The enemy never sleeps

Some time ago I analysed the subtle ideology of RPG games. They do come less subtle than that. The goal of Kirby superstar, an old Super Nintendo game, is to venture:

P.S.: Honest to Marx, I used Photoshop only to paste, crop and save the image.

Hegel on Kafka's Metamorphosis

The reader of Kafka's story is immediately struck not so much by the bizarre transformation of the protagonist into an enormous insect - surely not the most bizarre in the history of literature - as with the indifferent response the transformation is met with. Gregor Samsa at first feels no discomfort with his new shape, which leads us to reject the interpretation that his transformation is in itself a punishment. Indeed he finds pleasure in new habits that come with the new form: eating rotten food, crawling on the ceiling etc. The interpretation that the transformation is actually fulfilling a latent desire might seem far fetched at first, but let us see if it can help us make sense of the story. Gregor is working at a job he distinctly dislikes (that are his first thoughts upon waking) but to which he is bound by debts his father had incurred. The fantasy is not a positive one, a desire to become an insect, but a negative one, a desire to escape inescapable social obligations.

The insect can be read as a metonymy of nature (that Kafka declared a Bilderverbot regarding the insect in a letter to Kurt Wolff would indicate that the insect is a place holder for a more abstract idea), nature not as a positive idea, but as a purely abstract negation of human sociality, a wishing-away of the mediatedness of the subject through social institutions, a fantasy of pure immediacy in the midst of universal mediation. The tragedy of the insect testifies to the impossibility of an abstract negation. As Adorno noted in one of the most orthodoxly Hegelian parts of Minima Moralia, the bourgeois demand for purely spontaneous love functions as an alibi for the untrue society - it is not as pure spontaneity that love can offer resistance to the existing, only as specific negation, as "stubborn opposition" as Adorno put it. Note that the motive of family love (especially that of Gregor to his sister) is central to Kafka's story.

The answer to the question what the nature of mediation is, of what Gregor is running from, takes us beyond Hegel to Marx. On all the central parts of the story money is of paramount importance. The debt of the father is forcing Gregor to stick to a job he dislikes. Georg only finds displeasure in his new form when he realizes it will cause him to miss work. Gregor's family start neglecting him because of the jobs they in turn have to take to compensate for his missing pay check and they completely reject him after he has scared away the tenants inhabiting a spare room of their apartment. Gregor's sister put it most succinctly: "When one has to work so hard as we do it is impossible to put up with this incessant torture at home." Brecht's Good person of Szechwan immediately comes to mind, where Shen Te is confronted with an analogous dilemma: "How can I be good, when everything is so expensive?"

The transformation can then be read as a parable, the moral of which is that "there is no right life in the wrong."

Value neutrality

Norms are not stars, glittering on a horizon beyond being. They are an integral part of social reality. The norm of neutrality - besides the obvious fact that a normative demand for the absence of normative demands is a contradictio in adjecto - is nothing but the dictate of applicability. The results of research technique should be free from value statements so that they can be used broadly and efficiently. The measure of neutrality is the extent of capitulation to the existing. The attempt to eliminate the normative moment of cognition wrongs the object (unresolved antagonisms of society are paradoxes calling to be resolved) and the subject, equipping it with blinders that prevent it from seeing beyond the sensus communis. Research does not aim to satisfy a fickle curiosity as Popper had childishly imagined, it is productive work. As all productive work it aims to achieve an effect, that is provoke some change in the world. The question is therefore not whether research should or should not be value free, but what the nature of the values should be: should they be subjective, conforming to doxa (what is today deemed objective) or objective, following from the inherent paradoxes of the object (what is today deemed subjective).

Shizophrenia

In The good person of Szechuan Brecht portrays the protagonist faced with contradictory demands of reality and morality. Schizophrenia is a natural reaction then: Shen Te develops the alter ego of Shui Ta, who steps in when the dictate of being good threatens to destroy Shen Te. "How can I be good," she asks, "when everything is so expensive?" The only rational response to a pathological world is pathological.

When Freud developed his theoretical system he acknowledged that there is an inherent contradiction between desire and reality (what he termed the dynamic aspect of a metapsychological inquiry). When later on in life desire is hampered by reality libido regresses to an earlier stage (Freud gives the example of fetishism), but this regression is unacceptable to the superego, which censors the desire and neurotic symptoms are the only way libido can find an expression. What Freud has missed is that psychological contradictions originate from social ones, the contradiction between desire and reality is secondary, the primary contradiction is between the dictates of authority and the reality it creates. Ruling ideas take on a universal character which transcends particular class rule, hence the individual is faced with the task of yielding to moral imperatives which reality makes impossible to follow. The pathologies of the individual mirror the pathologies of society, the resolution of the psychical dialectic is possible only by resolving the dialectics of society. Until then we can resist totality only by being consistently pathological. As Horkheimer and Adorno noted in Dialectics of enlightenment, the task of philosophy is to be naively consistent, believing the whole of ruling ideology: "She believes that division of labour serves humanity and that progress leads to freedom."

G spot

That Freud was deeply conservative is clear from his theory of the development of erogenous zones. While the child - so Freud - is polymorphously perverse, meaning that it can enjoy sexual pleasure from the stimulation of a large number of organs, the genitals monopolise this function during the course of normal sexual development. The most bizarre element in this puzzle is the claim that the vagina must take the place of the clitoris as the primary erogenous zone. Freud tells us nothing about how this miracle is to be achieved. Furthermore it is noticeable that he uses the term "perverse" for sexual arousal originating from areas of the body other than the genitals, which would imply that heterosexual intercourse with the aim of procreation is the norm. Even foreplay must be thought of as a perversion.

Modern pseudo science has rushed to the aid of Freud's phantasm. It has discovered the g spot, an area inside the vagina, which is the harbinger of unparalleled sexual pleasure. It is no coincidence that the "discoverer" of the g spot was a man. What this phantasm actually discovers is a phallocentric view on sexuality. It tells us that only the penis can be the source of ultimate pleasure. It seeks to deny the obvious fact that women can quite well do without it. It is the most outstanding manifestation of the fear of castration. The g spot consoles men that their little friend is not utterly useless by projecting the male love for their penis onto women. Freud, the old prude, tried to base human psyche on sexuality, but he saw sexuality only in its limited bourgeois guise. He confused the superstructure for the base and built his theoretical construction on a hypostatized patriarchal society.

Lust

I believe a further elucidation is needed for those not fluent in German to fully grasp Freud's idea of the pleasure principle or Lustprinzip. The word Lust is - as are most German words - elusive. Its meaning is but imperfectly captured in the English pleasure. This is but one of its nuances. Another is retained in the English lust; the German original also has sexual, or rather sensual, undertones. At its core Lust means the most basic impulse which cannot meaningfully be reduced to any cause. If one is asked for one's motivation for some proposed activity and answers: "Ich hab' halt Lust dazu," any competent speaker would regard a further inquiry into the origins of Lust as absurd. Adorno took Freud by his word and demanded Lust to be the guiding light towards an emancipated society.

Philistine

Reading Freud is certainly a peculiar experience. At once one cannot help but be amazed at his profound insights into the human psyche, especially if we remember that the poor devils deemed "insane" were subjected to most barbaric treatments not so long before his time. His achievement is so much greater since it transcended the narrow stereotypes of his class, which in its turn reacted hysterically to psychoanalysis. Freud was very much aware of his intellectual supremacy and arrogantly stepped on a self-erected pedestal next to Copernicus and Darwin, next to the great demystifiers who dared insult the vanity of their fellows. Reading his later writings we see Freud in the role of the magician - the metaphor Marx and Engels used in the Manifesto for the bourgeoisie - who cannot contain the spirits he himself has conjured. It is not just the way he honours contemporary stereotypes by mentioning homosexuality in one breath with other "deviances" like misogyny. A more profound change is going on in his theoretical construction, which is shaking its very foundation. Just like the great bourgeois revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century unleashed desires of the oppressed that were needed for the bourgeoisie to dethrone the aristocracy and which needed to be contained lest they turn on the bourgeoisie itself, so Freud is faced with the task of putting Lustprinzip, the pleasure principle, in its place after he let it loose upon the world. The solution is as simple as it is unconvincing: condemning desire, which, as he discovered in Beyond the pleasure principle, contains not just Eros, but also a death drive. If desire - the only final justification of reason, as Adorno noted in Minima Moralia - is not to become a disruptive force, it needs to be kept in chains. Only these chains had do be made a bit more comfortable and be adorned with flowers, so that their bearers would not feel their weight so acutely. Freud the philistine preaches in Über das Unbehagen in der Kultur (rather awkwardly translated as Civilization and its discontents) that human desire is too dangerous to be allowed to roam free, that it must be curbed if civilization is to endure. He was correct: only by putting a check on desire can bourgeois civilization endure.