration, partiality, substitution, displacement, and exchange. While real, natural, animal, or infantile experience is always immediate, reveling in the here and now, human reality, revelatory linguistic meaning, must always unfold in time (for “meaning” is never instantly “revealed” through parting clouds but actually only ever appears in sentences, and even the shortest sentence imaginable isn’t exactly instantaneous, while some—like those I write, as you may have noticed—seem to drag on forever). Language, linguistic meaning, always takes time, always takes us out of the present, always tears us away from the here and the now. As Lacan writes, language,
by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by deploying its dimension in some sense before it. As is seen at the level of the sentence when the latter is interrupted before the significant term: “I’ll never . . .,” “The fact remains . . .,” “Still perhaps . . .” Such sentences nevertheless make sense, and that sense is all the more oppressive in that it is content to make us wait for it” (1966e/2006: 419).
Always making us “wait for it” (whatever “it” may be), language oppressively substitutes its “promise of happiness” for happiness itself. And language, with its negatively promissory or “differential” structure, always “exists prior to each subject’s entrance into it at a certain moment in his psychic development” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 413). Initially, upon entry into language, “each subject” is saddled with the responsibility of substituting words for withdrawn gratifications, for prohibited pleasures, for unsettled homeostases, for lost or missing things; consequently, as reality’s “life-sentence” goes on, “each subject” must ride out the relentless substitution of words for other words, must follow the potentially infinite combination of words with other words.
For each and every subject of human reality must be made to mean—that’s the symbolic order.
The negotiation between pleasure and reality is the symbolically ordered sacrifice of an insufficiently animal being for properly human meaning. Lacan calls this animality-overcoming exchange l’être pour la lettre, by which phrase he designates the anthropogenetic act of swapping “being” (l’être) for “the letter” (la lettre). But call it whatever we please, call “it” by some name we must, for barring this mandatory change-up, our infant can never become a “meaningfully” human being. If the infant “chooses” against reality, goes on hunger strike, opting for its internally conjured image of the mother’s breast to the point of refusing the externally real thing, it could starve to death, lose its very animal life. If it refuses to trade its demand for immediate gratification for its desire for the other’s recognition, for the promise of a more significant, meaningful, important pleasure in the future, then our infant will refuse (to be made) to mean, refuse to work (or be worked on) with words. It will never obey or accede to the symbolic order, and “it” could thus lose its opportunity to “fully” participate in properly human life, to be a subject of human reality, an “I.”2
Now, Adam Phillips suggests that the child sacrifices pleasure to meaning not to “be a subject of human reality,” but rather, and seemingly more simply, in order to be “polite.” The word “polite” does seem relatively simple, but it actually gets quite complicated if we play a bit rough with its etymology. For being “polite” involves more than simply refraining from talking with one’s mouth full, or interrupting the grown-ups, or loudly farting in their general direction. Of course, polite “participation in human reality” does largely entail learning how and when to keep our asses covered and our pie-holes shut, learning how to be well-behaved in the polis. But such excellent comportment doesn’t just develop spontaneously; rather, it results from our being rather relentlessly policed. The most profoundly political meaning of “meaning is the polite word for pleasure” is that proper “meaning” always means being subjected to “police” investigation. “Meaning” means being disciplined or corrected, not simply by Miss Manners or some overly prescriptive grammarian but by the symbolic order itself—the “Big Other,” as Lacan also ominously calls it. “Meaning” means pleasure’s being put under the Big Other’s surveillance; it is the political consequence of having subjected oneself and one’s pleasures to the normative policies and prohibitions of the socio-symbolic order. If these policies are properly enforced, then the polite or “politicized” child will have taken its rudely animal being and “turned it in”— given it up, informed upon it, betrayed it to the authorities, had it arrested—in exchange for literally human meaning. The wild child becomes a wise child when it trades up the animalistic demand for immediate gratification for the anthropogenetic desire for the other’s recognition.
To illustrate how this trade works, I turn back to that rudimentary example—the baby at the mother’s breast. At the animal level, the infant needs this overflowing “object” not merely for “ideal” psychical homeostasis but for real physical survival. At this level of sheer physiological need, there’s no real difference between the proto-human animal and any other udderly feeding beast—we all must nurse or die. What sets our “beast in the nursery” apart is that it demands more from the breast than mere mammalian sustenance. The “wannabe human” infant demands to be given the breast-giver’s gift not only as an indispensible “life-line,” but also as an excessive sign—a signifier of what else but love. In other words, just as Marx’s very early workers “distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence” (1845/1978: 150), so the very young child distinguishes itself from its own suckling animality as soon as it accomplishes the work of letting the sign-value that attaches to the appearance of the breast exceed the merely animal “life-value” that flows directly from it; in yet other words, the very young child distinguishes itself from itself when it first begins to learn how to read. For what else but reading would we call an activity in which a sign of life somehow becomes more important than immediate life itself, which thereafter seems strangely to lose significance? No non-human animal ever can be taught to “read” in this sense or to this extent; no non-human animal can ever allow a mere sign, a mere look of love or recognition, to become more important than itself, more significant than its own animal life; no non-human animal can ever consider losing life for love. A platypus couldn’t manage it.
But our little animal turns human not by literally losing life, but by symbolically exchanging l’être pour la lettre, not by really dying but by metaphorically sacrificing the “inner animal” that is unwilling to sacrifice itself, unwilling to metaphorize, that recalcitrant beast that needs to be fed and demands to be pleased, but can’t quite bring itself to “come to terms,” can’t quite agree to defer pleasure, or accept substitute gratification, the animal that can’t stand being in a state of sustained desire because it is incapable of ever “dying to be loved”—the animal, in other words, that can’t be made to mean. The fledgling human sacrifices or renounces or distances itself from its bad animal being in a bid to be recognized, to be meaningfully loved, or belovedly “read.” For to be read/recognized as being meaningful is to be loved, wanted, approved, applauded, to be the deserving recipient of some (typically parental) hymn of praise. Reading/recognizing as desiring to be read/recognized means desiring not only to “find meaning” in the other (rather than just demand pleasure from the other); it means desiring to be found meaningful (rather than merely animal) by the other, to rise in the other’s esteem, to become not a “what,” but a recognizably human “who” who would literally rather die than go without meaning, would rather die than remain an animal “it,” a mere thing, in the estimation of others. The anthropogenetic desire for recognition trumps merely animal need and merely infantile demand when the very young child recognizes that it is significantly more pleasurable to have certain others be pleased with it than it is for “it” to have whatever pleasure it wants whenever it wants it.3
The “beast in the nursery” begins to learn to read when it starts allowing the metaphorical incept of desired signs to become more important than the material intake of needed sustenance, when it starts perceiving substitutive “signs of life” and reality’s “promise of happiness” as being somehow better than immediate life itself—“even better than the real thing.” When the real thing in question is the breast, what the infant must learn to read is not that real pound of flesh, much less its milky issue, but rather the telling expression that “overflows,” so to speak, from the breast-giver’s face. When the needy infant demanding the breast accepts in its stead a disappointingly diminished substitute—the cold dry plastic pacifier instead of the warm and softly seeping thing—it accepts this diminution only because a surplus of meaning provides symbolic compensation, makes good the loss of real enjoyment qua enjoyment in the real. The mother’s completely approving facial expression, her milky look of love, along with any unconditionally soothing sounds she might manage to make—all work to compensate the infant, make up for the difference in pleasure-yield between breast and pacifier. These significant sights and sounds partially “paper over” the discrepancy between the enjoyment anticipated and the enjoyment obtained.
But if the infant does feel fairly compensated, it does so only because it senses what it damned well better get used to sensing—to wit—that it is “better” to “take in” these rewarding sights and sounds of approval than it is to obtain immediate gratification. At the end of the day, reality’s primary lesson is still Freud’s famous motto Wo Es war, soll Ich werden—“where id was, there ego must be” (1933/2001: 80), or, more literally, where an “it” was, an “I” must come into being. Reality’s lesson, in other words, is that it will have been much more significant for me, das Ich, to obtain recognition (for having sucked it up and been polite) than it would have been for it, das Es, to have gotten exactly what it wanted, exactly when it wanted it (back in the prehistorical miasma of the real, the merely natural/animal hic et nunc). If the infant doesn’t learn this “history lesson,” if it doesn’t on a very basic level grasp “the virtual character of the symbolic order [as] the very condition of human historicity” (Žižek 1999/2002: 241), if it doesn’t figure out the terms of this existential bargain—if it clings to its pure pleasure principle in the real and doesn’t allow itself to be worked over by virtual reality, if it simply continues to cry like a baby until it gets what it wants, refuses any substitutive pacification and never learns to give a big happy damn what any significantly “Big Other” thinks of it—then this beast isn’t going to get very far in the polis. It probably won’t make it out of the nursery.
Adulterated reality, then, must supersede pure pleasure if “das Ich” is ever to displace “das Es,” if anything resembling anthropogenesis is ever to occur. But reality can’t simply eradicate pleasure altogether; rather, reality modifies, redirects, transforms pleasure. Reality can’t “just say no” to any and all enjoyment. Reality “says no” to immediate and self-identical gratification, to be sure, but because no animal responds well to unmitigated negativity, the reality principle must always hold out the future promise of greater, more important, more significant gratification.
The paradoxical crux of the matter, however, is that, throughout their negotiated conflict, the pleasure and reality principles still share the same overriding goal—the reduction of unpleasurable tension, the restoration of homeostasis. And since the goal does remain the same, pleasure still pretty much rules the roost, despite reality’s encroachments on its terrain. What must fundamentally change in the transition from pure pleasure to accomplished reality is the question of what actually constitutes the source or cause of the unpleasurable tension that demands to be reduced. Back in the day of the pure pleasure principle, what caused unpleasurable tension was whatever forced us “to wait for it”; in our quest to have our homeostasis restored a.s.a.p., we psychically withdrew like the heads of frightened turtles from whatever threatened to make us wait—that is to say, whatever threatened to make us mean. In the accomplished reality principle, however, unpleasure involves whatever disturbs the reassuring stability of meaning, whatever threatens the formally established coherence of das Ich. The stray memory of non-meaning (the “purposeless” animal enjoyment of inarticulate babble); the emergence of bad meanings (impolite or “perverse” gratifications that “I” might feel sick even thinking about); the appearance of strange meanings (unfamiliar articulations that disturb my normal understanding, anxiogenic “foreign elements” that “terrorize” my psychic equilibrium) —all these “bad” things become the unpleasurable tensions that “I” have to deal with—that is, repress—if meaningful homeostasis (the “homeland security” of my own private Idaho) is to be maintained. In the pleasure principle, it is the very thought of repression, the thought of my having to renounce a satisfaction, of my not getting what I want, that precipitates unpleasure; in the reality principle, however, it is the thought of the return of the repressed, of getting more than I bargained for, that does the trick. As Freud writes in the essay called “Repression,” a specific satisfaction might be “pleasurable in itself” (i.e., in the pure pleasure principle), but “irreconcilable with other claims and intentions” (e.g., those of the reality principle). Thus the same thought can “cause pleasure in one place and unpleasure in another” (1915/1989: 569). Psychoanalysis, which studies psychic conflict, which explores the ways the same thought can generate antithetical feelings, has thus been called “the science of ambivalence.”4
But speaking of ambivalence, and of tricks, the one that my “I” is about to play on yours really isn’t very nice. For I can imagine that your “I” could without too much difficulty imagine itself as an infant sucking with great satisfaction at its mother’s breast. Your “I” might even be able to imagine that infant being seriously displeased to have this breast suddenly pulled away. You as an adult “I” can probably imagine fairly easily that you as an infant “it” would want to banish immediately the very thought of the nipple’s disappearance. OK, so far so good. Now let’s see if you can imagine yourself at your present age sucking away at the wet and erect nipple of your own mother’s breast (not just any old nipple, mind you, but specifically, unimaginably, unspeakably, your own mother’s). I imagine, I would even heavily bet, that your “I” can bring that image to mind only with extreme difficulty, if at all, that the very idea provokes feelings of queasy disgust, unbearable shame, painful embarrassment, horrible incestuous weirdness, homophobic revulsion (particularly if you’re a good girl), considerable anger at yours truly for even trying to stick the hideous thought into your head, etc.—in other words, massive psychical unpleasure. You must want to get this sick thought out of your head as quickly as possible. But while you’re busy trying to restore your disrupted homeostasis, let’s at least note what’s illustrative here—to wit, back when you were a little “it,” completely under the dominance of the pleasure principle, it was the thought of the object’s disappearance that you wanted immediately to get rid of; now that you’re a great big “I,” long under the sway of the reality principle, it’s the unwelcome thought of the object’s return that you want to beat back, exclude, expel, repress, tout de suite, for “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from consciousness” (Freud 1915/1989: 569–70).
In Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the term unconscious marks the “extimate” space of “otherness within” each of us, the traumatic thing or “unbearable truth” (Žižek 2006: 3) within each subject’s psyche from which normally constituted consciousness tries—pathetically and bathetically enough—to keep its distance.5 So, when I write that anthropogenesis depends upon repression, that anthropogenesis begins to kick in when impolitely animal being is “sacrificed” to properly human meaning, I don’t mean to suggest that the sacrificial beast vanishes into thin air, flies, or slithers, or waddles off to die. For “to be sacrificed” doesn’t necessarily mean “to be killed”; sacrificing an object can involve making it “sacred” by setting it apart, excluding it from the mundane, the everyday, the familiar, the easily accessed, the readily known. The strangely animal “it” of the pure pleasure principle is not terminated, but repressed, distanced from normal everyday consciousness, from the standard operating procedures of “common sense.” Upon repression, it—the it, das Es—is relegated to the unconscious, where it doesn’t expire but rather remains a lively but covert participant in the psychic life of the I, das Ich, sometimes coming back to bite my polite or “politicized” ego in the ass.
As this rather rude turn of phrase might suggest, its most vital activities are fundamentally incompatible with normal, conscious, proper meaning and manners, homeostatic good housekeeping, all the rules and regulations of fine upstanding citizenship, freedom, dignity, self-respect, impeccably clear writing, and so on. The fundamental psychoanalytic thesis about anthropogenesis is that none of us ever neatly exchanges l’être pour la lettre, pleasure for reality, wild being for civilized meaning, our pitiful portions of real happiness for the Big Other’s tenuous portions of security. There is always for each of us an “unbearable truth,” an ego-traumatizing remnant or leftover, unconscious but still unceasingly productive, the impolite if not unspeakable “stuff” that our darkest dreams of light are made of.
Freud, of course, called dreams the “royal road” to the unconscious. But for any theoretical writing that is informed by psychoanalysis, all the lost highways on the map of human reality lead to and from that strange location as well. For the gist of psychoanalysis is that the unconscious plays its part not only in the production of baffling dreams, neurotic symptoms, and embarrassing slips of the tongue; it determines and undermines the very production of meaning itself, all the work with words that makes the world that must be made to mean. Unconscious desire haunts all the forms of symbolic compensation or substitute gratification that we can imagine, or that have been pre-imagined or prefabricated for us, in this world or “the next.” Cartoons and other forms of child’s play can, of course, “count” as such imaginary or fabricated compensation. But then, so can all the really important grown-up stuff as well—literature, art, cinema, culture, politics, philosophy, science, religion, not to mention theory itself—in short, pretty much everything of which it pleases us to say that it all “has to meaning something,” that it must be meaning and not just pleasure.
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Two:
pleasure and reality principles, the unconscious
Notes
1 In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud writes that “whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for [us] than to give up a pleasure which [we have] once experienced. Actually, we never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate” (1907/1989: 437–8). In Civilization and its Discontents, however, Freud describes perhaps the most “universal” form this “existential bargain” takes when he writes that “Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his possibilities for happiness for a portion of security” (1930/1989: 752).
2 To get the “fullest” picture of what this thoroughgoing refusal might amount to, consider that the little animal that refuses linguistic training may very well decline other forms of “basic training” as well—toilet training, for example. Here, I suppose, would be the appropriate place to let drop what Žižek calls “Lacan’s thesis that [the] animal became human the moment it confronted the problem of what to do with its excrement” (1994: 179).
3 I allude here to the distinctions Lacan makes among need, demand, and desire, which roughly and respectively correspond to his three “registers” of psychic life—the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. We will return to the “knotted” relations among these two trios in our fourth lesson.
4 I have to apologize for the fact that I can neither remember nor discover who coined this phrase—I’m beginning to think that I dreamt it.
5 In How to Read Lacan, Žižek writes, “The unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have to be tamed by the ego, but the site where a traumatic truth speaks out. Therein lies Lacan’s version of Freud’s motto Wo es war, soll ich werden (Where it was, I am to become): not ‘The ego should conquer the id,’ the site of unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare to approach the site of my truth.’ What awaits me ‘there’ is not a deep Truth that I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth that I have to learn to live with” (2006: 2–3).