Art and Lustprinzip

Freud reduces artistic expression to phantasmal realization of desire, akin to that of dreams and daydreams. When looking at the earliest instances of art, that is palaeolithic cave paintings, one must concede some truth value to his theory. These cave paintings often take on the form of phantasmal realisation of desire, they almost exclusively portray animals that were hunted for food or the act of hunting itself. On some walls traces of the impact of spears and arrows can be found, showing that the ritual was a mimesis of hunting, an artwork taking the place of the real object. This is as far as I can agree with Freud, but now I would rather choose to venture on the path of sociology and ask what social consequences these ancient magical practices had.

First of all we must realize that ancient art can not be reduced to the formula of phantasmal realization of desire, although it is one of its defining features. We are dealing with a society living in scarcity, where every working hour not spent rationally can threaten the survival of the community. Looking at cave paintings one realizes that an enormous amount of technical skill was required for such a naturalistic depiction (stylized depictions cropped up only later), hence a substantial amount of working hours had to be taken away from essential activities like gathering food, hunting, building shelter etc. We see that the first manifestation of the separation of material and intellectual production - a social circumstance that for Marx and Engels meant that for the first time social consciousness was more than a direct registering of social praxis - took the form of a magical activity being separated from the neccessities of survival.

What Freud can not explain is why so much effort was put into magical practices if daydreaming could have performed the function of phantasmal realisation of desire quite adequately. The answer is that at the heart of civilization lies a misconception. Cave paintings were not only a fantasy, but a fantasy to which causal effects were ascribed. The only rationale of having a craftsman-artist absent from hunting and gathering in the conditions of material scarcity is that artistic practice has a causal effect on material praxis. By enabling intellectual production to have a certain degree of autonomy from praxis this misconception enabled the birth of civilization.

Let us look at another formula that aims to describe the essence of art: Adorno's promesse du bonheur. The fantasy that found its expression in the first instances of art was not merely one of gratification of immediate practical needs, it entailed a promise and a desire for the world to be formed according to the dictates of reason. The ancient magician claimed to be able to form the world according to human needs through ritual, a desire that is homologous with the desire of enlightenment for the rationalization of the world. The ancient misconception is still at work millennia later in Kant and Hegel, in the stirring of the French revolution, in Marx and in Adorno and in the Universal declaration of human rights. This is the illusion at the core of illusion. While the incidental desires art expresses are multitudinous and can range from love to revolution, from pumpkin pie to a new pair of Adidas, at its core always lies a desire for freedom, with which art transcends the world and offers us a vision of the emancipated society.